Ask HN: How to do online jobs better? - <AUTHOR>

I have had a long-simmering desire to create a new kind of website for job-seekers. It is due largely to my experience of how demoralising and ineffective traditional job sites feel.
I really want to avoid the existing model which has job seekers trawling pages and pages of jobs and then shooting off tons of CVs and flooding the job-posters with irrelevant candidates.
I am hesitant to just slap on a 'social' type interface where you can connect using linkedin/facebook and refer friends etc but I have hit a mental brick wall about what other options I can consider.
Would love to hear from HN'ers some new angles or approaches to consider.  Appreciate any and all input. <comment><USER2> Have a look at dating sites, there's much more innovation going on in that space, and they're essentially having to deal with exactly the same matching problem.

However one of the big issues with innovating in this space is that HR departments are generally quite conservative so it's hard to sell innovative products to them (look at the difficulty SnapTalent had with their initial product).

You'll probably have more luck selling to third party recruiters who are more risk tolerant.

There's about a dozen companies currently doing the whole social network recruiting thing, but none of them has serious traction, and I'm not personally convinced it's a model that will work.

I'm working on this problem by building a niche job site, it's not hugely innovative technically, but it should help with the relevance problem and also be traditional enough to appeal to HR departments.

One of the other ideas I had in this space was building a platform for matching recruiters to candidates, so recruiters could send targeted messages to candidates matching a set criteria (+using game mechanic techniques to stop spamming). If you want to talk more about this idea feel free to drop me a message.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a job Seeker, I'm looking for high quality jobs and low noise. What this points out to me is that it needs to be a curated list. You could go with letting users vote up good jobs and vote down bad jobs, but this creates an incentive to vote down jobs you've applied for already hoping no one else applies.

One model might be a curated niche of job postings for whatever niche you would understand the most. Then you need a way to reduce the talent pool the HR department sees.

One way to do this is give the job applicant a way to do a 'quick pitch' and the HR department can click a button called 'Tell me more' and the jobs process can go from there if both parties are interested. Maybe you could display stats as a way to incentive certain actions. If a job applicant has applied to 300 job offers with a cut and past and has only got 3 tell me mores, that would show to to the HR applicant. If however, a job applicant had a 98% tell more more rating on 30 job applications that means he's probably customizing it and the HR department can tell he probably has a pretty good EQ.

<comment><USER4> > this creates an incentive to vote down jobs you've applied for already > hoping no one else applies.

Should be fairly easy to solve this. You can only apply for jobs through a form that appears once you vote up. Once you apply your vote is fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Social filtering - pay people you trust to do the filtering of applications for you.

Recruiters literally have _no_ idea of what makes a decent candidate so they have to resort to simple (almost syntactic) measures - 6 years of C++, Oracle etc. where they have no idea of what those terms actually mean or how useful they are (what Oracle product - there are zillions of them).

I'd quite happily delegate filtering of candidates to people I trust and if they get paid for doing it then it is a win-win situation. If you had a site with effective workflow to manage each stage of the process then it could be pretty slick.

[NB I spent quite some time on this idea a while back but parked it to work on other ideas].

<comment><USER2> One problem with this approach is that recruitment agencies are paranoid about control of their CV databases, those CVs are one of the main assets of the company and they go to great lengths to restrict access to them.

Opening those databases up to third parties might be a risk many of them are unwilling to take.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure the databases are that valuable - simply advertise the posts on the site (or on other websites). Which is exactly what recruiters do.

<comment><USER2> Typically recruiters just use adverts to obtain CVs to put into their CRM system and match them to a range of roles they have available. The specific role you apply for isn't that important to the recruiter, as once they have your details they'll try and match you to any job they have which they think might be suitable.

The cost of advertising (which is high) is amortized by the long term value created by the CV database. Giving third parties access to those CVs is something I would imagine most recruiters would be reluctant to do.

<comment><USER5> Just about every role I've sent to a recruiter appeared within a few hours on the normal selection of websites - I'm not sure they ever had anyone "from their database" although they claim that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote my own job search engine after getting fed up of the existing crap. It pulls in rss feeds and mailing lists and even does a bit of crawling via HN and Reddit to find jobs. I used a trainable classifier to filter out most of the dross.

The main problem with job sites is matching jobs to applicants. As far as I know noone has gone beyond simple keyword searching. If you had an actual userbase you could make use of collaborative filtering techniques (like Amazons recommendations) to provide a tailored service to each user. CVs, personal blogs and github accounts give you enough information to seed each users recommendations even before they start rating jobs.

<comment><USER6> This is what I'm trying to work on. How did you train your search engine?

What sort of collaborative filtering techniques? How would that work? I'm intrigued! Would love to chat further via email.

<comment><USER4> > How did you train your search engine?

I used some pretty simple techniques: one bayesian filter to filter jobs from other posts in mailing lists etc, one bayesian filter to score jobs based on keywords. Both filters were trained by feedback from the console ui. The main problem is excluding site-specific keywords that distort the scoring (eg if a site with mostly crappy jobs includes its own name in the listing then even the good jobs will score low by association). A lot of job sites have manky markup so I also had a different scraping script for each site to extract text. All in all its only a couple of hours work. I've been thinking recently about extending it and adding a simple web ui, since finding freelance work is pretty time consuming.

> What sort of collaborative filtering techniques?

I didn't have any specific in mind but there are plenty of good machine learning books that cover different tecniques. If you don't already have a background in maths then 'Programming Collective Intelligence' is a good book to start with. 'The Elements of Statistical Learning' goes into a lot more detail but requires some basic maths.

> Would love to chat further via email.

Email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've given this a significant amount of thought, with the end result being that to make a better experience for the job seekers you need to improve the experience for those seeking applicants as well. My initial thoughts are detailed better over at [http://ismarc.tumblr.com/post/1458764869/hacking-the- hiring-...](http://ismarc.tumblr.com/post/1458764869/hacking-the-hiring- process). I don't have a solution, and may never, but hopefully it'll jog your brain in a direction I haven't thought yet.

</comment><comment><USER8> EDIT: TL;DR: I see the primary problem with recruitment being far too many applicants for each job, because applicants apply to many, many jobs. Incentivise applying to only a few jobs and the employer gets fewer, better applicants.

For job-seekers, the marginal cost of one more application is too low, so companies get too many applications. With too many applicants, filtering becomes more random, so the reward for applying for a job you are only tenuously qualified for increases. It's a classic hawks vs doves with a big payoff for being a hawk amongst mostly doves

So, make it more expensive to apply for a job. Two ways I can think of doing this:

1\. Charge applicants ten bucks to apply for a job. Have companies report if they were good enough but they found someone better. In that case, give them a refund. In all other cases, keep the money. (EDIT: This may possibly be illegal in some jurisdictions, but there are doubtless ways around that.)

2\. Show companies how many jobs the applicant has applied for recently (not necessarily where they have applied, but you could perhaps positions/business areas) and/or restrict applicants to N applications per month. Aggressively detect and ban sock-puppetting — perhaps you can require verified ID of the applicant's name and get companies to check that is the name of the person applying.

You could also make things less stressful by operating on a say weekly or monthly cycle. Jobs are posted at the beginning of the month, applicants choose which N jobs they want to apply for, applications go out, new cycle starts. This avoids stampedes and requires applicants to be discerning.

<comment><USER8> I'm confused: do people think these are bad ideas? Or that they couldn't be implemented? Or unethical or something? Or just having a bad day? I don't mind being downvoted; but I do like to have some idea why.

<comment><USER9> Limiting how many jobs people can apply to on your website isn't going to stop people from applying to lots of places, it just means that they're not going to use your website that much. And people looking for a job aren't going to drop a lot of money to apply for jobs because they don't have a source of income, which also makes them want to avoid your website. Sure, you could overcome these things if you had an extremely high placement rate, but that's going to be very hard, especially in the beginning.

Your core idea might be a good one, but companies have better ways of making applying more expensive. They have puzzles and automated assessments. Some places basically only hire people who can network in, others require a specific certification, and many bias towards people who have some public work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When using such sites, from a candidate's point of view, the two things that get on my nerves are:

a) Ads posted by Recruitment Agents giving me no idea who the actual employer might be.

b) Ads with no sensible salary hint.

