Meta’s entire 24-person team works and lives together in the same estate
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I can understand 3-4 people who are equals between themselves pulling this off, but with 24 people there's no way everyone likes the arrangement, so having everyone to be in it 24/7 is wrong.
(So no point in speaking for everyone, like managers typically do. "At our company, we think...")
Like others, I'm very curious how it works with non-work relationships like families and friends.
Mechanisms of social disapproval don't exist because anybody cares overmuch for the choices of a few people. They exist to forestall potential trends.
Thanks for putting it out in the open so we can discuss it directly.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
This is just a scaled-up version of what has already existed for years. The reason it's not more common is because it's logistically difficult to organise. I doubt that difficulty will suddenly decrease. The majority of people will always have families or different lifestyle preferences.
So I'm doubtful that society will be "dragged down" to a point where this is the social norm.
Hence, I think that the opprobrium and derision in this thread is stronger than it needs to be.
(For the record I don't advocate slut shaming and enjoy the company of promiscuous women. Just pointing out that Rayiner's logic applies equally well here.)
In any case, I'm glad you honest and intellectually consistent about your views. Sadly it's quite uncommon to see.
.. but not in the city the company is located?
.. but not working in an open plan office?
.. but not respecting the company policy on (x)?
If the logic is "everyone needs to prefer it or we go back to a 'normal' arrangement," normal becomes mandatory.
OK, so I'm being sarcastic there, but seriously, isn't it nice for a free society that there are a lot of different kinds of workplaces, and if people don't want to work in one situation, then they have the option to quit that job and work in a different one?
Except, of course, for employment choices. We all agree that traditional working environments with all their industrial era baggage sucks, but if I don't leave on the minute after a 40 hours work week, and I don't get paid overtime (so much for the industrial era baggage) it's incontrovertible evidence of rampant exploitation. Employees to claim to like their workplaces are brainwashed because the only reason you like your workplace is if you drank the koolaid - and of course hating your job is evidence of incompetent management. Remote work is the thing of the future, except companies that provide for easy remote working are under deep suspicion for tricking their employees to work during their free time.
HN is really, really schizophrenic on work. The middlebrow is strong with this one.
It's pretty obvious that the article is describing an unusual arrangement that won't suit everyone - although it's not specific to tech, there are other jobs where you get stuffed into a remote, often mostly young male, community for months at a time. Oil, the military, certain religious and agricultural communities.
a bunch of commenters on a news site don't all have the same opinion on everything. go figure.
It's very tied in to people's identity and realities often unpleasant to deal with. Many of us spend most our lives in a way we don't like. That's a tough pill. Some aspects of it can be dehumanizing emasculating (for men, of course) or demeaning in other ways.
In any case I think working life feeds you ills that are hard to swallow without a little delusion. Employer want passionate employees. What if you're not passionate? Are you supposed to grin and lie, delude yourself or go find a job spec without passion in it?
A knowledge company in 2014 is different to a factory in 1893 and they are both new on the grander scale. Before them we had lordships and serfodms, guilds, patrons, patriarchs, soldiers, knights, orders, ships, stations, slaves and lots of other things etc. Those things tended to be who you are in the way that we now think of being "A Canadian." A company is a social structure. psychological conformity is a part of all social structures.
note: I also agree with your detractors. It's tricky pointing to hypocrisy in a community Different people's opinions are incompatible. The opinion of a group can be inconsistent without crossing into hypocrisy.
Yet this living situation isn't that much of a stretch from the dormitory-style housing you still see in China for factory workers, or the company towns you saw in the U.S. for mine workers and the like.
You can't be serious. This is a Foxconn dormitory [1]. It's nothing like a beautiful mansion in the californian country side with swimming pool and tennis court.
Labour laws and conventions almost assume people do not have a choice in their place of employment. That's why a barman's right to a smoke free workplace is more recognized than a patron's. With that in mind I think people feel that employment needs to be accessible to everyone and that this is specifically designed for young singles.
