8 ms·
The Rise of the WeWorking Class
- bvm 8y agoDoes anyone else find they can't tell if things are an intentional design decision or an implementation bug anymore? case-in-point: the rendering of the title of this piece.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoI have the sort of opposite reaction - so many things are basically either bugs in implementation or bugs in specification that I find lots of things unusable.
- theoh 8y agoThe steelmanned version of your comment might be something like "graphic designers these days really seem to have abandoned every recognizable principle of 'good' design". That would be a claim that design quality is deteriorating, like a lot of other aspects of civilization. There's a case to be made for that perspective. But I'm guessing you just meant that hip graphic design/typography often confounds your own expectations. If you aren't a design practitioner/enthusiast, I don't know why you would expect your preconceptions of what design should look like to be validated.
- m_fayer 8y agoFunny that the same can be said about the subject of the article.
- dictum 8y agoThe typeface is inspired by stencil lettering. Puzzling design is definitely not a contemporary trend. It was more common in the 1980-90s, but the style reached its height when CSS wasn't available, most visitors were unfamiliar with the Web etc. so pulling this off in a major publication like the NYT would be risky. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_designer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_design... (To wit, it's in The New York Times Magazine: its printed version has had experimental design styling for quite a while)
- Taylor_OD 8y agoIn a WeWork currently. It's fine. Better than the last coworking space I was in but I still don't understand why any company would stay in a WeWork for longer than a year unless they only need 1 or 2 desks. The price is just not worth it. Offices are small and loud (glass boxes). But hey I didnt have to buy a fridge or desks when I opened this office so that's nice.
- SCdF 8y agoWeWork is absurdly expensive. IDK, or I'm absurdly cheap (or am not the target audience) In London you pay £450-850(!) per month for wework space, from a hotdesk (aka "go to a cafe / library") to a private office. Instead, I just moved from a one bedroom flat to a two bedroom flat, increasing my rent by about £250 per month, and now have both a private office and a place for guests / co-workers to stay when they come to town.
- romeoEtJoliet 8y agoIn NYC (WeWork's home turf), it's not uncommon to see a jump of £500-£1000 with increasing bedrooms so maybe that factors into their prices. For example, my apartment building has ~ $2400 studios, $3000 1brs, and $4000 2brs.
- everdrive 8y agoToggle Reader View (Ctrl+Alt+R)
- anonymfus 8y agoPlease don't assume people's browsers. For example in Firefox reading view is toggled by F9, and in Microsoft Edge it's toggled by Ctrl+Shift+R.
- infinitezest 8y agoI am on mobile and these keyboard-centric comments are exclusionary.
- rekshaw 8y agoA recent executive mandate declared the company a “meat-free” organization. When I interviewed McKelvey not long after the Summit, he had a very fuzzy time trying to explain the meaning of the “eight pillars” of its CultureOS and the relationships among them. But when he noticed that the P.R. representative happened to be carrying a single-use plastic water bottle, he admonished her to be mindful of her own consumption. Wow.
- stickfigure 8y agoDoes this mean you cannot bring meat into the kitchen, or just that they've found a socially acceptable way of keeping provided food costs down?
- quux 8y agoMembers and employees can bring whatever kind of food they like into the space, but no WeWork funds can be spent on meat (fish is ok)
- lr4444lr 8y agoI don't envy the psychotherapists that have a professional mandate to show empathy to people like this.
- dalbasal 8y agoPuts religion into context, human/anthropology/history-wise.
- BucketSort 8y agoWhen did it become acceptable to straight up disrespect someone to their face for their personal choices? Although I'm 29, I still remember a time where there was at least the pretense of civility. Civility was the oil that kept this machine running smoothly, now it's sputtering left and right. We don't even use formal names like Mr./Ms. as much as we once did, if at all. I felt that was an important part of creating a barrier of civil respect, distinguishing personal relationships from civil relationships. We threw a lot of cultural things away that were actually pretty damn important. Edit: Also, my karma is now a binary number. Please don't up vote.
- dsr_ 8y agoI wonder if WeWork has already started an espionage (excuse me, business intelligence) program or whether that's a future development. Consider: an ordinary landlord knows how many desks you have, how many people show up on an average day, and how much garbage/recycling you put out. WeWork has operatives who can measure what percentage of your employees' days are spent at their desks, what they like to do for fun, when they are taking trips, where they are going, all their internet usage, how much they print (and if they cared, the contents of all print jobs), what they underline or circle on whiteboards. And of course, they can cross-correlate that across thousands of tenant companies, some of whom are certainly in competition with each other, and some of whom are listed on the stock markets already. Some of whom are no doubt conducting mergers, talks to be acquired... there's a wealth of non-public information that WeWork has access to. How long until they start to take advantage from it?
