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The Google Employee Who Opted For a Truck Over Bay Area Rents (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: A little over a year ago, Google employees on a Quora thread announced they'd discovered an interesting way to live in the ultra-expensive Bay Area: Rather than pay for conventional housing, they resided in trucks and RVs parked near (or on) the company's campus, and took advantage of corporate perks—including free food, gym facilities, and dry cleaning—to get by on a day-by-day basis. Now one Googler, Brandon S., has taken to his blog to describe how he engaged in a little off-grid living within sight of Google's high-tech headquarters. First he spent $10,000 of his Google signing bonus on a 2006 Ford truck with 128 square feet of room in the back, which he filled with a bed, dresser, and coat rack. Google pays for his phone, and he uses the company's gym and cafeterias to eat and shower. For those Bay Area tech pros who think Brandon's lifestyle sounds appealing, his list of drawbacks includes "social suicide," the inconvenience of not having a bathroom or fridge in close proximity, stress, insect infestations, and the upfront costs of purchasing a large-enough vehicle. On the other hand, he's also using the cash savings to rapidly pay down his student loans.
or, you know, google could pay a living wage.
Time to unionize, boys!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Take up the life of a gypsy, you sing, you dance, you leave when your neighbors get to be pests!
"... He uses the company's gym and cafeterias to eat and shower."
Hopefully not in that order.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
It would at least be respectably configured for living in (bathroom, sink, heat/ac, fridge, etc). Solar on the roof would keep the batteries up with minimal need for generator run time.
If you wanted to go minimalist, you could probably get a pickup camper.
Don't Be This Guy! is the takeaway. He isn't living, he's merely existing, and worse, he's existing only to do his corporate masters' bidding.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Only a recent college grad will put himself through this kind of pointless crap, likely working long hours. The primary reason older people aren't hired in tech is because they finally realized what being taken advantage of feels like. They no longer put up with those kind of "working conditions" for that kind of pay and so they aren't hired.
TLDR: only the young can be treated like a commodity for any real length of time. Thanks HR.
I wonder how safe an area it is? Does he keep a firearm? Is it inside a fenced in area with a guard shack? I'm guessing most women probably would not be willing to do this.
for $10K, he could have bought a 20 year old motorhome and had a bathroom + kitchen... and windows. Sure, his operating expenses may have been higher due to maintenance, but it seems that it'd still be worth it for the comfort and convenience.
At the very least, he ought to glue up some rigid foam insulation to make the truck more comfortable - the truck must feel like an oven after a warm sunny day, even if he doesn't go to bed until after dark.
I'd be worried about emergency egress from the truck, if a fuel leak causes a fire at the rear of the truck, his only escape will be through the flames.
I think OP may be used to renting, where these things are taken care of for you. Buf just FYI, that's hardly unique. Having ants sounds a lot like like my house.
That's like 121% better than living in a cardboard box under a bridge.
Do what you want to do. I want to live in a McMansion. A McMansion on a beach, preferably.
>> 90% of my after-tax income, and throwing that in student loans...$22,434 worth of student loans, and has paid it down to $16,449...four months
That's only $1,500 paid down on student loans per month. If that's 90% of his after-tax income (even in California), he's making maybe $22K/year, and spending just $150 month on other stuff.
...A box truck is it's own special kind of sad. You can get a serviceable RV for under the $10,000 he spent.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
In the early days an employee lived in an RV in the parking lot. His RV was nicknamed the "Weaverplex". It wasn't really secret either.
So, if you can use a "Maxi-van," how about parking a trailer on the spot instead? A 24x8' trailer would give >160sqft of living space and could be double-decked. That's enough room for a composting toilet, and a solar powered mini-fridge.
Isn't sleeping under your desk while your code is compiling allowed or even encouraged at Google?
from pooling their resources and living together for a time until you are married or the situation doesn't suit you. Surely three or four guys can afford to rent an apartment, even if it is $3-4K month. At least you would have running water, a toilet, basic humanity. Living in a truck is good for saving money, but now he's a potential target for asshats who would target him thinking he's making bank.
His goal, and he will soon see thank to this publicity, is to sell that truck, use the proceeds to get into a nice, cheap loft apartment with one or two other people and live like a human being. $10K would have seen him in a nice motel for quite a long time.
The place where I work has a river running thru it. And there is a parking lot near the river. How sweet it would be to live in a van down by the river. I wonder if Google has a river on their campus?
student loans kill home ownership
If Google employees can't afford rent, how can teachers, nurses, and janitors?
Why not invest and build apartment buildings. That is most likely cheaper than a flipping truck.
