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Google Employees Secretly Live on Campus to Avoid Paying Rent
- cafard 12y agoI knew a programmer who did this in Baltimore, a much less expensive city, particularly then. In his case, it was probably the domestic uncertainty brought on by late-onset adolescence--he was forty or so and divorced. Even allowing for the expenses that brought on, he could probably have afforded to rent a rowhouse in a safe-enough neighborhood, but I think he couldn't quite focus on that.
- ck2 12y agoHeh I came up with this idea at another large company decades ago in another city. Unfortunately they were in no way tolerant of it and when security eventually caught on they reported me to my manager and that was the end of that. Google sounds far more laid back but I suspect if too many people do it, the loophole will come to an end.
- Systemic33 12y agoCan't Google just setup dormitories? It's halfway on being it's own city, so why not go all out and have cheap living quarters?
- w1ntermute 12y agoDo 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. http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-google-is-taking-over-mountain-view http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-g...
- blahpro 12y agoI 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.
- Symmetry 12y agoNot 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.
- VLM 12y agoAntarctica 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.
- jiggy2011 12y agoPeople 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.
- jschwartzi 12y agoYou couldn't pay me enough to work 8 back-to-back 70-hour weeks.
- corin_ 12y ago
- onion2k 12y agoAnd 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 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.
- Raphmedia 12y agoIf I could save rent by living in my office, I would. Hell, I would have double the income to put in my "let's have fun!" budget.
- morganvachon 12y agoBut 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.
- pestaa 12y agoAbsolutely agreed. A happy world is at least a tiny bit suboptimal.
- Morphling 12y agoMaybe they could start building apartments which would be open for rent for public as well?
- tarekmoz 12y agoWhat a sad life it would be.
- Pxtl 12y agoOr they could just move out of the polically dysfunctional SF-bay area. Seriously, why do so many companies put up with the broken real-estate market and government that completely fails to manage it?
- Iftheshoefits 12y agoThe 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.
- chillingeffect 12y agoYes 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.
- jimbokun 12y agoThis 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.
- praptak 12y agoDidn't the hotel owners lobby make such things illegal?
- ef4 12y agoIf I recall, the local municipality shot down the idea. Those cities are all notoriously anti-building, which is why housing is so expensive in the first place.
- arrrg 12y agoHah, 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.
- VLM 12y agoThat "tradition" actually goes back a little further to cotton operations in the deep south, and for that matter feudalism in the middle ages. That tradition is still at least minimally present for Ag workers today.
- raldi 12y agoNo; 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.
- xster 12y agoThis. 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.
- cbhl 12y agoIf you've been following local news, the local city council hasn't been enthusiastic to let them do it: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/09/08/mountain-view-city-candidates-split-on-housing-in-north-bayshore/ http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/09/08/mountain-view-city-cand...
- xster 12y agoCan'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.
- codingbinary 12y agoShouldn't the pay be good at Google? Or what are the rents over there? (Sorry, German here)
- sounds 12y agoIt sounds like Google will be making some rapid changes to their security policy. Part of me feels bad for the guys who just got ratted out. Homelessness is a pretty disorienting thing. Part of me feels like this is just another way of saying that there's a bay area housing shortage...
- jadc 12y agoI wouldn't really compare homelessness to being employed at Google and choosing to sleep in the parking lot.
- sounds 12y agoOf course not. Have you been homeless before? I've been homeless. Long story. If you've been sleeping in a parking lot and now security has caught on, you're homeless. Are you judging them because they happen to have some money saved up?
- jadc 12y agoGood for you for being able to have more compassion towards these people than I do :) People save on rent all the time: crashing at friends, moving in with their BF/GF, moving back with their parents, etc... so this is nothing new and I have no problem with the money saving aspect. I just don't equate it with homelessness.
- johan_larson 12y agoI doubt they'll do anything. Google management seems to be pretty leery of rocking the boat where the perks are concerned. As long as living on campus is a rare thing -- and it is -- they'll turn a blind eye. It's well known that Google's free meals policy is widely abused. At the end of day, you'll see lots of people getting on the bus home with their dinners, sure. But it gets a lot worse; some people bring home enough food to feed their whole families over the weekends. Management knows about it, and doesn't do anything.
