Google Invites Employees to Sleep 'On Campus' for a Fee | Hacker News Reader

Google Invites Employees to Sleep 'On Campus' for a Fee

gizmodo.com

47 pointsourmandave81 comments

This article is making a bad comparison.

From the CNBC article (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/04/google-offers-on-campus-hote...):

> The Google-owned hotel is situated on a newer campus in Mountain View, California, that it opened last year.

The Gizmodo article is comparing this to what Twitter did. Having a space that is actually run as a hotel is not the same as setting up bedrooms in an existing part of a building.

Based on the description in the article, I am reminded of the Stanford Guest House (https://rde.stanford.edu/stanford-guest-house), which is owned and run by Stanford, for the benefit of faculty, staff, students, and visitors. It is also run as a proper hotel.

It's not a bad comparison for their purposes, which is to look at two major tech companies who are trying to get their employees to sleep at work. I agree it's not identical, but it's valid in terms of common themes being discussed in tech, like lack of work-life balance and worker exploitation.

> who are trying to get their employees to sleep at work

I don't see it. It's optional. Google employees don't have to take up on the offer. The knee-jerk on this forum is always "worker exploitation" (not saying you're saying it's that, but speaking more generally to the sentiment here) but nothing about this says you can't exercise your own free will to choose your own hours. Just because you live close to the office doesn't mean you have to stay there. I currently live 15 mins from my office but I keep normal hours. Proximity to work has no bearing on anything except my own convenience.

If anything, I used to live a consultant life where I gave more of my life to my employer -- it was the name of the game. I was away many weeks from Mon-Thurs. I lived in Chicago but was working in a different city every month and had to be a plane several times a month -- that's more soul sucking (I practically lived out of ORD). That I didn't have a choice over. And when I landed, I didn't always get to stay near the office -- I always needed a rental car.

But this -- it sounds like a convenience. If I were a Google employee and moved away during COVID (say to San Luis Obispo) but had to RTO to Mountain View Tues-Thurs, I would appreciate having a place close to the office.

Back in the old days, prior to remote work, many people used to live this kind of life. They would live in a different city but commute in 3 days a week and stay at at rented apartment (they even have a name for it -- a "pied a terre"). This way folks got to work with a company in a less preferred geography but still get to live in a city they can enjoy on weekends.

The worker exploitation part is RTO. This is just another tool in their toolbox so that they can demand employees who live far from the office still return to the office because now they've offered you the "convenience" of a company owned (and presumably surveillanced) hotel room.

I'm not sure I see that as "worker exploitation" either. If you were hired remote and it's part of your employment contract, then yes, RTO is a breach of your contract. But most of us were hired for in-person, and remote was a concession that was made during COVID and some folks chose to move away. 3 day RTO makes it possible for these folks to still live far away and come in 3 days a week.

This 3 day arrangement was common in many companies even pre-pandemic, as a concession to higher level managers and directors who didn't want to relocate from where they were living because their kids were already in school, and they didn't want to move the family. Not everyone had that privilege. The rest of us had to relocate.

> But most of us were hired for in-person, and remote was a concession that was made during COVID and some folks chose to move away

You may have been hired for that, but it's been proven that it's unnecessary and detrimental for numerous reasons: commute time, real estate markets, lack of focus due to office layout, limited talent pool...

We live in a post-office world, asking to go back is exploitation because it's simply to suit management's preference at the employees expense. The time in the day you lose when going WFH to RTO is not going to be compensated.

I think we have different expectations and that's ok. I see the benefits of remote work too (I did it for 2 years during COVID), but I myself prefer to be in the office at least some of the time. I was stuck on a problem for months and it only took a week of huddling in person to solve.

I don't think it's wrong for employers to have an RTO policy -- as someone for whom 5 days in the office was and is the norm (and has been the norm for much of history).

We actually don't live in a post-office world. We live in a hybrid world where employers can choose full RTO, part RTO or fully remote. I'm glad for it because it means my employment options open up significantly without me having to relocate from the city I want to live in. We have more options not less, even though it means changing employers.

But to call full RTO/part RTO policies exploitation is sentiment I don't agree with. We can agree to disagree of course.

It's in slightly better taste, and it's even arguably beneficial as an option if any employees actually want to do this, but I think ultimately it's the exact same sin: Normalizing the idea of sleeping at work. It's insidious.