And with little help from Google that house might be close to the workplace. For Google it might be clever to build such house themselves and rent and sell it to their employees. At least it would require less space than everyone having a truck consuming the parking space.
If I was a young grad today with a high-paying tech job, this is what I would do:
* Live as cheaply as humanly possible, to hell with "social suicide"
* Save at least 50% of my take-home pay, preferably much more
* Become financially independent by age 30
* Dictate my new, improved terms to my employer, since now I have leverage over them, not the other way around, or simply
* Retire early, ride off into the sunset, and wave goodbye to the confused and speechless spenders who used to tell me what to do.
"For those Bay Area tech pros who think Brandon's lifestyle sounds appealing"
Not even a little.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The Who described this method in 1971, in the song "Goin' mobile", although this patent filing may have a fancier description of getting the police and tax man to miss you.
This must happen a lot: Rent is so high in San Francisco that I am a software engineer and I live in a van
Seriously though. Build a place for your worker ants to live. If they're sleeping in their cars they're going to be less productive at work over time, that shit wears on you.
Sounds some like the rental RVs.
The rental companies (for example cruiseamerica ) sell them off after a couple of years (and and few 100.000 miles).
They cost more (around 25.000$), but come complete with furniture and bathroom and are probably still a lot cheaper than an appartment in the long run
Makes me wonder, how long until the bay is full of house boats?
horror vacui
I make $50,000 per year doing I.T. support work in Palo Alto, rent a studio apartment near downtown San Jose for $1,400 per month, and take the express bus to work. Been doing that for 10 years now. Lot more comfortable than a truck camper and bumming food from work.
Recent grads tend to not have any scope on where they should be socially.
The idea of having their basic needs met, seems appealing, that they are making it. Then after some time, when they see their friends, getting nicer homes, or getting married and having a family, they realize that they are missing important aspects in life.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
http://vancouver.craigslist.ca...
http://seattle.craigslist.org/...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
... where everyone is a "consultant" (temp) and company provides a trailer park and hookups for employees' winnebagos. when your project wraps, you drive it to your next "job."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
replace old with US worker and grad with h1b.
The idea of company housing in days tech landscape is a bad idea. They can have there company stone 2.0 where they can hold both the company stone debt and the if you fired / let go you need to go home right away over there heads so they put in long hours / don't complain.
Facebook also has vending machines for computer accessories so they can even change workers for the tools needed to do there jobs as well.
I don't live in CA, but I have been recruited by many tech companies located in CA and specifically the bay area. I told each one of them that I would be taking a large reduction in my standard of living by moving to CA, even if they doubled my current salary. I tried suggesting that they could pay me 40-50k/yr less than a person living in CA and use some of that money to fly me in monthly or whenever is required. It would be a win for everyone, they save money, I could make more money, but that kind of thinking is too hard and dynamic for the HR lackeys.
I've consider the RV as my work has the same amenities as well as a large shopping center across the street. But my old lady said "no". It's also impracticable if you happen to play the Hammond Organ for fun.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This can also be ascribed to Uber drivers, Amazon packers, the entirety of the fast (and even slow) food industry...
Ok, so its a new grads rant and rave about his experience..
lets disect..
1. why does this individual feel he or sheen needs to do this? Why cant they get a job elsewhere in the US that is more accommodating to inexperienced job seekers or for those just out of school.. He does not have to live this way he chooses to.. Lets be crystal clear..
2. the money issues would not be such an issue if he was prepaired, or he set his expectations lower to fit his needs and/or what he is able to sustain..
It's people like this whom want to live the dream right away, whom displace others and dont think of the ramifications of their hasty, unthought, and reckless decisions.
Whats stopping you from Texas, Nevada, Arkansas, or The Carolina's?
It's like seeign the space shuttle, being so enamored by it, and wanting to fly it ASAP without any education, the article here, describes this individuals adventures trying to do that.. Sorry man, I have no pity for your unorganized adventures..
bottom line is,, I want this, but I am not in a position to obtain it, so I wil chip away at it at the expense of my physical and mental health, even though I want the shiny..
there are Many options out there,, why they are not explored I am unclear, but because those options do exist, I find an even bigger bullshit index on this article because this adventure is NOT NECESSARY.
If you cant manage it, dont blunder fuck it and ruin it for those whom can,.
So, moving past all of that, by publishing this article does Slashdot Or DHI condone this type of behavior???
Personally, If you HAD TO DO THIS? RV, Winnebago, something.. A delivery truck is SO NOT THE WAY to do this, thus comes the part about being un-organized, and make this article even more reckless an un-necessary..