On (b), I don't mind there being a wide band (e.g. 25-60K, depending on experience), as at least that is a hint. What I really hate is "£Competitive" or "£Neg+Bens" and other such non-information.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hm. I'd say that is not the easiest target audience to go after. I think you are very likely to fail, even if you produce something revolutionary. If it's that good there are probably hundreds of competitors of which some will be able to copy it quickly. Plus you have to solve the chicken and egg problem, of course.

</comment><comment><USER12> Er... Whose problems are you trying to solve? Job-seekers or recruiters?</comment>


Why We Should Be Excited About the Future of Work - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/7-reasons-to-be-excited-about-the-future-of-work-e8c9fbb61e52#.balst2ytx <comment><USER2> Is there any chance that widespread adoption/disemmination of basic income will take place prior to the rapid increase of automated jobs?

(Or, alternatively, that job skills will catch up with the change in demand? Historically this seems like a reach so I almost left it out)</comment>


How U.K.'s queen of tech turned London into Europe's Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/2015/01/28/how-u-k-s-queen-of-tech-turned-london-into-europes-silicon-valley/

<comment><USER2> I have to apologize because I couldn't actually read this whole article. Once I saw the word "baroness" I realized I was heading into a pit of PR nonsense written in the style of someone who traces their heritage back to the Mayflower. It was basically like the anti-startup spiel, where noblesse-oblige puts those silly commoners back in their place.</comment>


Ask HN: Which VPS hosting do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I don't have much experience with VPS hosting but all the companies seem similar enough. What companies have you had good experience with?<p>Note: I am looking at the cheapest solution at the moment but I would pay a bit more for quality. <comment><USER2> I've used SliceHost, Linode, and AWS, as well as some "no-name" providers. Linode is my top pick. I've thought about moving my stuff to AWS (due to the hourly vs monthly billing) multiple times but always ended up staying with Linode.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have added this as part of my original question but how easy is it to upgrade your hosting solution. Say I have a 20$ a month one but then one of my websites takes off and I need bigger and better. Is the transition painless?

<comment><USER3> Linode customer here. It really depends on your architecture, but I'd say it's just as easy to scale at Linode as it is with AWS. You can simply upgrade your linode, but that involves some downtime (depending on how much disk space you used). The other alternative is to setup a separate one then once you have everything switched over shutdown the old one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm using both <http://www.intovps.com/> and <http://www.linode.com/> currently, and I'm super-happy with both! IntoVPS is the cheapest VPS you can find, but their quality and uptime is outstanding. Linode... well... awesome.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't have much experience with VPS either, but I'm using Linode and finding their platform super easy to use.

When I asked around my friends, <http://www.wizzvps.com/> was recommended if I didn't need the 'support' of Linode.

</comment><comment><USER6> Having used Linode, SliceHost, and AWS I would say they are all about the same.

I had a severe crash at Linode years ago causing a complete loss of data. They did work with me for days trying to recover the filesystem and I found their support staff knowledgeable and helpful.

I never had problems with SliceHost so I don't know much about their support.

I'm using AWS because a reserved micro instance is super cheap at just under $10 and because I manage a much larger AWS infrastructure at work so it's nice to work with the same APIs for my own stuff and work. I also think the skillset is more transferable if you're learning.

</comment><comment><USER7> Like others in this thread, I have very good experience with Linode. I've used some local VPSs here, but Linode has the best specs for the price, and haven't had any reliability issues or mysterious out-of-memory issues with them.

</comment><comment><USER8> For cheapest, I have yet to see something less expensive than prgmr. Luke, I'm not sure if he owns it or is just the main administrator is a member here.

<http://prgmr.com/xen/>

<comment><USER9> I like them too. Cheap and simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My first personal VPS was with Bytemark and we use them at work for our Disaster Recovery box in case our datacenters get hit by meteors or whatever. They're a good team and know what they're doing.

I have also spent a couple of years with Slicehost, who have excellent docs and a reliable service. It's fair to say that I learned most of what I know about syadmin stuff while hosted with Slicehost.

When Slicehost got bought out, I switched to their new parent RackSpace to get some experience with "cloud" stuff. It's working out very well so far. They're a bit cheaper than Slicehost.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been using Slicehost for a while now — since May 2008, according to my email records. I use my slice mainly for development work, as a static media server (w/ nginx) and it has occasionally hosted the odd Django app.

It's been rock solid, they have a simple (yet great) administrative interface, and the two times I needed their support, I had a response within minutes (even at 2AM in the morning). Plus they contribute some great docs to budding sys admins and devs, and make it easy to pick up some sys admin basics. Very happy with them.

</comment><comment><USER12> Linode and arpnetworks are what I use at the moment. Arpnetworks is more on the cheap side but I use them only for freebsd and for linux I use linode (I was a customer of prgmr for a year before and only had 1 minor downtime with them for a hardware failure.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Was on Rackspace, thought about slicehost.com, but pricing wasn't that good.

I switched to Linode and have been very happy. Pricing is good, and bandwidth overage fees won't kill you.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do you guys have any preference for hardware or software virtualization? (i.e. xen vs. openvz)

<comment><USER6> Xen.

OpenVZ and Virtuozzo are more like chroot on steroids. Those technologies make it easier to oversell hardware and you'll often end up with some pretty crappy performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Bytemark. I've used them for years.

Dislaimer: as of last month, I'm also employed by them.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm using Linode, London data centre, very happy with them.

</comment><comment><USER17> I also use Linode, the London data centre. Very happy too.

</comment><comment><USER18> Linode. No downtime so far, awesome support.

</comment><comment><USER19> i'll go with either linode or slicehost.

</comment><comment><USER20> lowendbox.com is where I look for cheap experimental boxes.

</comment><comment><USER21> vps.net</comment>


Ask HN: Assistive Tools for Deaf and Dumb (Voice to Text) - <AUTHOR> I was talking to a friend who's cousin has been deaf and dumb since birth. They tried giving her "implants" to make her hear but the background noise made it intolerable. Given the breakthrough in Voice to text technologies recently, I took it for granted that she would be able to understand any conversation around but apparently she isn't able to make out anything people say and sometimes gets sad because of that (on quite a few occasions she can successfully lip read though).
Something even as simple as a continuous background voice to text converter, and when she wants to "talk" a text to voice converter should be much better for her than her current status (my assumption is she always has a laptop or mobile screen in front of her).
This should be as simple as integrating some Voice to text and text to voice APIs from anywhere (say Google cloud, assuming internet connectivity isn't a problem?)
This seems incredibly basic and I assume systems like this should exist! If not, I could hack it over a weekend. Could you please link me to the existing tools you know to solve this problem for folks with hearing problems? <comment><USER2> There are quite a few options. I am not deaf, but I did quite a bit of damage when I was young and stupid. Of these, I've only tried Dragon Dictation as I'm too stubborn/embarrassed to try other options or get hearing aids.

\- Ava - Ava sounds good and it used to be called Trancense. I'll try this one first once I get over my stupid shit - [https://www.ava.me](https://www.ava.me)

\- Dragon dictation is really helpful in meetings.

\- Speaksee is raising money right now, but if it works as well as advertised, it would be a dream. I have more trouble hearing on my phone than in person (unless there's lots of background noise) - [https://www.speak- see.com](https://www.speak-see.com)

\- I'd like to try Texthear, but I'm an iOS user and their pricing model on iOS ($0.30 a minute sold in 30 minute blocks) is fucking insane. The download comes with 30 seconds preloaded, but that's not much to test it on the speakers I have the most trouble with. The Android app is free. [https://texthear.com](https://texthear.com)

One thing to note is that for many of these technologies, the quality of your mic is important. Another thing to note is that they're not particularly discrete. If they're like me, they might find that the speech to text problem is easier to solve than the stigma of using one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just curious, when online, I would expect Google Speech to text models to outperform most of the offline only models. I also believe for text to speech their wavenet models are one of the best available for developers?

[https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/streaming- recog...](https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/streaming- recognize#speech-streaming-mic-recognize-python)

<comment><USER2> If you're looking into developing something, if I were you, I would look at three things.

1.) Form factor - it's amazing how much of this industry relies on either hearing aids or holding a mic/phone in someone's face.

2.) Quality of voice - I'm lucky. I am not "deaf", I just have trouble picking out voices at certain frequencies, or all voices if there's enough noise. Luckily, I don't have to speak with an electronic voice. If I did, I'd want a voice that sounds a little human and has some inflection. This is a tough problem, but if you can solve it, the Kurzweils of the world would be playing catch up.

