Pros
At WeWork, I got to meet a lot of amazing community-builders and entrepreneurs, which made the experience a net-positive. WeWork also 'toughened me up' a bit- I learned how to be more efficient and organized out of necessity due to the volume of tasks.
Cons
Many of us were barely able to pay our rent, and he hours were absolutely ridiculous. The company is growing way too fast, and money is being spent wrecklessly left and right while employees, the cleaning staff, and construction crews are barely paid living wages. The ratio of WeWork staff to customers was about 1 to 200, so the sheer volume of work of managing the office space, hosting multiple events on a daily basis, keeping a fresh keg on every floor, etc, was a daily struggle. The company culture was shiny and glamorous from afar but quite disappointing up close. Execs & CEO were doing coke with employees at the company retreat, just one of many behaviors I saw that was distasteful and irresponsible. As a manager, I saw age discrimination in interviews, sales pressure in the form of 5:30am texts telling us to CLOSE, and a disregard for employee wellbeing.