This actually sounds more like a "war story" Trial and tribulations one has to endure as a right of passage.. BULLSHIT this is not casablanca man.. pull ur head out..
retarded
Are they really the important things in life...
Or just what you've been brainwashed to believe are?
That certainly puts the episode "You only Move Twice" in a new light.
Homer, you monster!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Awesome. The liberal utopia that is too expensive to live in. Limousine liberal capital of the world. Corporate masters and their REAL party, the Democrats. The wealth is so great here it makes room for nothing other than the homeless. Zuckerberg, Soros, Gates, Bloomberg, Steyer, etc etc... all want to control and tell us how to live... the list of billionaire liberals is great and have their hands in so many areas of politics and business it's terrifying. But don't the low information dem voters, they need to parrot the "rich corporate republican" line that they're told too. Don't worry, they wont dare educate themselves and do any real research. They're read a Soros blog and parrot on! Oh, yeah... don't mention the hordes of celebrity TV and movie personalities who also preach to us from their ivory towers on a daily basis.
Yes, it truly is the limousine liberal capital.
... and I'll never understand the lure of Silicon Valley. I live a couple of miles outside Nashville in the country, in a very nice house I managed to pay off in 10 years. I make a decent living doing high-end computer work (academic HPC) which is pretty fun. Ambitious but realistic 40-hour week schedules, with co-workers as smart as any I've met at the Supercomputing conferences. I can eat out, go to the gym, go on a date, or just go home and watch a movie with my cat in my lap any time I want. I'll probably be able to retire in my 50's should I choose to do so.
Why, other than the hope of becoming an overnight millionaire, do people choose to work in Silicon Valley, with the insane hours, cost-of-living, commutes from hell, and a lack of any social life? Because if money is all they wanted, they can buy Powerball tickets in most states.
There's a post talking about him getting his Class B driving license and an image of it redacted. While I know most Californians get a lot of sun, I am pretty sure that guy is not a 20-something. He might have photoshopped someone else's photo on it, though.
http://frominsidethebox.com/vi...
I think it's time for companies (and tech companies especially) to start to encourage more remote workers.
Companies with stacked ranking don't do "remote".
This is because stacked ranking is basically a high school popularity contest which pits employees against each other to stay above the bottom part of the bell curve so that they don't end up on a PIP ("Performance Improvement Program") or just plain fired/asked to lead/offered severance.
When Marissa Mayer came into Yahoo from Google, she instituted stacked ranking. It's the main reason she disallowed remote workers, since they were going to be the lowest ranked anyway, and if you are going to be ranked low, you might as well pack your bags before it's an issue.
So... between a remote worker, who you hardly ever have any personal interactions with, and a local worker who you eat lunch with daily, and consider a good work friend/buddy... who are you going to shove under the bus?
Exactly.
So remote workers are strongly discouraged at most companies that originated in the Amazon/Google/Facebook cultures, or hired HR or management out of those cultures, which is to say "Company X is successful; let's act just like company X, and we will be successful, too".
I think this send a clear message to landlords in the area.
Charge what you will, we will find ways to allow it and survive within it..
regardless of whom it affects, how we do it and how you wish to be satisfied.
this sends the WRONG message stating its ok for thing to continue to become unreachable..
whats going to happen when employers cannot afford to do business and pay their employees a liveable wage??
Watch the Program SanFranCisco 2.0
look it up
I am not from Google and not in the US but I did something similar : living in a used RV for 5 years. It's impressive how fast you are saving money this way.
In the end I managed to buy a nice apartment downtown. Most of it paid upfront.
I make $50,000 per year doing I.T. support work in Palo Alto, rent a studio apartment near downtown San Jose for $1,400 per month, and take the express bus to work. Been doing that for 10 years now. Lot more comfortable than a truck camper and bumming food from work.
Spending 50 percent of your take home pay on rent is nuts.
So this is how everyone will compete with India for employment.
Because they shack up in greater numbers than is really optimal.
Case in point: When I lived in Northern Virginia (Silicon Valley East), I lived in a nice townhouse community in Herndon, VA. Indian families used to buy these townhouses up and move in -- 10-20 people in one house. You could smell them from down the street. One family were evicted by Fairfax county because they also ran a restaurant down the street a mile or so and were using their townhouse kitchen to make additional meals and then a van would appear and take the stuff to the restaurant -- a blatant violation of the health and safety codes. They were fined and warned once before. The second time the judge threw the book at them,
The other Indian families were shameless in their living conditions. When I sold my townhouse and moved away, my estate agent mentioned to me that he could not sell townhouses once occupied by Indians to anyone else. The smell was so strong it was completely off-putting. One guy that had the misfortune of living next to one of these houses said he could smell their food through the firewall after about a year. Yuck.
