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Incoming layoffs... between wework and uber the market will be "flooded" with talent. I wonder if having wework on your resume is a good or bad thing.
by mharroun 7y ago
Incoming layoffs... between wework and uber the market will be "flooded" with talent.
I wonder if having wework on your resume is a good or bad thing.
- dcchambers 7y agoHow many engineers does WeWork actually employ though? From everything I've read on here they're not really a tech company. I can't imagine that, even if it all goes up in flames, there will be many SWEs looking for new jobs from this. Uber is another story. They've got a sizeable engineering force.
- bjtonline 7y agoWeWork has done a significant amount of hiring in New York City for SWEs with very generous compensation, and honestly hasn't really had much for them to do.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoShould have made them get their realtor licenses.
- CydeWeys 7y agoAny idea how much the actual salary for these positions was vs the stock component which may well be worth nothing?
- martinald 7y agoAt least 500 doing a quick search for 'software engineer' at 'wework'. Probably over 1000 for different job titles, etc.
- puranjay 7y agoI honestly think Uber has over-invested in engineering. The problem they're trying to solve isn't so complicated that it needs their current engineering force. They don't have to add new features at as rapid a pace as a true software-focused company like, say, Stripe.
- jnwatson 7y agoAbsolutely. They need a huge operations and driver support/sales team, but R&D not so much, outside of the self-driving money pit.
- PMan74 7y agoFrom an external viewpoint stuff like building your own internal chat application seems like a "too many engineers with too little to do" kid of decision. https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ https://eng.uber.com/uchat/
- pram 7y agoThe chat program they’re referring to in the beginning was HipChat, which really was a steaming pile of crap. Uber was our largest user and they constantly brought the entire service down. IDK if making their own was the right solution, but it was driven by necessity and not boredom I assure you.
- user5994461 7y agoThe largest user of HipChat, really? Uber must have been something like 5k-15k employees at that time. I thought HipChat was used in F500, much larger than that. Anyway, HipChat was bought and killed by Slack. They avoided a dying product by accident.
- pram 7y agoYes. It seemed like every single one of their drivers was getting messages from one of their chat rooms in HipChat. It was like 25k people in a single room iirc. They seemed to be using it for notifications or something? At any rate HipChat was already dead prior to the sale. Atlassian made a new program from scratch called Stride which was its own little awful can of worms.
- acjohnson55 7y agoThey're a tech company in the sense that their internal and client-facing operations are enabled by custom tech, and they have the scale that that stuff needs to be pretty mature. But I wouldn't necessarily assume a WeWork engineer is doing cutting-edge stuff (not that they're not; I just wouldn't assume it).
- greenyoda 7y ago> They're a tech company in the sense that their internal and client-facing operations are enabled by custom tech... If that's the definition of a tech company, then Citibank, United Airlines and Fedex are also tech companies.
- acjohnson55 7y agoArguably, yes. I don't think that's exclusive of the other types of company you can be.
- untog 7y agoCompared to Uber they're still small. But I recall an article not so long ago talking about the tracking WeWork had installed in their offices that gave them startling insights like "people tend to drink more coffee in the mornings". They've been just as guilty as any of hiring a bunch of developers just so they can call themselves a "tech company".
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago> that gave them startling insights like "people tend to drink more coffee in the mornings". To play devil's advocate a bit, isn't this how science works? If you're not checking the obvious, you won't discover that people actually drink more coffee on the afternoon, or what have you.
- perl4ever 7y agoPersonally, I generally drink no more than one medium/large coffee all day, but sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, and sometimes I spend all day drinking it and reheating it, and still have some left when I go home. I guess I kind of wait until I feel particularly down and tired, but otherwise well hydrated, and that's when I want coffee, but not always at the same time of day.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chisleu 7y agoFlooded means I'll be able to find more than 3-4 qualified applicants per quarter? Good
- scandox 7y agoSo you mean flooded with "talent"?
- goobynight 7y agoThe people at these companies actually handling individual contributor level execution are pretty talented. It's just that the plan/model they work under is not sustainable.
- goatinaboat 7y agoCultural fit is so important these days and every one of them was a cultural fit at an extremely shady company. Even if they weren’t participating in the rampant excesses, they were still willing to go along with it.
