431–440 of 546 posts
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I pay almost $50k/year in rent for my family of four well outside of any city center. We live in a very modest apartment/townhome. That's right: my annual rent is just about the same as the median gross income for a household in this country. It is absurd, but I can easily see a family struggling to live on ~$65k take-home.
That sounds like a good deal for most of SV.
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Sorry for having to be "that guy" but they're living in Menlo Park for crying out loud! I'd love to live in Menlo Park too, but I can't afford it, so instead I live 2 hours away and commute to work like everyone else. In the Bay Area, living close to work is pretty much a luxury for the rich.
Sorry, you commute two hours EACH WAY EVERY DAY? Nothing is worth that. I'd expect serious money for putting up with that, and at that point, you could just afford to live closer.
It's like they went out of their way to come up with the most cringeworthy, Silicon Valley stereotype confirming names possible for their cafeterias.
They have been priced out of their own neighborhood and that is really unfortunate. Theoretically they should move to a place with a cheaper cost of living. People move all the time for wages and cost of living; I would guess its the number one reason people move. They don't work for Facebook they work for a contractor; I would say they need to find a better job or a less expensive place to live (cost of living).
If you're scraping by as tightly as they are - how would one expect them to afford to move?
You need money to rent a u-haul to haul your stuff, some cash to rent an apartment, and then enough cash to provide a runway to find a job (which in a service industry role shouldn't take more than 6-8 weeks) - that still adds up to about 10k to relocate to a cheaper part of the country.
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There is a limited supply of housing and they have no interest in building more. That means only a limited number of people can live there. Someone has to move. Rents will just keep increasing until they do. Paying them more will just increase rents more until someone else is forced out. And I do see it as a lifestyle choice. You can't choose a lot of things in life, but you can choose where you live. I don't have a…
>There is a limited supply of housing and they have no interest in building more. Who is "they"?
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Theoretically they should move to a place with a cheaper cost of living. Theoretically the entire company could do that.
I mean, they slowly are... Seattle is booming. Google, Facebook, et al. are all massively expanding their presence. Admittedly, the COL is going up rapidly there too, but at least there's a huge amount of construction happening. I wish the large tech companies would experiment with more remote-only teams, it would be great to eliminate the commute and live anywhere I want.
One way to minimize the cost of living impact is to set up satellite offices. Set up a campus in Texas or Oklahoma. It's not like people would not take jobs there. I'm sure some globe trotters would not, but most jobs don't need the globe trotter kind of mentality.
So maybe it's a chicken/egg problem; they'd love to set up such offices, but they can't find the workers they need. The workers they need are all in California or some other similar, more liberal-outlook place (Arizona as a whole, and Texas, and a lot of the rest of these desert places are mostly very conservative, unfortunately) - and they don't want to move to such places.
I don't know how you change this quickly. I don't think you can. I'm wondering if it is this divided political and social culture wars attitudes etc that is making this a gordian knot to figure out...?
I'm going to come right out and say it and fully expect to be downvoted to death - these people are the problem. Not Facebook (who they don't actually work for) and not their actual employer. They make a combined 75-80k a year. The median household income in CA is 61k. The median for the Silicon Valley area is 94k. They need to get up and move to give their children and themselves a better lifestyle. They have the me…
Two hours from Palo Alto gets you nowhere - because its not any more affordable two hours away by car - there two hours on public transit wouldn't even get you out of the Bay Area proper.
50 years ago, it was common that the employees in the cafeteria (janitors too) were actually employees of the company who's building they worked for - why should they have a different want - its not unreasonable to ask that they be extended the same benefits of others working on the site.
To give you a clue - most of the bay area housing is single family homes (by area) - its not anywhere near as dense as NYC or even large parts of NJ - its a housing supply problem.
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You really seem set on missing kafkaesq's point, take this specific line from the article, and this specific line from you: the distance between the two classes of Facebook workers can feel immense. >I don't personally see a difference other than the average wage for what I do. As a highly-paid tech contractor it is obvious on which side of that class divide you fall. Even though you were a contractor. So when you sa…
No I'm not missing this point I just don't agree with it. Companies contract with other companies for all kinds of services. When I call someone to fix my air conditioner I'm not suddenly responsible for the person fixing the air conditioners wages or social status or class. If Food Service workers are underpaid that's a fair point but it's not something for Facebook to fix. If the idea is just that Facebook employee…
Well, we'll see about that.
Being as, you know, it's not like companies such as Facebook have some inalienable right to exist, or anything like that.
> They earn too much to qualify for state healthcare, but not enough to afford the health insurance offered by their employer. They frequently struggle to find enough money for basics like food and clothes for their children. Victor recently borrowed money from his mother to hold a birthday party for one of his daughters, and from a friend to pay for a dentist appointment. They might want to look into not being marri…
Christ, is this where we all are now? Just to work and eat, you have to get a divorce and try to finagle your way through the state systems? I don't even know if I know of a word for the feeling I get from this. Despair, resignation, disgust, extreme tiredness, a sense that I should be shocked by this but I am not anymore, a small pinch of Jurassic Park's 'clever-girl' moment....
I don't know what the solution is here, there are a lot of ideas, but good God people, this is really crazy now.
I mean, I know that an armed rebellion/revolution is a thousand times more horrible, the deaths will be millions of times worse than Antietam, the Cultural Revolution, and the Khmer Rouge combined, but the system, the bureaucrats, they will not reform. People become accustomed to poverty and abuse, like they did with slaves whipped and raped in fields in the Antebellum, it becomes normal to just put on sunglasses in the rain to not look at the stunning injustices of a family shitting on the sidewalk, in dirty, wet, and stinking rags. Whatever, where is my gluten-free latte?
And this is flippin' FB! These folk are not neo-slavers or people with dreams of a new nobility.
These are us, hackers, lovers of freedom and justice and peace and order and linked-lists and a good Pad Thai.
Christ, what is going on anymore!?