WeWork Is Cutting About 7% of Staff
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
As a tenant that lack of things to do is great for me. It means they can be attentive to our needs when they arise. For WeWork, i suspect it is indicative of overstaffing campuses.
Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing (unless you work for WW). Starting by crazy delighting your customers to get an initial bump, then cutting back to something more sustainable isn't exactly a groundbreaking strategy. It's a bit reminiscent of what Uber does in new cities.
Then there's a night crew that comes in and cleans the building.
Of course, who knows what the staff do all day. The bathroom on our floor regularly runs out of paper towels or has overflowing garbage cans.
Also, fwiw, I can't disrecommend WeWork strongly enough.
* They let one of the two elevators in our building sit out of service for 6 weeks last year. I hope you like a 15+ minute wait to get in or out of the building. Instead of being aggressive with the building owners to get it fixed, the smarmy wework pricks did nothing.
* They also can't get the door locks on our door to work reliably. Now the door just sits open all day.
* The hvac doesn't work. More than half the staff on my floor used blankets last winter, and even I found it quite cold, and I grew up in the north. Now that it's summer, it's regularly low 80s in the office.
* The offices themselves are loud overpriced echo boxes.
We finally got a real office and put in our notice this month. I was ready to quit to get out of WeWork.
The "offices" are pretty useless. You hear everyone around you all the time, and you have no privacy for conversations or phone calls. The modern decor just means lots of noise too - god forbid someone on your floor wear high heels, you'll hear them walking up and down the hardwood halls all day.
I also noticed the staff spent a lot of time hanging out on couches, playing ping pong, and chatting with their friends. Everyone was always really friendly and professional when I needed something and it contributed to a laid-back vibe, but that's not a good staffing model for a business that's running at scale and not for fun.
It seems to have the same problem. Although my office is the "home" office of this company, it still has way too many employees of its own.
And I reckon they might be profitable, but I find that a lot of them aren't doing anything really.
I mean, do you really need 5 people just to handle your social media? Or do you need 4 people in one office just to handle billing?
There are a LOT of people working there. What's really surprising to see is how many of them are non-profits. The company I work for can swing it because we are a very profitable consulting company. But I don't get how the non-profs do it.
And there are always at least three people behind the reception desk. I don't ever see anyone actually using the reception desk, but there are three people manning it just in case. I did a loop around the halls and found no less than 4 custodians working at the same time. It's not like there is anything dirty going on. Everyone is working with computers.
I mean, there's free beer in the kitchen. How can this not be expensive? My CEO told me what he was paying for rent not too long ago. It was ludicrous. We could rent a warehouse in the city I actually live (Alexandria) and have 10 times as much room, and still have enough left over to renovate and make the warehouse into a "livable" office space.
I find it odd that people at the front desk just kind of hang out. I never got onboarding but was able to figure out everything on my own. Not that difficult.
I wish there were more tech meetups there. Instead I'm going all over DC/Northern Va. to random offices for those. Because of that I kind of feel disassociated from other people at WeWork. I go in, do my work in my fishbowl office of 6, and go home. Little interaction with others there.
I once went to a meetup at MakeOffices at Tyson's Corner which is a competing colocation workspace. It is a lot less "hip" but has things like open tables with seats and whiteboards everywhere which really appeals to me. We have to provide our own in Chinatown or rent a conference room using credits. Which we hesitate to do because you never know when you'll need it.
These spaces are expensive. If it were up to me I'd be working in a less "hip" but more functional space.
Can someone give an anecdote on when a shared workspace like this was beneficial to their startup's growth?
Erin uses it, but I never do; I just stay in the coworking space downstairs. Generally people aren't very annoying (exception: enthusiastic dial-for-dollars recruiters taking loud phone calls), and the open space is a lot more comfortable.
It's like the good bits of working in a coffee shop with none of the bad bits.
As for the price: even with a private office, I felt like WeWork's pricing was competitive. I could have paid less for an office in Chicago, but it would be much less nice, and I'd have to lease it. Leases are especially painful in the early months of your company, because you have no visibility into how you're going to need space moving forward.
I'm not a WeWork booster. The place feels... let's say, "heavily subsidized by investors". I'm happy to take advantage.