There is also an objection to the cultish nature of this, the opposite of work-life balance. If an employer controls your work life and your home life… I think that's what rayiner is objecting to.
Think about it this way. In one case you have a high priced escort who takes on a select few clients and earns like a star stockbroker. On the other you have a lower end prostitute earning less, in worse conditions and probably and with all the associated social problems of prostitution. To many, they are fundamentally the same thing because being a hooker is the important part, not the consequences of being a hooker.
I'm glad to see experimentation like this. I think if some people really like it, that might outweigh the other cases where people dislike it. In the midst of such a demand for programmers, they should be able to leave.
Is this the latest, legal, technique to discriminate against older workers?
You have to be part of a very very narrow demographic to be compatible with this type of work environment.
EDIT: On a serious note, it is quite frustrating to me to read things like this. My colleagues so willingly giving up any life whatsoever, dedicating themselves to their company 24/7... How do you compete with such lunacy? I don't really fear much, I know these are fringe cases and most people are probably with me on this. But, the USA and this startup scene is definitely the last place on earth I would want to be. Proud drones, flaunting their having successfully reduced themselves to cogs in a machine. This is just so, so wrong.
In fact, I'd recommend the experience for a year or two. It was a bit like an extension of university dorm life. And it was a lot of fun that first year.
Living in the office (we had our separate rooms, our breakfast table was in the reception area; our living room was also the meeting room...) and being used to bizarre sleeping patterns provided a lot of unintentional entertainment.
Like the time I happened to be up at 3am on a Sunday morning, and the support phone rang (we ran an ISP), and I decided I might as well pick it up, only to hear a lot of noise on the other end before a bewildered voice told me he'd called in pure frustration and didn't actually expect anyone would answer, and had gotten so surprised he actually dropped the phone.
And this is a bit sad, but one of my best memories from that year (1995) was staying up late at night to max out our little ISPs 512kbps line downloading Netscape 2.0 right after it had been put on the FTP site.. Font color, animated gifs and livescript/javascript!
Frankly, I felt filthy hearing him talk about productivity and evening brainstorming sessions and people talking in the kitchen, you know, furtively at 3am, about his great company and product. Does it occur to him that his employees are humans and might be interested in talking about other things? Every mention he makes of spontaneous social interaction involves "brainstorming and great ideas." The dream of every founder, that he could scale his (warranted) passion down to all those who have not nearly as much stake in it but should love it all the same! Yuck.
If you want communal living, there are cooperatives and similar arrangements with equal stakes. If you want to play capitalism, don't play fucking coy.
"I can't or don't want to do that, so I don't think you should be allowed to do that either. I'm going to judge you and speak badly of you, to try to punish you for doing something I don't want to, and discourage you and others from doing something I don't want to."
Meta is a start-up (cool) creating augmented reality (very cool) hardware (even more cool) for interactive interaction with virtual overlays (just unbelievably cool). I'm a computer vision / computer graphics guy, and everything about this project looks technologically awesome, with potentially world-changing applications.
They went through YC and are still getting positive press, so the start-up is looking about as successful as a start-up at this stage can be.
I bet you that every single one of the employees loves this idea, loves working on it, and honestly believes that Meta is going to change the world and be the next Apple. When I was in my twenties, I worked crazy hours and slept under my desk for a lot less.
EDIT: Added the word "same-sex" before "slut-shaming" to clarify the comparison I'm making.
Sexism is a such huge issue (especially in this industry) that you should probably consider educating yourself before you vomit ignorant comments about it.
My comment wasn't intended to suggest one gender slut-shaming the other gender; people of a gender can (and certainly do) slut-shame members of that same gender to control them and keep them in line. This is the comparison I was making.
In retrospect, I see that my comment was not sufficiently clear in this regard. Please re-consider my comment from this clarified point of view.
My point is that many of the comments in this thread suggest that Meta is like a cult or a sweatshop, or that the situation is "fucked up", etc. The commenters are implicitly trying to punish Meta for engaging in a behaviour with which those commenters do not agree.