3.) Targeting - I damaged my hearing when I was young, addicted to very very loud music (especially live) and not particularly bright. I'm in my forties and still not particularly comfortable using assistive technology. If I were a teen, I'd be fucking mortified to use any of these. Fuck, I could have easily failed high school because of that. I can't escape the feeling that there's a market for people like me. I would love an audiologist's office with tattoos and Bad Religion. If that feeling came to an assistive device, I'd be a customer.

Of course, I'm a weirdo and it's not always the best idea to start a company to cater to a weirdo!! :)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: "Introduction to React" screencast with source files - <AUTHOR> https://sutras.herokuapp.com/intro-to-react <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks, I made a couple of videos here on how to start playing with React in your browser with almost no setup. I am new to screencasts so any feedback would be great. I hope they're useful!</comment>


Show HN: Tip Calculator – A simple project I made to learn jQuery - <AUTHOR> https://codepen.io/hsrinivasulu/pen/Baymezb?editors=1010 <comment><USER2> to reduce dom transversal you should assign selectors to variables. var tipBtn = $(".tip_btn");

then anytime you use tipBtn it has a saved reference to the dom node, if you repeat selectors they recalculate each use.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's helpful. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Can Zapping Your Brain Make You Smarter? - <AUTHOR> https://daily.jstor.org/can-zapping-your-brain-really-make-you-smarter/ <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)</comment>


[Tell HN]: I built a web app for image forensic analysis. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR>

I made something cool, and I just wanted to share it.
There was an article submitted here last month, about forensic analysis of a recent Victoria's Secret photo (Discussion here:  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017726)
It raised my interest, and I thought it was a great article. HN User slig made a quite comment about how some parts of it would be pretty easy to implement as a 'web app'. Turns out he was right. I read up on the theory in the linked research paper, and here is the result of a few days work:
http://www.errorlevelanalysis.com
Any thoughts or suggestions, I'd love to hear them. <comment><USER2> Cool project ! Care to open source your error level analysis implementation ? I'm curious of how complex it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, here is a link: <http://errorlevelanalysis.com/source/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like it, but would like to see something more general.

Copy-move detection would be neat: [http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/2008/02/protecting_journal...](http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/2008/02/protecting_journalistic_integrity_algorithmically.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, cool. I'd seen that before but I was unaware that the source code had been posted. Thank you for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And as a clickable links: <http://www.errorlevelanalysis.com> \+ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017726>

</comment><comment><USER4> If the theory is correct, on a cursory glance I'm not convinced, then could you not do a quick analysis to give a numeric likelihood of the image having been tampered with?</comment>


Tech Company CEOs as Game of Thrones Characters - <AUTHOR> http://beatrixapp.com/blog/15-tech-company-ceos-as-game-of-thrones-characters.html

<comment><USER2> Steve Ballmer is Hodor

<comment><AUTHOR> man, I really wanted to say that in the text but it just felt a little bit too cruel :D

Hodor, hodor, hodor = Developers, developers, developers

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> this is kinda pissing me off. Melissa Meyer shares no personality traits with Khaleesi, but they are the same because she's the only woman leading a major tech company?

Saying Peter Cashmore is the equivalent of Jamie Lannister is even worse. Saying that one represents the other because they share "dashing good looks, their flowing blonde locks, their square jaws, their piercing eyes" (all of which fall under the category of "dashing good looks" btw) is like when dudes say that this chick and that chick both have big boobs, so their obviously the same, as if they are devoid of personality. Jamie is defined by his skills as a warrior and his DGAF attitude as much, if not more, than he is for his looks.

I will concede though that the comment of Elon Musk discovering alien life by staring idly at the sky one day was pretty funny.

<comment><AUTHOR> oops, please don't let yourself get angry :)

some of these are because of actually-similar character traits, and a few are just-for-fun because of physical similarities. I tried to make that clear in the text.

Out of interest, who would be your Mother of Dragons?

<comment><USER3> Naval Ravikant. Not to accuse him of femininity, but I think he's building his own little army over at Angellist, and a few of them are bound to be Dragons in the near future.

<comment><AUTHOR> ah good analogy, but arguably I could say the same thing about Mayer and her slew of recent acquisitions :) 37 acquisitions in 20 months (!!)

[http://ibnlive.in.com/photogallery/15418.html](http://ibnlive.in.com/photogallery/15418.html)

<comment><USER3> ya but not one of them is going to save Yahoo!. Yahoo!'s problem is that they're too large to be a media company but too small to be a technology company, so inevitably, they are neither.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The WeWork IPO - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2019/the-wework-ipo/ <comment><USER2> Refreshingly, this article opens by stating the strong case FOR WeWork's business, before getting down to asking whether this is a sound investment given the founder's behaviour and the structure of the company.

But when it does turn its attention to that, it is as unflinching in its criticism as it was optimistic in its appraisal of the business opportunity:

 _Everything taken together hints at a completely unaccountable executive looting a company that is running as quickly as it can from massive losses that may very well be fatal whenever the next recession hits._

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't recession make business real estate dirt cheap for WeWork too? Wouldn't it make flexible business spaces even more valuable when things are uncertain?

At first glance, maybe a recession can enable WeWork to acquire lot's of real estate under really favorable conditions and make it's premium when the recession is over. Don't you think so?

Also I'm under impression that the WeWork ysers are not the well funded companies but smaller companies and contractors and those people usually make money on their services, instead of relying on funding keeps flowing intil they exit.

<comment><USER4> A recession now will make their already signed real estate too expensive, and that will happen when people dial back in discretionary expenses.

<comment><USER3> They may be able to re-negotiate their contracts. It might be much more desirable to let your tenant get cheaper price than go bankrupt. It might be more profitable to cut a deal concerning prevoiusly lent space if your tenant is willing to expand the lending when no-one else wants to rent.

You know what they say? If you owe your landlord 1 month of rent for one room, you have a problem but if you owe your landlord 10 years of rent for 1000 buildings, your landlord has a problem.

<comment><USER5> Man, this was covered, in-depth, in the article. Not only the recession case but the fact that WeWork will likely just default on a lot of leases in the worst case scenario as the lease is signed by a independent corporation that has no assets for the landlord to seize. In addition, of course landlords would re-negotiate with WeWork, better to have some money than none.

<comment><USER6> Except, as noted above, real estate leases usually don't get renegotiated. I don't know if it's because of the long time frames or exactly why, but landlords frequently would rather leave a building empty than not get their rates.

<comment><USER7> It's because there are huge tax incentives for "under preforming" real estate investors. It's honestly maddening. You literally get to deduct everything short of your desired "market" rent (even if the market can't bear it, you just need a team of appraisers on your side) and you can even include upgrades and entrepreneurial risk as a deduction.

[https://www.nreionline.com/finance-investment/struggling- vac...](https://www.nreionline.com/finance-investment/struggling-vacancy-you- may-get-break-property-taxes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad Ben laid out the bull case simply because nobody else is doing that. However, the analogy to AWS isn't compelling. First, running data centers is a much bigger challenge (technically, organizationally, and financially) than running your own office space. That's why AWS can maintain 30% gross margins and still be cheap at the price. By contrast, it's hard to imagine WeWork getting that kind of margin for repackaging leases (and adding beer and smugness into the mix.)

With the rise of serverless computing and similar technologies, there's also the question of utilization. Setting up your own server for an occasional request is expensive because you end up using some small percentage. of the capacity. AWS can make a lot of margin by pooling and smoothing demand for those occasional services. I don't think there's a good analogy in the office space category: maybe shared kitchens? Your average small business is much better at managing it utilization percentage for office space than for compute.

<comment><USER9> While this is true, the ability to get space in a new city for exactly as many employees as needed, without having to have someone on the ground who knows local neighborhoods is pretty compelling. By going with WeWork a company has reasonable assurance that the location will be in a good place, have nice amenities for happy employees, and have the comfort knowing they are purchasing the right amount of space for their current needs and can expand or contract quickly. This makes expansion much quicker and lower risk.

Sure a company doesn't need to offer beer or kombucha or be in central working districts, but not having to figure out all this info on their own when they just need a few rooms in a remote city is what companies are paying for. Like scalable sever infrastructure, the benefit isn't the cost savings, so much as not having to hirer experts for things outside your business domain.

<comment><USER10> You're giving a perfectly compelling reason for someone to use WeWork. Clearly there are hundreds of thousands of people for whom WeWork offers a service that benefits them. But there is no reason for me to believe that the few companies that cannot afford to pay a local expert a few thousand dollars to help them with a move is going to lead to WeWork fulfilling its $1T/year vision.

