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

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#91

Post by dvtrn » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:09 AM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #43

softwaredoug wrote: post #12

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?

If my friend who owns real estate can be used as an anecdotal bulletpoint: At the pub last night he told me how he and numerous other property owners here in Chicago have people who are trying to start their own catering/dinner party businesses and will rent out airbnb's with especially nice/large kitchens to do all of their food prep over a couple of days, check out and leave. A couple of them graduated to being able to sign leases on their own commercial kitchens once their respective client bases grew large enough.

At first, he said he was confused why the kitchen of all places was constantly the most time-costly area of his properties to clean. Then one of the renters let him know what was going on.

Now there's an opportunity.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#92

Post by joejerryronnie » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:12 AM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #49

jrvarela56 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There should totally be a cottage industry of AI snakeoil salesmen that travel the valley in colorful wagons claiming to provide cure-all data insight tonic.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#93

Post by tempsy » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

dvtrn wrote: post #91

tempsy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If my friend who owns real estate can be used as an anecdotal bulletpoint: At the pub last night he told me how he and numerous other property owners here in Chicago have people who are trying to start their own catering/dinner party businesses and will rent out airbnb's with especially nice/large kitchens to do all of their food prep over a couple of days, check out and leave. A couple of them graduated to being abl…

Yes, I mean that is what Travis Kalanick is doing with his new company Cloudkitchens

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#94

Post by willhslade » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

solidasparagus wrote: post #86

encoderer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whoops, apparently I can't read. That would be $52M per year. I would guess there are under 100 companies with that kind of AWS bill and probably closer to a couple dozen with that kind of spend.

$12M but sure.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#95

Post by dvtrn » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #93

dvtrn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my friend who owns real estate can be used as an anecdotal bulletpoint: At the pub last night he told me how he and numerous other property owners here in Chicago have people who are trying to start their own catering/dinner party businesses and will rent out airbnb's with especially nice/large kitchens to do all of their food prep over a couple of days, check out and leave. A couple of them graduated to being abl…

Yes, I mean that is what Travis Kalanick is doing with his new company Cloudkitchens

Oh you gotta be kidding, really?

Edit: Googled it, You are NOT kidding wow. On the one hand, it's a great idea. On the other hand CloudKitchens?

I grok that, but...is the target market here DevOps people who make a great alfredo on the side?

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#96

Post by kasey_junk » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:16 AM UTC

aswanson wrote: post #75

unreal37 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeWork had apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency. They had one of the lowest sqft per paying member in the business. They also were into custom spaces. They needed software to design the office floor plans for big customers like MixPanel. Lots of software. Not just booking rooms and events.

apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency That sound like some useless bullshit if I've ever heard it.

This sort of software is hugely valuable in things like manufacturing. I don’t know enough about commercial real estate to know if it can drive the same efficiency there but it’s certainly not on its face clearly useless.

In fact it sounds way more useful than most software projects I see.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#97

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:25 AM UTC

aswanson wrote: post #75

unreal37 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeWork had apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency. They had one of the lowest sqft per paying member in the business. They also were into custom spaces. They needed software to design the office floor plans for big customers like MixPanel. Lots of software. Not just booking rooms and events.

apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency That sound like some useless bullshit if I've ever heard it.

It's literally the bin packing problem, which is NP-complete. Plus you have another axis entirely on top of the already NP-hard problem: You want to minimize the number of times that you move any given group of people over time as you re-configure the office space to fit the maximum number of groups into it.

This is an algorithmically hard problem, and I'm not surprised that there might be significant benefits to investing in solving it very well.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#98

Post by legostormtroopr » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:26 AM UTC

B_Throwaway wrote: post #66

farisjarrah wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beca…

There are no systems running Windows 10X in production yet.

Its a shame this amazing reference is being downvoted.

Hopefully Windows 10X puts an end to the "10x developer" meme.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#99

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:29 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…

Twitter runs an entire advertising platform. If you've ever logged into Adwords or Adsense you'll know how complicated that is.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the basic twitter.com tweeting/commenting/retweeting system isn't remotely the most complex system that Twitter even has.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#100

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

dvtrn wrote: post #91

tempsy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If my friend who owns real estate can be used as an anecdotal bulletpoint: At the pub last night he told me how he and numerous other property owners here in Chicago have people who are trying to start their own catering/dinner party businesses and will rent out airbnb's with especially nice/large kitchens to do all of their food prep over a couple of days, check out and leave. A couple of them graduated to being abl…

Wow, that is fascinating. There's clearly a larger market for commercial kitchen space than is being satisfied.