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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

Why not offer dorms for people to live there on a daily to weekly basis? It looks like a fantastic place to work but it seems like not a lot of people live near there.

It would be totally awesome to get a group of developers together and hack away at stuff not having to worry about going home for a few days.

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> It would be totally awesome to get a group of developers together and hack away at stuff not having to worry about going home for a few days.

lol to me this is the opposite of "totally awesome"

"work for us, never go home, leave your family behind"

Yep, company dorms, company stores, etc. have been tried before. We've made labor rules prohibiting them because we realized that the line between dependence and outright slavery blurs more quickly than many expect. It's a trap.

Sadly, this gung-ho "for the company" attitude, which arises from a combination of naivety and boredom, is one of the essential characteristics that VCs want to see in prospective founders. It's one of the biggest reasons they push the "You must be young and pure to be an innovative founder!" angle, although most people aged 25+ can see pretty clearly that experienced founders would be a great benefit to any company. That experience threatens the VC game, so they keep it as far away as they can.

Research indicates that older founders perform better:

http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2010/05/the-anat...

You and me both, but there was a time when I would have been perfectly fine with this, because I lived it.

Well, it was the military, and you'd have to replace "hack away" with "non-stop exercise and dumb chores", but the analogy still fits I think.

At least in the military you stay fit!

Because that's an extremely expensive project that nobody would use in addition to the already super expensive space that they are closing because nobody uses it.

Also I can't imagine many people want to be at work for days at a time and not go home

There are also city regulations against using office space as living space.

The downside of working remotely all my days are at work, or is it all my days are at home :-)

Not only is it expensive, it's often difficult and cumbersome to deal with zoning and occupancy laws in a office or area that was set up mainly for business use

I take it you are young and don't have a family?

Most people over 25 want to go home at the end of the day to their friends/family and don't want to live in dorms.

There are apparently plenty of large Japanese companies that own apartment buildings for their employees to live at, simply because the economies of scale make that cheaper than paying them extra so that they can all rent from hundreds of different landlords. I doubt many in the US would go for it; can you imagine if your boss was also your landlord?

Most places have zoning restrictions where commercial property is not authorized for use as a dwelling. I would imagine they would need a fight a zoning variance battle to set up something unconventional like that.

I would rather be unemployed than in that situation.

This is cool when you're in college, or maybe like one year out of it.

Older adults (aka anyone over 23) typically prefer to have their own space.

And many people, surprisingly enough, don't want their job to be the sole focus of their existence.

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