<comment><USER9> But this is also the way the world is moving – don't hirer or purchase anything that is not your companies core competency.

Don't run a janitorial service? Use contractors and hirer/fire at will [1]. Don't run a CRM service? Use Salesforce and pay per user. Don't run a server company? Use AWS and turn on/off servers. Don't run a payments company? Use Square/Stripe and never think about payment types.

Modern business is becoming (for better or worse) about owning 0 assets and only focusing on your core product. Yes, with all these things you can do it yourself, but having a company that is an expert in that service saves your business time (and often already employees the best resources in that industry).

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand- risi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising- inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html)

<comment><USER10> Where AWS succeeds is actually in its ability to save money. Netflix has elastic demands that are negatively correlated with other users. Netflix doesn't have a system to share compute resources with say a hedge fund. Amazon steps in and allows them both to save money by having one server fulfill both their needs instead of two. The problem being solved has nothing to do with expertise. Netflix is as equipped as anyone to manage their own data center. It's not just domain expertise. It's a marketplace.

That said, there may be reasons that WeWork could entice companies to join, but there still need to be reasons. Extrapolating with a hand wave just doesn't cut it.

<comment><USER9> Well the same thing applies. WeWork can step in and allow Netflix and a hedge fund to save money on a floor in a remote destination where both companies don't know anything about the region except for how many people they plan to employ there. When one of them needs a bigger office, they move out and another company moves in

Again Netflix is equipped to have office managers, find people/firms to scout nice neighborhoods to remote cities, and stock kombucha, but all of this requires hiring people to do a job that Netflix fundamentally doesn't care about. WeWork will save money for companies not ready to commit to long term leases, and it will certainly save time for companies that don't want to have to think about this

<comment><USER10> What I'm pointing out is that Netflix is not equipped to manage a shared server marketplace. They don't manage their own servers because Amazon/Google can do it more effectively for more reasons than expertise. You seem hung up on the idea that companies just want to give up money to pay other people to do stuff they don't like.

A better analogy may be legal work. Law firms offer a way to use lawyers as companies need them, and to share these resources among multiple companies. But all corporations still hire in-house counsel to fulfill the needs they know that they have. None of them say "analyzing law isn't our expertise, so we exclusively use law firms." But almost all of them use law firms, because there are niche specialties that aren't worth hiring for, and times when more lawyers are needed to handle a particularly heavy load.

WeWork can definitely fulfill similar analogous roles in real estate. When Facebook has three people who wants to work remotely in Missoula, co-working spaces will win their business. But Facebook is never moving its campus to WeWork, and any startup with over 50 people and decent funding will realize how unnecessarily expensive it is to use a coworking space, and cut out the middle man. What's left is not a $1T/year business.

<comment><USER9> [https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/06/21/facebook...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/06/21/facebook- wework-mountain-view-lease-campus.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I lived through the dot-com bust. In Silicon Valley, there were scores of "technology parks" that were completely abandoned for years afterwards when the bust hit.

This is a company that can thrive in a Fed-fueled ZIRP economy that only goes up. If we don't dip into recession and keep growing for the next 15 years, this company will be genius.

But if there's ever a stumble in the road, it's also the type of company that immediately collapses on itself.

I also can't stress enough how detrimental Softbank has been and will be to Silicon Valley. They are dumping billions into companies that have no business being alive and if/when the econonmy collapses, it's going to be bad for the entire world. It's like preventing forest fires that clean up dead brush and instead sets up for a huge uncontrollable forest fire.

I'm personally trying to figure out how to protect myself, whether it's through buying US Treasuries, or gold or diversifying my cash in various currencies. But personally I don't think the fund is going to survive and there will be terrible repercussions from it.

<comment><USER12> There's also a possibility that the economy grows indefinitely, but remote work overtakes hour-plus commutes to city centers as the preferred working arrangement for startups.

<comment><USER13> OTOH, you also have at least somewhat of a trend of those young urban professionals wanting to live near those city centers rather than commuting out from the suburbs. And those that do end up living in the city probably don't have nicely appointed offices in their apartments.

People's preferences vary of course but I imagine that, under those circumstances, a lot of those remote workers would like an office they could go into--at least some of the time.

<comment><USER14> Just dropping in to say the comment threads on this page are refreshing! Way better than what you'd find on reddit, Twitter, etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The comparison between WeWork and AWS the author attempts to make in the bull case is deeply flawed, IMO. He states the AWS story: commoditizing servers and allowing new customers to get in cheaply/quickly/easily.

Then he compares to that to We Work...well, don't many customers already have libraries, cafes, and their own homes to potentially work from? Did AWS customers have numerous server options to easily use in case they needed to save money? How are these comparable? Adding ping pong tables and surveillance tech to an open office work space is vastly less useful than AWS.

And corporate entities, surely WeWork will rely on those and not just contractors/freelancers/entrepeneurs, right? Well, corporations in a recession would likely lay workers off, so this dream WeWork has of gaining corporate partners seems unlikely in the next 5 years, if a recession is to hit as everyone claims. These corporate players will probably have excess office space of their own, never mind paying for more.

I appreciate attempting to present the bull case, but comparing WeWork to AWS is laughable.

<comment><USER16> I thought his AWS comparison was more favorable than it seems you did. I remember launching a startup in 2009 and our head investor (who was a CFO at a bespoke insurance firm) was floored when he saw our financial docs and that we were able to make our infrastructure expenses OpEx instead of CapEx.

As AWS got its start making it easy for startups to get access to infrastructure, the bull case for WeWork is that startups choose that environment over signing a traditional lease. It's not that a startup can't work out of a coffee shop, just like we could have theoretically run our own email servers. But a physical location and address has advantages and WeWork opens that to more people with less friction than the pre-WeWork options.

But that's the bull case. I'm not a financial analyst and I'm not your financial analyst so this isn't financial advice, but my risk profile tells me to pass on this opportunity...

<comment><USER17> > [He] was floored when he saw [...] that we were able to make our > infrastructure expenses OpEx instead of CapEx.

Can someone ELI5 to me why spending a dollar on OpEx is better than spending a dollar on CapEx?

<comment><USER18> You'd likely be able to expense the dollar (deduct 100% of it against your taxes in the current year), versus having to capitalize the CapEx (deduct perhaps 20% of it against your taxes in the current year, via depreciation, while carrying the remaining 80% on your balance sheet for the next ~4 years in this stylized example).

The real magic, though, is flexibility: you don't have to bunch all of your server purchases into an annual (or worse) exercise, execute a buildout at a data center, and then somehow allocate them to internal teams consuming them prior to the next capacity planning exercise. You just fire API calls, and a bill arrives at the end of the month. The bill may be _a lot_ of money, but the amount you were spending on planning, building, operating, fixing, and decommissioning your infra was a lot of money, too, split between big spiky equipment purchases and employee salaries with a dusting of leases and electricity on top.

<comment><USER19> Am I understanding that right, that there are major inefficiencies induced merely by how you have to expense capital purchases?

<comment><USER20> The second paragraph beginning "The real magic, though, is flexibility: " describes practical benefits that are not just due to accounting.

<comment><USER19> Right, but it sounded like that flexibility was at least partly about not needing to buy the computational resources on a rigid schedule, which, in turn, is due to capex accounting requirements.

<comment><USER16> It's also never a convenient time to buy a new physical server and set it up in a colo facility while managing DR. Especially when your bread and butter is a CRUD app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The thing that bothers me about the comparison between WeWork and AWS is that Amazon builds, owns and operates AWS data centres. Wework largely doesn't own the properties. I think that's a pretty important distinction.

Also, whilst a normal business can't really build a "AWS competitor for Chicago" the "A WeWork competitor for Chicago" seems like a much bigger threat. If the only way that WeWork can win those situations is by running at a loss in competitive markets and then monopoly pricing in other markets you've got two choices: Either they'll never make money because they'll always be loss leading, or they're facing being broken up by a regulator.

<comment><USER22> Further, AWS had Amazon as its first customer. Eat your own dog food and all that.

I'm trying to think of a large business that could build (or did) an internal WeWork like division, and then offered that service to outside parties.

Huh. I guess that'd be a big white collar employer that did project centric work. Like a big consulting firm. Or an IT services unit, like Microsoft or Oracle.

Imagine Amazon bundling their own real estate, construction, facilities, space planning, and misc A/E/C functions as a service. For their own use. And then offering that service to outsiders.