SF has Earthquakes, a toxic employment and living environment.. drains your resources and pretty much leads to an early death.
I really don't see the advantages.
The SF of 1978 or even 1998 is long gone.. and its a financial disaster area.
Its totally unsustainable, so why even consider moving there?
Smart that it's urban camouflage, nobody questions a big white truck parked for a long time.
Dumb that the same money would have bought him a very nice RV that would be a lot more comfortable and would have been useable for a very long term compared to living in a box truck where someone can slap a padlock on the outside and trap you in it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What about all the cities where they've put in Google Fiber? What about the temporary Google Kansas?
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
More like 40% per year. Most financial experts recommend not spending more than 33% of yearly income on housing. I'm just a few percentage points off the norm.
Free food and shelter!
The whole thing seems silly. Why doesn't Google shit-can the fancy perks and just build basic employee housing?
You sound like you have been brainwashed to believe all you should do is work at your job all your life.
Having room to host friends and family and have them feel welcomed is an important part of life, as well starting a family.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Suicide is an acceptable excuse for absence.
Please alert your immediate supervisor of your intend and complete all your assigned work before committing suicide.
Please note that you will receive no benefit and compensation for the duration of your death... absence;
your paid vacation time and sick days will not accrue during your absence.
I work remotely, for Google, and get good performance reviews. I suppose one counterexample doesn't necessarily destroy your claim, but it does call it into question.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I did tech support for AMD back in the 90's, and stumbled upon this idea back then. A friend had an old camper-van that I could buy cheap; AMD was a 24-hour campus with cafeteria, gym and other amenities. A cell phone and PO Box was all that was needed to complete the picture.
If I wasn't married, I might have tried it. Things were not nearly as expensive back then as they are now, but AMD paid their tech support folks crap; I would have been hard pressed to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the area on my salary. If you're willing to live simply, it's definitely a viable option.
... but damn, if nothing else his blog reminds me of how incredibly un-handy some people are. A van can be made extremely comfortable and practical for a pittance if you've got some decent skills and a handful of basic tools.
Log in or piss off.
Sorry to hear this. Good luck with your game, hope it's a hit.
apparently they've never heard of truck drivers. they do this day in, day out. might want to look at that industry to solve some issues. they pretty much have it down.
Click modifications. You trolled yourself. :)
Is it only a matter of time before Google starts floating container ships in the SF bay to house its employees? They put data centers on the water - why not people? They can invent mooring balls to provide fiber, power, water and possibly even sewer connections somewhere in the south SF Bay. Employees can stay/work on board or ferry to a dock near the Googleplex. They can dock at Treasure Island occasionally to resupply, and add/remove container homes.
Why stop there? Put employee containers on unused stretches of railroad. Develop underused parking lots, salt bogs, or airfields into multi-story lego brick cities. Refurbish older cruise ships into wired work havens.
Anyone know where all those people are going to live?
Cmon, that is photoshopped. Could not have been more obvious than that.
A little over a year ago, Google employees on a Quora thread announced they'd discovered an interesting way to live in the ultra-dangerous Detroit Metro: Rather than pay for conventional housing, they resided in Detroit. Now one Googler, David X., has taken to his blog to describe how he engaged in a little off-grid living within sight of Google's high-tech headquarters. First he spent $10,000 of his Google signing bonus on a pit bull and a handgun, which he filled with ammo. Google pays for his dog food, and he uses the company's range to practice shooting. For those Detroit Metro tech pros who think David's lifestyle sounds appealing, his list of drawbacks includes "social suicide," the inconvenience of not having a bathroom for himself or the dog, stress, lack of police, lack of city services, crumbling urban infrastructure, and the upfront costs of purchasing a large-enough handgun. On the other hand, he's also using the cash savings to rapidly pay down his student loans.
Also on the Plus side: Gets to watch RoboCop kicking some ass on a nightly basis!
I read a statistic (sorry Google couldn't find it) I believe from a several year old Wired issue, the the average distance between a CEOs home and their company headquarters was 8 miles. This is why companies don't relocate to where the cost of living is less expensive for the rank-and-file employees in the SF Bay Area. The CEOs can afford it and want that lifestyle...
Dude did it wrong, if he got a bumper pull he would have been fine and had plenty of room. /Still social suicide, but who cares.
My wife bought one of these and a massive truck to put it on.
http://www.travelizmo.com/archives/001063.html
We use that as our remote office and work all over the country. Since I'm remote 50% of the time and she's remote 100% we see a lot of the country and still get our work done.
