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 of years. If a tech is going to be inclusive and produce a better society in to the future it's important that the people making things are integrated with the rest of society.
"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/social engagment is driven by where you spend your time between work and sleep (assuming you have any). It's family, old friends, neighbors, fellow sports team members or music fans or craft companions who aren't all from the same few companies. You can interact with all of those people even if you live in your car, whether that car is in the Google parking lot or elsewhere. You can fail to interact with them even if you live in a real home.
The only way your choice of sleeping arrangements might matter is if the security folks think it's odd when you come back from elsewhere and go straight to your car without going into the building first. That's not a normal commuter pattern, so it might pique their interest. On the other hand, as one of the Quora commenters said, if you just show them your company ID they don't care any more.
I see your point, but I'd still venture living on campus or in dormitories is worse.
I used to live in an apartment building Seattle that was immensely popular with Amazonians and Microsofties. Social interaction there was very limited to high tech (to an annoying degree), but at least we ate at local places, drank at local places, visited local grocery stores and barbers, etc.
So yeah, "insular techies" can't be fully solved by simply having people live in regular apartments, but I'd argue dormitories or campus-living is strictly worse.
I guess the problem is that we define "living at" Google to mean sleeping there. In many ways eating there is more relevant. Someone who sleeps in a car in the Google parking lot but eats elsewhere at least gets that modicum of outside interaction. Someone who eats at Google before going to a real home and flopping straight into bed does not.
Of course, companies like Google know this. The whole reason they provide the meals is so that people's attention stays focused within Google instead of elsewhere. That probably leads into a whole 'nother discussion of whether meals at work are really a good thing, but I'll just leave it there for now.
> 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.
Not normally, but if you sleep at work then definitely yes. If you never leave the Google campus what are the odds you'll interact with people who don't work for Google?
I find it interesting that you implicitly treat sleeping there as the last step toward full isolation. I understand that "sleeping" at work might also include things like morning showers and laundry. Still, doesn't the idea of eating every meal every day at work - not just lunch Monday through Friday - strike anyone else as equally anomalous? Isn't that just as much an indicator of having no separate life? If so, then why it assumed to have come before that "final step" of sleeping there as well?
In theory, no. But we're all a little lazy. If you live at the CompanyX campus, surrounded by other CompanyXers, and have to drive a bit to get to the rest of the community, then people mostly won't do it. Maybe you'll mean to, but gradually you'd have busy or tired days here and there and not have time to do it, and you start to miss things and lose touch with people, and gradually the people and places closest and most convenient become your social circle. Maybe not for everybody and not right away, but it'll happen.
Spread those same CompanyXers around a larger community at random, and you get the opposite effect of them tending to form social groups more with people outside the company who do other things.
Your good solution cannot be implemented by handing a rent check to the apt manager every month. My bachelor pad experience with dropping off the check to someone other than my employer was not as intellectually and emotionally stimulating as your goal.
A good analogy to google barracks would be .mil and I was in the USAR in the very early 90s starting about a year after the first middle east war, as what boils down to a very low level DBA / sysadmin MOS (which due to reorg no longer exists) and the weird parts of living on base would definitely be security checkpoints and knowing your job and your housing are inextricably linked, making looking for a new job a little weird. Oh and your day time "boss" inspects your living quarters occasionally, so there is no separation between work/life, although, weird as it might sound to non .mil people, it wasn't really a problem.
I wouldn't sign a lease contract to live on-base at google without an airtight employment contract to get paid by google. I can't imagine how weird it would be to get a new job or get fired or get downsized and still have to live with now ex-coworkers.
I could see a google half way house, where you just immigrated from the other side of the planet this morning or the girlfriend kicked you out last night, so chill out on campus for a week or maybe a month till you get your stuff together. Part of a google hotel, perhaps, for business meetings. Or just a partnership with zillions of existing hotels and extended stay hotels.
But wouldn't you eventually get burnt out? For me at least, going home every day is my release from the pressure and stress of work.
I even have a real-world example: My boss is getting divorced, and as the president of our small company, he has the alarm codes and keys to every door. We have a full kitchen, multiple bathrooms, etc. The only thing we don't have is a shower. He figured he could sleep on the conference room couch, shower at the gym since he goes there every day before work anyway, and wouldn't have to pay rent in an apartment while making house payments too. That lasted about a week before he became so sick of being in the building he was ready to quit. He's now living in a hotel while he searches for an apartment.
No; though they desperately want to, Mountain View strictly regulates how much housing can be built, and where.
Why? Because only the people who already live there get to vote for local representatives, so everything's biased toward what's best for established homeowners -- not struggling would-be homeowners.
This. The root conflict of interest in the whole bay area housing issue. Existing residents vote on propositions to block new construction that were approved 20 years ago. New residents prop up the region's economic vitality with new industries benefiting existing residents and existing residents further restrict housing supply, further increasing their own home values while preventing new residents from coming in.
Do you think they haven't thought of that already?
> if it could house employees on federal property, those people could work, eat at Google cafes, and go home again without ever leaving Google’s island.
This is very common in Japan. I lived in a company dormitory during a one year internship at NTT Data. Was nice as a foreigner. Meals provided in a cafeteria, and lots of opportunities to get to know my coworkers out of the office.
Having company dorms seemed almost a necessity for young workers, until they had saved enough for the enormous deposit needed for an apartment. Maybe that's the direction Silicon Valley is headed.
I would argue that this could be counter-productive. 24/7 immersion in an employer-owned and operated environment doesn't sound healthy from a work/life balance perspective.
Not in the long term certainly, but there are lots of people in the military, on cargo ships, etc who do that. Back when I was working at Lincoln Labs I considered going out to Kwajalein for a year.
If you're looking for a moderately entertaining light read try a book called "Big Dead Place". The author's life is pretty dark but the book is funny light reading.
Its basically the movie "old school" with a lot of snow and a screwed up male/female ratio, combined with a bit of Dilberts PHB is both your boss and your landlord with predictable results. His writing is more or less reportedly true with the obvious exception of the "blind men talking about the elephant" issue where you get 1000 people and none of them have the whole total story and experiences will vary.
The author had a pretty interesting blog which responds with a blank white page today. Its worth your time to read it off the wayback machine. The books name is big dead place so search for bigdeadplace.com
He eventually got banned from working in Antarctica because of his writings, and then suicided, shotgun from what I heard. Long term addiction to alcohol didn't help much.
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 for 2.
The comments here that express positive sentiment toward Company Towns ought to be a clue. There is a large supply of qualified people willing to subject themselves to such conditions here--much larger than these companies will find practically anywhere else. It boils down to this: the environment is extremely advantageous for the very wealthy.
Yes that's true, but viewing the whole thing daily via HN from 3,000 miles away, it seems like there's much more than just wealth about it: there's adventure, mystery, the Unknown as well as camaraderie, being around optimistic, productive people like ones' self, and being part of a bigger thing at a critical time in (tech) history.
I ponder daily ditching my utterly satisfying life Here for SV but mainly family and the housing prices keep me away. I, like you, think the over-corporatization is unhealthy.
Can't. They would have done it a long time ago and stop clogging the freeway if they could but Mountain View doesn't allow zoning of any additional residential areas in the city. Typical bay area NIMBY-ism.
Hah, it seems worker housing (from the times of the industrial revolution, when many employers attempted to control every aspect of their employees’ lives) is coming back.