That's what WeWork should look like.

\--

I now predict that's exactly what Amazon will do.

Amazon will compete with WeWork and others in this space. With the advantage of themselves as their own first customer. And unlimited capital.

<comment><USER23> > Further, AWS had Amazon as its first customer. Eat your own dog food and all > that.

Is that true though? I've read many stories about internal Amazon teams not being allowed to use AWS and that, for the longest time, it was for customers only.

<comment><USER24> The alternative story told internally is that the predecessor to AWS originated from a white-label storefront offering sold to traditional retailers entering the digital world in the early 2000s.

Edit: Target, Borders (the late bookstore) and gap were example users. It was called merchant.com (website url now redirects).

Supposedly AWS came about when merchant.com and the main site became hard to manager resources for, so they were broken out into services and APIs a la AWS.

<comment><USER25> Here is a good history of this for those interested. I had to search after seeing this.

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/02/andy-jassys-brief- history-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/02/andy-jassys-brief-history-of- the-genesis-of-aws/)

I think more companies should look at selling their internal core-competencies to outsiders. It would make starting and managing businesses easier for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So, this brings us to the possibility that WeWork is a symptom of a broader problem, which is that all that money which central banks have been printing since 2008 has mostly gone into doing stupid stuff. Eventually, the reality beneath the accounting always comes to the fore. In 2008, the reality that spending so much labor and resources on ever bigger houses for people who already had houses, didn't really produce much benefit (probably not even for the people living in the new houses).

The money glut printed since 2008 has mostly not gone into new productive capacity, it has gone into a lot of software-related hooey like Slack, WeWork, Uber, and various new social networks. I don't even think these have improved the target sectors that much, far less have they been worth the labour and other resources put into them.

It feels like another Fiscal Crisis is coming.

<comment><USER27> All that money did not go to fund "hooey" tech companies. $450B total has gone into VC since 2009. Stock buybacks in 2018 for U.S. companies alone was $1.1T.

Total global QE is $12.3T.

U.S. stock buybacks alone could be about $5.3T--or an order of magnitude more than global VC investment.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure why you're trying to draw a connection between stock buybacks and QE when there isn't one.

Stock buybacks are just tax-optimized dividends.

<comment><USER29> Stock buybacks are a misappropriation of capital fueled by QE/low interest rate environments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Having used wework for a couple of businesses, and left after 12 months or so, I have a slightly different view.

I think wework is a noisy, distracting and expensive pit stop on the way to remote work. The company turnover at the weworks we were at was remarkable, to me. I don't know the root causes (business closing? Unsatisfied?) but it seemed very transient.

Our businesses moved to fully remote and enjoyed a significant rise in productivity each time.

Wework feels like a massive bet on open plan offices. They didn't work for us.

<comment><USER31> Companies entering a new market will rent a spot for their "6 person team" at WeWork. And within a year they'll transition to a real office.

WeWork is indeed a pitstop. A pitstop to better offices for companies on the rise. Or a pitstop to working from home for people who think they need an office to work from but eventually don't.

<comment><USER32> Is it different in the US? in the UK (London) it is literally like 25% (£1000+) more expensive than just renting a "normal" (nice) office. Couple that with the "noob" factor of having clients or whoever walking into a big "WeWork" labelled building, and i just simply don't get why people do this. The offices and facilities in most of them also look like glorified cafes. If it was dirt cheap i'd get it, but at the moment i'm just at a loss. What are you paying for?

<comment><USER33> I can't speak for WeWork specifically since the closest one to me is about 3 hours away, but I'm renting space at another co-working place near me starting next week. The space is $275/mo for a dedicated desk, compared to $1300/mo for the cheapest (second floor) office space nearby. And that $1300/mo does not include furniture, utilities, or coffee. If you need an office, it's a no- brainer. And I'm not going to meet clients at my home.

I'm not sure what "noob" factor there would be... meeting clients at home would be worse. Meeting them at a cafe would be better than at home, but worse than an office. WeWork or any other coworking office is one step below your own office, but far above the alternatives. If you're worried about the signals you're sending to clients, at least a rented office (even at WeWork) sends the message "we have enough money to afford this". A cafe or home office does not send the same message.

<comment><USER32> Sorry, i should have been more specific.. i'm talking about the 6 person company the OP was on about (assuming they get a private office for 6 people) as opposed to just one singular person here. From what i can see in my cursory googling and previous experience looking for offices, wework still comes out a lot lot more for a lot less.

<comment><USER31> Well the theory is this. Company X wants to open an office in London. But they don't know much about real estate, and don't have time to search around for offices, sign a multi-year lease, or get furniture.

But they can sign a deal with WeWork that gets them a 6-person enclosed office that they can move into tomorrow.

So you pay a premium to avoid the hassle of doing it yourself. Much like anything in life.

And if the expansion into London doesn't work out, they cancel the month-to- month lease with WeWork and their financial exposure is finite. You can't just walk away from a 3-year office lease.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I respect the hell out of this author but this article to me fell a little short of his usual rigor/insight.

Two points I would've like to see him analyze given the AWS metaphor

1) gross margins - this article reports 15-20% not 30% AWS [https://news.crunchbase.com/news/gross-margins-wework-and- th...](https://news.crunchbase.com/news/gross-margins-wework-and-the-public- comp-question/)

Maybe AWS was able to improve GM over time and the author expects similar trend but he should explore this given the whole biz is built around variable income.

2) comparing the core competency between AWS and WeWork. He only gives this lip service and assumes the two are the same but I don't agree.

I buy the argument that There's core competencies in server management. In the old days servers were pretty basic - you buy, install, and turn on. Done. But then companies realized all that fixed supply was expensive so they made server supply dynamic, being able to dial up and down on short notice. That, plus integrations with lots of dev tools, necessitated a lot of software on top of the hardware. So now a company can invest precious engineers in managing that, or can use AWS or Google cloud, where the fixed costs of developing that software scale infinitely. Plus add on new requirements around security, etc and it's a lot for a company to manage in house.

Compare this to office space. The fixed cost of lease is NOT scalable (only so many people you can fit in a building), and the core tasks of managing an office are...basically the same as they've always been. Sure you have some new design trends and IT requirements, but it's slow moving. And who manages office space? HR and IT, which while valuable, aren't forcing companies into trade offs between working on that or new product features / revenue driving opps.

I definitely agree wework is valuable for the flexibility. I just don't really see mass adoption from large companies in the long term. Sure some large company may temporarily use them when they enter a new market but they will revert to managing themselves once they feel confident in signing their own lease.

<comment><USER35> Call it post-vacation hangover...Your point is very well made tho. Completely agree that office space != Cloud Service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Regus (IWG) have been doing this for nearly 20 years. Apart from the slightly funkier interior decoration, what's the big difference?

<comment><USER37> Nothing.

Regus has 2.5 million customers but WeWork has only about over a quarter of a million. I live in a public housing estate in Singapore and there's a Regus Business Lounge in our estate's public library. We aren't even talking about the central business district, here.

I think WeWork has a lot more to catch up on in terms of scale and reach. Right now they're just building up hype like a tech company but really, they're just in the property space.

<comment><USER38> _Nothing_

This is the key "problem." WeWork is a boring real estate business that is trying to frame itself as some massive scale startup. Add in growth fueled by a ton of VC money (not earnings), tons of leverage, not even for owned property, but leases, some questionable deals with the CEO, insane hype and trying to redefine accounting metrics, and in the end you have a "boring" business dressed up in a pretty hype coat made of red flags.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've started working in Mexico City as a European software engineer. My job offers 100% remote work and that allows me to work from anywhere. My home includes a girlfriend and her incidental home office, so I went searching for office space for myself, thinking it would be affordable in CDMX. There are like 7 WeWork locations and tons of other state of the art places to work. But for a private office sized to place one desk chair I'd be paying well over €500 euros per month. And it won't be a corner office, it'll be a glass- surrounded cubicle without a view.

So, instead, I went to look on AirBNB. I could rent a full apartment for about the same amount of money, except this would come with a view, with a couch, a shower, kitchen, weekly cleaning service, and all kinds of nice things.

But I kept on looking. There are numerous extremely luxurious buildings in the city where middle to high class people live. And a lot of them have rooms for rent. So I considered my own office room inside an apartment I share with 2 others. I can lock the door and I get 2 pets for free.

