Some WeWork employees concerned about salary, career after WeWork

As WeWork commences its layoffs this week, some WeWork employees are concerned that their time with the company has hurt their careers.

Some are worried about the impact of their association with WeWork, employees told Business Insider. This comes after the company's initial-public-offering ambitions imploded under a barrage of headlines about the hard-partying tequila-drinking culture created by founder and ousted CEO Adam Neumann — along with questions over its corporate governance, business model, and self-dealing in the executive suite.

But, Business Insider previously reported, while Neumann was living large, employees under him were working long, hard hours.

One current WeWork manager, who just celebrated his four-year anniversary at the company, addressed this concern head-on when he offered to help those who were cut in the layoffs.

"Don't think for a second that the tumultuous headlines you've seen translate beyond the c-suite. There are a ton of driven, creative, entrepreneurial, resilient friends hitting the job market," Jesse Ganes, the director of architecture, product development, and management, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. Ganes declined to give further comment.

Many WeWork employees have been looking for new jobs for months, ever since the company started warning them that big layoffs were coming. Those layoffs began in earnest this week, with the company saying that it has plans to cut 2,400 people. WeWork is also transferring about 1,000 janitorial and facilities-management staff off its payroll to roles with a contractor.

One person who worked for WeWork in New York on special programs told Business Insider that getting a new job offer wasn't hard but that the offers were for salaries smaller than at the WeWork job.

"Everyone knows where we are, so the lowball offers are coming strong. It's like a drip campaign; everyone knows that everyone applying who works at WeWork can be lowballed," this person said.

A Blind survey

A survey of WeWork employees on Blind conducted for Business Insider found that others share these sentiments. Blind is the anonymous chat app for employees that validates work email addresses but does not reveal the person behind the username.

In a survey of 230 respondents, 38% said they worried that negative perception toward the company would hurt their career. This also means that 62% were not concerned. About half the people who responded said they feared that layoffs would affect them.

Likewise, 132 people responded to a poll asking them if working at WeWork would negatively affect their compensation from their next employer. Sixty-eight percent of respondents were actively looking for a new job, and 30% said they were, in fact, worried about lowball offers.

Interestingly, that worry was more intense for folks with nontech roles, 34% versus the 26% for those who had tech roles. Demand remains high for skilled programmers and IT professionals. Equally interestingly, 81% of the people with tech roles said they were actively seeking a new job.

WeWork did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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