Google Employees Secretly Live on Campus to Avoid Paying Rent

Post by Jekyll » Tue, Sep 09, 2014, 2:18 PM UTC

mvlad wrote: post #90

awjr wrote: post #73

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…

I love that social groups are critical and so it seems that swimming and saunas, but when taking a piss, or having a kitchen are ``irrelevant'' topics.

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Sep 09, 2014, 2:23 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #113

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the paradox. You can phrase it as a question: Why don't blubsoft or blub.ly open offices in city X and continue to pay the same salaries there . Relocated employees would be richer and blub.ly should have an easier time hiring. 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 w…

Post by potatolicious » Tue, Sep 09, 2014, 2:24 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #72

onion2k wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thus, Google becomes The Circle completely. I'm being a bit flippant, but really the last thing Google employees (and every other successful tech businesses to be fair) need is to be more isolated in their ivory towers. Meeting people outside of the tech industry keeps you grounded and stops you forgetting that there are vast numbers of people who aren't so intelligent and happy with massive changes every couple…

"Meeting people outside of the tech industry keeps you grounded" But does where you sleep affect that at all? Even where I am, many people live in apartments or houses and yet have almost no social interaction outside of high tech. I'm sure that's at least as true in Silicon Valley, with its corporate citadels and meetups and apartment complexes that specifically court techies with fast networks etc. Civic/community/…

Post by dreamweapon » Tue, Sep 09, 2014, 2:25 PM UTC

Post by bellerocky » Tue, Sep 09, 2014, 2:26 PM UTC

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #57

electrograv wrote: post #15

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…

Don't extrapolate based on one sensationalistic article. Most engineers employed at Google (or any other company) in Silicon Valley have enough to rent or even buy houses. Actually, a lot of other workers who make one half (or even less) that salary manage as well. People who choose to live in cars or on campus have something else going on with them. It's not just about money, most of us will always choose to have th…