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Comment by CaliforniaKarl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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

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