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Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

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Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#41

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…

Because at scale small changes can save or make a company more money than an engineers salary. Simply making a process 2% more efficient can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or increasing advertising conversions by 1%. etc etc.

But WeWork doesn't make any money. That is the problem. No matter how many smart engineers they hire, it is just adding additional cost, until they start to turn a profit.

Majority of its business value goes to real estate owners.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#43

There IS a market for a WeWork like service. A WeWork-like model has appeal to someone like me that would love good coffee and an office/hoteling space! Especially as I travel a lot and sometimes want a reliable private workspace in an arbitrary city. Coffee shops frankly don’t cut it for working/meeting with people all day. Also there’s often a need for meeting spaces in arbitrary cities. my company would have used…

I feel like a missed opportunity for WeWork was a kitchen. AFAIK none of them sell food for purchase. Why not get all the workweek lunch revenue?

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#44
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…

So you'd freeze the feature creep, but keep working on the set of features you listed? I think you answered your own question.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#45

There IS a market for a WeWork like service. A WeWork-like model has appeal to someone like me that would love good coffee and an office/hoteling space! Especially as I travel a lot and sometimes want a reliable private workspace in an arbitrary city. Coffee shops frankly don’t cut it for working/meeting with people all day. Also there’s often a need for meeting spaces in arbitrary cities. my company would have used…

There's IWG. The unsexy competitor whose been doing it for longer and has more properties and isn't valued at 100x their worth.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#46
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…

One of Twitter's main challenges at this stage is content moderation and fraud detection, a technical challenge for which solutions are not straightforward or easily scalable.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#47
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.

There are consulting roles like that, but you’ll make more in infosec and it’s an easier sell than arguing why you should capture your share of the value you’re delivering to make it worth your while.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#48
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infrastructure and software are hard.

What hard problems related to software and infrastructure WeWork was solving? I can not imagine a single one. Handling check-ins? Counting number of beers consumed?

"Counting number of beers consumed?"

This spring I talked to their software engineering manager/lead at a tech meetup in Shanghai (the guy was from SF) and he said that they plan to hire tens of engineers just to analyze their beer consumption data to optimize supply.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#49
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.

Do you think so? I posted this mostly as a joke.

The idea that this was anything close to being "AI" is a bit silly. The insight that there were long lines for coffee in the morning and small groups were taking large conference rooms are simple observations that one person could've made and written a report about.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#50
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because at scale small changes can save or make a company more money than an engineers salary. Simply making a process 2% more efficient can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or increasing advertising conversions by 1%. etc etc.

Right, but system creation+enhancements can be made by a single engineer in a large % of those cases. Overwhelmingly so if you already have a working live system to start with and you are seeking incremental improvements (vs a full rewrite). There aren't many technical challenges I have encountered, when reduced to their smallest functional dimensions, that couldn't be fundamentally addressed by a single engineer. Ob…

Most of the time one competent 10x engineer could indeed build out all the special features that a company needs. The problem is that one person generally doesn't know all the best practices required of every problem domain, so they may implement things poorly. Furthermore, the one dev thing really doesn't scale up. As soon as your product gains any critical mass and you have an outage then the platform is hosed because no one knows how to fix anything except MAYBE that one engineer who implemented all the special features.
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