That said, I "worked" in a WeWork for about 6 months and it was just terrible. Tiny offices, lots of visual distractions, lots of noise, many parties. I wouldn't ever do it again.
If BigCo has exhausted the talent in their city they have three options left: employ remote workers, pay people to relocate, or open satellite offices and pay a little more than then the local businesses to get people. WeWork is enabling the last option at scale. Renting managed office is a viable business model that's been happening for decades.
Whether there's enough of a market to make WeWork work is another question, but there might be. Anecdotally, a large insurer recently opened a new office in my city here in the UK because they've had 40 open positions in their London office for years. They've already filled half those positions. They wouldn't have done that without renting a large office on a business park.
Paying people to relocate from a small city to the most expensive place in the country is exceptionally difficult and expensive. Many developers here in the UK see London as a really bad place to live unless you're paid more than £100,000. Developer wages in London are often not £100,000.
Though obviously somebody must have crunched the numbers and decided these WeWork things are a cheaper bet.
Same (London, Shoreditch). Additionally we had relatively frequent and loud noises from the ceiling ("eeeeeNNGNGNGNGNGNNG") which they couldn't fix. But not once did they suggest we move offices to any one of the 30+ empty ones downstairs.
It's a terrible place to work. We recently moved out of the shared, fixed desk room which was relatively quiet into a glass office. There is no sound insulation whatsoever, you can hear every recruiter on the floor speaking their patter down the phone (loudly, because they have earbuds in) on repeat all day every day.
I also think WeWork will collapse eventually, it's just so clearly unsustainable. Maybe the hope is that they become 'too big to fail' first?
But compared to a decent traditional office, they are:
- noisy (always someone phoning while walking around because they couldn't get a booth, even when recruiting or doing otherwise sensitive discussions)
- more agitated (at a point there was people trying electric scooters in the corridor)
- some offices are just gloomy (some don't have any windows, with no natural light coming in from any direction)
I think we could see them as the McDonald of offices: a know quantity that passes some threshold. It's better than a random sandwich place next to a tourist trap, but not as good as a decent well managed (although slightly pricier) restaurant.