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- mithras 12y agomaybe change the link to the quora thread? The article adds literally nothing. http://www.quora.com/Which-Googler-holds-the-record-for-living-at-Google-HQ http://www.quora.com/Which-Googler-holds-the-record-for-livi...
- Systemic33 12y agoIn any normal case i'd agree, but Quora is just a straight out terrible place to share stuff because it's essentially a paywall. (paying with money or a registration doesn't really make a difference for this situation).
- tehwebguy 12y agoWoah it seems that it no longer requires a registration to see all of the answers. Not sure when this changed.
- roywiggins 12y agoI think it changed when Google started enforcing that sites can't present different content to Googlebot (to show up in results) then live users (to try and make them register once they click through).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jkldotio 12y agoThe article definitely adds a narrative which isn't there in a forum discussion. I also don't think the Quora link should replace the current one given Quora's practices in the past.
- mithras 12y agoMost of the narrative consists of direct quotes from the top two Quora answers.
- 12y ago
- bsaul 12y agoDoes anyone else feels like we're really getting towards the cyberpunk universe ? with corporations that completely own the life of their employees by providing them with everything, and a violent lawless and miserable outside world. And as always, it all started with the best intentions.
- blazespin 12y agoTech folks tend to live in their heads. Houses, etc, is just boring distractions.
- viewer5 12y agoI'm sure some people are like that, but you can hardly say that most techy folks do that.
- falcolas 12y agoAs a techie who just recently completed purchasing a house, I disagree. It's a reminder that there's more to life than what's in my head, and it's something I can call my own (well, mine and the banks).
- yummyfajitas 12y agoThis. Currently all my stuff fits into two backpacks (a big backpacker one and a small one for the laptop). The only thing I miss from my old stationary lifestyle is a regular gym, sparring partners and a coach. The only thing I don't understand about living in the googleplex is sex. Logistics is everything - I remember once dealing with a month of involuntary celibacy due to a bad living situation. NOT an experience I want to repeat. I guess these folks just have much better game than I do.
- lablurker 12y agoI did this for a couple of months at my university, having failed to secure accommodation at the end of a rental period. Slept variously in an electron microscopy suite, a darkroom, and a rarely used bathroom. Wasn't too bad, though there was the omnipresent fear of campus security twigging on. As this was in London I saved quite a decent wad of cash in rent. Wouldn't do it again though unless I was particularly desperate.
- kabdib 12y agoA friend and ex-cow-orker of mine had a nice little space in the ceiling tiles in one of CMU's machine rooms (probably late 1970s). He had a bed, a microwave oven and some other creature comforts.
- electrograv 12y agoSilicon 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 everything collapses under its own weight?
- stevewepay 12y agoI've been living in the Bay Area since the dotcom days and they've been asking the same question since I've been around. Until people in tech stop making money, I doubt SV will collapse, but it will go through boom and bust cycles. But the booms tend to be huge and the busts tend to be not as bad. I had the opportunity to get a job in Seattle at Amazon about 10 years ago. I would have taken a paycut, but with the 0% state income tax and with the generous signing bonus it would have more than made up the difference. (I'm pretty sure property taxes are higher though.) But then I had to contemplate exchanging 300 days of sunshine for 200 days of rain. At the time, I was playing rollerhockey outdoors at 8pm and came to the conclusion that I just couldn't do it because of the weather. And I grew up in Vancouver, BC so the rain didn't bother me as much, but I just got too spoiled by the amazing Bay Area weather. If you're not used to it, the rain in the Pacific Northwest truly is relentless, so it takes getting used to. Mind you that was during the time when rent prices were high but not as ludicrous like they are now. Even during the dotcom boom there were similar stories of people living in their vans, so it's not really a new story. But my friend was charged 5100/month for a 2 bedroom at mission bay, which doesn't make sense. If I had to make the same choice now, it would be a lot harder to make and Seattle is definitely compelling if you can get past the 200 days of rain.
