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Comment by Balero | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently in a non-WeWork co-working space. It's not clear what you mean with "The fact that no one can actually do real work at a WeWork was just icing on the shit pie.".

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My guess is that this person is super angry about open plan offices

WeWork isn't an open plan office. At least, not the one I work in in London. We just pay an extraordinary amount of money for a small glass-walled room. We internally have an open plan office, but that's just because we opted for a single WeWork room.

At least in my NYC WeWork the sound isolation is so bad that it might as well be an open office. I can clearly hear all the phone conversations my WeWork neighbors make. I assume they can hear mine as well.

The two I've been in in seattle have been basically silent inside our office.

One of the reasons that I didn't sign up for a WeWork space was that it seemed to noisy. WeWork plans social events in the office every day.

I guess it's good if you like to meet people. Not so much if you need a quiet space to work.

Don’t they serve beer whole day there? Or have they stopped doing that? I guess that was seen as one reason why you couldn’t get serious work done.

in the book Disrupted (about the author's time working at Hubspot), he posits that the free beer offered at startups is to soften the blow of the long working hours and relatively low salaries.

In this case, the free beer might be an intentional way to take "loud room I can't work in", to "laid back atmosphere I feel home in". The latter is false, but it's not as bad as being stuck with "loud room I can't work in".

Different people have different fcactors effecting quality of life. Some people want something more laid back and are willing to give up salary. Others want to optimize salary and work at a big corporation. The market can take a number of strategies—it’s up to the employees to vote with their feet. Given the inherent instability of startups and if they in fact do it less, that vote should be easy to cast if someone is not satisfied.

Drinking or not drinking beer during the times you should be productive is a matter of self-discipline and I doubt it has any direct relation to productivity.

Disclaimer: I work in a private office in a London WeWork and the free beer is a nice to have, even if it wasn't a consideration while picking an office.

The place I'm in doesn't serve beer at all. I can see that not being great for productivity.

I tend to think the beer, or the bar serving it, are not the ones at fault.

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