I'm not necessarily anti coding interviews, but somehow convincing yourself there is any degree of innate talent is a myth. There is a linear relationship between practice and performance. It's as simple as that. Some people are privileged with better resources to practice more effectively, but at the end of the day, it comes down to who has done it more.
This is always where I land. If you fail try try again, with effort and critical thought. But I just can't meaningfully dedicate the time to making more money at the expense of all the hobbies and other past times I love doing so much. I don't want to spend 20 years with hardly any enjoyment just to be able to retire at 55 instead of 70 or something.
It's a challenging decision to make and I also believe in most cases it isn't a decision that is "free" or without some form of consequences. All things come at a cost.
I hate my job so much that I would love to retire at 55. I've already had to give up or greatly scale back my hobbies when I got married and had a kid. I also had to give up my career advancement (watching the kid means I can't work 50-60 hr/week, which is expected in IT).
Funnily enough I usually experience the opposite. I've worked with very heavy systems and very light systems, and I always find more stability with the really light weight stuff. Obviously there are more bugs at first, but once you go through your first wave of code fixes I'm usually sitting pretty for awhile until I change more stuff.
I'm a WeWork customer and I really like the service ... their financials I understand have been controversial for a number of years -- the service itself is great though!
First, sometimes people build (or buy) office buildings, and then lease the space in them to companies. Office buildings (and the land they're built on) tend to be very expensive, so landlords tend to be levered (ie, they borrow money to build/buy them), and they like to sign long term leases to try and lock in revenue so they know they can cover their loan payments. Companies like flexibility (who knows how many staff you'll actually have in 36 months?), so they don't like that, but what are you going to do?
Being a landlord is a big business, and profitable enough, on average. In the US, there are a lot of large REIT (Real Estate Investment Trusts) that do this.
Second, some people had the bright idea of getting some office buildings in hot markets, and renting space in them flexibly - short term, no lengthy contracts, with the ability to grab more (or less) space as tenants need it. This is risky for the landlords, so they have to charge more rent to make up for it; to soften the blow they try and spruce up the buildings, offer services, and otherwise try and compete on things other than price (since they'll never be as cheap as just leasing a floor of a skyscraper for 5 years).
This is also a big business, although it traditionally hasn't been super profitable. The biggest player in this space was traditionally been IWG (also known as Regus or Spaces in some markets I believe), which had 3000+ buildings in 1000 cities, ~600k desks, and was worth, as of last year before stuff went weird, around $4B with $0.5B of profits on $3.5B in revenue.
That's not an amazing valuation considering! Basically 1x earnings, or 8x profits. Then again, a business like IWG is always going to be vulnerable to a downturn; the customers can stop paying, but you still have to pay off your loans. In any case, big, multi-billion dollar business, it's been around since 1989, it's doing fine. So are all their many competitors.
Then WeWork popped up. WeWork's big idea was to do exactly what IWG was doing, but to somehow be a little cooler, and explain very loudly to anyone who was listening that they were a tech company, and should be valued like a tech company (ie, at a crazy high multiple of earnings), and also spouted a lot of weird stuff about wanting to change the world, and to be the first "physical social network", and just generally spun a lot of guff, but ultimately they bought (or in some cases, leased) buildings, sliced them up into offices and desks, and rented them short term, which is what IWG does.
SoftBank listened and, inexplicably, believed WeWork. They pumped an eyewatering amount of money into WeWork. They spent it trying to grow to match IWG, but they never made it; at one point about six months ago they had about $2B in revenue, were losing $2B a year, and were being valued (by SoftBank, if no one else) at almost $50B. Growth is valuable, yhs, but if IWG is worth $3.5B, and WeWork $50B, then presumably WeWork is going to grow to be 15 times the size of IWG...except IWG (again) has been around since 1989 and seems to be in a pretty mature market. Where's the growth coming from? (WeWork's answer was "everywhere", and they started a bunch of spinffos, like WeGrow (a school), WeLive (apartments), and some other weirder ones. None worked out.)
Anyhow, $2B of revenue is a lot less than $3.5B. And negative $2B is a LOT less profit than $0.5B. And yet, $50B is a lot more than $4B! What gives?