It's much better than a box truck, we have plumbing, electricity, gas and a kitchen.
Its a shame when an unhealthy lifestyle is promoted. /.-dhi.
I think there is definitely a hidden agenda
How can you allow the promotion of such a deplorable situation?
Its like our parents stories of young.
" We had to walk in the snow up and down hills to school everyday" the difference being that people who go to school like that don't necessarily have a choice. Where is various other people do. But the fact that it's portrayed with sensationalism here, I think is very short sighted and is doing a disservice to your constituents.
I work remotely, for Google, and get good performance reviews. I suppose one counterexample doesn't necessarily destroy your claim, but it does call it into question.
It greatly depends on the group, but the group I was involved with was rather large, and has since gotten rid of many of the remote employees.
The most successful remote employees were those who were well thought of because of their existing reputation in the field, or because they would periodically fly in and stay for at least a week to build a rapport, before flying out again, or because they were critical path, and most everyone knew it, and they did their job.
The least successful were those who were *not* critical path, and most everyone knew it, or they would fly in rarely (e.g. every 3 months), and tended to stay for only a couple of days, or who were relatively unknown players in CS.
A lot of the review intermediation is also done by your manager, meaning that if your manager likes you and your work, they can buffer bad reviews, and pick other people to place at the bottom of the bell curve instead of you.
Stacked ranking is somewhat of a malaise on the entire industry at this point, and you don't have to look very far to find articles about the negative effects it has had on organization (predominantly, it causes forced churn of employees). Here are a couple of them:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://qz.com/320532/marissa-m...
http://www.nbcnews.com/busines...
http://www.halogensoftware.com...
A number of companies in Silicon Valley just give severance to the bottom 30% (yes, 30%!) in the rankings.
Just got laid off from a place like that. For the last several years, the mantra had been "We want to be just like Zynga!" nevermind how THAT company was rotting from the inside out. And then management decided to adopt Google's OKR process. A key problem is that management talked big about doing these things but rarely ever actually does them, so you end up with some teams and groups doing OKRs and others who have none, for years. So when the annual reviews come around, you cannot say you have met any OKRs because you and your manager and their manager and in fact the entire department never had any OKRs.
But of course the REAL secret of the OKRs we did was to set ridiculous goals you could never meet. For example, the team I was in was kind of a helpdesk/front line firefighter team, doing things like on-call support at 3:00AM. Client support stuff. We eventually got an OKR of "increase sales turnovers by 20%" but of course we weren't IN sales and had no training or tools to do that, and if we'd actually tried, the real sales side would have had a fit. So nobody ever met that OKR. It was impossible and stupid. By attaching OKRs like that to most of the teams and pinning bonuses on results, what they did was rig it so very few people qualified for bonuses any more. Now they SAID "we're setting sky-high impossible OKRs so you will reach for the sky and achieve the amazing" but they meant "we've set a goal not even God can meet, good luck to you hahahaha!"
At the same time, they began hiring H1Bs, kids fresh from college, and co-ops and interns, all working for half the wages and sometimes actually buying the "We're just like Google!" bullshit.
Anyway, they'd been gunning for me for a while. Had a decent review and scored well. They went back and changed it and decided no, I needed to be on a PIP. Because somebody had to be. Gave me stupid goals and priorities and then while I was on approved vacation, my manager told HR I'd quit.
Raised a stink about that but they laid me off two weeks later anyway. More than a decade at that place. Absolutely thrilled to be gone.
Sig for hire.
As the AC says, you should click on Modifications under the image. The picture is from an advertisement.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I'd thought of doing exactly this, just a few years working among the hipsters while camping out of a vehicle for a near-zero housing cost could leave you with a quarter or maybe half a million in the bank.. Just daydreaming though, since I'm not a US citizen.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
one of my coworker in the 90's was living out of a VW bus. And he wasn't even hippie. I envied him lol...
This is because stacked ranking is basically a high school popularity contest which pits employees against each other to stay above the bottom part of the bell curve so that they don't end up on a PIP ("Performance Improvement Program") or just plain fired/asked to lead/offered severance.
So that's how you become a manager at Google!
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I would release him to the market asap, he just gives bad name to Google.
As a living thing, the most important thing in life is to reproduce. It isn't to worship a deity, or to eat, or to work, or to sleep. More politely, the most important thing for a heterosexual man to do is to meet women. (Substitute all of the pronouns you want for women and for people in the LGBT community.)