- Padding 12y agoI'm curious why the weather argument comes up so often. Aren't we, as "software people", under a roof and in front of a screen most of the time anyways? Then again, I'm "deep inside" Europe, so I have no idea how bad the weather over there really is.
- VLM 12y agoWell, the author has clearly never car camped or worked operations before: "It's not clear what the Googlers like Discoe did when they had to go to the bathroom at night." They went to the bathroom of course, just like you would in the day. Its not like toilets are solar powered and don't work after dark. If you work there and have an ID and walk past the guard at 2am and walk past leaving a couple minutes later, they simply don't care. "He must have been called in to reboot a server or something". Also although I am a morning person the world has no shortage of night persons and my experience in a 300 person building is I never heard of it being empty although it could happen, and at a 800 person building I don't think we ever, not even on holidays at 3am, dropped below six people.
- ellysetaylor21 12y agoYes, highly paid employees do deliberately go homeless in the Bay Area. This isn't unique to Google. If you own the right vehicle, sleep in it.
- mtbcoder 12y agoI wouldn't be surprised if there were ordinances in place to discourage/prohibit that though.
- poopsintub 12y agoIt seems like every Wal-Mart has a sign now for this. I imagine their big empty parking lots might have received decent use a few years back.
- maxerickson 12y agoWhile we do not offer electrical service or accommodations typically necessary for RV customers, Walmart values RV travelers and considers them among our best customers. Consequently, we do permit RV parking on our store parking lots as we are able. Permission to park is extended by individual store managers, based on availability of parking space and local laws. Please contact management in each store to ensure accommodations before parking your RV from: http://corporate.walmart.com/frequently-asked-questions http://corporate.walmart.com/frequently-asked-questions
- raverbashing 12y agoThis is not "a perk". This is homelessness plain and simple. (Tech) People glamorize campus life but at least in campus you have a bed, clubs, parties and other interaction opportunities, etc
- aianus 12y ago> at least in campus you have a bed, clubs, parties and other interaction opportunities, etc I think Google has all of the above.
- michaelt 12y agoGoogle has clubs as in nightclubs where you can pick up women? Or clubs like chess clubs and stuff?
- raverbashing 12y agoYou are correct Interaction with other people, not the Google circle. Concerts, arts, picnics. No, taking your Google buffet food on a table outside does not count as a picnic. Going to the Starbucks on Shoreline is not a social outing.
- aianus 12y agoWas thinking of the latter. Shows what kind of person I am, I guess.
- 2muchcoffeeman 12y agoIn most other jobs, if you could not afford to make rent, or had other commitments that drained your income, you could not find the resources at work to even attempt this. If they are lenient on this sort of thing, you could use this for other purposes. You decide to move and your leases don't quite line up, saving money to buy a house (as mentioned in the article)... I would certainly classify this as a perk.
- krschultz 12y ago
- jesstucker 12y agoI remember reading a similar article about yahoo employees some years ago.
- jesstucker 12y agoI remember reading a similar article about yahoo employees some years ago.
- jacquesm 12y agoNot so secret any more.
- Zigurd 12y agoSupposedly some pilots live in RVs at LAX.
