111–120 of 275 posts
Can't Google just setup dormitories? It's halfway on being it's own city, so why not go all out and have cheap living quarters?
http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/09/08/mountain-view-city-cand...
Moscow University main building has cafes, shops, dormitories and even a barber's shop. I've heard rumors that some students spent months without leaving the building. On campus this should be even easier, come on.
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Rent in central cities is one of the unintuitive outcomes of the modern economy. SV might be an extreme example, but it isn't the only one. The world is far more globalized. People work with clients, customers, and coworkers mostly through the internet, even if they are in the same building or city. Google's a good example. They have offices all over. They have clients everywhere. Common sense would dictate that empl…
The cities where a $140k salary exist in the same quantity as in the bay area are roughly equivalent with respect to the cost to live there. A job in SF that pays $140k might fetch $60-$90k in most of the rest of the US, with higher salaries being more rare. So while there are lots of places where $140k is practically king-like, the number of positions with that salary are both hotly competed for and far fewer in num…
Obvious'y this doesn't happen even though a simple common sense "story" suggests that it should. Hence unintuitive.
I'm not saying that individuals don't have their reasons for doing what they do, that's not the interesting part. It's interesting that we don't see digitization and globalization take the pressure off high rent areas and encourage a migration of firms and employees to lower rent (for equivalent of better quality of life) areas at a systemic level.
I did this on a 6 month contract as an experiment over a mild winter in the UK in 2011. You can pretty much do this anywhere. Couple of tricks: 1) Get a small camper/van that can park in one car parking space with a diesel heating system. Kitchen is irrelevant. Bed/toilet/heating system/space to sit and type/space for clothes to hang. 2) You need a toilet but usually you time your bowel movements to only need to use…
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People on cargo ships or oil rigs still usually have regular homes that they live in when they are not working which is often for weeks or months at a time. Google uses it's employees year round. I wonder if this might be a good solution for the software industry to avoid burnout. Have people live in SV for designated "crunch" periods where you work for 70 hours a week for 2 months, then go home to somewhere cheaper…
You couldn't pay me enough to work 8 back-to-back 70-hour weeks.
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Tech folks tend to live in their heads. Houses, etc, is just boring distractions.
This. Currently all my stuff fits into two backpacks (a big backpacker one and a small one for the laptop). The only thing I miss from my old stationary lifestyle is a regular gym, sparring partners and a coach. The only thing I don't understand about living in the googleplex is sex. Logistics is everything - I remember once dealing with a month of involuntary celibacy due to a bad living situation. NOT an experience…
We had a contractor in Xbox who was let go. They snuck back into the building and lived there for a number of weeks (not sure how many), pretending to work and hanging out in our various couch areas during the day. [Someone quipped: "Not much different than certain full-time employees."] I've known a few people who lived in vans / RVs in the company parking lots. (Ironically, the guy whose van had the ATARI vanity li…
cool!
Does anyone else feels like we're really getting towards the cyberpunk universe ? with corporations that completely own the life of their employees by providing them with everything, and a violent lawless and miserable outside world. And as always, it all started with the best intentions.
People talk about sharing and stopping to own stuff you don't need. Which is probably a good idea, if one person owns a car and 10 use it when they need it.
But it stops when companies are in play. When they end up owning everything, we're all in trouble.
Silicon Valley: Where highly paid ($100-$200k+) engineers sleep in cars to save money on obscenely expensive rent. Honestly, recently moving to Seattle has been refreshing to me in this regard. I find Seattle tech industry pay no less than SF, plus no state income tax, and for the same rent as SF you can practically live like a king/queen here. I wonder how long the housing situation in SV can keep up until everythin…
It's weird. There has always been some water-cooler talk among the engineers about how it would be possible to live on campus. But these journalists actually found people who've done it. And they're engineers; most of our speculation focused on interns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tech folks tend to live in their heads. Houses, etc, is just boring distractions.
This. Currently all my stuff fits into two backpacks (a big backpacker one and a small one for the laptop). The only thing I miss from my old stationary lifestyle is a regular gym, sparring partners and a coach. The only thing I don't understand about living in the googleplex is sex. Logistics is everything - I remember once dealing with a month of involuntary celibacy due to a bad living situation. NOT an experience…