13 ms·
Meta’s entire 24-person team works and lives together in the same estate
- rodgerd 13y agoStartup or cult?
- anvandare 13y agoReported to HR for not loving and worshipping Dear Company and devoting every single moment of your existence and every fiber of your being to increasing Its Holy Profits and Stock Value! :>
- woof 13y agoBoth.
- Centigonal 13y agoThat's really the first thing that comes to mind, isn't it? I mean, I feel like it could go either way: eccentric jazz musician Sun Ra's Arkestra lived (and still mostly live) communally in a Philadelphia row house, and they haven't gone insane. On the other hand, the demands of a business are different from those of a musical group. It seems like, for young tech people, the pendulum is swinging in the direction of communal living. Co-working spaces, specialized housing for groups of tech-entrepreneur-types[1], and more holistic workplaces (Google providing day-care, lots of startups bringing a chef on board to do meals in-house) seem to be in vogue right now. This looks like a particularly extreme extension of that trend (especially since they're leaving the city, a fundamental fixture in the SV startup culture), but I guess we'll see how it works out. [1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Tech-entrepreneurs-revive-communal-living-4988388.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Tech-entrepreneurs-rev...
- lhgaghl 13y agoThey may not have gone insane, but Sun Ra has been on Saturn.
- anjc 13y agoBeautiful residence, but it's still striking me as an overbearing set up. I suppose people are choosing to be there. He says they're getting 3x more work done, but i'd love to know why, in terms of work hours etc.
- damncabbage 13y agoSo... Not for anyone with a significant other. Or a family. Or an aversion to spending all day and night with your co-workers.
- PeonBob 13y agoSeems an awful lot like a post-college fraternity...
- huhtenberg 13y agoThis is seriously f#cked up. I can understand 3-4 people who are equals between themselves pulling this off, but with 24 people there's no way everyone likes the arrangement, so having everyone to be in it 24/7 is wrong.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoI think it's safe to assume everyone there is pretty ok with it. It's not like anyone there doesn't have 3 recruiters/week asking them if they want a more traditional arrangement.
- calibraxis 13y agoAt virtually every company I've worked with, there's something fucked up. (Can't even afford to be unaware of it, as it affects the work.) Yes, I've been privileged enough to leave... for yet another fucked up company. (So no point in speaking for everyone, like managers typically do. "At our company, we think...") Like others, I'm very curious how it works with non-work relationships like families and friends.
- rayiner 13y agoThe negative reaction isn't because anybody thinks those engineers are being held against their will. It's to avoid the race to the bottom that could happen when some fad-addled PHB decides that nerd labor camps are the latest hot trend. Mechanisms of social disapproval don't exist because anybody cares overmuch for the choices of a few people. They exist to forestall potential trends.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoOk - this negative reaction is to prevent others from competing with us in dimensions we can't win on. Thanks for putting it out in the open so we can discuss it directly.
- rayiner 13y ago
- pavlov 13y agoKool-Aid on the house around the clock. But does it take a tangy flavor when the funding runs out?
- nnnnni 13y agoMore like burning acridness: http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/suicide-note-reveals-taste-of-cyanide/2006/07/08/1152240534587.html http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/suicide-note-reveals-taste-...
- lennel 13y agoIt would be interesting to be able to measure burnout rate, employee turnover and just general psychological indicators over time in such a setup. I find creative thinking and critical analysis often comes from engaging in disparate actions (as compared to full immersion in work), here I would imagine group think and not seeing the mistakes you are making as a group could be amplified easily.
