7 ms·

I don’t understand how this company employed 1500+ programmers, PMs and data science people. What did they do? I guess not much, as 500 of them got laid off rec

by cgh 7y ago

I don’t understand how this company employed 1500+ programmers, PMs and data science people. What did they do? I guess not much, as 500 of them got laid off recently.

ben_jones 7y ago
Analytics, logging, "Artificial Intelligence", the latest Fad in devops/application development, System administration duties, help desk duties, hiring/interviewing duties (you don't get to 1500+ without A LOT of this!), the refactoring after the clusterf* of using the latest Fad in devops/application development. "BIG" data pipelines, managing an Elasticsearch cluster, PM for the design of app 1, PM for the design of App 2, (for probably dozens of apps), QA teams, Design teams, Localization teams, Accessibility teams, SEO and marketing automation teams, teams to build out their CRM, and the all important management layer to interface all these teams together! This, this ladies and gentlemen, is how Silicon Valley changes the world.
- reustle 7y ago
  Totally agree, but I guess this is how they tried to brand themselves as a tech company and not just an office space provider.
- api 7y ago
  A small team could have written all the software for WeWork to do what it actually does. Each location could run it on an Intel NUC or similar. Central cloud could be moderately sized, maybe a dozen instances. That would be efficient, but ironically it would not have attracted so much investment because fewer buzzwords. It would have been a better way to run a business that sells office space but a less effective way to run a business that sells its stock. In a top heavy severely demand constrained economy it is far more profitable to sell stock than goods or services.
- delfinom 7y ago
  And with all of that, they couldn't even setup their wework networks more securely, even as little as blocking device discovery and port scanning.
vraivroo 7y ago
The comical thing is how often their systems are down. When I was in a WeWork we used to get free coffee all the time because they couldn't accept payments at the moment.
- dustinmoris 7y ago
  Coffee is always free at WeWork. The one from the machine as well as from the Barista.
  - vraivroo 7y ago
    Unless this is a development from within the last year, this is not universal.
- dan_quixote 7y ago
  When I was at a WeWork last year, kombucha and cold brew on tap was out of service at least 50% of the time. I took this as mismanagement then, now I wonder if it was simply cost-cutting.
  - ertemplin 7y ago
    I'm currently at a WeWork. They run out of sparkling water in the morning and fail to replenish it until around 2:00pm. I'm under the impression that they wait until then so people don't drink all the sparkling water when they eat lunch.
qsymmachus 7y ago
Careful! It's easy and fun to make fun of WeWork for calling itself a "tech" company, but we might be throwing rocks in glass houses. How many of us are currently working at """tech""" companies right now?
- dastx 7y ago
  I used to work for a startup bank. They used to always say "we're not a bank, we're a tech company with a banking license"..
  - fjp 7y ago
    Even when I interned it proto-dinosaur Allstate they called themselves "a tech company that happens to sell insurance". It does sound absurd and annoying, but for businesses like that it's good reminder that they'll probably get their market share eaten away if they don't stay on top of things by someone that can move faster or cheaper with their underlying technology stack.
    - thenightcrawler 7y ago
      Or they are hoping for a higher stock price by calling themselves tech companies?
      - repolfx 7y ago
        Stock markets don't listen to glib slogans like that. I've been to a lot of conferences over the past few years where CEOs/CTOs stood up and said "we're planning to become a tech company", or words to that effect. It's become a totally standard announcement, no more meaningful than "innovation is in our core values" or "we value diversity". The motivation is a mix of fear and ambition. Almost all industries are stagnating or declining: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-the-biggest-companies-keep-getting-bigger-its-how-they-spend-on-tech-1532610001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-the-biggest-companies-ke... The graph of the gap in productivity growth is the important thing here. The top 5% most productive firms captured nearly all economic growth (that wasn't merely due to population growth). And there's a lot of evidence that the top 5% of firms are essentially tech companies or at least have very high IT spending. I think there was some other story I read lately that claimed almost all wage growth up until recently came from wage growth at tech firms. Every industry has seen how tech startups or bigger tech firms can enter an industry and "disrupt" it, rapidly capturing huge control of the market through superior execution. So they all want to be like that. I know of one company where the senior management apparently goes and sits with Facebook employees once a month, to "learn how to be a tech firm"! My experience has been none of them really understand what tech firms are or why they're different, and wouldn't be willing to do what it takes to be one, even if they did.