- awjr 12y agoI 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 it as a urinal unless you decide to go for a crazy hot curry 3) Find a local sports centre (not gym) with a sauna. Go for a swim in the morning, spend the evenings working out or hanging out in the sauna (you get regulars). 4) Bank of leisure batteries in your van (to drive the heater and give your laptop power), can give you the power to live for weeks inside your van. Luckily I went home every weekend to recharge them. If you can't get a power source connection (friend etc.), then consider covering your roof in solar power cells. 5) Unlimited mobile data plan that allows tethering. 6) Clubs/Meetup/Work social groups (CRITICAL). 7) No it's not 'hot' to invite a girl back to your van in a car park. 8) Scout the areas and work out where to sleep. Sleeping on a road can mean you get traffic buzzing you from 5am. Go find a really quiet road or lay by. Use retail park car parks if they don't have security patrols. Remember you're parking up at work during the day. You only really turn up after the gym at 8pm or later and leave by 8am. 9) It's quite liberating. Want to wake up next to the sea and go for a swim....yes you can. 10) Be proud of what you are doing. The limited space you have frees you from clutter. 11) Do crazy things...like continue to run an ebay magic card sales business inside the van! 12) Cold is your enemy. When winter hit hard, the issue was the driver cabin and the rear doors. Two cheap double duvets insulated the rest of the van from those cold spaces. 13) Go stealth mode if possible. No windows on the sides of the van, roof windows are perfect. You want somebody to think there is no one in the van. 14) Layout can be interesting, but I prefer bed at back on a removable platform, storage under neath, rear door 'insulated'. Sliding door opens into a space with bench and toilet under bench. Blackout curtains between driver cabin and rear area. Lockable from the inside. 15) Always go for a van you can stand in. 16) Check your drinking laws. In the UK sleeping in the back of a van is legal if drunk. 17) Going to repeat this. Scout out your area and work out great un-disturb-able places. A quiet car park in the centre of town may have a lot of pedestrians walking through it at 2am going back from clubs. Go for those parks/spaces that are not natural through routes. You will get into a routine. You'll end up parking in the same place on the same night of the week. 18) Be social. Get out of that space. Do not go back to the van and lock yourself away and watch stuff on the internet. GET OUT. [edit] This was the van: https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/306924_10150370608981281_637005_n.jpg?oh=9ae9541b5afe125be1e09fea80599cb8&oe=54893FE7&__gda__=1419678336_1a6368d26d18e73834a30006f5138c8e https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/v/t1.... Slightly on the big side, but it worked at the time. If I was going to do it again, I would custom build. Height for me being 6'2 is always going to be an issue. I would consider a normal height van but bending over all the time is not my thing.
- oftenwrong 12y agoI lived in an office for a few months once. I did not have a car, so I was actually staying inside. It was not worth the savings. Especially since the rent in that city was far lower than in the places discussed in the article. No bed. Worrying about security (even though I made friends with the main night-shift guard). Worrying about people finding out. Worrying about people finding my caches of possessions. Etcetera. Not worth the stress.
- BGyss 12y agoI can speak to this happening at a major visual effects facility in the Los Angeles area. There was one developer (a guy who developed Academy Award-winning volumetric rendering software) who was able to live out of a mobile home parked in the main parking lot. This was around '99-01 or so - they're no longer in the same location and I'm sure the current ownership would throw a fit if someone tried it today. You could pretty much get away with anything at Venice Beach in the 90s.
- hellbreakslose 12y agoyahoo post about google... thats what the guy that was quoted has to say about this rubbish article: https://plus.google.com/+BenDiscoe/posts https://plus.google.com/+BenDiscoe/posts
- ycombinatoracc 12y agoThats rather sad imho
- guard-of-terra 12y agoMoscow University main building has cafes, shops, dormitories and even a barber's shop. I've heard rumors that some students spent months without leaving the building. On campus this should be even easier, come on.
- twistedpair 12y agoAt MIT, it's a badge of honor how many days you spend during finals living in the library, studying all day, every day. Students literally move into the library and live there. There was even a student that secretly built his own dorm room in the steam tunnels. It's on the unofficial tour as the "Tomb of the Unknown Tool".
- jessaustin 12y agoHaving worked in Cambridge steam tunnels during the winter, I suspect the "room" wasn't actually all that close to any steam pipes, because otherwise they would have found his (her?) corpse.
