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Silicon Valley: Where highly paid ($100-$200k+) engineers sleep in cars to save money on obscenely expensive rent. Honestly, recently moving to Seattle has bee

Silicon 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 ago
I'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 ago
  I'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.
  - enraged_camel 12y ago
    Even if you are indoors most of the day, the weather outside can make a huge difference on your mood. It also encourages getting up and taking walks every now and then, which has various benefits (both mental and physical). I lived in Seattle for six years. The environment is gorgeous. Lots of trails for hiking, ton of greenery... the thing is though, the weather made me not want to go out. And that can be horribly depressing.
  - stevewepay 12y ago
    The weather in the Bay Area is essentially perfect. The scenery is beautiful, and you can see the ocean, the desert, magnificent forests and the mountains all in the same day. It doesn't get too hot, it doesn't get too cold, it rains only for a few months out of the year, and it never gets very humid. Living in the Bay Area makes you spoiled and lazy because it is too comfortable. As the piece [1] by Mary Schmich (and again by Baz Luhrmann) says, "Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft." [1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-sunscreen-column-column.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-su...
    - kylestlb 12y ago
      It's strange. I grew up in the Bay Area (Santa Cruz and South San Jose) and am weather-neutral. I've had stints in Sweden, Portland and Arizona (all pretty extreme) and none of the climates really affected my life too much. Most of my friends are the same way. Anecdotal, but maybe the weather effect is more pronounced on transplants who don't take it for granted? The reason I chose to move back has more to do with the sheer amount of stuff to do. And the good food :)
      - perrylaj 12y ago
        I wish I had your weather neutrality. I grew up in the bay (Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Tri-Valley) and spent a couple years in Portland, OR. I liked the city a lot and tried to get used to the weather but just couldn't. The rain wasn't the problem, the constant darkness was. I like the rain and loved how green everything was up there, but even when it wasn't raining, it was dark. Came back to CA and will put up with its faults in exchange for the climate and activities.
- squidbot 12y ago
  Global warming (maybe?) could be changing this. It's been depressingly hot this year in Seattle. I moved here from the Bay Area (well, Pleasant Hill) to get away from the heat. Ugh. http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/Seattle-Home-of-10000-minutes-of-summer-warmth-almost-272987631.html http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/Seattle-Home-of-...
johan_larson 12y ago
It's weird. There has always been some water-cooler talk among the engineers about how it would be possible to live on campus. But these journalists actually found people who've done it. And they're engineers; most of our speculation focused on interns.
- mccr8 12y ago
  This isn't really journalists, this is Yahoo reposting Business Insider reposting some people's claims from Quora.
  - canvia 12y ago
    BusinessInsider seems to be taking the BuzzFeed "news" sourcing approach. They are certainly good at getting their links onto aggregation services. It's a very annoying combination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget
    - Fuzzwah 12y ago
      I don't disagree, but the upside is that it eventually finds its way to HN and generates interesting discussion. This saves me from having to visit quora, businessinsider or yahoo news.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Back in '98 was my first visit to the valley, and I had dinner with a tech writer from Netscape. She told me about an engineer that had just been fired after they'd found he lived in the office. I think you'll every now and again find the odd case at many larger companies; especially companies that offers amenities that makes it easy, and campuses large enough that it becomes easy to avoid standing out too much.
blazespin 12y ago
Yeah, but that noncompete really sucks.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
Don't extrapolate based on one sensationalistic article. Most engineers employed at Google (or any other company) in Silicon Valley have enough to rent or even buy houses. Actually, a lot of other workers who make one half (or even less) that salary manage as well. People who choose to live in cars or on campus have something else going on with them. It's not just about money, most of us will always choose to have their own place, no matter how small, than living this kind of life. I don't doubt what the Quora discussion describes happens, I'm just claiming these are very few and far between exceptions.
- AVTizzle 12y ago
  Yeah. Those Quora answers definitely show a sense of "it was interesting/fun". "I'd definitely do it again..." and "I've always wanted to live out of a car, ever since my first station wagon..." are quotes in there.
- bellerocky 12y ago
  As someone who lives and works in the bay area, you cannot buy a house with a software engineer's salary, not unless it is a very poor neighborhood, in which case you're contributing to gentrification, or you want to drive 2 hours from Pleasanton. I say that as a software engineer home owner who bought a house before the prices sky rocketed again in 2011. I wouldn't be able to afford my own house right now.
  - skj 12y ago
    > I wouldn't be able to afford my own house right now. Sounds like a good time to sell!
    - bellerocky 12y ago
      It's our home, not an investment, and where would we live if we sold?
      - tdfx 12y ago
netcan 12y ago
Rent in central cities is one of the unintuitive outcomes of the modern economy. SV might be an extreme example, but it isn't the only one. The world is far more globalized. People work with clients, customers, and coworkers mostly through the internet, even if they are in the same building or city. Google's a good example. They have offices all over. They have clients everywhere. Common sense would dictate that employees would be easier to hire for the same cost elsewhere where that salary affords a better lifestyle. With all due respect to SF (last time I visited I was 12), there are lots of places where a $140k salary will get you the best schools for kids, entertainment for the adults and palatial digs. It is quite literally like doubling you salary to take it someplace else, even within the US. I wonder what the reasons are. Obviously clusters matter. There's the tautology that everyone wants what everyone wants. Being someplace vibrant and affluent is valuable to the resident & employees (or resident-employees). I also think that nominal salaries are important to people's decision making. A 25% pay cut from relocation resulting in a 10% cut in after tax salary but a real measurable and provable increase in purchasing power still feels like a 25% pay cut. Interesting.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  The cities where a $140k salary exist in the same quantity as in the bay area are roughly equivalent with respect to the cost to live there. A job in SF that pays $140k might fetch $60-$90k in most of the rest of the US, with higher salaries being more rare. So while there are lots of places where $140k is practically king-like, the number of positions with that salary are both hotly competed for and far fewer in number.
