Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles • Hacker News Board

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#31

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 12:56 AM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #24

undefined3840 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean 1500 people.

1500 is the rough total number of employees, including non-tech ones, but the question is more along the lines is what the need is for 500 programmers/sysadmins/etc. EDIT: Nevermind, I got confused with this part of the article: > New York-based WeWork has roughly 15,000 employees

[deleted]

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#32

Post by olivermarks » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 12:56 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #21

spectramax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without meaning any offense to anyone, I am also genuinely curious how is a company such as Twitter have so many employees? Outsiders like myself know what goes into running GE or Tesla (and is easy to understand), but I would really appreciate someone from silicon valley enlighten about various needs for a company such as Twitter (or WeWork, etc.); what really goes on inside the doors, how are teams organized, what…

I have always wondered this too. On the surface, Twitter doesn't seem like a very elaborate service. I'm sure there's serious thorny scaling problems to deal with. But how many engineers does that really take?

Remember the fail whale? Scaling is hard.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#33

Post by egdod » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 12:56 AM UTC

autotune wrote: post #6

egdod wrote: post #2

Why does wework even have tech roles?

Infrastructure and software are hard.

Being a landlord doesn’t require much in the way of bespoke infrastructure and software.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#34

Post by webscalist » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 12:57 AM UTC

ulfw wrote: post #3

What do five HUNDRED people in tech do at an office rental company?

- Kubernetes operation: 3 people

- API on top of Kubernetes: 2 people

- Tools around the API on top of Kubernetes: 1 person

- API and tools specific for continuous integration: 2 people

- Database operation: 2 people

- Event/Data pipeline: 5 people

- Authentication: 3 people

- Mobile API: 2 people

- Mobile App: 2 people

- Web API: 4 people

- Web App: 4 people

- ETL/Data science: 5 people

- Document writers, testers, new tech on-boarding evangelists: 5 people

That's 40 people for one feature. And you have 12 features, you need 500 people.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#35

Post by crtlaltdel » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 12:59 AM UTC

webscalist wrote: post #34

ulfw wrote: post #3

What do five HUNDRED people in tech do at an office rental company?

- Kubernetes operation: 3 people - API on top of Kubernetes: 2 people - Tools around the API on top of Kubernetes: 1 person - API and tools specific for continuous integration: 2 people - Database operation: 2 people - Event/Data pipeline: 5 people - Authentication: 3 people - Mobile API: 2 people - Mobile App: 2 people - Web API: 4 people - Web App: 4 people - ETL/Data science: 5 people - Document writers, testers,…

is this breakdown based on experience with the wework tech stack?

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#36

Post by codesushi42 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:00 AM UTC

youeseh wrote: post #15

Say you own a co-working space. You probably should have some way to let: - People book conference rooms. - Let people check in and check out. - Let people book hot desks. - Manage access for members, hot desks, event participants etc. - Lots of other stuff. At some point, the off the shelf software is no good, especially if you're looking to... build a single experience around the world for lots and lots of office b…

Does this justify hundreds of engineers?

No.

And the software to do those things isn't worth billions.

WeWokeUp.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#37

Post by lprubin » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:01 AM UTC

cagenut wrote: post #29

I kinda wish there was a job for like, DevOps Hatchet Men. I don't want to lay people off, but after they're laid off I feel like I could probably delete about a million dollars a year worth of their AWS bill right now and they'd never even notice the stuff missing.

Sounds like a great consulting niche. It's a simple to understand value proposition and I imagine there is somebody powerful at many successful companies that would love to see the huge server cost line item go way down on their P&L.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#38

Post by Johnny555 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:01 AM UTC

spectramax wrote: post #7

ulfw wrote: post #3

What do five HUNDRED people in tech do at an office rental company?

Without meaning any offense to anyone, I am also genuinely curious how is a company such as Twitter have so many employees? Outsiders like myself know what goes into running GE or Tesla (and is easy to understand), but I would really appreciate someone from silicon valley enlighten about various needs for a company such as Twitter (or WeWork, etc.); what really goes on inside the doors, how are teams organized, what…

As a company grows, development becomes harder due to the need to interface with so many teams -- a feature that you used to be able to implement a couple days after a lunchtime discussion with your coworkers turns into a detailed design and design review, design revisions to prevent breaking functionality that other teams use, a revised design review and approval, security review and approval, and then finally implementation, but you find that in the 3 months since you started the design, the functionality you were planning on using was changed by yet another team and the affect on your feature was missed during that project's design review.

Plus, the problems you need to solve get more complicated, you have new compliance needs, paying customers are demanding new features that may require changes across your entire stack, performance is more of an issue (saving 3% of your compute costs didn't matter when you were paying $500/month for infrastructure, but saving 3% of 10 million dollars/month starts turning into real money) and writing and deploying software used by hundreds of millions of people is literally orders of magnitude harder than software a few million people use.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#39

Post by jrvarela56 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:01 AM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #23

This article on Masa from January gives some insight on what engineers were doing: https://www.fastcompany.com/90285552/the-most-powerful-perso... tl;dr They used sensors to determine that people drink coffee in the morning and the line was long. They also used sensors to determine that small groups of people were booking large conference rooms so they made more small conference rooms. Relevant part: WeWork’s potenti…

This is it. A friend who worked in the analytics team mentioned how everything is measured and taken into account when renovating and buying new buildings. Things like exposure to sunlight, time spent at a desk, etc. These analytics are offered to FB/Amazon/big-co along with office as a service.

As someone else mentioned, cool/potentially profitable company. Just not worth 40B.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#40

Post by wcip » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 1:01 AM UTC

webscalist wrote: post #34

ulfw wrote: post #3

What do five HUNDRED people in tech do at an office rental company?

- Kubernetes operation: 3 people - API on top of Kubernetes: 2 people - Tools around the API on top of Kubernetes: 1 person - API and tools specific for continuous integration: 2 people - Database operation: 2 people - Event/Data pipeline: 5 people - Authentication: 3 people - Mobile API: 2 people - Mobile App: 2 people - Web API: 4 people - Web App: 4 people - ETL/Data science: 5 people - Document writers, testers,…

Every feature requires 2 people to build the endpoints, 3 people to wire up the auth and 2 people to add it to the web app? And that's all they do going forward?