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Comment by liquidise | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised most of the comments here are on the merits of shared workspaces instead of the potential overstaffing of WeWork. They have opened a couple of campuses in Denver in the last couple of months, and i was surprised to see about a 2:1 company to WeWork staff ratio. I won't pretend to know the list of the staff's responsibilities, but i can say that often times they appear to be hanging out in the general area chatting.

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.

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Been a WW member for a while, through their recent growth period. From what I can tell this is part of 'the strategy'. Start a new office, make it incredibly shiny/nice/very fully staffed, fill it up, then start cutting back to something more sustainable.

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.

That is approximately the impression I have of the staff in the West Loop office as well. The place feels overstaffed.

I have visited We Work after hours for meet ups but never during the day. Could someone describe what the staff does or what they should do? Isn't it substantially a real estate company, so is it all leasing/sales plus some facilities work?

At West Loop, there are two front desks, each staffed by 1-2 people; one at reception, one on the second floor, which I assume is there for member services? Then there are 3-4 at-large workers in black WeWork t-shirts taking out trash, delivering mail? No, wait, no they don't deliver anything. I think they just take out the trash.

Then there's a night crew that comes in and cleans the building.

Same feeling in Austin location as well.

In the wework at Market and 6, there's a bunch of staff too. Though they have I think 8 or 10 floors of 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.

Wework flagship for two years. I realized when there the tenants were mostly pretty bad startups who were just blowing through VC and would never survive. Saw Weworks valuation to continue to skyrocket -- all they do is sublease! Ridiculous, and they'll lose more than half their tenants as soon as VC dries up.

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 like WeWork quite a bit and they have a few locations in Seattle, but they also seemed way overstaffed. Other than putting sliced cucumbers in the water and answering the rare phone call, it's not clear why they would ever need more than 2-3 people working there at a time, but I always saw 6+ people there.

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.

I work out of a co-working space in India, the largest of its kind with 6 big offices across 5 cities.

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?

That staff to company ratio is surprising. I did a month at NextSpace.us in Culver City, CA and they really only ever had 2 or 3 staff members on at one time for the whole location.

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