  - netcan 12y ago
    This is the paradox. You can phrase it as a question: Why don't blubsoft or blub.ly open offices in city X and continue to pay the same salaries there. Relocated employees would be richer and blub.ly should have an easier time hiring. Obvious'y this doesn't happen even though a simple common sense "story" suggests that it should. Hence unintuitive. I'm not saying that individuals don't have their reasons for doing what they do, that's not the interesting part. It's interesting that we don't see digitization and globalization take the pressure off high rent areas and encourage a migration of firms and employees to lower rent (for equivalent of better quality of life) areas at a systemic level.
watwut 12y ago
No matter how high the income, you will find an obsessively frugal person given large enough group. Whether he/she will end up sleeping in car is more function of local security, available free facilities (toilette, shower) around and how much is his/her job image dependent.
UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
> Silicon Valley: Where highly paid ($100-$200k+) engineers sleep in cars to save money on obscenely expensive rent. I've known quite a few people who have lived exactly like this for a while. You know what? None are from Silicon Valley and are all from different walks of life. You have your people who ended up in difficult situations, people strapped for cash, people who were ultra minimalist, people who were looking for adventure, people who didn't want to be tied down, people looking to save up money for a couple years. None had Google's perks/free meals. All different motivations. Some by choice, some not. To generalize that Silicon Valley is somehow responsible from one article about one subset of people is disingenuous.
drewblaisdell 12y ago
> I find Seattle tech industry pay no less than SF The census arrived at a different conclusion. edit: Engineering talent at AmaGooBookSoft are sometimes given pay in Seattle that is comparable to SF, however.
potatolicious 12y ago
It's coming to Seattle too. I moved away from SEA 3 years ago and the rent on my old apartment has gone up by 50%. If you want to stick around, consider buying. Anecdotally I've been hearing more Valley-style anti-tech sentiment coming out of Seattle lately. If not careful Seattle can just as easily turn into the same us vs. them, haves vs. have-nots story of San Francisco. It'll just be the MS Connector instead of the Google Bus instead.
Clanan 12y ago
Isn't a huge part of the housing issue in SV the zoning? I recall reading about how large swathes of land have been zoned away from residential, largely because of the influence of the wealthy who live in and near the area. Never underestimate the politics!
- narrator 12y ago
  And that is the paradox. In order to make cheap housing you'd have to destroy all the open space and low density zoning that made all the tech and VC people want to live here in the first place. Besides the current economy isn't permanent at all. The tech bubble will bust and this will all go back to normal in a few years. People who are living here for the long haul, and not just for the gold rush don't want it to get overbuilt and spoiled. The funny thing about the bay area is that people are not really impressed by the economic benefits of further development because collectively people have an enormous amount of money in the wealthier bay area cities and no amount of money being waved in their faces will make them give up their quality of life.
  - bengoodger 12y ago
    Good luck waiting out the gold rush, it's been a part of the California way of life for more than a hundred and fifty years.
    - narrator 12y ago
      You should have seen it in 2002. The freeways were nice and empty and rents were cheap. Even as recent as early 2009 office rents were much much lower than they are now.
  - Clanan 12y ago
    Well, I think you're oversimplifying quite a bit. There are more options than {develop nothing, develop EVERYTHING}. Through politics, the former options has been selected. But perhaps a better options lies somewhere in-between.
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
yitchelle 12y ago
From the household perspective, if the partner also works in tech, their disposable income for a house would be about (200k to 400K). I could imagine that would rent you a nice house/flat for that money. Is the problem mentioned in the post, typically, relevant to singles?
jusben1369 12y ago
Well first you'd need NY to collapse to prove that dynamic work locations collapse under their own weight. Young people (fresh out of school) really have few needs and so will put up with a lot for the experience of working with great people for great companies. It doesn't hurt that the weather is also fantastic (weather crushes NY but culturally NY has so much more to offer). It's only when they hit their 30's and (if they do) start thinking about children that broader quality of life issues come into play. Those that are very successful can afford to stay there. Those that aren't will move on to cheaper metros or somewhere else. Many that are successful will still realize there are other options (the realization that Tahoe never is closer than a 6 hour commute unless you leave at 4am or 10pm) and move away (making way for the next generation). There's a reason those trains to CT are so full of people every night.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 12y ago
That is a silly generalization, I'm not going to generalize about people in Seattle who live on boats even though I know a couple of folks who do that. There is a push afoot to get Google (and then by reaction everyone) to treat the perks they give as taxable income. I expect it is being "encouraged" by companies that don't want to pay for that kind of thing as a way of killing it. Unfortunately if they are successful I expect it to backfire, Google to continue to do it and to cover the tax aspects and the other companies being forced to follow suit.
trhway 12y ago
>I wonder how long the housing situation in SV can keep up until everything collapses under its own weight? it has already couple times at least during my time here - since 2000 - only to emerge with higher rents and higher real estate prices. Buying is the best solution for your own housing - it moves your onto the other side of the wave where you just enjoy the ride (and yes, i've been under water, didn't care as i bought to live in it, not to speculate)
lawnchair_larry 12y ago
It's very silly of you to advertise this if you don't want to increase demand there, too.