- KennyCason 13y agoAt Datarank we spent our first two years living together. The first year was four of us in one big house, and the second year we lived in two neighboring two-bedroom apartments. While at times you can definitely feel cramped, 99% of the time it's pretty awesome. I do believe that living/working together increased our productivity a lot. It also made brainstorming ideas much easier as we would often times spend late nights in the kitchen/living room talking about our company, whereas in a traditional office setting that may have ended at 5-6pm everyday. Props to Meta for making it work with 24 people, that seems intense. :)
- not_paul_graham 13y agoThis seems like a good solution when all your employees are young males without spouses/kids. Also works if most of the folks living together are founders (vs early employees). Personally I'd probably not want to be part of a young company where there was so much peer pressure [1] to stay with the founders and other team members in a cramped up apartment. But then again maybe I'm not the target hire anyway. Also, I'm not claiming to speak for all females on the planet, but most of "my" female friends would probably avoid working at such a company. Of course if you are starting a start-up you gotta do what you gotta do to survive and minimize expenses, and all that but it seems like a practical arrangement if you are the founder and not an early employee with meager equity. [1] Fear of missing out on critical decisions that happen before the slumber party for instance.
- rayiner 13y agoWhat, you wouldn't want to live, as a woman, in essentially a geek version of a frat house?
- KennyCason 13y agoI can completely understand. Our initial motivation was to just conserve cash as we were still very early in the design/conception phase and weren't really ready to attempt to grow. Also being married, I couldn't imagine doing this anymore haha
- bakhy 13y ago
- unsigner 13y agoSo, just like SF, once you finally kick out the annoying non-techies?
- bakhy 13y agoThe next Heaven's Gate (?) EDIT: On a serious note, it is quite frustrating to me to read things like this. My colleagues so willingly giving up any life whatsoever, dedicating themselves to their company 24/7... How do you compete with such lunacy? I don't really fear much, I know these are fringe cases and most people are probably with me on this. But, the USA and this startup scene is definitely the last place on earth I would want to be. Proud drones, flaunting their having successfully reduced themselves to cogs in a machine. This is just so, so wrong.
- seivan 13y agoI'd love this.
- mseebach 13y agoYup. We're all liberal pluralists. Live and let live. Except, of course, for employment choices. We all agree that traditional working environments with all their industrial era baggage sucks, but if I don't leave on the minute after a 40 hours work week, and I don't get paid overtime (so much for the industrial era baggage) it's incontrovertible evidence of rampant exploitation. Employees to claim to like their workplaces are brainwashed because the only reason you like your workplace is if you drank the koolaid - and of course hating your job is evidence of incompetent management. Remote work is the thing of the future, except companies that provide for easy remote working are under deep suspicion for tricking their employees to work during their free time. HN is really, really schizophrenic on work. The middlebrow is strong with this one.
- pjc50 13y agoAnything can be made to sound bad if you oversimplify. Any community can be made to sound incoherent if you collapse the opinions of very different people on top of one another. It's pretty obvious that the article is describing an unusual arrangement that won't suit everyone - although it's not specific to tech, there are other jobs where you get stuffed into a remote, often mostly young male, community for months at a time. Oil, the military, certain religious and agricultural communities.
- it_learnses 13y agoI sense deep irony in this comment...
- pjc50 13y ago?
- bakhy 13y ago"we are all".. "we all agree".. a bunch of commenters on a news site don't all have the same opinion on everything. go figure.
- rayiner 13y ago
- activepeanut 13y agoNice sweatshop. Is this the latest, legal, technique to discriminate against older workers?
- theorique 13y agoHow does this discriminate against older workers?
- activepeanut 13y agoWould your bring your wife and kids into this environment? Or even just a date? You have to be part of a very very narrow demographic to be compatible with this type of work environment.
- theorique 13y agoFair point. So it is probably incompatible with workers who have their own families. And probably more 23 year old hackers are unattached than 35 year old ones.
- renang 13y agoI see myself doing this for a short period of time, say one or week. That's actually a plan I am making with some friends/coders. We may rent a nice villa somewhere in Spain for two weeks. Get some buzz and some work done. Would be nice to have ideas flowing and in the end we may leave with a product.
