Comment by youeseh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by youeseh | Hacker News Reader

Say you own a co-working space. You probably should have some way to let:

- People book conference rooms.

- Let people check in and check out.

- Let people book hot desks.

- Manage access for members, hot desks, event participants etc.

- Lots of other stuff.

At some point, the off the shelf software is no good, especially if you're looking to... build a single experience around the world for lots and lots of office buildings under your management! The software will have a lot of other admin and reporting doodads. Especially if you're trying to turn your office company into an everything company. Then the scope goes way up.

You might even start thinking about managing everything because you're a control freak... stuff like central air con control and energy use analytics across all properties... I'm just throwing stuff out there, I've never worked for WeWork.

Does this justify hundreds of engineers? It is so easy to hire more people when you have a massive war chest. Projects begin to justify themselves because you'll need them "soon enough". And if the founder pulls it off, then they're a genius! Or not.

It's a classic case of hire engineers first and figure out problems to solve later. This works great if the company already has a massive revenue stream (Google, Facebook etc.) so the engineers can just mess around and once in a while come up with something great. For a company losing $2B+ a year, not so much.

Once WeWork solved its core engineering problems (bookings), engineering job descriptions got more and more abstract - "build the operating system for the workspace", "bridge the gap between physical and digital", "create a sense of community", "humanize through technology" (all copied directly from their engineering website), so it's clear that they are paying thousands of engineers to do nothing.

I know for a fact that they have large data and machine learning teams spread across SF, NYC, Tel Aviv, Shanghai and maybe more that collect and analyze data from all their operations - few hundred offices and few hundred thousand members. At this scale there is zero reason not to use off-the-shelf products (or pay one of the dozens of companies out there that specialize in this), but they decided to custom build all the infra in-house from scratch.

> I know for a fact that they have large data and machine learning teams spread across SF, NYC, Tel Aviv, Shanghai and maybe more

That's going to be an awkward presentation to management when they present their revenue forecasts under different economic scenarios...

Maybe they are using all those ML teams to build "self driving offices" (a la uber) or Self-greeting receiption? or predictive room bookings

Could have hired 500 office managers at half the salary and give them a paper daily planner.

Probably need 20 engineers to do that...

And another 480 to change the UI in annoying and unnecessary ways every three days.

I'm struggling to think what of that couldn't be done with off the shelf software, honestly. Hell, most of it could be done with Outlook and Active Directory.

Not in a way that scales or is user friendly. You might be able to use those as a base for something very hackey. I helped build a full suite to do everything in that list for a coworking "start up". It gets complicated pretty quickly and you need a custom ui and good control of the data model for custom business logic. If you want self serve subscription payments and reservations you'll need a few programmers. But not 1000 of them.

So Wework acquired https://www.teem.com/ specifically to do this, well the room booking part at least. They actually approached a different company and were rejected so they bought Teem.

I liked the product, and wanted to purchase it. We Co had so over funded Teem that the sales people couldn't keep up. They were doing demos with experienced Sales Engineers and literally couldn't explain how things worked. We had 2 demos in 2 successive weeks and the product fundamentally looked different both times.

Think about that: Imagine having unlimited eng and product resources and pushing code so fast that your sales team can't keep up sounds good right?

Wrong...we didn't buy Teem we went with their competitor who was behind on a few items, but had a concise product and a concise roadmap that met our needs, not the needs of 1000 coworking spaces tied together.

WeWork had apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency. They had one of the lowest sqft per paying member in the business.

They also were into custom spaces. They needed software to design the office floor plans for big customers like MixPanel.

Lots of software. Not just booking rooms and events.

apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency

That sound like some useless bullshit if I've ever heard it.

So does most software until you try doing stuff the hard way.

Really? You think optimizing office layout to maximize rental income is ”useless bullshit”?

In fairness, it might actually be. They have a lot of properties, yes, but is it so many that that can't just send a particularly skilled human around to design them?

Binpacking is np-hard but humans still do a very good job of playing Tetris. It is hard to imagine getting a positive return on automating something they (in the long run) will do a few times a year.

> It is hard to imagine getting a positive return on automating something they (in the long run) will do a few times a year.

That's totally fair. I think they actually do some other types of more mundane optimization that are geared towards managing the properties. I think a number of the engineers also work on the learning platform for their education services.

If I understand their business correctly, way more than a few times a year. I think they have problems of the kind

”there’s a team of 5 Monday to Wednesday, one of 7 Tuesday that also have a meeting room, one of 4 Tuesday to Friday, one of 3 for the next three weeks, one of 2 that have to sit side-by-side, …. Figure out who to place where, minimizing the times we have to tell customers to move desk, maximizing the ‘cohesion’ of desks assigned to each group. Oh, and do this knowing that the problem may change at any time”

And all of that, hopefully, in a building with a high occupancy rate, all the time.

This sort of software is hugely valuable in things like manufacturing. I don’t know enough about commercial real estate to know if it can drive the same efficiency there but it’s certainly not on its face clearly useless.

In fact it sounds way more useful than most software projects I see.

It's literally the bin packing problem, which is NP-complete. Plus you have another axis entirely on top of the already NP-hard problem: You want to minimize the number of times that you move any given group of people over time as you re-configure the office space to fit the maximum number of groups into it.

This is an algorithmically hard problem, and I'm not surprised that there might be significant benefits to investing in solving it very well.

Can you give me an order of magnitude estimate of how many milliseconds you believe solving the 2d bin packing problem with added constraints would take on a commodity PC when n=the max number of clients in any wework building?

The problem is interesting, but it isn't one you need to set up an entire engineering team to solve.

Actually, yes, I think you would need an entire engineering team to write, maintain, scale, and run a system that solves this problem. For example, my employer has a whole team working on internal tools for booking/managing/re-allocating conference rooms. It's almost exactly the same problem, it's non-trivial, it's complex, and it takes an entire team.

lol here's a hot tip for you: anything with "optimize" in the description is not useless bullshit. like the person said: it's literally an np-complete problem.

That’s a very weird take. That’s probably one of the highest value problems to solve in the entire economy.

Um, ok, so they just put in more chairs than anyone else.

A lot of those are build-once (if you don't buy third party) and do tiny updates later.

Does this justify hundreds of engineers?

No.

And the software to do those things isn't worth billions.

WeWokeUp.

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