The ones I saw were very busy, and, filled by large corporates that wanted to be hip. I think for them value proposition is that they are able to hire some hipster people who don't want to work in the old buildings and also build some marketing stories around their "labs".
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.
I don't think it's a matter of wanting to "be hip", but a case of recruiting being a huge problem for most companies. Renting out the 'cool' co-working spaces of WeWork probably isn't their long term goal.
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.
I agree - but it makes sense to try to spread work out in other cities rather than have all the jobs in London with soaring CoL and struggling infrastructure.
A big company that's resisted remote working will find it hard to integrate remote people in to their teams. Remote is great, but unless everyone is in favor of it it can fail horribly - a manager who insists on having oversight of what people are doing at any given moment will kill any chance of remote workers being productive. Consequently if you have a big team at 'head office' who aren't used to or good at managing remote people then remote won't work.
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.
> it was just terrible. Tiny offices, lots of visual distractions, lots of noise, many parties. I wouldn't ever do it again.
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.
In Spitalfields. It's big, and sparsely occupied. There are 6 (or more?) other WeWorks within a five minute walk and all are ultra-prime locations - not cheap. The attitude to spending is unbelievable.
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?
I actually know why this is! If you're referring to the WeWork I think you are, it shares a building with Scape, a student accommodation I used to live in - the kids who live there are fairly loud, and the plumbing is quite weird and noisy
Yeah, that's what the engineers claimed but then it was only happening in our small office and it would alternate between "very frequent" and "gone for days" which makes their explanation somewhat unbelievable.
Really? I'm working in wework Lafayette right now and I love WeWork, so many free stuff (even beer!), beautiful building in a well placed location... I love it.
The frame of reference matters. In Paris at least Wework offices are relatively clean, well managed, and modern compared to most offices.
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.
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.