For years I tried to convince myself that working on technical projects was the most interesting thing that I could possibly be doing, and I denied my basic biology. By your 30's the defects in our society's social structure become readily apparent. The social norm for nerd behavior does not favor us in any way whatsoever. It distances us from the requirements of our biology. Is it self-imposed? In part, I suppose. For the most part, though, we're brainwashed. Programming is not preferable to having sex. Programming should be something you do after you're exhausted from sex. The value that companies get from the software that we write means that we should be getting paid 10 times what we do at the very least, or work one day a week and spend the rest of our lives doing what we should be doing.
This individual has it completely backwards. His job at Google and money are his god. He is a brainwashed automaton, exactly who Google wants to work for them.
and they manage to have one or two tall buildings there.
Most of Slashdotters are way to young to know about this, but there was a doctor called Gonzo Gates in the TV show "Trapper John MD" who lived in an RV in the hospital parking lot. The RV was The Titanic.
I think there's a widespread misconception that San Fran is this big mingling party of 'hot shots.' That talent pool is filled with clueless millennials as much as geniuses. Both groups of recruits think they are geniuses and will attempt to leverage unrealistic salaries.
As easy as it is to recruit from that genius pool next to the Bay, so too, is it easy to lose your genius back into the pool. Might make more sense to get them stranded out in Biloxi...
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Housing prices are higher than "the cost to build" in major metropolitan areas all over the world (London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, etc., etc.).
Your definition of 'normal' is abnormal.
Back around 2004 I was considering doing this very same thing. I lived outside SF and hated spending 2 hours of my day commuting on BART. The parking garage next to my office charged $300/mo for monthly parking (which, lets be honest, in SF lots of people pay just to keep their car parked 24/7). I was considering buying a VW camper and living out of it. I had 24/7 access to the building so I could use the bathrooms there, a gym membership of $30/mo would cover the shower needs, and while I'd have missed out on a lot of internet time, that didn't matter to me.
It would have been a lot cheaper than the $1,424/mo I was throwing away on a crappy 2bd 1ba apartment in Fremont and the $300 a month or so I was spending on BART. The only reason I didn't do it was because I had a cat and putting him in a space that tiny all day long did not seem humane.
I actually moved into a $900/mo ~350sq-ft. apartment in downtown SF for the next 6 years. I got lucky and got in at the 2006 real estate dip, that same studio is now more than double that price, the only reason I moved out was I got married and had a kid.
Absolutely lived out of my car in Mountain View because 1) I was never not at work for more than 9 hours at a time 2) could shower at the gym and 3) didn't feel like forking over 2500 a month for a 1 bdm.
Problems arising include *it's illegal* and enforced, having to find somewhere else to park each night, having to pee ( pooping was on schedule, at work) staying organized in a smaller car. Hiding what you're doing from everyone.
So been there done that and I'm not the only one.
Later was at an interview in Palo Alto. Went to lunch with team. Manager remarks on a certain truck / car thing he's seen parked around town and comments that someone is living out of that, and wasn't that something? Oh the irony.
First - Air:
You don't necessarily need a heater or A/C all the time, but I would seriously consider getting a camper/RV crank open/closed air vent with screens and putting a couple in the ceiling. He mentioned he left it slightly open for air control and it invited bugs.
Second - Bed:
Just build up a wooden frame at the very front to hold a mattress - I think a queen size - would fit. Put the dresser underneath. You could also build in a short closet/locker under there. That could be the general storage area for everything. Since the bed will be quite long get a rolling clothes rack - like the stores use - and park it under the bed. Put a door in front so you can slide it in and out and it will contain the thing when you drive it. Get creative. I personally would make a parking space for -----
Third - Bicycle:
You call the truck social suicide. Obviously you don't want to drive that thing everywhere, get a bike. I know Google has them on campus you can use, but get your own and park it under your bed. I would build a lifting staircase with hinges as a garage door.. You're young and socializing on a bike isn't that hard, especially in more left-wing type metros where it's popular.
Fourth - walls and ceiling:
Put carpet, curtains, or if you want to be all function no form kindergarten style sleep mats all over the walls and ceiling. This will block some outside noise, will get rid of the "tin can echo" and insulate against the weather. You can use spray glue, but that could smell the place up and invite bugs. How about magnets? That way you can easily remove everything should you want to use it as a cargo truck again?