- flmontpetit 7y agoWe're talking about an office here, not a SS regiment.
- goatinaboat 7y agoIf your company is embroiled in a misogynistic scandal, people will wonder why you hired all those techbros from Uber.
- Nextgrid 7y agoWell in case of Uber their engineering side is quite strong. WeWork? Not saying their engineering is bad, but as far as I know there's nothing groundbreaking there besides a standard CRM & billing system? So I think as an engineer having Uber would be a very good signal your resume, WeWork would be just like any other company.
- streetcat1 7y agoThe market is always flooded with "talent". The problem is finding good engineers which are around 1 in 100 resumes.
- samstave 7y agoWe should start a google sheet of startup ideas where ppl from this and all pools can say “I have talent that would work for that” and others can say “I’d fund that” Actually, we just need this in general...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lazybreather 7y agoOn a side note, I was quite surprised/shocked to see Waymo's recent valuation. $105Bn!! That is after Morgan Stanley cut it by 40%. So it was 165 Billion dollars prior to that. 165!! Now, Uber has it own share of quite extensive R&D on self driving tech. How can it be a $50 Bn market cap company today? With all the markets it is present in? For me, it looks like an opposite case of that of WeWork. Conspiracy against the company right in public market. It began with Travis getting all the heat for pretty trivial things, all the way till the IPO and now. I honestly don't understand how a company which practically revolutionized public transport all over the world and created a business model which gave a bazillion uber-for-X companies be valued so less.
- danbarker 7y agoUber's tech and business model is relatively easy to replicate. So much so, that in many of their markets they already have at least one close competitor, or near-perfect competitor if you count Lyft (who have a similarly good app to Uber in my estimation; many of the other substitutes seem to have a pretty acceptable app that is missing some of the polish of Uber). This makes their business vulnerable to price competition and raises doubts about their ability to make large profits over any long period of time. At the moment, they are losing money, but their (still high, imo) valuation is based on the fact that they are the biggest player and this means they have 'mind share' / brand awareness. If they try to start making a profit e.g. by pricing above their costs and not giving so many subsidies / bonuses, then they are vulnerable to any of their numerous competitors stealing market share by undercutting / offering their own bonuses or subsidies. They are already in fierce competition in many markets so it doesn't seem that their brand is necessarily enough to give them a huge and defensible advantage. By contrast, all reports I have read (e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/7c8e1d02-2ff2-11e9-8744-e7016697f225 https://www.ft.com/content/7c8e1d02-2ff2-11e9-8744-e7016697f... ) indicate that Waymo's self-driving tech is the best in the market by some margin, with Cruise a distant second (and everyone else, including Uber, way behind that). And Waymo's technology is fundamentally more complicated and difficult to copy than a taxi hailing app. You couldn't have multiple local competitors to Waymo popping up in each city around the world, in the same way you have with Uber. So their competitive advantage seems a lot more defensible, meaning that their potential to earn defensible profits from their technology seem stronger in the long run. Continuing on this idea of defensibility: whereas people are happy to try any new cab-hailing app that launches with a promotion, the decision on which self-driving tech to use is going to be a lot more strict, in that unless it really works, it's not viable. So having the best tech makes a BIG difference, unlike for ride sharing. The car industry is worth $1tn+ per year. The market for ride sharing is probably one or two orders of magnitude smaller than that ($12bn by 2025 according to this: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ride-sharing-market-size-worth-11-94-billion-by-2025--cagr-7-5-grand-view-research-inc-300808247.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ride-sharing-market... , although Uber's revenues are already $11bn so I question the accuracy of this). Uber is a loss-making and non-unique ride sharing company with so-far unfilled aspirations to develop market-ready self-driving tech. Waymo is a self-driving tech company with apparently real potential to disrupt the trillion-dollar car industry with their unique technology. Finally, Waymo's valuation is only on paper, whereas Uber's is in a public market. As WeWork (and Uber) have recently demonstrated, private valuations may not hold in private markets. However, given the reasons above, I actually think that the Waymo valuation might be more reasonable than the Uber one.