Best of all: The building is only 2 years old. They have a full sized gym on the 22nd floor, 7 swimming pools of which 2 olympic sized ones and 2 infinity pools, free saunas, free yoga and spinning lessons every day, a bowling alley and gaming hall, an indoor soccer field, et cetera.

So I took that. The building even comes with integrated office rooms and a full floor with couches and desks and tables and ping-pong tables and table- tennis tables and a grand view of the city. So it's not like they're against people working from there.

The problem with WeWork is that they aren't that interesting, not even in cities that are more expensive. The credits you get only allow you to switch locations until they run out, and then you need to purchase new ones for a lot of money.

They should really do a few things:

1\. Look at the area they're in, at the very least be cheaper than AirBNB when it comes to offering a space to work from. 2\. Once someone is a member, allow them to work from ALL WeWork locations (in the public areas). No credits cost, nothing. 3\. On the website, per location, clearly show how crowded it is and how crowded it is expected to be that day.

They're way too expensive for what amounts to a crowded and noisy library. At least in a library people are expected to keep quiet so you can work. At WeWork I've been told you're to expect people coming up to you.

Side note: WeWork might be a great choice for companies who want to rent their first office space. That's not something I looked into.

</comment><comment><USER40> >Everything taken together hints at a completely unaccountable executive looting a company that is running as quickly as it can from massive losses that may very well be fatal whenever the next recession hits.

Absolutely spot on

</comment><comment><USER41> Matt Levin recently wrote about this too: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-19/we- loo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-19/we-looks-out- for-our-selves)

</comment><comment><USER42> AFAICT, Uber, Lyft, AirBnB & WeWork's valuation can only be justified via the natural monopoly angle: network effects and all that.

Ben's AWS comparison is apt because I don't think many people consider AWS to be a natural monopoly. It has huge lock-in and a huge first-mover advantage, but is not a natural monopoly.

<comment><USER2> But what is the lock-in with WeWork? It's not like you have to rewrite the way you conduct meetings if you move from WeWork to ACME.

With things like hotels and travel companies, there is a hidden lock in with their integration with enterprise back end systems.

If there is any lock in, that's my first guess as to where it would be: Big companies would integrate with WeWork tightly, and there would a lot of friction in setting up another company account, similar to what happens when big companies have a process around becoming an approved vendor.

<comment><USER42> Isn't WeWork mostly used by small companies? Changing the address of a company's "headquarters" is a PITA when you have a million other things to do that actually progress you towards the goal of making customers happy.

<comment><USER2> This is very true, but a lot of software companies begin selling to SMB, but move "up" to Enterprise companies once they have traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The AWS analogy is flawed because there is a "lock in" to the ecosystem of AWS services outside EC2 once you start using those services. Terraform aside, it is not easy to divest of AWS once you invest in it for your infrastructure.

WeWork, on the other hand, has very little "lock in". Not much to stop your business from moving out.

</comment><comment><USER44> Relevant thread on WeWork as well by Scott Galloway, from a few days back: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724260](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724260)

</comment><comment><USER45> The growing trend or working remotely is clearly contrarian to this case.

As a startup co-founder and CEO, I've never found their offer compelling enough, way too pricey to put it bluntly.

And I really think that remote work is here to stay and grow.

<comment><USER46> Not exactly. It actually took me a while to figure out that WeWork even offers this, but for $45 a month you can have access to pretty much any common area at any WeWork, with a per-visit fee ($25-$50) and 2 credits per month.

In other words, I can travel and work remotely, and maybe once or twice a week check into a WeWork for a proper work space, unlimited coffee, and a bit of camaraderie and networking. For $100-$200 a month.

<comment><USER45> Ok, maybe that's just me, but I do not find that compelling either. I never really managed to work efficiently on a laptop or with a lot of strangers around.

If it was quiet as a library and equipped with real desktop screens (at least two) and good keyboards, my opinion might be different.

And if working on a laptop is your thing, you might as well do that from an actual library or a Starbuck...

<comment><USER47> > Ok, maybe that's just me, but I do not find that compelling either. I never > really managed to work efficiently on a laptop or with a lot of strangers > around.

That's corporate hot desking for you.

<comment><USER45> I know, I once worked at a startup where I made the mistake to ask for a laptop instead of a good old boring workstation, figuring that I might want to use it from home sometimes... I did only once.

My desk was a bit too close to the conference room and I could hear people talking aloud on the phone, it was overall extremely unpleasant.

Of course I could kinda work with the laptop and the noise, but I never attained the magic -flow-

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> > _" The obvious competitor is a company called IWG, with 3,306 locations and > 445k workstations at the end of 2018. WeWork, in comparison, had 528 > locations and 604k workstations as of June 30, 2019. Note the date mismatch > — this isn't a perfect comparison — but that only makes the point that these > are two very different companies: WeWork had only 466k workstations at the > end of 2018; a year earlier, when the Wall Street Journal pointed out that > WeWork's then-valuation was 5x IWG's (it is now 13x), WeWork had a mere > 150k, while IWG had 414k."_

There are a ton of obvious competitors, they are not big, but they are everywhere, at least in the UK. Hotdesk rental has been a common SME thing for ages.

</comment><comment><USER49> Slack grew, because anybody from your organization could just acquire the tool. No need to talk with IT.

What if same thing hapoened for office space. BYOD and support for remoting allows people to work anywhere. If marketing finds the company HQ unattractive, they could just move elsewhere.

Does it actually make sense for different teams to be stuck in one location. Should they instead work close to customers or partners?

</comment><comment><USER50> AWS has data lock-in and offers fundamental capability-altering abilities to its customers. And it can't be replicated without a massive influx of capital to jumpstart (Microsoft, Google, etc).

WeWork has hundreds of competitors, including every building in a downtown with unused office space, to say nothing of better organized entities.

</comment><comment><USER51> >The tech industry generally speaking is hardly a model for good corporate governance

I'd love to know what industry is!

</comment><comment><USER52> _2006 was the year that Amazon launched Amazon Web Services, a computer hardware business that leveraged the commoditization of hardware_

I'm not sure that's true. IIRC AWS started as a way to monetise the excess capacity that Amazon had to have on-hand anyway to cope with spikes.

<comment><USER53> That story doesn't appear to be true.

[https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth- about-...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-how- amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-20/wework- an...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-20/wework-analyst- warns-ipo-filing-a-masterpiece-of-obfuscation)

</comment><comment><USER55> The bull case for WeWork is really well laid out here. And what it tells me is that a well-run company competing with WeWork would (or will) destroy them.

Imagine a WeWork competitor that launches in a few years, at the bottom of the coming recession, that isn't doing sketchy financial things to make their founder wealthy. They could match or undercut WeWork's prices at a time when WeWork will probably be barely alive (if they make it that long) and still make money.

"AWS for Offices" is a great story, but it forgets that AWS has some serious competition now. Hardware as a service stopped being a disruption and became the norm with a competitive market. So too will "offices as a service" if WeWork's model is correct.

<comment><USER56> What if WeWork is a bet on a future where no recession is going to happen? If the zero-interest money policy continues, then the amount of money increases and prices will slightly go up. No competitor can get the low rents that WeWork has secured.

<comment><USER57> If the thesis is that no recession will happen, and that money is free, why not just borrow money and dump it into an S&P 500 index fund and skip all the actual work?

<comment><USER56> Guess what buybacks are!

The problems for anybody else are diminished returns and the limited amount of banks that are willing to give you money for nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> IMHO: Great stock to own if/when its trading about 50% down from its IPO. I feel similarly concerning Slack.

<comment><USER59> IMHO: Once Slack hits 50%, it must be on its way out. Slack is one of the most easily replaceable tech 'unicorns'. Your company could decide tomorrow to use one of the many competitors (or clones, since they all look just about the same) and the biggest downside for you would be having to resubscribe to channels. And that's if they don't build a migration tool for you.

They're not even that great at what they do, they have regular downtime.

<comment><USER60> > _Slack is one of the most easily replaceable tech 'unicorns'. Your company > could decide tomorrow to use one of the many competitors (or clones, since > they all look just about the same) and the biggest downside for you would be > having to resubscribe to channels._

As a tech community organiser, Slack's biggest appeal is that our members usually already have the desktop and mobile apps installed because of work, so it's relatively easy to onboard everyone by just asking them to add another workspace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Before the next recession hits, WeWork will be the first to die.

I hope someone from WeWork reads this, and knows it to be true.