codesushi42 7y ago
I am even more baffled that 1500 engineers accepted an offer at a company that's clearly a fraud. And it would have taken one Google search about their prospective employer to have seen this. If you work at or did work at We, what was your reasoning? Did you have any?
- bdcravens 7y ago
  I don’t think it was as obvious as it is now. Plus a lot of engineers work at companies which are blatant VC plays with little chance of viability, outside of acquisition. Those companies just don’t burn as hot or as fast as WeWork.
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    Even so, surely the revenue numbers were shared internally at some point. After which, anyone who could would have run for the hills.
    - bdcravens 7y ago
      Unless you're stuck in a job where you're below market in exchange for equity, as long as the checks keep clearing, you're not really incentivized to run for the hills. Keep your resume fresh, sure. Though we can make presumptions about what having WW on your resume will do reputation-wise, it sounds like it was a good opportunity to also fill it with a ton of buzz words.
      - codesushi42 7y ago
        I guess. But I bet the work environment was terrible. Why waste time? Life is too short, pull the trigger and leave. If you can.
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  I'm sure they worked for a paycheck, providing the critical infrastructure needed to property manage that many office spaces and customers. WeWork has tens of thousands of customers who for the most part are able to seamlessly come and go, check out conference rooms, pay for various one-offs, and their membership fees. Did they need 1500 engineers to build all of that, no. But when you take venture capital in the expectation of growth, you have to grow.
altmind 7y ago
https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/1085583434788020227 https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/10855834347880202...
EpicEng 7y ago
>What did they do? My guess would be 'very little', though I have no facts to back that up. It's just a staggering number given what the company does. I've worked at a place like this. The job was as easy as it was cushy. Two week sprint plans could be completed in literally 3-4 days... but they just kept on hiring. I often heard the word "growth", but I have no idea as to why their interpretation of the word was desirable. In contrast, I have also worked at two sucessful biotech companies. At the first we developed automated microscopy systems used by pathologists, as well as image viewing/analysis applications and your typical data management type interfaces. I worked on the scanner/image processing team. We were a team of six, three of which were software devs. The other software team (the data management / viewing stuff) had about eleven people. We were the most successful company in our domain, and our competition was the likes of Zeiss and Hamamatsu (one of which later purchased us.) At my next company we successfully released a prognostic test for late stage colon cancer using CTC's found in the blood stream. In the course of doing so we had to write all sorts of integrations on top of an image viewing application, reporting systems, and the core bits (scanning + image analysis + local data management + R&D tooling.) We had a team of ~4 devs over a three year period. When I read about stuff like this I'm just mystified.
- codesushi42 7y ago
  People like easy money. Anyone with ambition, opportunity, talent and foresight would likely have left We after a month and never looked back.
  - jermaustin1 7y ago
    Or they used their cushy job, high salary, and low expected work output as a nice way to fund and work their side projects. If you leave work energized from not doing much, you have plenty of energy to burn off building something. I know plenty of ambitious and talented developers who work at menial jobs to cash a paycheck and pay for their side projects.
    - codesushi42 7y ago
      Huh? What do your acquaintances do then for 8 hours, sleep?
cameldrv 7y ago
What's more amazing is that as far as I could observe, the software that they had was terrible. As one example, in order to use a printer, you had to install this enormous, incredibly slow and invasive java program on your computer, which was very difficult to use. They could have put a couple of developers on something that allowed you to upload a PDF to their website and have it be printed, and it would have improved the experience of their core product significantly.
tetron 7y ago
It's been like 3 years since I worked in a WeWork location but it seemed like they were doing a lot of wheel reinventing, they had their own social network site, their own room reservation system (actually something that makes sense, but it sucked), probably their own printer manager, chat app, mobile app, billing system and who knows what else. I could believe they employed a hundred programmers to just clone popular apps, and thinking they were "providing value" but the actual software was classic shovelware.