What about people visiting from out of town?

It isn't oriented at local employees, probably. More like...hey some Googler from Seattle needs to visit Mountain View for a few days, and doesn't want to drive, where will they sleep?

Mountain View does not have any hotels? Sounds weird.

They're very expensive.

I'm sure Palo Alto has hotels too, but Stanford still runs their own.

Google is not a university. Do you think Stanford could come up with something like WEI?

The way I heard it, Googleplex land uses are limited because it’s so close to Shoreline wetlands. The nearest hotel (Shashi) is about a mile away to the southeast, but it now seems to be surrounded by newer Google offices so maybe the campus shuttles would serve that street?

If you know where Google's office is, ya, there isn't any hotels nearby. You would probably have to trudge out to across El Camino, better have a rental car!

Definitely nothing nearby at $99/night...maybe East Palo Alto?

> Definitely nothing nearby at $99/night...maybe East Palo Alto

Why fixate on $99/night as if Google won't pay for/refund $500/night hotel stays and cover rentals for employees it requested to report to Mountain View? Even if there are no hotels nearby, Im sure there are dozens of hotels within walking distance of a Google shuttle stop all across the bay.

If Google won't pay for your hotel but still expects you to HFW (H@W?), well - that's a little gross.

I think the going rate for a room now, just three stars or less, is around $200-250? And that’s anywhere close or not. I don’t think shuttles service hotel areas, since they are focused on Google’s who live in residential areas. It’s not like Europe where hotels are often mixed in with residential areas.

> It’s not like Europe where hotels are often mixed in with residential areas.

I disagree - I did a search for "Hotels in Mountain view"[1] and I see no distinction between "residential areas" and hotel areas. I randomly searched for apartments close to 5 hotels, and 4 of them had apartments within 2 blocks. Unfortunately Google's shuttle-stops are confidential so I can't correlate how close some of them are to hotels. Regardless, Google can afford to shuttle its employees

1. https://www.google.com/maps/search/hotels+in+mountain+view/@...

Have you actually lived in MTV before? I did for a summer, in a hotel within walking distance of shoreline park actually, and….it is pretty segregated. That was the only one actually in that area, and it was nowhere near residential. Most everyplace else was in commercial el Camino anyways.

And that really isn’t the point, there are probably no shuttles in MTV other than the Caltrain station one. If we are talking about other areas in the bay, it’s the same.

I'm sure the one hotel you stayed at was far from residential areas (I'm assuming you mean areas with Singe Family Homes). From what I can see, the majority of hotels I checked are near apartments and/or SFH neighborhoods. If Google wanted to find a handful of hotels meeting that criteria, it could.

> And that really isn’t the point, there are probably no shuttles in MTV other than the Caltrain station one. If we are talking about other areas in the bay, it’s the same

Are you suggesting Google, which is headquartered in Mountain View, and runs its own bus lines for employees in the bay, doesn't have shuttle-stops in MTV?! If so, then I don't believe you.

How’s the song go?

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime.

That’s why I sleep on company time.

It may be the exact same sin, but that's not the point I'm making.

Though TBH, as others note, I doubt this is normally meant for local employees. At some scale, it makes sense for a large company to have their own hotel (either run by them, or contracted out) to host employees traveling in.

And if you've got a hotel like that, you have a certain occupancy rate that separates profit and loss. Advertisements to local employees make sense, in such a situation.

But who takes vacations at the office? If it's a work trip, it's work expenses.

> If it's a work trip, it's work expenses

That doesn't probably affect the financials of the hotel though (assuming its financial profit/loss charts are totally independent from google's OpEx)

Exactly.

Take the Stanford Guest House: It is operated by Residential & Dining Enterprises, which is an auxiliary. It is expected to maintain its own financials, and break even (or make a profit) on its own. It's not perfect (for example, accounting for students who get free room & board), but it's largely completely separate.

It's deeply insidious. From the advert, they recognise that time is valuable:

> Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning and instead, you could have an extra hour of sleep and less friction

Cool, you mean by working from home?

No? Oh, you want me to home at work. Gross. People deserve a life away from work.

A lot of universities in China have or used to have hotels on their campuses. It wasn't weird at all staying at a campus hotel at Peking University 20 or so years ago. It is seen as kind of old fashioned however (like hotels at similar company towns), so it is a bit surprising to see Google doing this (disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in Mountain View).

