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Comment by gunshai | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine who is a PM at google was telling me about this the other week.

Her job situation sounded so tenuous, in that a lot of it hinged on how cool her manager was with her living situation not being in SF. Also having to ask a friend to swipe her badge because she couldn't afford living in SF.

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> PM at google

> couldn't afford living in SF

Seriously though, it's a major city with too much single unit family housing. The fact tech exists there is more of an anomaly at this point, our democracy continues to fail us.

I agree, though I think the problem is that they should've never zoned the city such that you have all the residential areas in one spot and all the commercial areas in another. I mean there are residential units in the business areas, but not that many. That's how downtown gets freaky at night.

They can afford to live in SF, they can’t afford the lifestyle they want.

this is a bit bizarre, how do you know what personal issues they have? maybe they need to care for someone or need special assistance due to their disability, maybe she is actually paid less than many other PMs

I think it was stated that she “couldn’t afford” to live there, not that she just “couldn’t” live there. Pay at large companies is typically in a defined band, so while she could be getting paid less it wouldn’t make or break being able to afford living in a place at all. If one can afford “a” place to live, but perceives the city as unaffordable, then the places that are affordable must be considered below standard.

Well yes, at some point in many people’s lives, renting a crappy apartment or buying a small condo in a failing, crime-ridden city ceases to be a compelling life choice.

I had a apartemnt in west oakland. I was paying 1800/month. when I left, they increased the rent to 3000. And that was in the "hood." it was a bargain compared to what my friends in SF proper were paying.

How can she not afford to live in SF on ~$300k a year?

Because it's not rational to pay $4000+ rent for 1 bed apartment regardless of how much you're paid; especially when that job has no reason to require a physical commute to a shared office space.

If the alternative to renting that apartment is getting fired then it is rational for the employee to rent, even if it was irrational for Google to require RTO in the first place.

Because it "afford", not afford. Clearly it would be possible, but not for the QoL they prefer. For $300k/yr you're buying a SFH in many other parts of the greater bay area.

So glad you mentioned committing badge swiping fraud.

I was going to ask on an original thread, what is to stop people simply swiping other people in on their badge to pretend that they're in the office more than they actually are?

On a large tech campus you might expect

* Cameras recording faces near badge swipe points, and | or

* Campus wide mobile phone services that also log SIM cards and other locale data.

You can imagine some data analyst being tasked with trawling logs to look for inconsistancies.

There are, of course, other meta data logs and sources that could be used.

Or the very simple human intelligence factor: "It says you swiped your badge every day this week but nobody seems to remember seeing you around the office"

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