by cgh 7y ago

I don’t understand how this company employed 1500+ programmers, PMs and data science people. What did they do? I guess not much, as 500 of them got laid off recently.

ben_jones 7y ago

Analytics, logging, "Artificial Intelligence", the latest Fad in devops/application development, System administration duties, help desk duties, hiring/interviewing duties (you don't get to 1500+ without A LOT of this!), the refactoring after the clusterf* of using the latest Fad in devops/application development. "BIG" data pipelines, managing an Elasticsearch cluster, PM for the design of app 1, PM for the design of App 2, (for probably dozens of apps), QA teams, Design teams, Localization teams, Accessibility teams, SEO and marketing automation teams, teams to build out their CRM, and the all important management layer to interface all these teams together! This, this ladies and gentlemen, is how Silicon Valley changes the world.

reustle 7y ago
Totally agree, but I guess this is how they tried to brand themselves as a tech company and not just an office space provider.
api 7y ago
A small team could have written all the software for WeWork to do what it actually does. Each location could run it on an Intel NUC or similar. Central cloud could be moderately sized, maybe a dozen instances. That would be efficient, but ironically it would not have attracted so much investment because fewer buzzwords. It would have been a better way to run a business that sells office space but a less effective way to run a business that sells its stock. In a top heavy severely demand constrained economy it is far more profitable to sell stock than goods or services.
delfinom 7y ago
And with all of that, they couldn't even setup their wework networks more securely, even as little as blocking device discovery and port scanning.

vraivroo 7y ago

The comical thing is how often their systems are down. When I was in a WeWork we used to get free coffee all the time because they couldn't accept payments at the moment.

dustinmoris 7y ago
Coffee is always free at WeWork. The one from the machine as well as from the Barista.
- vraivroo 7y ago
  Unless this is a development from within the last year, this is not universal.
dan_quixote 7y ago
When I was at a WeWork last year, kombucha and cold brew on tap was out of service at least 50% of the time. I took this as mismanagement then, now I wonder if it was simply cost-cutting.
- ertemplin 7y ago
  I'm currently at a WeWork. They run out of sparkling water in the morning and fail to replenish it until around 2:00pm. I'm under the impression that they wait until then so people don't drink all the sparkling water when they eat lunch.

qsymmachus 7y ago

Careful! It's easy and fun to make fun of WeWork for calling itself a "tech" company, but we might be throwing rocks in glass houses. How many of us are currently working at """tech""" companies right now?

dastx 7y ago
I used to work for a startup bank. They used to always say "we're not a bank, we're a tech company with a banking license"..
- fjp 7y ago
  Even when I interned it proto-dinosaur Allstate they called themselves "a tech company that happens to sell insurance". It does sound absurd and annoying, but for businesses like that it's good reminder that they'll probably get their market share eaten away if they don't stay on top of things by someone that can move faster or cheaper with their underlying technology stack.
  - thenightcrawler 7y ago
    Or they are hoping for a higher stock price by calling themselves tech companies?
    - repolfx 7y ago
      Stock markets don't listen to glib slogans like that. I've been to a lot of conferences over the past few years where CEOs/CTOs stood up and said "we're planning to become a tech company", or words to that effect. It's become a totally standard announcement, no more meaningful than "innovation is in our core values" or "we value diversity". The motivation is a mix of fear and ambition. Almost all industries are stagnating or declining: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-the-biggest-companies-keep-getting-bigger-its-how-they-spend-on-tech-1532610001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-the-biggest-companies-ke... The graph of the gap in productivity growth is the important thing here. The top 5% most productive firms captured nearly all economic growth (that wasn't merely due to population growth). And there's a lot of evidence that the top 5% of firms are essentially tech companies or at least have very high IT spending. I think there was some other story I read lately that claimed almost all wage growth up until recently came from wage growth at tech firms. Every industry has seen how tech startups or bigger tech firms can enter an industry and "disrupt" it, rapidly capturing huge control of the market through superior execution. So they all want to be like that. I know of one company where the senior management apparently goes and sits with Facebook employees once a month, to "learn how to be a tech firm"! My experience has been none of them really understand what tech firms are or why they're different, and wouldn't be willing to do what it takes to be one, even if they did.