I went to a state university and we had/have a Hilton hotel on campus.

> Based on the description in the article, I am reminded of the Stanford Guest House (https://rde.stanford.edu/stanford-guest-house), which is owned and run by Stanford, for the benefit of faculty, staff, students, and visitors. It is also run as a proper hotel.

The Guest House is also explicitly for visiting guests of the university, like a visiting professor, a student's family, or a patient of the medical center. While the FAQ doesn't explicitly say that the university's own on-site staff are forbidden from staying, it's fairly clear from context that they aren't welcome.

https://rde.stanford.edu/stanford-guest-house/faq#Eligibilit...

True, but that can change depending on circumstances. For example, I believe that during the early days of Covid, a number of Hospital folks stayed at the Guest House, presumably to avoid passing an infection on to family.

My point is: There is often a difference between the stated policy on a website, and what is actually being implemented.

Seems strange to be picky about comparing the quality of the sleeping arrangement but then be loosey-goosey by comparing Google with a university.

Google is not a university and their intentions are completely different. The fact that the dorms are nicer and look like a hotel doesn't change this.

Corporate just won't give up.

I can't believe a software company is so bad at leaving people at home doing their work.

If they can't work from home something is wrong with how the company approach work. 10 people can often do what 100 is expected to do.

If people don't actually provide value fire them. I imagine Google easily could lay off a lot of people without any productivity change at all.

Same goes for all other corporate software companies. They are a labour intense communication hell.

What's next? A Google village ?

> I can't believe a software company is so bad at leaving people at home doing their work.

You almost got it. A software company is still a blood sucking company. Y’all get fooled all the time.

> I can't believe a software company is so bad at leaving people at home doing their work.

Apparently, they also suck at leaving people at home while they're off hours...

Google's expecting employees to be in 3 days a week. So if you need 2 nights at a hotel, thats $200/week * 52 weeks = $10k (minus some vacation time away). Not cheap but could really be much worse.

What a weird new attempt. The implication that some people just live at a hotel for the in-office part of their life is - still, I feel - like 20x better a quality of life than where we were pre-pandemic with commuting. But it's still bloody weird.

Maybe eventually some actual carrots arrive with this stick the companies are using. But unclear when or how that will happen, still.

> The implication that some people just live at a hotel for part of their life is still, I feel, like 20x better a quality of life than where we were pre-pandemic with commuting. But it's still bloody weird.

For a long time now, it's been not-weird for a lot of people.

Within the realm of tech jobs, it's not-weird at some large companies to have folks travel, so everyone crunching on one project can be together to work on it.

For certain types of IT equipment (mainframes, supercomputers, big tape libraries, and more), it's not weird for support and installing engineers to travel from location to location, working on service calls or new installs.

For electricians with high-voltage experience, it's not weird to travel to where a new data center is being built, or other facility that needs major electrical work done under time constraints.

And then your have pilots, railroaders, long-distance truckers, etc..

Well then pay for it. Requiring to travel but not paying for it is the part that’s problematic, not the travel part.

The jobs I listed do pay for it, either directly (reimbursing hotel costs) or indirectly (for example, in per-mile trucking rates).

I don't think the Google program referenced in this article are for people who are traveling out of their normal work area (like, someone traveling from New York to Mountain View). It's targeted toward employees already local to the Bay Area.

I'm upvoting because I see your point generally & it's good to keep in mind in general.

The main constrast is that those are all events. They're for a reason. This is a steady state situation: every week you'll come back to the Bay area, work a normal in office week, then leave. Not because there's any real reason, but just because those are the arbitrary rules.

I suspect this is paid for by employees to stay on one side of the "line".

If google provided bedrooms for employees, they would be seen as a sweatshop.

Additionally, what if someone did "something" in their bedroom? Google might be responsible.

But if there is a hotel, and the employees pay, then what happens in the hotel room stays in the hotel room, especially legally.

I'm pretty convinced that my own bedroom in my own home is cheaper and more comfy, along the rest of the home and nature around it then an hotel... Oh, yes FTTH connection are good enough and my setup is good enough as well to WFH.

