I don’t understand how this company employed 1500+ programmers, PMs and data science people. What did they do? I guess not much, as 500 of them got laid off recently.
My guess would be 'very little', though I have no facts to back that up. It's just a staggering number given what the company does.
I've worked at a place like this. The job was as easy as it was cushy. Two week sprint plans could be completed in literally 3-4 days... but they just kept on hiring. I often heard the word "growth", but I have no idea as to why their interpretation of the word was desirable.
In contrast, I have also worked at two sucessful biotech companies. At the first we developed automated microscopy systems used by pathologists, as well as image viewing/analysis applications and your typical data management type interfaces. I worked on the scanner/image processing team. We were a team of six, three of which were software devs. The other software team (the data management / viewing stuff) had about eleven people. We were the most successful company in our domain, and our competition was the likes of Zeiss and Hamamatsu (one of which later purchased us.)
At my next company we successfully released a prognostic test for late stage colon cancer using CTC's found in the blood stream. In the course of doing so we had to write all sorts of integrations on top of an image viewing application, reporting systems, and the core bits (scanning + image analysis + local data management + R&D tooling.) We had a team of ~4 devs over a three year period.
When I read about stuff like this I'm just mystified.
I know plenty of ambitious and talented developers who work at menial jobs to cash a paycheck and pay for their side projects.
Where as I have absolutely no desire to look at a computer when I GET to work, let alone after work.
Almost exactly 2 years back, when interviewing around for a position, I talked with WeWork (along with several other firms). I attempted to ask their recruiters on the phone about how they use computers. I didn't walk away with a very strong understanding of how they used computers, but what I did manage to take away was that they wanted to be a software provider for firms that used their office space.
With broad ambitions like that, I am not confident that they had enough focus to deliver meaningful software products without them being a massive drain on their resources. I will also note that this was months before they bought Teem in 2018.
It's interesting work. Sounds like you're an in house dev in a research company or maybe academics? I went from device development in my first job to applications in my second.
How many of us are currently working at """tech""" companies right now?
It does sound absurd and annoying, but for businesses like that it's good reminder that they'll probably get their market share eaten away if they don't stay on top of things by someone that can move faster or cheaper with their underlying technology stack.
I've been to a lot of conferences over the past few years where CEOs/CTOs stood up and said "we're planning to become a tech company", or words to that effect. It's become a totally standard announcement, no more meaningful than "innovation is in our core values" or "we value diversity".
The motivation is a mix of fear and ambition. Almost all industries are stagnating or declining:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-the-biggest-companies-ke...
The graph of the gap in productivity growth is the important thing here. The top 5% most productive firms captured nearly all economic growth (that wasn't merely due to population growth). And there's a lot of evidence that the top 5% of firms are essentially tech companies or at least have very high IT spending.
I think there was some other story I read lately that claimed almost all wage growth up until recently came from wage growth at tech firms.
Every industry has seen how tech startups or bigger tech firms can enter an industry and "disrupt" it, rapidly capturing huge control of the market through superior execution. So they all want to be like that. I know of one company where the senior management apparently goes and sits with Facebook employees once a month, to "learn how to be a tech firm"!
My experience has been none of them really understand what tech firms are or why they're different, and wouldn't be willing to do what it takes to be one, even if they did.
"BIG" data pipelines, managing an Elasticsearch cluster, PM for the design of app 1, PM for the design of App 2, (for probably dozens of apps), QA teams, Design teams, Localization teams, Accessibility teams, SEO and marketing automation teams, teams to build out their CRM, and the all important management layer to interface all these teams together!
This, this ladies and gentlemen, is how Silicon Valley changes the world.
That would be efficient, but ironically it would not have attracted so much investment because fewer buzzwords. It would have been a better way to run a business that sells office space but a less effective way to run a business that sells its stock.
In a top heavy severely demand constrained economy it is far more profitable to sell stock than goods or services.
They could have put a couple of developers on something that allowed you to upload a PDF to their website and have it be printed, and it would have improved the experience of their core product significantly.
If you work at or did work at We, what was your reasoning? Did you have any?
WeWork has tens of thousands of customers who for the most part are able to seamlessly come and go, check out conference rooms, pay for various one-offs, and their membership fees.
Did they need 1500 engineers to build all of that, no. But when you take venture capital in the expectation of growth, you have to grow.