stevewepay 12y ago

I'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 ago
I'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.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  Even if you are indoors most of the day, the weather outside can make a huge difference on your mood. It also encourages getting up and taking walks every now and then, which has various benefits (both mental and physical). I lived in Seattle for six years. The environment is gorgeous. Lots of trails for hiking, ton of greenery... the thing is though, the weather made me not want to go out. And that can be horribly depressing.
- stevewepay 12y ago
  The weather in the Bay Area is essentially perfect. The scenery is beautiful, and you can see the ocean, the desert, magnificent forests and the mountains all in the same day. It doesn't get too hot, it doesn't get too cold, it rains only for a few months out of the year, and it never gets very humid. Living in the Bay Area makes you spoiled and lazy because it is too comfortable. As the piece [1] by Mary Schmich (and again by Baz Luhrmann) says, "Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft." [1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-sunscreen-column-column.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-su...
  - kylestlb 12y ago
    It's strange. I grew up in the Bay Area (Santa Cruz and South San Jose) and am weather-neutral. I've had stints in Sweden, Portland and Arizona (all pretty extreme) and none of the climates really affected my life too much. Most of my friends are the same way. Anecdotal, but maybe the weather effect is more pronounced on transplants who don't take it for granted? The reason I chose to move back has more to do with the sheer amount of stuff to do. And the good food :)
    - perrylaj 12y ago
      I wish I had your weather neutrality. I grew up in the bay (Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Tri-Valley) and spent a couple years in Portland, OR. I liked the city a lot and tried to get used to the weather but just couldn't. The rain wasn't the problem, the constant darkness was. I like the rain and loved how green everything was up there, but even when it wasn't raining, it was dark. Came back to CA and will put up with its faults in exchange for the climate and activities.
squidbot 12y ago
Global warming (maybe?) could be changing this. It's been depressingly hot this year in Seattle. I moved here from the Bay Area (well, Pleasant Hill) to get away from the heat. Ugh. http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/Seattle-Home-of-10000-minutes-of-summer-warmth-almost-272987631.html http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/Seattle-Home-of-...

