Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 120 posts

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#51

Post by nopriorarrests »

rosybox wrote: post #26
softwaredoug wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Having tried to use hotels for meetings, they are unreasonably expensive and do stupid stuff like “the whiteboard rental fee is $500/day”

Maybe that's just the cost of offering these things. How much money do you think they're making off of those fees? They're probably covering costs and are low margin.

I think they are making a killing. If you have a business meeting in progress with your client, you are not going to move to another hotel bc of $500 whiteboard fee. You cringe and put this expense on your corporate credit card. And hotel knows this.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#52

Post by paxys »

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…

It's a classic case of hire engineers first and figure out problems to solve later. This works great if the company already has a massive revenue stream (Google, Facebook etc.) so the engineers can just mess around and once in a while come up with something great. For a company losing $2B+ a year, not so much.

Once WeWork solved its core engineering problems (bookings), engineering job descriptions got more and more abstract - "build the operating system for the workspace", "bridge the gap between physical and digital", "create a sense of community", "humanize through technology" (all copied directly from their engineering website), so it's clear that they are paying thousands of engineers to do nothing.

I know for a fact that they have large data and machine learning teams spread across SF, NYC, Tel Aviv, Shanghai and maybe more that collect and analyze data from all their operations - few hundred offices and few hundred thousand members. At this scale there is zero reason not to use off-the-shelf products (or pay one of the dozens of companies out there that specialize in this), but they decided to custom build all the infra in-house from scratch.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#53

Post by encoderer »

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.

I think this space is hotter than ever. Hard to keep juicing profits for Wall Street when you are increasing AWS spend 5% month over month.

There are LOTS of companies spending a million a month or more on AWS.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#54

Post by nopriorarrests »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #48
nopriorarrests wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This should be top level comment.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#55

Post by codesushi42 »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #48
nopriorarrests wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SF is the only place in the country where you could say that with a straight face.

In fact, that guy has probably long since left and is doing his own beer analytics startup.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#56

Post by appleiigs »

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…

Could have hired 500 office managers at half the salary and give them a paper daily planner.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#57

Post by ethbro »

paxys wrote: post #52
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…

It's a classic case of hire engineers first and figure out problems to solve later. This works great if the company already has a massive revenue stream (Google, Facebook etc.) so the engineers can just mess around and once in a while come up with something great. For a company losing $2B+ a year, not so much. Once WeWork solved its core engineering problems (bookings), engineering job descriptions got more and more…

> I know for a fact that they have large data and machine learning teams spread across SF, NYC, Tel Aviv, Shanghai and maybe more

That's going to be an awkward presentation to management when they present their revenue forecasts under different economic scenarios...

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#58

Post by opportune »

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,…

40 people with this kind of breakdown for a product, sure. This huge team for a feature? Lol, no

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#60

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

olivermarks wrote: post #32
darawk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's hard when you build a global business on a scripting language.
Post reply on HN