Previously I did substantially all of my work from either my apartment or from cafes. Offices are better than apartments: you can bracket all time spent in them as "work" and then go home from work. Offices are better than cafes: it is expected that you will be working at an office, and you don't have to play a constant am-I-paying-enough-to-keep-my-table game with the cafe. Relevantly for Tokyo cafes, offices (even cramped offices) are substantially more spacious per seat than cafes are, have much better power/Internet situations, and often include printers and fax machines, for when you need a printer and/or fax machine.
Additional these places can be attractive for remote workers and freelancers. Its offers a community of individuals in same/similar industries. Clean bathrooms, usually basic amenities.
Edit: Just to add, I worked at a co-working place in downtown San Francisco. I think we spent maybe ~1 year there. Started with a couple desks, ended with maybe 8 desks and then we moved out. It gets expensive but it offers a level of flexibility that we found valuable at the time.
To me it sounds a bit like playing the networking lottery at a very high cost.
(I can only speak for the West Loop office, though).
Still, the price is really high. I certainly wouldn't be able to afford it if I was trying to bootstrap a new business.
PS: If anybody else is Portland based, come by and have coffee with us ;-)
- Gets me out of the house, away from wife and kid, huge deal.
- The networking I don't use often but it IS a good option.
- The facilities are great, well staffed, clean, no complaints.
- I don't have to deal with anything for office upkeep.
- I can use other WeWorks all over the world, which are a lot these days.
As another poster said, who knows if I'll have 1 or 20 employees next year? Leases are impossible at this stage.
I would probably grow within WeWork around 8-10 employees before looking at other options. Yes, it's expensive per square meter but well worth it for flexibility.
Beyond the physical space in a desirable location, the value for us comes from:
* Perks like free beer, free food (sometimes) social and professional events * Networking via their social network * A big, fun, creative space
The staff always seem busy to me and the place is really well kept. Happy customer.
WeWork provided a good / cheap alternative for a small group of ppl.
Is it over priced? Yes. Is it worth the flexibility for most startups, without question. +20 people i'd look elsewhere.
WeWork Walnut St. Desk[0] - $450
Allegheny Ave Office[1] - $450
But then it goes on and says
"WeWork said it hired 175 people in May and expects to add about 500 employees by the end of the year. The company said it expects to lift the pause on hiring as soon as next week."
What kind of information should I synthesize from this ? Is it bad is it good or is it both at the same time ?
In fact, why did I just waste x minutes of my life reading this piece of malreported doublethink-provoking article ?
My prayers go to the ad blockers ..
The company said it expects to lift the pause on hiring as soon as next week.
“WeWork's growth and expansion continues to accelerate and we expect to add hundreds of employees between now and the end of the year,” a company spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail. “Recent employee actions were part of the company's talent review process to ensure that we have the right teams in place that align with the company’s priorities.”
I suppose this is as good of a place to ask as any, are there any good coworking spaces in South Bay, preferably close to Cupertino?
You'll be fine. There's still a good bit of demand for junior programmers, and there are no signs of that going away anytime soon. If you're in a top-tier bootcamp and you do well in it, you will come out ready to take junior positions, roughly comparable to a new CS grad minus their internships (which do give them an advantage). Just don't expect a $105K base salary at your first job - some bootcamps set unrealistic expectations to sell you on the program.
Keep working on the bootcamp, write some open-source code on the side, focus as hard as you can at getting better. It'll work out.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/Labour_Isnt_W...
Innocence is injured experience just talks
Everyone seeks damages and everyone agrees
That these are 'classic symptoms of a monetary squeeze'
On ITV and BBC they talk about the curse
Philosophy is useless theology is worse
History boils over there's an economics freeze
Sociologists invent words that mean 'Industrial Disease'"
- Dire Straits, "Industrial Disease".
WeWork sounds so much like WeComply, or WeReEnslaved, or perhaps WeHaveNoSpine.
I'd much rather dwell 8 hours a day in a place run by a company called CompulsoryDungeon or ItinerantWarden or WeSquat or WeDetain or WeSlum. At least to dispose of the facade that people are always thinking happy thoughts about their employment situation.
Advertising puts an upper limit on the value of content it's possible for you (or anyone) to see. With advertising, you are never shown content that is more valuable than the ads you're being sold to.
Other payment models allow you to buy more expensive content than your time is worth to advertisers.
Hence why very expensive content (like popular feature-length movies) are rarely paid entirely by advertising. Even with hundreds of product placements and an expensive ticket, movie theatres still have to overcharge for concessions to pay for the movie.