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[Reelya]

https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/10/15/1737202/in-new-headache-wework-says-it-found-cancer-causing-chemical-in-its-phone-booths

Cash-strapped WeWork, the office-sharing company that is trying to negotiate a financial lifeline, has a new problem that may prove costly. From a report:

It has closed about 2,300 phone booths at some of its 223 sites in the United States and Canada after it says it discovered elevated levels of formaldehyde. The company, which abandoned plans for an initial public offering last month after investors questioned its mounting losses and the way it was being run, said in an email to its tenants on Monday that the chemical could pose a cancer-risk if there is long-term exposure.

Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine quips:

"I don't understand what is happening here. Did WeWork founder Adam Neumann disturb a mummy and trigger an ancient curse? Was a WeWork built on a haunted graveyard, unleashing powerful dark energies and also elevated levels of formaldehyde? How do you have such a relentless parade of negative financial news and then find out that your phone booths cause cancer? 'Our phone booths might cause cancer' was not an IPO risk factor. Nobody had 'phone booths cause cancer' on their WeWork Disaster Bingo cards."

There have been other studies suggesting open-plan offices in general are a bad idea. It's no real surprise that a start-up entirely dedicated to cramming people into open-plan offices with random people is having problems. Something like cancer phone booths is just a nail in this particular coffin.

Now, you too can pay too much to get too little work done with too many distractions, while also getting cancer from the conveniently places poison dispensers, which double as the oh-so-useful landline payphones.

[wierd]

The whole "Open floor plan" in offices thing, as I perceive it anyway-- is just upper management seeking justification-- any justification at all-- for their belief that if they cannot see somebody working, they are not being productive.

They WANT to stand up, look out the window of THEIR cozy corner office (with blinds and shades), and see all their underlings toiling away. If there are cubicle walls there, they can't do that. Why-- those ingrates! They might be in there texting or who knows what behind that cube wall!

Nevermind that when people cannot effectively own a space, they cannot effectively concentrate on a project.  Also nevermind that occasional bits of unproductive activity often enable a greater degree of overall productivity.  Those little facts are not important.  Biases are at stake here.

/opinion (also /irony)

WeWork's business plan was to exploit this bias, to get businesses to jump on the notion that "These people are super productive-- open floor plans everywhere! No room for misfits in that kind of setting! Herpa-derpa!"

Nevermind that the people trying to work there couldn't get a damn thing done with the raging cacophony of the Borg Collective raging all around them.

[thompson]

I'm going to be a little more severe: WeWork was never anything more than a scam. A business without a business model where the only goal was to tell wonderful tales of the future to entice investors, who in turn also knew it was all crap but went along with it anyway because they thought they could palm it off to the next sucker in line. Well, Softbank got burned, and deserved it for their greed and stupidity.

There's probably also an element of "sunken cost fallacy" where investors keep throwing money into profitless ventures that sounded good on paper (Uber) but never had a sustainable business plan (flouting regulation to undercut competitors: it worked until the regulators caught up). There will be a big reckoning one day once people decide to stop throwing good money after bad.

[Iduno]

Isn't WeWork also the one where the owner bought property using WeWork's money, then rented that property back to WeWork?

[Reelya]

Other that phone-booth cancer, the other news is that that guy was forced out of the company on Sept 26 this year. The valuation of the company was estimated at $47 billion in January, but that's down to $10 billion now. So this thing really is still imploding quickly. I'm sure the founders are well and truly rich as fuck now though.

[Naturegirl1999]

Okay, does anybody else want a gritty post-apocalyptic survival story about a family of Cockroaches trying to survive after humanity wiped itself out in nuclear winter?

Anybody? No? Just me then...

I actually think this would be cool

[Il Palazzo]

Isn't WeWork also the one where the owner bought property using WeWork's money, then rented that property back to WeWork?

No, no: the owner registered the name "We", and then forced WeWork to rename itself to We under a licensing agreement with him over the name that he just registered.

It's both, actually.

[MorleyDev]

As a programmer, I actually prefer open plan offices. Much easier to get up and talk to the person you need to talk to, and cooperate as a team, instead of being trapped in a prison cubicle. And much easier for people to talk to you when they need to. And much easier for other people to listen and drop in if they hear something that warrants it. They fit the 'agile' mentality quite well in that regard.

I've seen the sectioned cubicle mentality devolve into people feeling the need to book a meeting just to ask a 5 minute question or get help on a problem you know someone else has already encountered. Which to me suggests something has gone horribly horribly wrong.

[Iduno]

As a programmer...talk to the person

We all know that's not true. That's like telling me you saw an engineer who looks up.

Isn't WeWork also the one where the owner bought property using WeWork's money, then rented that property back to WeWork?

No, no: the owner registered the name "We", and then forced WeWork to rename itself to We under a licensing agreement with him over the name that he just registered.

It's both, actually.

I think he also managed Silicon Valley Tech start-up VC money by claiming to be a tech company, even though they aren't. He's like the new Elizabeth Holmes.

[MorleyDev]

People over processes and all that Can't fix a problem without knowing what the problem is, and can't provide a fitting solution without checking the solution fits.

Plus I'd rather talk face-to-face than email, half the conversation is missing when you can't convey tone easily. All it takes then to insult someone is to forget a smileyface (which I am of the opinion serves an effective purpose as a tonality marker so is entirely reasonable in work correspondence). And I'd definitely rather do either of those than use a phone and, ugh, call someone. Always hated calling people.

It does somewhat come down to culture from higher-ups. Where I've worked managers have understood that you occassionally take a break or go off on a web tangent rabbithole, so haven't been draconionly enforcing "eyes on screen, hand on keyboard" type nonsense.

[Reelya]

In other news

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/18/2345209/air-force-finally-retires-8-inch-floppies-from-missile-launch-control-system

The Air Force finally retired 8-inch floppy disks from their launch systems. They're still using the same 1970s-era computers but they now have SSDs attached to them, probably emulating the floppy interface. I wouldn't be surprised however if this was using similar tech to what they use to attach USB drives to retro gaming computers where you're able to manually select disk images to load.

[Naturegirl1999]

What? How have they not upgraded their technology until now? what is all of the money used for if not to update their computers so that they run fast enough to get data? I understand the Air Force doesn't only deal with computers, but an updated computer would be easier to get data on your planes with than an older one, yes?

[Trekkin]

What? How have they not upgraded their technology until now? what is all of the money used for if not to update their computers so that they run fast enough to get data? I understand the Air Force doesn't only deal with computers, but an updated computer would be easier to get data on your planes with than an older one, yes?

These are ICBM launch sites, so they aren't actually carrying them on planes (and so mass isn't an issue.) Nuclear security is, which is one reason to leave the system alone: every new part is a potential security vulnerability or failure point, so there's a good reason not to update to a newer computer to do the same task.

[Reelya]

What? How have they not upgraded their technology until now? what is all of the money used for if not to update their computers so that they run fast enough to get data? I understand the Air Force doesn't only deal with computers, but an updated computer would be easier to get data on your planes with than an older one, yes?

These are the nuclear launch computers. If they updated them all the time, they risk introducing bugs. i.e. accidentally launching some nukes, or introducing backdoors for hackers. Just be glad they're not updating them every time there's a new Windows operating system, or running Windows Update on them in general, heh.

[Naturegirl1999]

Ah. I thought updates were always good.