Slashdot Mirror
Google Preparing To Launch G-Town
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google's aggressive online growth increasingly has a counterpart in bricks and mortar, with the company's Mountain View HQ mushrooming in the past four years to occupy more than 4 million square feet. And that's just for starters. On Silicon Valley's NASA Ames base, Google is preparing to build a new corporate campus with fitness and day care facilities and — in a first in the valley — employee housing, adding 1.2 million sqare feet to Google's real estate holdings. 'I don't want to say it's the new company town,' said commercial real estate VP Gregory M. Davies of Google's role, 'but it's not far from it.' Presumably, no anti-suicide nets will be needed for this one."
I worked in Colorado for a company headquartered in Sunnyvale. They used to fly us out from CO and we'd work in silicon valley for Colorado wages, staying in corporate housing. I loved it because I sublet my apartment in CO out so I was essentially staying for free. Top that off with all the overtime I was working in a place that I didn't technically live (yet) and thus didn't have many friends to go out partying with.
Then they wanted to bring some of us out to CA to live permanently, but didn't want to give us the cost of living adjustments. In order to pacify us they let us stay in the company housing with less than cost-of-living raises, making less than we should but compensating the low pay by covering the housing cost. It worked out really well for a while and was a great start. I had to quit the company when I wanted to move out though because they wouldn't budge on giving any of us raises if we moved out.
The living wasn't bad, I had some interesting room mates that were smart people, but some were crazy or just odd characters. They were bringing in Taiwanese engineers that couldn't speak just about any english and urinated all over the bathroom in the middle of the night. Thankfully we had housekeeping three times a week. I also had these two drunk party-crazy room mates that would tear the place apart. One of them came home drunk and drank a half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and went blind for like a day or two. Another one would get drunk and go steal fruit off the trees in people's yards. One time they got in a flour fight and when I woke up it was like a ghost had walked all over my apartment. Another one went crazy on drugs, lost a rental car, got sent back to CO but never made it because he got arrested on his Phoenix layover for trying to disassemble a metal detector or something (though he wasn't technically my room mate.)
Ah, the good old days of technology, per diem, overtime cash and partying with other nerds in Man Jose. Can't say they weren't interesting, but I'm glad they're over.
My experience in Silicon Valley -- when a company announces that it is going to build a new corporate headquarters, then short the stock. This has an amazingly positive correlation. When executives are fusing about the house, they are not ruthlessly plotting to eviscerate their competition, enslave their workers, screw their stockholders, and take over the world. They are nesting. Now they are going to face the City Council, who are going to want 3,618 EPA, economic, and tax reports -- that is just for starters. Then, they are going to face 20,000 local residents who are going to hate any idea Google has just because Google is successful and lives on the side of the freeway that produces tons of tax revenue that cannot be shared with the rest of the city. This is called a morass. It is not what nimble companies like to kill time managing. Eric Schmidt would have more success fucking a tar baby.
Why are you using a url shortener in a non-twitter-like environment? You could have just copied the URL, just like any other URL instead of passing it through Google, so they'd get click tracking.
Does that make the local nightclub the G-Spot?
Isnt g-spot is that red spot found on Thinkpad just below the 'G' key?