- clamprecht 12y agoIs his name Lazlo? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa8kCQQUjHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa8kCQQUjHM
- jailbreakiosus 12y agohttp://jailbreakios.us/bypass-icloud-activation-lock/#.VA8AovmSxZ0 http://jailbreakios.us/bypass-icloud-activation-lock/#.VA8Ao... Bypass your icloud account without apple ID using Bypass iCloud activation lock tool. this is a hacking tool. you can download free without any doubt
- kabdib 12y agoWe had a contractor in Xbox who was let go. They snuck back into the building and lived there for a number of weeks (not sure how many), pretending to work and hanging out in our various couch areas during the day. [Someone quipped: "Not much different than certain full-time employees."] I've known a few people who lived in vans / RVs in the company parking lots. (Ironically, the guy whose van had the ATARI vanity license plate was one of the first to be let go in the crash of 1982). A friend of mine lives in the Sierra mountains, and used to RV down to Silly Valley for a week or two at a time. Really pretty convenient. Once he was parked underneath the flight path for Moffet Field around the time that Air Force One was scheduled to fly in, and the Secret Service politely asked him to move his RV.
- bitJericho 12y ago"It's not clear what the Googlers like Discoe did when they had to go to the bathroom at night." Can #1 and can #2?
- fishnchips 12y agoPerhaps behemoths like Google could literally build company towns in the vicinity of their campuses with heavily subsidised rents. I'm not even being sarcastic here - I live in Ireland and until recently worked as an engineer for Google in Dublin. With 3k+ folks there - most young and single and not much into commuting - a few square miles around the campus is just a 'Google ghetto'. Some folks even happily connect to the office wifi using various contraptions. The only difference between that and a 'company town' is higher rents. I'd imagine that would work even better in SV where rents are outrageous as compared to Dublin, IE. With regards to the original article I can testify to knowing a guy on the MTV campus who did that for a little while. To be fair his manager eventually got involved and told him to find either an apartment or a new job.
- geebee 12y agoThey want to, but mountain view and other peninsula districts have generally resisted new housing at the scale needed to accommodate the tech workforce. http://www.spur.org/publications/article/2012-12-18/corporate-campus-embraces-urbanization http://www.spur.org/publications/article/2012-12-18/corporat...
- fishnchips 12y agoOne reason NOT to do it would be that it puts workers with families or those who need something different than a 'standard corporate housing unit' at a disadvantage - if single professionals can get subsidised housing it effectively increases their take-home salary.
- skizm 12y agoI guess I'm wondering if Google actually cares. Seems like if they think it will help employee productivity to let them hangout at work 24/7 then seems like a win for everyone. Maybe they formalize it and set up a few bunk beds with lockers or something. Doesn't seem out of the question.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoI guess they are officially disapproving but turn a blind eye as long as it's not a common occurence. Unofficially letting someone live at work every now and then is helpful for everyone, but if they tried to formalize it, then a lot more people would like to save on rent like that and all the benefits for the company could quickly disappear.
- UrMomReadsHN 12y agoNot to mention legal issues, liability, zoning, and insurance and all of that stuff.
- dreamweapon 12y agoMust be kind of hard to bring a date home to... a car in some corporate parking lot, with the windows blacked out. But I guess for Googlers, that's not such a high priority.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoRent a room in a nice hotel for a night and generally aim for dates that will appreciate the pragmatic approach to spending living in a van demonstrates :).
- paulhauggis 12y agoIf you are a Google engineer, you can afford to rent an apartment. Living out of your car/van making that kind of money is silly.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoThe original comments suggested that those Googlers were saving money to buy things like a house, etc. It's a very pragmatic attitude from my POV. Earning a lot of money only to spend most of it on housing anyway seems kind of defeating the whole purpose of earning a lot of money.
