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Even though the idea kind of disgusts me, I wish companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, etc would experiment with building new campuses in the middle of nowher
by opportune 7y ago
Even though the idea kind of disgusts me, I wish companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, etc would experiment with building new campuses in the middle of nowhere as “planned cities” complete with airports connecting to regional hubs, housing, good public transportation, etc. Employees could take home more of their salaries. The only thing disgusting me more is how expensive Bay Area rent and property are, and how people who moved here long ago and didn’t contribute to the tech boom get to cannibalize our incomes by restricting housing supply.
This would also relieve housing pressure in the Bay Area, and let native kids not in the tech industry maybe one day move into their own places without waiting for their parents to die.
- magduf 7y agoSorry, your idea is lunacy, and here's why: >Employees could take home more of their salaries. That's not how it works. These companies would pay much lower salaries, with the justification that "the cost of living is much lower". We already see this whenever companies have multiple locations, with any of those locations in low-CoL areas. They'll push employees to relocate to the cheap place, but the employees don't get to keep those high salaries.
- opportune 7y agoWe’ll see, since these employers are near the top of the pay scale usually they are pretty competitive with pay to attract employees. I know for a lot of them, they don’t pay that much lower (maybe 10%) even for offices in low CoL areas For businesses in general, I agree. But there’s a reason I listed these particular ones
- srj 7y agoPay is not based on the cost of living but on the area job market. These can have a relationship but are not the same. London is an example of an expensive city where software engineering wages are relatively low. If there's robust competition and a shortage of people, the salaries will be high.
- magduf 7y ago>If there's robust competition and a shortage of people, the salaries will be high. Yes, but if some software corp builds a campus in the middle of nowhere, there won't be robust competition, obviously. So the salaries are going to be terrible. The only reason the corporation would do this is to save money, so they're not going to offer salaries similar to the high-CoL location; doing so would cost them more money (paying for building the new campus, the huge administrative cost of opening and staffing this location and getting it productive, plus the lack of savings in salaries). The whole idea doesn't make any sense at all. If you look at the way companies operate, they never do this, except for manufacturing (where they're looking for low-skilled workers they can train). For high-skilled knowledge workers, they always go where the workers are.
- diminoten 7y agoWorks pretty well for Walmart!
- watwut 7y agoThis would mean that employees would have to be either single or have stay at home spouse willing to trail. In particular, with workforce of Facebook, Apple, Google being heavily tilted toward males, most of their young employees would have no chance of finding a mate due to basically math and demographics. Which means that while they would not be living with parents, they would not be living with spouses either.
- opportune 7y agoThis is a good point, maybe these company towns could be on the outskirts of low COL cities to balance this issue. That way you could meet people outside of the company and spouses/partners could get local jobs
- efa 7y agoSounds like EPCOT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot#1960s:_Experimental_concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot#1960s:_Experimental_conc...