- buboard 8y agowell why wouldn't they? as long as people treat it as a workplace (i.e. they dont print their love letters there) its a good opportunity for some neat travel advertising etc.
- slig 8y agoI don't understand your point. Are you suggesting that people that pay a co-working space to work there should accept that whatever they're printing (most likely they're also paying for the pages they're printing) can be read by the co-working space?
- blfr 8y agoI don't know if they should accept it but realistically vast majority of companies don't have any valuable secrets. Maybe payroll data and perhaps the client list would be somewhat sensitive. Still difficult to act on for anything but price discrimination.
- yxc 8y agoYeah, a decade ago the company you worked for had your highly personal data. Now Slack, GSuite and others practically have the salary and work history of millions of programmers. Everyone seems to be totally okay with that.
- puranjay 8y agoI recently moved to WeWork after nearly half a decade of working in plainly inferior coworking spaces. It's early days, but I wouldn't be wrong to say that this is probably the first time in my career that I haven't felt, well, "unmoored". I freelanced through college, then through grad school, then I worked for a couple of years from home before moving to coworking spaces. At all these coworking spaces, despite their regular events, I never really felt like I was a part of a broader culture. I don't know how, but WeWork manages to do that. Maybe it's because the people around me there look and act and work like me. Whereas the average coworking space worker felt like he was struggling (heck, even drowning), the people at WeWork feel like they have more time, that they've done the battle, and if they haven't won, they've at least fought enough to win some peace. I don't know if I'm there yet, but I would like to imagine I'm getting there. WeWork, with its pricing and positioning (it's 2x the rate of my last office) seems to attract people who want to buy into the vision of success, who don't want to see themselves as just "digital labor".
- scandox 8y agoSo would it be fair to say it's like freelancing but you feel like you're part of a corporation? Like freelancing with the social and motivational aspects of working at say Google or whoever?
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoPresumably without the politics and bullshit you get in a corporation.
- scandox 8y agoOr the actual barrels of cash
- Kurtz79 8y agoNot OP, but I guess it is more similar to being at college.
- magwa101 8y agoI like the ability to optionally participate in a work culture, in fact, looks like you could pick and choose between a few. The forced culture of most companies is pretty tiring.
- code4tee 8y agoThe dot-com bubble tells us that when company leadership appears more concerned with meat consumption on premises or water bottle choices of employees vs say addressing actual business issues like losing money hand over fist despite being in business for many years then the future may be a wee bit bumpy for said company...
- crispyambulance 8y agoEvery time I see articles of these places there are pics of people with laptops, in rows, on narrow tables, almost elbow to elbow, sometimes sitting on high chairs or stools. Is that what these places are all like? It looks uncomfortable. It's like doing all your work in a high-end cafeteria.
- dalbasal 8y agoWhat a long winded article. I don't really understand the fascination/surprise at wework and similar. It's just office space, packaged in a way that suits a few underserved markets. Flexibility is valuable, and was previously underavailable. It also turned out that a lot of the "work-from-home" people would like office space, if it's nice and they can afford it. What is so surprising or notable here? A slightly quirky aesthetic? Espresso?
- porpoisely 8y agoIt's just paid PR for WeWork. WeWork must have a great PR team and most importantly investors with significant contacts because they get great press. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- eeZah7Ux 8y agoDisguising PR as articles is really dishonest.
- black6 8y agoNative advertising... After Craig Newmark effectively killed newspapers’s No. 1 source of revenue, they had to turn to other means of generating ad sales.
- pizzazzaro 8y agoI had thought the NYTimes was above that internet troll behavior. Clearly I was mistaken. Well, that's one less place I'll be spending my money online.
- jdormit 8y agoI don't know, the tone of the article wasn't actually super favorable towards WeWork. The author outright mocked their founder pretty consistently throughout the piece. The vibe I got was more, "WeWorks are nice to work at but they are not as revolutionary as they think they are".
- ohithereyou 8y agoDoes anybody else feel that ads like this in the NYT should clearly be marked as such?
- detaro 8y agoWhat is it advertising?
- ohithereyou 8y agoThe article is one giant ad for WeWork.
- detaro 8y agoOn first read it totally didn't come across that way, but on second look I might just be too far out of the target group to recognize as positive what it advertises...
- moonbug 8y agoIt's like no one's ever heard of Regus.
- cryoshon 8y agothat's because i think regus is a real place for people who want a small office and who don't want to pay for extra frills. i was very pleased renting from regus, and i got an entire small office to myself and my friend for the price of membership with no dedicated space that you'd be paying at wework or similar
- iceninenines 8y agoWW is Regus "emperor's new clothes" free PR from the mainstream media