Corporate owned smart-city will be the next? https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/34827717.html | https://youtu.be/p-9X8Z2kJt8 well... Companies should consider a thing: those who buy their propagandized model are probably not smart enough to be valuable employees. Witch means they'll likely loosing money with their moves, directly and indirectly. Slaves do not work as good as free people.

The last time a company tried to get me to pay for my own room and travel expenses during "unapproved business travel" at their home office when it came time to expense it, I found a new job within a week.

My CEO called me, highly upset that I was leaving. I asked him what did he thing would happen when he's the one who requested my presence there in the first place. He wouldn't budge on the expenses, so I wouldn't budge on getting the fuck out of there.

Wait, your employer requested you travel, then claimed it was unapproved? What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Despite tech jobs being much better than 18th century coal mining, I think it might do us some good to pick up Zola's Germinal and remind ourselves that wholly attaching one's life to a corporation generally doesn't work out in our favor.

I'm really confused about responses here, feels like people just didn't read the whole article.

It's literally just a 2-month offer to make it easier for ppl to transition back to RTO (like in case they moved away and now they need to move back and find housing nearby). Google is not asking people to permanently live there.

They're asking people to RTO, that's the problem. This is just their justification for demanding people who have to travel to the office also RTO.

If you are still working at google, it's time to start looking for a different employer.

Would you sleep in a hotel who's owner turned voyeurism into a business?

There must be hidden mics at least: how else are they going to monitor adherence to the company speech standards?

How dystopic is it that not only Google opens a hotel onsite, but they expect employees to slot in in order to work more?

"“I would’ve totally done it, had it fit a certain profile: $3k rent all-in, fully-furnished, unlimited meals, paid utilities, plus housekeeping/cleaning every day,” another employee wrote."

I think companies offering on-campus housing is a good idea(not hotel). I think there will be many takers at Google.

At this stage i actually feel sorry for those people. Working in software is becoming a little bit of a joke let alone working at a company that will dump you in a hotel owned by them so you can work more to pay them for the said hotel. They might just as well put some cables in people’s heads, a food pump at the mouth and bucket opposite end.

I never understood why US companies do not have company dormitories. We have them all over Japan.

Make Black Mirror fiction again.

I'd vote for you

It's kind of dystopian. Then, I wouldn't mind working 12-14 hrs for 4 days and be done with the week, even if it means staying at a workplace "hotel".

I'm not sure that would be the intention here...

Seems to be for business travel. All the adjacent hotels in that area can reach $200-300/night with business travel. If you're Google size, that cost can be quite high.

You mean 10 hours a day, right? People fought and died for the 40 hour work week, don't give it up for free.

Some of them working at google are not giving it up for free. They are paying for it!

Let me guess: the TV in the room only plays YouTube.

LOL, they want me to pay to go hybrid?

You would think they would let the employees use the hotel for free? Am I that out of touch?

My guess is simply to deter people from using it as their more permanent option. Nevertheless, the phrase "I owe my soul to the company store" starts ringing in the back of my head.

$99 is steep. I found <$75 ABNB rentals in Moutain View.

If they're charging that little, there's some sort of massive caveat involved (I'm guessing there's a massive "cleaning fee"). That would be cheap for rent, never mind temporary accommodation.

ahhh that makes sense. I'm not an airbnber.

Can’t they include the hotel fee as part of your salary? Could be part of total comp.

Maybe they could just issue them company tokens employees could use to pay for the hotel and other goods from the company store.

Pretty good idea, then employees could exchange tokens between themselves for other goods or services if they don’t want company stuff.

There's a gym, with showers.

A cafeteria of course.

Locker for my stuff.

I think that's all covered.

Is there a laundromat?

with showers, you say?

It makes sense for it to be available and also for traveling employees to be able to expense it. I wonder what Google's policy is on that?

> Google CEO Sundar Pichai took it one step further and is actually requiring employees to pay for the rooms with no reimbursement from the company

It says that in the article

> "Google is charging its employees $99 a night to stay at its on-campus hotel to help "transition to the hybrid workplace.""

I don't think this article, or the Google program, is talking about Google employees who are traveling to a different region.

Top tech re-brands slavery?

Reminds me of that time X had beds in thier offices

First time I've seen someone refer to Twitter as X in the wild. Looks like a variable that will be entered later.

Yeah maybe people should stick to calling it Twitter. X sounds dystopian.

Sounds like working for the company store in the old coal mining days. That didn’t work out so well Google.

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