I must say, I am jealous. It seems a bit unfair to me how computer engineers are getting hired and paid so well, while my economics degree is useless and I have to fight like crazy to get a job that pays WAY less than engineers get. Honestly, I studied economics because I wanted a job that pays well - that was one of the key criteria - and now I am standing with little money and a job I hate. It sucks.
Maybe this will cheer you up: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/business/liberal-arts-ste...
I'm so glad I read hacker news. I almost took a job at WeWork just 2 months ago with a recruiter working very hard to convince me I'd be rich when they IPO. Now I'm at a much smaller startup called Weave which is a really phenomenal place to work. I didn't discover until recently that it's also a YCombinator company. edit: to clarify, hacker news has been extremely skeptical of WeWork for some time, due to this, I wa…
> a recruiter working very hard to convince me I'd be rich when they IPO
Well, corporate governance was one of the main factors why the market refused to accept anything close to their last private valuation, so this makes sense. Note that they desperately need the public money before the end of December in order to avoid running out of cash [0]. My bet is that they will now try to remarket We as a shareholder-controlled company, will maybe even eliminate the multi-class stock structure i…
> slow 30-year-old companies like Regus
Unless I am completely misunderstanding the value of WeWork, this ship seems to have already sailed. At least locally, Regus has offerings that are substantially the same in price and features to what WeWork has.
Well there's a clear advantage for b2b. Say you're a pretty large company and suddenly decide you want to open a dozen 'offices' in a dozen different countries. You just have to deal with one provider, one set of infrastructure etc. Plus if you decide you then want to consolidate to half-a dozen offices, it's easier to scale some up and some down. However companies like Regus have existed for ages - so not quite sure…
Weird hypothesis, but is what WeWork brings to the table that Regus doesn't is Silicon Valley brand recognition? Not that I'm in the market for office space, but I haven't heard about Regus until this comment.
AIUI, Regus won't talk to you if you're not willing to commit to a 12 or 24 month lease. If I had a stock position, it would be very short WeWork, but assuming you can make the month-to-month economics work, that's a pretty big benefit regardless of customer size.
My company was in WeWork for roughly 2017. I had your initial impression, it does look good and you can certainly get up and running quickly. But after a while, my feeling was that it really seemed to be poorly thought out as an office space. I get the appeal of natural light, but you were looking right at your neighbors. The hardwood floors look great, but everyone with heels is banging away, and there was generally…
Yeah, I've noticed this, too. It definitely optimizes for the initial "Oh wow" walk-in experience. But day-to-day could well be different. As one example, I'm drowning out their hip background music with my earphones and something that enables me to actually concentrate.
Yeah I was at Wework (2 separate locations in SF) and found it subpar as a working environment. Very hard to concentrate and most printers offline half the time while meeting rooms and phone booths are lacking in numbers to the point of not being something you can really count on.
Same here, and only by reading the headlines. A WeWork recruiter reached out to me. I laughed out loud and added it to the list of companies I would never work for. Not only do they do nothing interesting, but they are apparently unethical as well. No doubt another failed tech bro pump 'n dump scheme headed to the dustbin of history.
Definitely just another failed tech bro pump 'n dump scheme headed to the dustbin of history. I seriously doubt that. I think they're overvalued too, but I predict WeWork is still going to be around in another decade. There's clearly a ton of demand for what they provide.
I agree, but will any management still be there if they're worth $2-5B rather than $40 billion?
Also, the strategy of segregating assets onto Adam's personal balance sheet looks like a bad idea now that he's no longer ceo.
WeWork is basically a real estate company. Why would they need a data science engineer?
Engineer? Harder to say. Data scientist--that's easy. Stackbucks is very good at looking at demographic data and recognizing where future demand will be new new locations. They basically mark gentrification.
I used to work with a guy whose wife worked for Starbucks. He explained that they'll do seemingly crazy shit, like put stores across the street from each other, that makes sense when you look at the data. The store on one side of the street picks up traffic from point A to point B, while the other one gets point C to point D, optimizing for not making their customers walk across the street.
I think of it as similar to how UPS rigs their routes to avoid left turns.
what are the other companies you'll never work for?
Hijacking this spot to highlight newrelic as a company I used to evangelize and now will go out of my way to recommend against (I consult startups as a virtual CTO). They used to have a brilliant offering (Application level monitoring with all associated hosts included) then they deprecated the host monitoring and jacked the price up on every one of my clients while simultaneously threatening them to collect based on…
Ah, brings back memories. We used NewRelic at Jux circa 2012ish onward. We were happy with it at the time. What year did this all happen?
I had a remarkably intense series of frontend... ish interviews for a really difficult to define project. As in, I was working very hard in the little 5 minute slices of time I got for "do you have any questions" figuring out just wtf the job was and what the team was doing, and nobody could really explain it. It was some sort of "connectivity and identification team" working to identify people/customers/tenants/what…
"WeWork used [a sensor network that tracked everyone throughout the building combined with machine learning] to learn that people drink coffee in the morning so they should hire a barista." Source: https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/10855834347880202... Sounds like a reasonable use of tens of millions of dollars of VC money.
Not a fan of WeWork, but there actually is something to this. We have two coffee makers in the break room at work, and there's always a line. If they brought in a barista who could work the machines, it's theoretically possible that you'd get better efficiency as there wouldn't be the dance of "who is next in line" or "sorry, gotta block the machine while I get sugar" or "I just want some hot water". I'd love to be able to point building management at some data that says that a barista costs $100/hour for 2 hours, but having them would unlock $1000/hour in lost productivity.
Weird hypothesis, but is what WeWork brings to the table that Regus doesn't is Silicon Valley brand recognition? Not that I'm in the market for office space, but I haven't heard about Regus until this comment.
AIUI, Regus won't talk to you if you're not willing to commit to a 12 or 24 month lease. If I had a stock position, it would be very short WeWork, but assuming you can make the month-to-month economics work, that's a pretty big benefit regardless of customer size.
Doesn't Regus own Spaces, in the co-working space?