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>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 wo
by 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 agoPeople like easy money. Anyone with ambition, opportunity, talent and foresight would likely have left We after a month and never looked back.
- jermaustin1 7y agoOr 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 agoHuh? What do your acquaintances do then for 8 hours, sleep?
- jermaustin1 7y agoGet to work at 9-10am. Work slowly doing trivial things. Eat long lunches. Go to the gym. Leave by 5pm. Get home by 6pm, and have the energy to get back on the computer. Where as I have absolutely no desire to look at a computer when I GET to work, let alone after work.
- codesushi42 7y agoSounds like a FAANG.
- remotecool 7y agoThis is exactly my position. I have job where I can get most of my daily work done in 2 hours. I spend the rest of my time on my side projects.
- fennecfoxen 7y ago> My guess would be 'very little', though I have no facts to back that up Almost exactly 2 years back, when interviewing around for a position, I talked with WeWork (along with several other firms). I attempted to ask their recruiters on the phone about how they use computers. I didn't walk away with a very strong understanding of how they used computers, but what I did manage to take away was that they wanted to be a software provider for firms that used their office space. With broad ambitions like that, I am not confident that they had enough focus to deliver meaningful software products without them being a massive drain on their resources. I will also note that this was months before they bought Teem in 2018.
- Konnstann 7y agoHey, I work on automated microscopy systems too! I'm the only dev though, rest of the team is optics/biologists. It's surprising how few solutions there are for incubated microscopes.
- EpicEng 7y agoNice. It's a niche industry still for sure, and I didn't work on live cell imaging that would require incubation (we had a process that would keep the cells in good shape via a live cell medium.) It's interesting work. Sounds like you're an in house dev in a research company or maybe academics? I went from device development in my first job to applications in my second.
- Konnstann 7y agoSomething like that. The institute bills itself as the link between the two, so we do a wide range of things. I got hired to do image processing work, but as things tend to go am now being leveraged anywhere they need software. Can't complain though, interesting work with a world class team.