3 ms·

Reasonably well paid doesn't alway hold compared to the cost (and supply) of housing in the bay area; new grads are often forced to share bedrooms even though t

by cbhl 8y ago

Reasonably well paid doesn't alway hold compared to the cost (and supply) of housing in the bay area; new grads are often forced to share bedrooms even though they make $110k+. (This isn't entirely tech companies' fault -- homeowners are not incentivized to allow housing growth to match new jobs, and California has been through many booms and busts in the past, so it is conservative in building out new capacity.) Moderate hour expectations don't always hold during "crunch time"; Facebook and Google have large swaths of their employee base who are subject to the schedules of the large annual developer conferences (F8, Google Cloud Next, Google I/O). There have been internal mandates where employees were forced to work weekends for entire quarters.

xienze 8y ago
> Reasonably well paid doesn't alway hold compared to the cost (and supply) of housing in the bay area; new grads are often forced to share bedrooms even though they make $110k+. Yes, this is true, but I wonder if anyone is going to someday connect the dots between "crazy high average salary" and "high housing prices". Simply raising wages doesn't in and of itself make housing more affordable... it kicks off a feedback loop. When it's not unheard of for tech workers to make $250K-$500K per year (ostensibly to make it easier to buy those million dollar homes!), don't be surprised when housing prices spiral out of control.
- cbhl 8y ago
  I think folks have, but it's hard for any one group to break the loop: Local government mostly represents native San Franciscans who, understandably, do not want to give up their home so that "other people" can live there (even if, by utilitarian standards, more of those other people can live there). Folks who moved to the Bay Area in search of employment in tech (both immigrants and Americans who are not "native San Franciscans") who desire more housing are not always represented in local government. (In some local meetings, folks shoot down your opinion if you aren't born in SF.) For CEOs/management, telecommuting and remote sites can make your company less nimble / competitive. Remote workers get left out of "serendipitous microkitchen discussions", and coordinating across sites/time zones is more work than just having one big all-hands in one big campus. (Can be mitigated by starting with a remote-first culture, but this is very hard to bolt on to an existing company.) Finally, companies can't exactly reduce their hiring (number of roles) or salaries in collaboration with their neighbours to reduce housing prices.

by cbhl 8y ago

xienze 8y ago

> Reasonably well paid doesn't alway hold compared to the cost (and supply) of housing in the bay area; new grads are often forced to share bedrooms even though they make $110k+. Yes, this is true, but I wonder if anyone is going to someday connect the dots between "crazy high average salary" and "high housing prices". Simply raising wages doesn't in and of itself make housing more affordable... it kicks off a feedback loop. When it's not unheard of for tech workers to make $250K-$500K per year (ostensibly to make it easier to buy those million dollar homes!), don't be surprised when housing prices spiral out of control.

cbhl 8y ago
I think folks have, but it's hard for any one group to break the loop: Local government mostly represents native San Franciscans who, understandably, do not want to give up their home so that "other people" can live there (even if, by utilitarian standards, more of those other people can live there). Folks who moved to the Bay Area in search of employment in tech (both immigrants and Americans who are not "native San Franciscans") who desire more housing are not always represented in local government. (In some local meetings, folks shoot down your opinion if you aren't born in SF.) For CEOs/management, telecommuting and remote sites can make your company less nimble / competitive. Remote workers get left out of "serendipitous microkitchen discussions", and coordinating across sites/time zones is more work than just having one big all-hands in one big campus. (Can be mitigated by starting with a remote-first culture, but this is very hard to bolt on to an existing company.) Finally, companies can't exactly reduce their hiring (number of roles) or salaries in collaboration with their neighbours to reduce housing prices.