Once you do all of this everything is at the front of the truck. This leaves the back half available. Put a couch, or some folding chairs (the comfy "umbrella" style sports chairs, not the crappy old metal ones) around that area for visitors. I know you don't have any now, but think of camping trips on your off time or whatever - this doesn't have to be a "sleep at work only" capsule. Use it! Get camping gear, a folding Coleman stove, a lantern etc.. I personally would put some solar panels on the roof to charge a battery bank so I could have more or less normal lighting, charge all my stuff (yes, even the laptop). In fact I would get a monitor that runs on DC power (some Samsung's for instance), screw a VESA mount onto the wood rail towards the back so I could lounge around for movies. Screw speakers to the rails also. Now not just for sleeping anymore. I would probably get a portable air conditioner for when I'm near a power outlet, but I'm a Texan and I've been in too many triple digit summers to not consider that.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Mired in debt, sleeping on corporate campus, don't even have a toilet of your own. Yup. Taste that American dream! ... tastes a bit nutty.
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Hum... Sorry, I thought my line of reasoning was simple enough to be understood by anyone. Reread as this: If the house costs x, x + 50% is kind of expensive but acceptable. X + 100% already becomes expensive, and X + 200 is ridiculous. Better now?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
"A few percentage points"?
40% is seven percentage points above 33%, and put in a useful way, it's more than a 21% increase.
Congratulations, you're house poor - living in a rented studio. Yay?
You articulated it clearer, but you are still wrong. The price of the house includes more than just the simple construction cost. You are also paying for location, which is a huge factor. That is the reason the exact same house can cost different amounts in different locations.
You are close to repeating Adam Smith's "natural price" theory.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
IF he has to that to pay off his student loans that was his first mistake.
As opposed to being house rich? Absolutely!
My older brother and his wife make $100,000 per year. They bought a house for $800,000 at the peak of the real estate bubble with a down payment borrow from the wife's 401k. They want to retire but they can't sell the house. The mortgage is still under water since the Great Recession. The wife is still paying off the down payment. The bank won't let them refinance the house. Without selling the house, they have no money to retire on. So they're stuck working until they drop dead from working.
Work to live
Live to work..
an employers Wet dream
Needed to catch those not under the H1-B bondage...
is that he is cheating.
I don't think Google places that much emphasis on stack rankings. My managers have always described them as primarily a tie-breaking tool, when, employees are close to some boundary based on their peer feedback.
I suppose it might be a problem if an engineer's work was so isolated that he or she didn't have enough peers to get feedback from. It's hard to see how that could happen in Google's organizational structure, though.
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When you buy a house you're also paying for the land. I paid about a million for my house, but I only have it insured for $400k because the land is worth $600k and can't be destroyed in a fire.
Seriously, buy a decent (preferably used) RV and your standard of living (such as it is) would go up considerably over the bed of a pickup truck.
They have a stove, shower, bed, seating, etc etc. I know people that have lived comfortably in an RV for months while touring the country. (Obviously the meaning of "comfortably" is open to discussion, but still...) Hell, I've lived in crappy rooms that weren't as nice as some low to mid-range RVs.
Is it for me? Probably not, but no doubt it would work fine for some people. The whole "hay baby, lets go back to my place" thing takes a big hit, but that would have been true of some of the places I've lived for that matter.
With that said, this is what happens when rents go out of sight and home prices rise along with them. A "living wage" these days will hardly let you buy a home in most parts of the country without years and years of saving, and this is especially so in most metropolitan areas. I myself probably couldn't afford to buy another home if I sold mine. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of what's happening in America these days. :(
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Does he leave the door cracked at night after eating Mexican at the Google cantina? Would that be self-asphixiation? I mean, c'con, how do astronauts deal with their own farts?
And this looks like another reason that it does.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Why buy an old cargo truck? I suppose it would work, especially if you fixed it up a bit more on the inside but you can get an nice new travel trailer for about $10k, less than $5k if you go used. With that kind of signing bonus ($10k) you could get a used SUV/Truck and a used camper to pull it with. Maybe he's afraid he'll get ticketed/"evicted" for camping in a parking lot? If that's the case they're going to eventually catch you in a cargo truck it might simply take a bit longer.
What is OKR?
You are right. But there are some other factors:
In Soviet Union there was a state policy: The university education is free. If your grades are high enough you even obtain some scholarship money. But after you graduate there is a procedure of "distribution": There is a list of employers pretending to employ the graduates, and the graduates choose the employers. The distribution begins from the best students which can choose the best employers, and then the worst students choose the rest. Then, the employer must give the new worker some place to live and spend efforts for his specialization but the worker must work here 3 years as a payment for his education.
The other state policy was that it was almost impossible to buy an apartment (cooperation and private sector aside). Instead, there was lot of state and employer's place to live rented for the nominal fee - but as a rule with a terribly long waiting list.
And this week I've read somewhere the article stating that the free education and free place to live are necessary to prevent the condition "poor became poorer, rich become richer" and the resulting crash of the society.