johan_larson 12y ago

It's weird. There has always been some water-cooler talk among the engineers about how it would be possible to live on campus. But these journalists actually found people who've done it. And they're engineers; most of our speculation focused on interns.

mccr8 12y ago
This isn't really journalists, this is Yahoo reposting Business Insider reposting some people's claims from Quora.
- canvia 12y ago
  BusinessInsider seems to be taking the BuzzFeed "news" sourcing approach. They are certainly good at getting their links onto aggregation services. It's a very annoying combination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget
  - Fuzzwah 12y ago
    I don't disagree, but the upside is that it eventually finds its way to HN and generates interesting discussion. This saves me from having to visit quora, businessinsider or yahoo news.
vidarh 12y ago
Back in '98 was my first visit to the valley, and I had dinner with a tech writer from Netscape. She told me about an engineer that had just been fired after they'd found he lived in the office. I think you'll every now and again find the odd case at many larger companies; especially companies that offers amenities that makes it easy, and campuses large enough that it becomes easy to avoid standing out too much.

blazespin 12y ago

Yeah, but that noncompete really sucks.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

Don't extrapolate based on one sensationalistic article. Most engineers employed at Google (or any other company) in Silicon Valley have enough to rent or even buy houses. Actually, a lot of other workers who make one half (or even less) that salary manage as well. People who choose to live in cars or on campus have something else going on with them. It's not just about money, most of us will always choose to have their own place, no matter how small, than living this kind of life. I don't doubt what the Quora discussion describes happens, I'm just claiming these are very few and far between exceptions.

AVTizzle 12y ago
Yeah. Those Quora answers definitely show a sense of "it was interesting/fun". "I'd definitely do it again..." and "I've always wanted to live out of a car, ever since my first station wagon..." are quotes in there.
bellerocky 12y ago
As someone who lives and works in the bay area, you cannot buy a house with a software engineer's salary, not unless it is a very poor neighborhood, in which case you're contributing to gentrification, or you want to drive 2 hours from Pleasanton. I say that as a software engineer home owner who bought a house before the prices sky rocketed again in 2011. I wouldn't be able to afford my own house right now.
- skj 12y ago
  > I wouldn't be able to afford my own house right now. Sounds like a good time to sell!
  - bellerocky 12y ago
    It's our home, not an investment, and where would we live if we sold?
    - tdfx 12y ago

netcan 12y ago

Rent in central cities is one of the unintuitive outcomes of the modern economy. SV might be an extreme example, but it isn't the only one. The world is far more globalized. People work with clients, customers, and coworkers mostly through the internet, even if they are in the same building or city. Google's a good example. They have offices all over. They have clients everywhere. Common sense would dictate that employees would be easier to hire for the same cost elsewhere where that salary affords a better lifestyle. With all due respect to SF (last time I visited I was 12), there are lots of places where a $140k salary will get you the best schools for kids, entertainment for the adults and palatial digs. It is quite literally like doubling you salary to take it someplace else, even within the US. I wonder what the reasons are. Obviously clusters matter. There's the tautology that everyone wants what everyone wants. Being someplace vibrant and affluent is valuable to the resident & employees (or resident-employees). I also think that nominal salaries are important to people's decision making. A 25% pay cut from relocation resulting in a 10% cut in after tax salary but a real measurable and provable increase in purchasing power still feels like a 25% pay cut. Interesting.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago
The cities where a $140k salary exist in the same quantity as in the bay area are roughly equivalent with respect to the cost to live there. A job in SF that pays $140k might fetch $60-$90k in most of the rest of the US, with higher salaries being more rare. So while there are lots of places where $140k is practically king-like, the number of positions with that salary are both hotly competed for and far fewer in number.
- netcan 12y ago
  This is the paradox. You can phrase it as a question: Why don't blubsoft or blub.ly open offices in city X and continue to pay the same salaries there. Relocated employees would be richer and blub.ly should have an easier time hiring. Obvious'y this doesn't happen even though a simple common sense "story" suggests that it should. Hence unintuitive. I'm not saying that individuals don't have their reasons for doing what they do, that's not the interesting part. It's interesting that we don't see digitization and globalization take the pressure off high rent areas and encourage a migration of firms and employees to lower rent (for equivalent of better quality of life) areas at a systemic level.

watwut 12y ago

No matter how high the income, you will find an obsessively frugal person given large enough group. Whether he/she will end up sleeping in car is more function of local security, available free facilities (toilette, shower) around and how much is his/her job image dependent.