<comment><USER62> Isn't this why all the companies are IPO'ing currently? Lyft and Uber hit the 10-year investment marker and were essentially forced to exit, but all the others I feel just see the writing on the wall and know they can't outlast a multi-year recession.

<comment><USER61> Can't say much about others but WeWork has been the product of a frothy bull market for a long time where anybody with a half decent startup could pick up generous venture capital.

But when that market tightens up, and we see less new startups coming out and with less money than before, those startups will take a hard sobering look at their finances and decide they simply can't afford to blow money on shitty overpriced hipster co-working spaces, which unfortunately for WeWork is the only product they offer. WeWork will run into cashflow problems and that will be the end of it.

<comment><USER63> What would be the alternative for small companies who want to have some kind of space to co-locate? If they feel like they can't afford something like We Work, they probably aren't willing to commit to a dedicated office space.

Also, it isn't just tiny startups that are using We Work. The article stated that 40% of their revenue comes from large enterprises. The money will be much slower to dry up for the large, established companies.

<comment><USER64> You do realize WeWork doesn't have a monopoly on shared office spaces? In fact, they aren't even the biggest player in the space - Regus is.

<comment><USER63> Yes I'm aware they aren't the only ones. The person I responded to is implying that total demand for coworking spaces would fall, and I was asking what the alternative would be.

<comment><USER65> Some possibilites:

\-- Home offices for employees that can have one.

\-- Move remote employees into corporate HQ or other existing offices, lay-off employees who refuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Why does this article keep calling WeWork a software company??????

<comment><USER67> Because there's no way to justify their ludicrous valuation if you admit that they are a real estate company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I disagree that WeWork has a lack of competition, they are getting crushed in China and many local businesses are undercutting them. I'm shocked landlords sign leases with an entity they cannot sue.

</comment><comment> cde-v This guy just gets off on being contrarian. Don't ask him the color of the sky.

<comment><USER69> Put another way, "I can't address his arguments."

<comment> cde-v I'm not saying he doesn't do his research or argue well. I am saying all he does is write contrarian articles on every topic.</comment></comment></comment>


Reddit's new rules explicitly allow promoting hate against "majority" groups - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or <comment><AUTHOR> Relevant section of the rule: "While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate."

I put "majority" in quotes, because reddit is used globally, and very few groups form a global majority. E.g. if you categorize everyone on the Asian continent (including India) as one group [1], you get a majority, which is a category so broad it's silly.

Regarding the domain, ICANN lists it as registered to Reddit, Inc. in California, so as far as I can tell it is an official reddit property.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_populati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_population)

<comment><USER2> Interesting perspective because as the term has been written, it can be used to invert the logic and exclude such groups of the rule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Aren't there infinite number of groups we can group people by? And effectively everyone belongs to unique group of size 1 which is that, unique person herself?

</comment><comment><USER4> Women outnumber men almost everywhere.</comment>


The Mystery of the Vanishing Tech Workers - barry-cotter https://elaineou.com/2017/08/26/the-mystery-of-the-vanishing-tech-workers/?utm_content=buffer68999&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><AUTHOR> Article posits more immigrant workers and increasingly difficult interviews means immigrant workers are smarter, pushing out dumb Americans. This ignores the Flynn effect, and that immigrant workers work for lower pay.

The two things may be happening at the same time, but that doesn't prove they're related. Correlation != causation.</comment>


How school killings in the US stack up against 36 other countries put together - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-against-36-other-countries-put-together/ <comment><USER2> _I am a gun-toting country boy, who has no use for any type of automatic weapon or handgun_

The article seems to point towards needing tighter gun control, but I would lean more towards a systemic failure. Why do many of our fellow Americans hold so little value for human life? Why do they feel they deserve to strike out? Why does the media lavish them with the media attention they so desire?</comment>


Tenure: An idea whose time has gone. - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/07/tenure-an-idea-whose-time-has-gone/60187/

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding liberal arts professors; here is an almost-perfect Patrick McKenzie sentence, written this time by Megan McArdle:

 _Basically, these people are supporting an expensive hobby with a sideline business certifying the ability of certain twenty-year olds to write in complete sentences._

<comment><USER2> Also, while this is true on some level, on another, its not a bad thing for society to support a few people whose sole purpose is to uphold a link to the past (in any of it's incarnations).

Sure they may not provide a lot of utility in terms of increasing production, but they do have a lot of perspective to offer to students.

<comment><USER3> I don't think the author of this article disputes that tenured experienced professors contribute something to the system. They do. The problem is their huge and disproportionate cost.

<comment><USER2> I actually think what the author is saying is that the huge and disproportionate cost is what some of the best and brightest have to go through in order to get a job in academia and that the purported advantages of tenure come too late for those that could best make use of them.

I was responding to the author's dig at liberal arts fields above. That while they may seem like expensive hobbies, they are expensive hobbies that are important for society to have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Though perhaps not at the scale subsidized by academia today.

<comment><USER4> My uncle is a chemist, and he wanted to see what sort of salary he would have made if he was a tenured chemistry professor, instead of staying in industry. It turns out a tenured chemistry professor at the University of Minnesota makes $190,000. The top paid professors were economics and b-school profs, who made $300K+. In contrast, the highest paid tenured humanities prof made about $90K; most made around $60-$70K. Of course, the highest paid people at the university were administrators ($400K) and sports coaches ($1M+).

We looked up Wisconsin and the pay scales were similar.

I believe every state has a database of state funded university professor salaries, it's pretty eye opening.

<comment><USER5> Is this surprising? Professors are paid within the academy depending on what sort of salary they could demand outside. Since the demand for industrial chemists is a lot higher than the demand for industrial philosophers, this seems reasonable.

<comment><USER4> Sort of surprising. Less so for the salaries of the philosophy profs, which were around what I expected. More so for the big salaries of the other profs.

Someone who is a B-school prof isn't necessarily going to make $300K in industry. I mean, this is the University of Minnesota B-school, teaching classes like "Leadership." Not exactly the purview of captains of industry. Likewise, industrial chemists do not typically make $190K. That's $50K more than what my uncle makes as an industrial chemist. Also, these are all taxpayer funded jobs. It seems like the salaries factor in to the new American trend of public sector employees making MORE money than they would in private industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> These numbers seem entirely consistent with the broader marketplace. A chemist who is herself qualified to be a chemistry professor won't make $190k in industry; $110k might be a better estimate. An executive might not make $300k; the low $200's might be a better estimate for the CEO of a small (~100 people) company. And, forgive me for what will sound like a snarky observation, but a book store clerk is going to make $40k, not $90k. In all cases, there's a base compensation set by supply & demand in the market, and an uplift on that base set by supply & demand in academia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On the other hand, without the tenure carrot, how could you possibly persuade a smart, successful individual in his thirties to pack up his life and move to, say, Urbana-Champaign or College Park, TX? The biggest problem with the academic job market is how spread out it is; while other professions usually have a choice of dozens of employers in any metropolitan area, very few cities have more than a couple of universities.

Tenure is a fantastic perk, and if it didn't exist, academic salaries would have to be a helluva lot higher.

Now, tenure for _school_ teachers, that's crazy.

<comment><AUTHOR> My read of this article is that it's not the problem that some teachers get this perk. Instead, it's the fact that the system that results from this culls out huge amounts of talent,

(a) because few people will risk 15 years of their life on a career that is more likely to unceremoniusly eject than to reward them,

and (b) because there will never be nearly enough openings for tenured professors to make use of all the talent vying for those roles.

As always, it's not that the perk is bad, it's that it comes at cost disproportionate to its value.

<comment><USER5> Right. But I'm not sure how abolishing tenure would help with this. Sure, you could throw professors out onto the street once they reach fifty and make 'em find new jobs as Walmart greeters, but that's not a great solution.

What really needs to be addressed is the vast pyramiding of talent between the PhD and the tenure-track level (I'm talking about sciences, not humanities, which have other problems). The current system of postdocs sitting in a long- term holding pattern until they either get picked for a permanent position or give up doesn't actually reward talent, it mostly just rewards patience, being independently wealthy, or having nothing better to do. A young scientist's level of talent _should_ be apparent by the time you finish your PhD -- let the universities snap 'em up for tenure-track positions then, instead of six years later.

(Why yes, I am a fifth-year postdoc, thanks for asking.)

<comment><AUTHOR> By creating a more uniform, easily-accessible, and equitable marketplace for academic talent, where access to scholarly positions didn't require a lifetime committment.