- tsuyoshi 12y agoAs an executive at a nonprofit, I was renting an apartment several blocks from my office. The apartment building was purchased by a developer who proceeded to convert them to condos. I was offered some money (I think $1500 or so) to end my lease early. I was planning on leaving the country in a few months anyway, so I took the money, and just moved all my belongings into my office. I stored my clothes in an otherwise-unused filing cabinet, took showers at a gym a few blocks away, and slept on the floor, with just a blanket and pillow. The biggest problem was laundry; the nearest laundromat was pretty far away and I didn't have a car. I ended up strapping a sack full of clothes to the back of my bicycle and riding a couple miles to the laundromat every weekend. I had a private room with a door that closed, but everyone at the office knew what I was doing. The only conceit was that I claimed that it was only temporary until I could find the right place to move into; in reality I found it so convenient and cheap that I stayed for over a year (until I did, in fact, leave the country). One Friday night, I even had a friend stay over; he slept on a couch in someone else's room. Our organization rented a suite in a larger building, and every morning when I woke up and went to the restroom, I saw other people seemingly doing the same thing. One guy even went to the restroom every morning in a bathrobe. From about 6-7AM it reminded me a truck stop restroom, with people brushing their teeth and giving themselves sponge-baths at the sink. There are zoning laws that prohibit people from sleeping in offices, but I think the property manager didn't really care as long as everyone was reasonably discreet. There were a few significant disadvantages. First, there was no kitchen. I had an electric kettle that I used to cook ramen, which I would add eggs and canned meat and vegatables to, but that was about it, except for eating out. There were plenty of nice restaurants nearby, and I had plenty of extra money from not paying rent, so it was not a huge problem. Second, personal mail. The US Postal Service has a policy of not forwarding mail, addressed to an individual at a commercial address, to a residential address. This meant that when I forwarded my mail from my apartment to my office, I couldn't later forward my mail from my office to somewhere else. Third, the gym was not open on holidays. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, I went to my parents' house anyway, so I just took a shower there. But for other holidays like Labor Day and Independence Day, I had to do without a shower. I would do it again. Actually, I would even consider just renting an office instead of an apartment to live in. Generally speaking, office space is cheaper, easier to rent, and more centrally located than housing. These days though, I'm married, and my wife would not be so enthusiastic.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- panzerboy 12y agoWhy secretly? I mean, Google should seriously offer this as a perk. In this way, you have your employees 100% of their time on campus.
- skynetv2 12y agoIf you have to resort to living in your car while working at Google or other such big companies, there is something wrong with the way one looks at life. Unless there are exigent circumstances, like you were bankrupt for whatever reason, or you are a fresh grad with nothing but time on your hands, this is not ok. work is not everything. there is life to be had
- avz 12y agoI think one should spend their time on whatever one is passionate about. It seems some people have jobs which are so interesting and engaging that they are essentially aligned with their passions. I think it's great!
- lakeeffect 12y agoThey offer everything else, why not offer barracks?
- api_or_ipa 12y agoHonestly, not that surprised. I basically live at my co-working space. Showers, lots of comfy desks, couches and bean bag chairs, well equipped kitchen (gotta buy your ingredients though), well heated, even at night. Apparently someone lived there for a couple months before someone found out.
- quicksilver03 12y agoAnd at the same time Yahoo doesn't want employees working from home...
- piratebroadcast 12y agoI lived in a coworking center for about 6 months. Slept on a couch in a dark room, got up at 7am and showered before anyone else got there. Wasn't too bad, really.
- luckydude 12y agoI did this for a while when I was working at Sun but it wasn't to avoid rent (I paid rent) it was to avoid my commute. When I was in full on work mode I viewed the commute as too much of a time drain (I lived in San Francisco, Sun was in Mountain View, 30 minutes without traffic, closer to an hour with. Each way. Blech.) I had two VW vans parked next to each other, one was set up as a "bedroom", the other was set up as the "living room" and was also my daily driver. It worked pretty well if you don't count social life (I didn't have one).
- joeguilmette 12y agoI currently live in a van. It's a 1996 Plymouth Voyager. The back is converted into a bed with storage. I absolutely love it. Currently in bed in Brooklyn!
- ryanpardieck 12y agoThe author William Vollmann comically wrote about doing this at a San Francisco (I think?) software shop when he was young and writing his first novel. Living off of vendor-machine candy bars, dodging the janitor, etc ... Probably my favorite parts were how he confessed having no bloody clue what he was doing when faced with the thing he was being paid to do: write code ... As with any fiction author, the details are probably exaggerated, and he particularly tends toward a certain kind of luxuriant self-deprecation, so, pinch of salt and all ... I believe the dueling meta-narrators of his first book, You Bright and Risen Angels, were also programmers, or something like that. It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember Electric Emily's origin story and the parts where the programmer-narrators fucked with the "source code" of the narrative being my favorite parts.