UrMomReadsHN 12y ago

> Silicon Valley: Where highly paid ($100-$200k+) engineers sleep in cars to save money on obscenely expensive rent. I've known quite a few people who have lived exactly like this for a while. You know what? None are from Silicon Valley and are all from different walks of life. You have your people who ended up in difficult situations, people strapped for cash, people who were ultra minimalist, people who were looking for adventure, people who didn't want to be tied down, people looking to save up money for a couple years. None had Google's perks/free meals. All different motivations. Some by choice, some not. To generalize that Silicon Valley is somehow responsible from one article about one subset of people is disingenuous.

drewblaisdell 12y ago

> I find Seattle tech industry pay no less than SF The census arrived at a different conclusion. edit: Engineering talent at AmaGooBookSoft are sometimes given pay in Seattle that is comparable to SF, however.

potatolicious 12y ago

It's coming to Seattle too. I moved away from SEA 3 years ago and the rent on my old apartment has gone up by 50%. If you want to stick around, consider buying. Anecdotally I've been hearing more Valley-style anti-tech sentiment coming out of Seattle lately. If not careful Seattle can just as easily turn into the same us vs. them, haves vs. have-nots story of San Francisco. It'll just be the MS Connector instead of the Google Bus instead.

Clanan 12y ago

Isn't a huge part of the housing issue in SV the zoning? I recall reading about how large swathes of land have been zoned away from residential, largely because of the influence of the wealthy who live in and near the area. Never underestimate the politics!

narrator 12y ago
And that is the paradox. In order to make cheap housing you'd have to destroy all the open space and low density zoning that made all the tech and VC people want to live here in the first place. Besides the current economy isn't permanent at all. The tech bubble will bust and this will all go back to normal in a few years. People who are living here for the long haul, and not just for the gold rush don't want it to get overbuilt and spoiled. The funny thing about the bay area is that people are not really impressed by the economic benefits of further development because collectively people have an enormous amount of money in the wealthier bay area cities and no amount of money being waved in their faces will make them give up their quality of life.
- bengoodger 12y ago
  Good luck waiting out the gold rush, it's been a part of the California way of life for more than a hundred and fifty years.
  - narrator 12y ago
    You should have seen it in 2002. The freeways were nice and empty and rents were cheap. Even as recent as early 2009 office rents were much much lower than they are now.
- Clanan 12y ago
  Well, I think you're oversimplifying quite a bit. There are more options than {develop nothing, develop EVERYTHING}. Through politics, the former options has been selected. But perhaps a better options lies somewhere in-between.
- thrownaway2424 12y ago

yitchelle 12y ago

From the household perspective, if the partner also works in tech, their disposable income for a house would be about (200k to 400K). I could imagine that would rent you a nice house/flat for that money. Is the problem mentioned in the post, typically, relevant to singles?

jusben1369 12y ago

Well first you'd need NY to collapse to prove that dynamic work locations collapse under their own weight. Young people (fresh out of school) really have few needs and so will put up with a lot for the experience of working with great people for great companies. It doesn't hurt that the weather is also fantastic (weather crushes NY but culturally NY has so much more to offer). It's only when they hit their 30's and (if they do) start thinking about children that broader quality of life issues come into play. Those that are very successful can afford to stay there. Those that aren't will move on to cheaper metros or somewhere else. Many that are successful will still realize there are other options (the realization that Tahoe never is closer than a 6 hour commute unless you leave at 4am or 10pm) and move away (making way for the next generation). There's a reason those trains to CT are so full of people every night.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 12y ago

That is a silly generalization, I'm not going to generalize about people in Seattle who live on boats even though I know a couple of folks who do that. There is a push afoot to get Google (and then by reaction everyone) to treat the perks they give as taxable income. I expect it is being "encouraged" by companies that don't want to pay for that kind of thing as a way of killing it. Unfortunately if they are successful I expect it to backfire, Google to continue to do it and to cover the tax aspects and the other companies being forced to follow suit.

trhway 12y ago

>I wonder how long the housing situation in SV can keep up until everything collapses under its own weight? it has already couple times at least during my time here - since 2000 - only to emerge with higher rents and higher real estate prices. Buying is the best solution for your own housing - it moves your onto the other side of the wave where you just enjoy the ride (and yes, i've been under water, didn't care as i bought to live in it, not to speculate)

lawnchair_larry 12y ago

It's very silly of you to advertise this if you don't want to increase demand there, too.