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It's a property company that's planning tracking everything people do in their buildings. >WeWork's latest acquisition is a small software company with 24 empl

by nabnob 7y ago

It's a property company that's planning tracking everything people do in their buildings. >WeWork's latest acquisition is a small software company with 24 employees. Euclid is a spatial analytics platform...Euclid's website says the company is "focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future." Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive. Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It's all done over Wi-Fi. Edit - forgot to link the article - https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/wework-is-trying-a-creepy-new-strategy-it-just-might-signal-end-of-workplace-as-we-know-it.html https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/wework-is-trying-a-creepy-ne...

wpietri 7y ago
Yeah, I don't see that providing the outsized gains they're hoping for. I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs who business plan is basically 1. Collect data 2. ??? 3. Profit And every time I quiz them on point 2, they get squirrely. They can never explain exactly how it works; at best I get hazy references to Google making lots from data, which is at best a partial truth. In this case, I doubt having that data will do much; humans are already natural optimizers. Really, the things workplaces should be optimized for are unlikely to be easily measurable, so at best these systems will optimize for the wrong thing. And really, the reason workplaces aren't particularly optimal now is that most decisions are made not for maximizing business value, but for maximizing the power and comfort of those high up. As an example, when businesses relocate their headquarters, it is generally to move closer to the CEO's home. Or we can look at all the decisions made to optimize a visible metric, like cost, to the harm of invisible ones. E.g., the open office plan, which is cheap and lets managers supervise by looking out their office window, but significantly harms productivity and employee happiness.
- wickedsight 7y ago
  > And every time I quiz them on point 2, they get squirrely. Well, sure, but all they're being told is that data is the new gold. [0] And gold is valuable, so data must also be valuable. They tend to forget that not all data is gold, because 'some data is gold' isn't what they were told and also isn't fun. 0: https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/data-analytics/articles/the-new-gold.html https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/data-analytics/article...
- jedberg 7y ago
  > humans are already natural optimizers This right here. Most humans will do whatever they can to achieve minimal work. However, they aren't great at gathering all the necessary data and often find local maxima, so there is still some value in "AI augmentation".
- nabnob 7y ago
  Yeah, I don't think tracking this type of data would improve worker productivity, and I think it could actually have the opposite effect of demoralizing employees. However, I can definitely see some unethical companies being interested in this type of tracking, so I'm guessing there's a market for it.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  I'm sitting in a very similar situation.The company I work for provides relatively basic service, however the operational( we are brokers) model is challenging. We have tons of reports and dashboards measuring things from A to Z, sometimes it feels like we are some sort of analytics company. While some metrics are useful and help steer the ship either way,the rest simply becomes noise. Also a lot of data is not being interpreted correctly because of lack of statistics/math skills within the company.
- raywu 7y ago
  Always great to run into your comment on HN
xchaotic 7y ago
Did Euclid / WeWork realise that many people prefer to work from home? My past 14 years of professional experience would net WeWork 0 rental income.
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  I'm part of an almost entirely remote company, where the headquarters is stationed in a coworking space. If the company offered a WeWork membership for us remote-workers, I'd occasionally like to visit the space for the atmosphere of working around other working people and the conveient coffee, booze, and views. But as it stands WeWork is far too expensive for me to justify paying out of pocket for considering how noisy the shared areas are compared to any of the cafes down the block from my home, where I can get the same work done in a similar environment for a fraction of the daily cost.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    Don't rent in some hipster corner,where you'd have 9/10 doing anything but work.Find a slightly run down office space and get a desk or a tiny room there. I've been to so many non A+ office buildings and most of them are dead quiet because most tenants in such buildings have to work their asses off to make living because they don't operate in high margin,low competition markets.
vadym909 7y ago
Sure- and if they report which employees attend meetings and who spend more time at the water cooler, their rent and valuation will go up. That is some serious stretching of possible ways to make money

by nabnob 7y ago

wpietri 7y ago

Yeah, I don't see that providing the outsized gains they're hoping for. I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs who business plan is basically 1. Collect data 2. ??? 3. Profit And every time I quiz them on point 2, they get squirrely. They can never explain exactly how it works; at best I get hazy references to Google making lots from data, which is at best a partial truth. In this case, I doubt having that data will do much; humans are already natural optimizers. Really, the things workplaces should be optimized for are unlikely to be easily measurable, so at best these systems will optimize for the wrong thing. And really, the reason workplaces aren't particularly optimal now is that most decisions are made not for maximizing business value, but for maximizing the power and comfort of those high up. As an example, when businesses relocate their headquarters, it is generally to move closer to the CEO's home. Or we can look at all the decisions made to optimize a visible metric, like cost, to the harm of invisible ones. E.g., the open office plan, which is cheap and lets managers supervise by looking out their office window, but significantly harms productivity and employee happiness.

wickedsight 7y ago
> And every time I quiz them on point 2, they get squirrely. Well, sure, but all they're being told is that data is the new gold. [0] And gold is valuable, so data must also be valuable. They tend to forget that not all data is gold, because 'some data is gold' isn't what they were told and also isn't fun. 0: https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/data-analytics/articles/the-new-gold.html https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/data-analytics/article...
jedberg 7y ago
> humans are already natural optimizers This right here. Most humans will do whatever they can to achieve minimal work. However, they aren't great at gathering all the necessary data and often find local maxima, so there is still some value in "AI augmentation".
nabnob 7y ago
Yeah, I don't think tracking this type of data would improve worker productivity, and I think it could actually have the opposite effect of demoralizing employees. However, I can definitely see some unethical companies being interested in this type of tracking, so I'm guessing there's a market for it.
cosmodisk 7y ago
I'm sitting in a very similar situation.The company I work for provides relatively basic service, however the operational( we are brokers) model is challenging. We have tons of reports and dashboards measuring things from A to Z, sometimes it feels like we are some sort of analytics company. While some metrics are useful and help steer the ship either way,the rest simply becomes noise. Also a lot of data is not being interpreted correctly because of lack of statistics/math skills within the company.
raywu 7y ago
Always great to run into your comment on HN

xchaotic 7y ago

Did Euclid / WeWork realise that many people prefer to work from home? My past 14 years of professional experience would net WeWork 0 rental income.

ilikehurdles 7y ago
I'm part of an almost entirely remote company, where the headquarters is stationed in a coworking space. If the company offered a WeWork membership for us remote-workers, I'd occasionally like to visit the space for the atmosphere of working around other working people and the conveient coffee, booze, and views. But as it stands WeWork is far too expensive for me to justify paying out of pocket for considering how noisy the shared areas are compared to any of the cafes down the block from my home, where I can get the same work done in a similar environment for a fraction of the daily cost.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Don't rent in some hipster corner,where you'd have 9/10 doing anything but work.Find a slightly run down office space and get a desk or a tiny room there. I've been to so many non A+ office buildings and most of them are dead quiet because most tenants in such buildings have to work their asses off to make living because they don't operate in high margin,low competition markets.

vadym909 7y ago

Sure- and if they report which employees attend meetings and who spend more time at the water cooler, their rent and valuation will go up. That is some serious stretching of possible ways to make money