- mjn 13y agoThat kind of "retreat" is a bit more conventional I think. It's fairly common at large companies to occasionally send a team to Vail or Hawaii or a cruise or something for a week for team-building / brainstorming / etc. But you don't usually bring your family and actually move in with your coworkers; it's more of a business trip. In a more researchy direction, there's a German institute that organizes these kinds of events. They have a castle in the middle of nowhere, Schloss Dagstuhl, which accepts proposals from people who want to use it to organize 1-week residential seminars on different subjects: http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/dagstuhl-seminars/ http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/dagstuhl-seminars/
- malux85 13y agoI would do this. I understand it's not appropriate for some people (families / children etc) But there are people like me, who just aren't good at the "real life" stuff. Give me a place to sleep, eat and exercise (wow - they have a pool!) and I'd gladly spend the rest of the time hacking on a start-up ... especially if it was cool technology like Augmented Reality
- k-mcgrady 13y agoSurprised at the negative attitude in this thread. It's certainly not an environment I'd like to work in but all the people working there don't have to, they choose to. It's probably also a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to rent in SF which I'm sure a lot of them like. Without knowing working hours/salary it's hard to say exactly how good or bad it is but the most important thing is that with so many companies having difficulty finding talented engineers all of those people are working there because they want to.
- davidgerard 13y agoAnd the free E-meter is not to be sniffed at. Those things are pricey.
- vidarh 13y agoI can understand people considering it fucked up, but I've also done this on a smaller scale (my first startup - we were 5 people initially and 3 of us lived in the office, and the other two spent most of their waking time there too) and it can be awesome for a while if you're young, without dependents and enjoy what you're doing. In fact, I'd recommend the experience for a year or two. It was a bit like an extension of university dorm life. And it was a lot of fun that first year. Living in the office (we had our separate rooms, our breakfast table was in the reception area; our living room was also the meeting room...) and being used to bizarre sleeping patterns provided a lot of unintentional entertainment. Like the time I happened to be up at 3am on a Sunday morning, and the support phone rang (we ran an ISP), and I decided I might as well pick it up, only to hear a lot of noise on the other end before a bewildered voice told me he'd called in pure frustration and didn't actually expect anyone would answer, and had gotten so surprised he actually dropped the phone. And this is a bit sad, but one of my best memories from that year (1995) was staying up late at night to max out our little ISPs 512kbps line downloading Netscape 2.0 right after it had been put on the FTP site.. Font color, animated gifs and livescript/javascript!
- goldfeld 13y agoSo I suppose you were a founder of the startup, or at least an early employee with the expected benefits. It sure is great! Like this dear CEO of Meta, he wakes up with a big smile on his face thinking of his equity and all these employees who probably have little enough or none and put in just as much time as he does, and are presumably as immersed in it as he is. Frankly, I felt filthy hearing him talk about productivity and evening brainstorming sessions and people talking in the kitchen, you know, furtively at 3am, about his great company and product. Does it occur to him that his employees are humans and might be interested in talking about other things? Every mention he makes of spontaneous social interaction involves "brainstorming and great ideas." The dream of every founder, that he could scale his (warranted) passion down to all those who have not nearly as much stake in it but should love it all the same! Yuck. If you want communal living, there are cooperatives and similar arrangements with equal stakes. If you want to play capitalism, don't play fucking coy.
- Disruptive_Dave 13y agoThis is clearly Carcosa.
- emanuelsaringan 13y agoAnd that is how to not get female employees.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gyardley 13y agoRun your company how you like, of course, but I doubt the benefits of the arrangement outweigh the smaller recruiting pool it leads to.
- mojuba 13y agoI bet they won't even consider married candidates, or even anyone over 30. We did something like this some 14-15 years ago when we were a 7-8 employee startup, but it was voluntary. Want to stay in the house? Be my guest, we have plenty of bedrooms. Wanna commute? Any time, but be sure to spend at least 6 hours daily in the office house. Worked like charm.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jboy 13y agoMany of the comments in this thread are depressingly similar to same-sex slut-shaming. "I can't or don't want to do that, so I don't think you should be allowed to do that either. I'm going to judge you and speak badly of you, to try to punish you for doing something I don't want to, and discourage you and others from doing something I don't want to." Meta is a start-up (cool) creating augmented reality (very cool) hardware (even more cool) for interactive interaction with virtual overlays (just unbelievably cool). I'm a computer vision / computer graphics guy, and everything about this project looks technologically awesome, with potentially world-changing applications. They went through YC and are still getting positive press, so the start-up is looking about as successful as a start-up at this stage can be. I bet you that every single one of the employees loves this idea, loves working on it, and honestly believes that Meta is going to change the world and be the next Apple. When I was in my twenties, I worked crazy hours and slept under my desk for a lot less. EDIT: Added the word "same-sex" before "slut-shaming" to clarify the comparison I'm making.