Answer: It was all just a borderline scam. SoftBank gave a stupid amount of money to WeWork, and they basically piled it into a bonfire and lit it on fire. There was no secret tech; no cunning plans. Some have suggested that WeWork spaces tend to be nicer than equivalent IWG properties (famously they offered free beer, and I think in one case in London they paid to have a live band just perfoming in the lobby of a building all day?), but that was all being funded by SoftBank's money faucet. When the money ended, so did all the parks that separated them from IWG (and their competitors). Now they're just another company offering flexible office space.
Meanwhile WeWork's CEO/founder (Neumann) was engaged in a lot of dodgy things. For example, he would borrow money from WeWork, buy office buildings, then re-sell them to WeWork. In another case, he decided to change WeWork's name from "WeWork" to "We", but it so happened someone owned the trademark to We, which just so happened to be....Neumann! So he sold them the trademark. (That last one got so much negative attention they eventually rolled it back.)
TL;DR: WeWork is a boring company that rents office space. The founder briefly convinced SoftBank they were going to change how we live our lives, got a massive investment, wasted most of it, siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars, and then got kicked out of the company.
Pretty good summary but I think you were a little off on the Softbank side of things.
SB pioneered the practice, based on the concept of Blitzscaling, of pushing entrepreneurs to take an insane amount of money. WW's CEO likely convinced SB that it was a great idea, and then SB likely just ran it through their playbook of throwing money in. If you read up on SB, you'll hear several examples where they did this.
Their thesis is that if you pick a winner in a huge market and give it an insane amount of money, no one else can compete.
There might even be validity to the concept for some startups. But most definitely NOT in the case of WW.
I'm aware of blitzscaling, but for it to work, you've got to be looking at a market with strong network effects - that is, a "natural monopoly". Selling office space is (to my eyes) clearly not a natural monopoly.
So my theory is that "we sign long-term leases on office buildings, then rent desks on short-term contracts" didn't sound like "we're fighting to become the single dominant player in our space", and so would not have qualified them for blitzscale funds. But WeWork never played up that aspect; instead they talked a lot about wanting to elevate the world's consciousness, being the world's first physical social network, and having maximum global impact.
Now to me, that sounds even less like "we're going to crush our opponents in a brutal winner-takes-all game to dominate the market for flexible office space, and we just new a few billion dollars to do it", and more like "we're trying to run a hippy commune but accidentally started a real estate company". But apparently to SoftBank it...did? And so they invested hugely, and we got a prospectus that said:
> We are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world's consciousness.
And everyone who was not SoftBank laughed very hard, and refused to invest. And I have to point the blame at SoftBank here. The logic if blitzscaling is that you pick a firm that, with enough resources, can dominate their market, and then you give them the resources. I don't think WeWork was even in that sort of market. This is like trying to blitzscale the market for dog walking or something.
So in that case Neumann was a damn smart individual, he saw the money flood coming and tried to siphon off as much as he could in creative ways.
On one point, well done getting as much of the flood as he could, even though a lot of it was done in incredibly dodgy ways. Though these ways don't actually sound at all that ridiculous given some other accounting and financial practices that exist. He just got caught.
On another point, this shows how much of a divide there is between normal or even high earning people and the ultra wealthy. Even if you make six or seven figures working at a big company, you're not part of that ultra wealthy crowd, not even close. There is all this money and opportunity if you are already rich that doesn't seem to exist for working class people in general.
On my last point, it just goes to show how much of a divide there is between capital and society. Yes new taxes could be introduced but it will most likely hit those people earning six figures (and lower) than the ultra wealthy that got almost a billion dollar payout for failing. There are a lot things that society needs to reflect upon and consider, perhaps now is a good time because of the isolation.
Is there any evidence SoftBank actually believed them? Belief was not required for SoftBank's business model to work (take it IPO before everyone figures out which end is up). They almost got away with it too.
That question is up for debate, but I personally believe SoftBank was naive (and incompetent) but legit. The concept of blitzscaling is not entirely absurd. If you've identified a market with strong network effects, there will likely be a single winner. If you can pick one competitor early in the process, and give them all the money they need to crush the opposition in exchange for a hefty equity stake, and you don't, say, get confused and accidentally fund a bunch of their competitors, then you can probably ensure your chosen firm "wins", and the returns could be very positive. It's not clear that SoftBank managed to ever execute that strategy correctly, but it's not obviously crazy!
Uber has been bleeding money for awhile now. What has kept them afloat is the fact that people keep using them and their fleet of drivers. But if people stop doing that, it's going to get real hairy for Uber and Lyft.