codesushi42 7y ago

I am even more baffled that 1500 engineers accepted an offer at a company that's clearly a fraud. And it would have taken one Google search about their prospective employer to have seen this. If you work at or did work at We, what was your reasoning? Did you have any?

bdcravens 7y ago
I don’t think it was as obvious as it is now. Plus a lot of engineers work at companies which are blatant VC plays with little chance of viability, outside of acquisition. Those companies just don’t burn as hot or as fast as WeWork.
- codesushi42 7y ago
  Even so, surely the revenue numbers were shared internally at some point. After which, anyone who could would have run for the hills.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    Unless you're stuck in a job where you're below market in exchange for equity, as long as the checks keep clearing, you're not really incentivized to run for the hills. Keep your resume fresh, sure. Though we can make presumptions about what having WW on your resume will do reputation-wise, it sounds like it was a good opportunity to also fill it with a ton of buzz words.
    - codesushi42 7y ago
      I guess. But I bet the work environment was terrible. Why waste time? Life is too short, pull the trigger and leave. If you can.
jermaustin1 7y ago
I'm sure they worked for a paycheck, providing the critical infrastructure needed to property manage that many office spaces and customers. WeWork has tens of thousands of customers who for the most part are able to seamlessly come and go, check out conference rooms, pay for various one-offs, and their membership fees. Did they need 1500 engineers to build all of that, no. But when you take venture capital in the expectation of growth, you have to grow.

altmind 7y ago

https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/1085583434788020227 https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/10855834347880202...

EpicEng 7y ago

>What did they do? My guess would be 'very little', though I have no facts to back that up. It's just a staggering number given what the company does. I've worked at a place like this. The job was as easy as it was cushy. Two week sprint plans could be completed in literally 3-4 days... but they just kept on hiring. I often heard the word "growth", but I have no idea as to why their interpretation of the word was desirable. In contrast, I have also worked at two sucessful biotech companies. At the first we developed automated microscopy systems used by pathologists, as well as image viewing/analysis applications and your typical data management type interfaces. I worked on the scanner/image processing team. We were a team of six, three of which were software devs. The other software team (the data management / viewing stuff) had about eleven people. We were the most successful company in our domain, and our competition was the likes of Zeiss and Hamamatsu (one of which later purchased us.) At my next company we successfully released a prognostic test for late stage colon cancer using CTC's found in the blood stream. In the course of doing so we had to write all sorts of integrations on top of an image viewing application, reporting systems, and the core bits (scanning + image analysis + local data management + R&D tooling.) We had a team of ~4 devs over a three year period. When I read about stuff like this I'm just mystified.

codesushi42 7y ago
People like easy money. Anyone with ambition, opportunity, talent and foresight would likely have left We after a month and never looked back.
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  Or they used their cushy job, high salary, and low expected work output as a nice way to fund and work their side projects. If you leave work energized from not doing much, you have plenty of energy to burn off building something. I know plenty of ambitious and talented developers who work at menial jobs to cash a paycheck and pay for their side projects.
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    Huh? What do your acquaintances do then for 8 hours, sleep?

cameldrv 7y ago

What's more amazing is that as far as I could observe, the software that they had was terrible. As one example, in order to use a printer, you had to install this enormous, incredibly slow and invasive java program on your computer, which was very difficult to use. They could have put a couple of developers on something that allowed you to upload a PDF to their website and have it be printed, and it would have improved the experience of their core product significantly.

tetron 7y ago

It's been like 3 years since I worked in a WeWork location but it seemed like they were doing a lot of wheel reinventing, they had their own social network site, their own room reservation system (actually something that makes sense, but it sucked), probably their own printer manager, chat app, mobile app, billing system and who knows what else. I could believe they employed a hundred programmers to just clone popular apps, and thinking they were "providing value" but the actual software was classic shovelware.