- doesnt_know 13y agoThe comments in here are absolutely nothing like slut-shaming. It's insulting you even equate the two. Sexism is a such huge issue (especially in this industry) that you should probably consider educating yourself before you vomit ignorant comments about it.
- jboy 13y agoYour mention of sexism in the technology industry suggests to me that you interpreted my comment as men slut-shaming women. I agree that sexism in the technology industry is an important and sensitive issue. My comment wasn't intended to suggest one gender slut-shaming the other gender; people of a gender can (and certainly do) slut-shame members of that same gender to control them and keep them in line. This is the comparison I was making. In retrospect, I see that my comment was not sufficiently clear in this regard. Please re-consider my comment from this clarified point of view. My point is that many of the comments in this thread suggest that Meta is like a cult or a sweatshop, or that the situation is "fucked up", etc. The commenters are implicitly trying to punish Meta for engaging in a behaviour with which those commenters do not agree. What is wrong with someone choosing to devote themselves to a start-up about which they are enthusiastic? What's wrong with believing in something and devoting yourself to it for a while? Does it hurt anyone other than themselves? Why then is it so important for other people to disparage that person's choice so vocally? Likewise, what is so wrong about a company where enthusiastic employees live in this arrangement? If you accept my axiom that the employees are enthusiastic about the start-up (based upon the reasons I outlined in my original comment), then why is this arrangement "fucked up"? I hope you will re-consider your assertion that I am uneducated and that I am vomiting ignorant comments.
- quesera 13y agoI don't know about Portola Valley zoning regs, but I hope this article doesn't draw unwanted attention to Meta's arrangement. Many/most towns would frown on the number of unrelated people living in a unpermitted hotel, operating a business with more than a certain number of employees in a non commercial district, etc. Legal or not, it sounds like fun for a couple years, if you're young enough to see appeal in dorm life.
- jedanbik 13y agoSo if you get fired, where do you live?
- tptacek 13y agoI don't understand how this could be a lawful arrangement. How do you run a company that structurally precludes hiring people with families?
- gatehouse 13y agoIt doesn't seem possible that all the people live in the house, I think they might be glossing that over a bit. Although their jobs page for open contracts it says "food and accommodation are included" haha.
- edj 13y agoAt around 1:00 minute the CEO says "All of us live and work here."
- yummyfajitas 13y agoI imagine it's as lawful as employment on an oil rig, a distant lumberjack camp, pipeline work, etc.
- tptacek 13y agoThat's a good question. Lumberjacks and pipeline workers are not required to live in company dormitories; the North Dakota gas boomtowns have cheap family housing, and, presumably, subsidized housing provided by employers is considered employee compensation. Workers on oil rigs have no choice but to live on-site. What's the argument that says you can rig a software company in such a way as to precluding hiring people with families?
- yummyfajitas 13y agoLumberjacks and pipeline workers are often required to live in encampments near the work site. Some jobs require living in isolation. These jobs don't "preclude hiring people with families". If a person with a family worked there he'd probably do the same thing as the oil rig worker - live on site and skype his family at night. The only difference I can see between this job and oil rig work is that the software guy probably has a few recruiters/week emailing him opportunities he likes more.
- ulfw 13y agoThe ideal setup for people who literally have absolutely no life besides work. Kudos.
- wglb 13y agoA great way to engage the Reality Distortion Field. Which is certainly functional. And at least faintly creepy. But I am thinking--where would I put my Ham Radio Antenna?