Consider: I could conceivably become an MD at this point in my life, but stand zero chance of becoming a professor of English. This seems warped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In science and math there are often times when developing a new contribution takes several years. Research is inherently a risky and long process requiring intellectual courage, adding economic worries to a researchers life will have a chilling effect on the research. Industry does a great job at engineering and exploring solutions around established theories. However most significant scientific theories come from academia. In short without tenure I fear that 10-20 year timescale problems and pie in the sky ideas will go largely unaddressed and unexplored.

</comment><comment><USER7> The biggest problem I find is that universities avoid free market forces by bundling everything together. Tenure is only one part of this.

Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt. Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM (other people's money).

Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the same salary as the overpaid professors.

Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered something like that following:

$600 for a course taught by a tenured professor

$300 an instructor

$150 by a teaching assistant

$50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center

Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of the university system.

Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too expensive.

Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part of the universities' way of promoting their own.

The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled choice.

The university system has not changed despite increased information availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age.

Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll repeat the same comment I made on McArdle's blog:

Dean Dad has a good discussion of this in today's post, The Tenure/Adjunct Dialectic: [http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2010/07/tenureadjunct- dialecti...](http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2010/07/tenureadjunct- dialectic.html) :

        "The cost of tenure goes far beyond the salary of the tenured. It includes the opportunity cost of more productive uses that had to be skipped to pay for a decision made decades earlier in a different context. (We actually have people for whom staff jobs were created when their tenured speciality went away. That's a direct cost of tenure.) It also includes the cost of the various bribes that have to be paid to the tenured to get them to step up to acknowledge institutional needs: course releases (a direct cause of adjunct hiring), preferential scheduling (whether it makes sense for students or not), and even cash stipends (which have to be paid for somehow).

        Whenever we allocate course reassignments for full-time faculty, we hire adjuncts to make up for it. Sabbaticals? Adjuncts. Grant work? Adjuncts. Someone has to teach the classes the tenured faculty won't. (As one embittered adjunct put it in a department meeting, "I teach so you don't have to!" Exactly.) Aristocrats need serfs, and the tenured need the adjuncts.

        It starts earlier than that. The 'bait' of tenure is part of what lures so many young idealists into graduate school, replenishing the reserve army of the adjuncts. That oversupply allows the adjunct trend to continue. The crushed dreams of a generation of underemployed academics are a cost of tenure."

Nonetheless, I think tenure will remain as a lure for superstars in the profession if nothing else: for schools that are competing to get the best faculty, tenure will remain a strong draw.

In addition, I still haven't seen anyone address Lorne Carmichael's argument in "Incentives in Academics: Why is There Tenure?":

        "Loosely, tenure is necessary because without it incumbents would never be willing to hire people who might turn out to be better than them-selves.

        The analysis is consistent with several other aspects of the academic environment. It provides a rationale for "tenure-track" appointments and says something about the standards that can be used for tenure decisions. The job security derived here is not absolute. Incumbents (454) can be released if they fail to meet exogenous standards of performance (i.e., engage in "gross moral turpitude") or if the separations are voluntary (contract "buy-outs" or early retirement). In times of financial crisis, when involuntary separations are inevitable, the model suggests that entire departments be eliminated. This is because the members of one department do not choose the new hires of another. The framework used for the analysis is quite general, so it also makes predictions about the form of other organizations in which members have input into overall decisions" (455).

(Carmichael, Lorne H. "Incentives in Academics: Why is There Tenure?" The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Jun., 1988), pp. 453-472)

Until you get past the hurdle of having only people within the discipline being able to evaluate others within the discipline and those in a department not wanting to hire themselves out of a job, I don't think you'll have a sufficiently persuasive case to get rid of tenure altogether, whatever the benefits.

<comment><USER6> The quoted sections above show up with horizontal scrollbars for me. Does anyone else have that ? Admittedly my settings are a bit funky - my firefox is set to override site fonts with Computer Modern.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's a side-effect of how he pasted his comment in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nonsense.

The problem that tenure solves is that politics is the enemy of truth. In any organization without some form of tenure, an individual is going to have to be very political to stay employed, advance, etc. (When I say politics, I don't mean left or right or democrats or republicans. I mean the process whereby humans jockey for position in a social hierarchy.)

Tenure is an (imperfect) way to remove people from the political game, thus enabling them to tell the truth and think honestly. It's not perfect or complete, but it works better than nothing and it's simple.

Tell me another simple way to enable people to be honest or tell the truth.

Edit: there's another related reason, and it came to mind when I was thinking about Paul Graham's latest startup essay about keeping your most important idea in mind...

Political maneuvering is hard. Political maneuvering with honesty and integrity is even harder, since lying and deception are often quick and easy shortcuts in political games. (This is why so many salesmen lie so often. Lying is the lazy solution.)

What you want academics to be thinking about is their field of inquiry, not politics. But without tenure, politics will get in the way and distract people from doing their real job. Not only that, but those that lie and cheat will find themselves with more free time than those that try to play the political game honestly. Are those the folks that you want as intellectual leaders?

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you read the article, or do you just have very strong opinions about tenure? I'm not criticizing what you're saying so much as pointing out that you haven't engaged with any of the points McArdle (or the Thomas H. Benton articles, like "Graduate School In The Humanities: Just Don't Go", that she's clearly drawing from) has made.

McArdle isn't arguing that people should be made more accountable to politics. She's pointing out the hard-to-deny fact that tenure has warped the market for scholastic talent. What part of that argument do you disagree with?

It's one thing to say that we should make it hard for professors to be fired for saying unpopular things or taking research risks. It's another to say that it's acceptable for a lifetime in academia to require a 15-year longshot gamble that leaves you penniless and unhireable at the end. I think a reasonable person could argue that the latter problem is has a greater chilling effect than the former.

<comment><USER9> The article talks more about the humanities, but my reaction was based more on thinking about the sciences. The sciences, I suppose, are a far different ballgame... if you don't make it to a tenure track position or want to skip the whole postdoc nightmare altogether, you can always get a good job in industry. That's not necessarily true if you studied, say, medieval literature.

But I think what I said still stands. I think that tenure represents an example of a really expensive solution to a nasty problem. The nasty problem is that politics makes it hard to be honest, think unpopular thoughts, speak truth to power, investigate unpopular topics, etc. It's also a huge distraction and time sink. Tenure is the only solution we've come up with to this problem that's workable. It's an ugly and hugely expensive solution, but nature favors ugly solutions over no solution.

In other words: it might be worth employing 10 space-filling past-their-prime tenured professors and destroying the careers of 100 aspiring students who don't make it to buy 5 free thinkers with the time and resources to ask tough questions and protection from politics.

A very loose but economically similar analogy would be VC investment, where it's worth funding 99 failures to get one Google.

<comment><USER4> _The sciences, I suppose, are a far different ballgame... if you don't make it to a tenure track position or want to skip the whole postdoc nightmare altogether, you can always get a good job in industry_

Unless your science PhD is in Biology.

People overstate how easy it is for a science PhD to get a "good" job in industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a friend with a physics PhD who makes the same observation. The supposed ease with which a postdoc can break into industry may be unique to computer science.

<comment><USER9> That's a widespread problem, and I don't see how tenure affects it. The problem there is that we're no longer trying to win a cold war with the USSR, and there's no domestic demand for such things. People don't want to go to the stars. They want to gossip on Twitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the connection to tenure is obvious. Instead of a very select few people getting a vast reward for engaging with the field, a less select few people will get a less significant reward. More people will have the opportunity to contribute, and, because the stakes will be lower, it will be less risky for academia to hire and thus easier for people to switch between industry and academia.

<comment><USER4> The stakes are already as low as they can get. There is no shortage of postdocs who will work for peanuts.

In relation to tenure, what you are proposing is already in place. When a tenured prof dies, they don't replace him, they just hire 2-3 adjunct faculty.

With this in mind, the article is somewhat pointless; most universities have been in the process of effectively eliminating tenure for at least a decade. The ones that don't have billions of dollars worth of endowment money, so who really cares what they do?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Software Engineers at Lyst develop the world's first search engine for fashion - <AUTHOR> https://apply.workable.com/lyst/j/DB8A242B28/ <comment><USER2> HN is not a job board, please read the FAQ.

Further, you disguise this job advertisement with another title meant to intrigue, shame on you

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad, sorry about that! I'm actually new to HN and didn't know how it works. Genuine mistake, I didn't mean to mislead anyone.</comment></comment>