Now let's return to the procreation. In Soviet Union there was enough place to family life and enough time for family life. ("In USSR there is no sex" is a famous phrase I personally heard from TV). In USA (and in modern Russia too) you either have no place or no time for procreation since your student loans eat all your free money and correspondingly all your free time which you spend to earn money.
And the second factor is that in USSR your wealth didn't count, you needed something else for girls' attention. Creativity, for instance. Ability to obtain USA jeans. Or CPSU membership :-)
Sound like a great place to work at. Or not. No wonder only shit comes out of those companies.
A camper van built for the exact purpose would be more livable and would take up the same parking space providing better living conditions. Ventilation most of all.
Objectives and Key Results (OKR). (I assume)
That's not how capitalism works--the price of something is based on its scarcity. Housing in San Francisco is scarce and thus expensive. You said this was an American problem and that "normal" countries don't function this way--but you are completely wrong. The same dynamic exists in nearly every major city in the world.
Reread as this: If the house costs x, x + 50% is kind of expensive but acceptable. X + 100% already becomes expensive, and X + 200 is ridiculous. Better now?
Nope. Because the value is mostly in the land, not the house. Back when I bought my first house, I could buy land for $20k and build a humble cottage for $20k. Back then a big TV (27") cost $2k.
Now a block of land cost $1million, and a good house can be built for about $250k. The big TV is now 55" and cost $600. The $250k house will cost you $350k in the crap areas, and over $1.5 million in the good areas. It has zero to do with the actual house.
I worked for google for several years, my boss there was pretty much a 'pointy haired boss'. One of my team members max out his vacation and had a baby and only took a few days of paternity leave. That coworker was the most praised team member for being such a team player, yet his code was horrendous with very dumb designs (xml mounted over NFS as a 'shared' DB for example). That's how I learned the hard way that HR only job is to make problems disappear for the company, not for the employees.
It varies very much from team to team, but my own personal experience from years at Google is that work life balance is not important to some managers, and reputation is much more important than real performance. Google is full of 'long timers' that proved themselves in the past and just barely show up to work in time to have lunch at the free cafeteria then go to the gym. People that keep the boat actually afloat are never recognized (at least during my time).
San Fran may be crazy anti-housing, but a motivated company could skirt the rules and build a "parking lot" for their employees, which just happens to work well for employees with RVs.
It would need convenient proximity to an RV (sewage) dumping station, which doubles as a water supply. Nearby propane refuelling station, or even a full-for-empty tank swapping kiosk would fill-out the picture. That and space is all you strictly need. Nearly all RVs are designed for this off-grid mode of operation.
30A electric hookups would sure be nice, but if you can't get that through, solar panels on the roof would do a good enough job. Very small propane-powered generators can do the job of backup power supply.
Personally, I'd prefer to see some cheap capsule apartments...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Setting goals you cannot achieve so you cannot get a bonus?
We recently had a similar case in Germany where a woman went to court because her company had promised her a bonus, but didn't want to pay it because the company as a whole had missed its target.
The judge didn't quite agree and pointed out that boni coupled to targets have to be set in such a way that it's possible for the individual to achieve this goal.
As a result, your firing over impossible to meet targets would have cost them quite a bit in severance pay...
In 1999 i had an extended business trip to San Jose to do stuff for Y2K. As usual my company made my travel arrangements but I couldn't understand why they had screwed up this time and put me in a shitty hotel next to a bunch of disgusting-looking shacks. It was several days before I found out these slums were actually insanely expensive homes costing five times as much as a large house back home where I lived.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Your experience is completely different from mine.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
but keep in mind that capitalism has outperformed (by pretty much every metric) every other economic system that has ever been tried.
Capitalism worked so far for not being a "pure" capitalism as written in the books, the government has intervened in the worst cases, avoiding more or less well the worst excesses. The problem is that the "economists" (bankers, financiers and other really dangerous criminals) insist on taking this "unwanted intervention," and if this really happen one day ... I hope your favorite God have mercy on us.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
It seems individuals at the publication still have their heads firmly planted within their Anal cavities..
This article has been determined to be BULLSHIT by several people and reputatable resources.. /. or DHI.. /. and DHI are really doing their community a huge dis-service..
The method is wrong, the image its promoting is very negative,
This person Obviously did not do their research, nor did
Not to sound racist, but this sounds like an other uninformed immigrant story of how he made it in america..
It's promoting an unhealthy lifestyle, misery, and potentially illegal activities for anyone in a civilized community..
I think by promoting this type of behavior
Many cities in CA prohibit sleeping in your car. You could get fined for doing it.
thank for information mr coward...