What is wrong with someone choosing to devote themselves to a start-up about which they are enthusiastic? What's wrong with believing in something and devoting yourself to it for a while? Does it hurt anyone other than themselves? Why then is it so important for other people to disparage that person's choice so vocally?
Likewise, what is so wrong about a company where enthusiastic employees live in this arrangement? If you accept my axiom that the employees are enthusiastic about the start-up (based upon the reasons I outlined in my original comment), then why is this arrangement "fucked up"?
I hope you will re-consider your assertion that I am uneducated and that I am vomiting ignorant comments.
Personally I'd probably not want to be part of a young company where there was so much peer pressure [1] to stay with the founders and other team members in a cramped up apartment. But then again maybe I'm not the target hire anyway. Also, I'm not claiming to speak for all females on the planet, but most of "my" female friends would probably avoid working at such a company.
Of course if you are starting a start-up you gotta do what you gotta do to survive and minimize expenses, and all that but it seems like a practical arrangement if you are the founder and not an early employee with meager equity.
[1] Fear of missing out on critical decisions that happen before the slumber party for instance.
- Personal hygiene: my roommate wasn't the cleanup. In fact, the only time he got into it was when he had company (a girl) coming over.
- Personal finance: I was able to get the landlord to split the rental but this was not the case for heat, electricity, cable, and internet.
- Personal space: We were both guilty of this. Our girlfriends, unofficially, moved in at some points. Normally, not a problem but if you've ever had to wash your face in the kitchen sink because the bathroom was occupied for hours sometimes.
Sometimes you have to pullback and focus. If you are constantly surrounded by the same faces it can be easy to do "work" without actually doing anything productive.
I mean, I feel like it could go either way: eccentric jazz musician Sun Ra's Arkestra lived (and still mostly live) communally in a Philadelphia row house, and they haven't gone insane. On the other hand, the demands of a business are different from those of a musical group.
It seems like, for young tech people, the pendulum is swinging in the direction of communal living. Co-working spaces, specialized housing for groups of tech-entrepreneur-types[1], and more holistic workplaces (Google providing day-care, lots of startups bringing a chef on board to do meals in-house) seem to be in vogue right now. This looks like a particularly extreme extension of that trend (especially since they're leaving the city, a fundamental fixture in the SV startup culture), but I guess we'll see how it works out.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Tech-entrepreneurs-rev...
These jobs don't "preclude hiring people with families". If a person with a family worked there he'd probably do the same thing as the oil rig worker - live on site and skype his family at night.
The only difference I can see between this job and oil rig work is that the software guy probably has a few recruiters/week emailing him opportunities he likes more.
Also, pipeline workers need to work on remote sites. Software developers do not. That will matter at trial.
It's hard to make out a disparate impact claim to begin with. Doing so on the basis that you don't like the living arrangements would seem impossible. What limiting principle would the courts apply that wouldn't result in legal liability for every company that doesn't allow employees to telecommute?
In practice, people do casually ask where candidates live (usually to find out if they require relocation), but companies also don't tend to select only employees willing to live in a dormitory.
Requiring employees to work at a particular job site is uncontroversial; in fact, it's overwhelmingly the norm for all employment. The same thing is absolutely not true of requiring employees to live at a particular location.
You would first have to establish that that duty has a statistically significant harmful effect on persons over 40 that it does not have on other groups. This will not be easy, people under 40 have families, too!
It will be further complicated by the fact that the same effect occurs simply by virtue of a workplace being in a remote, hostile environment, or having work hours incompatible with a typical family life, requiring a limiting principle, which you have not provided.
If you pass that hurdle, Meta would have the opportunity to establish that the policy is based on a reasonable factor other than age. The court would have to find that Meta's policy and/or its purposes are unreasonable. That seems unlikely.
If you are not speaking of discriminating based on where people live, then I have no idea why you are bringing up employers supposedly avoiding asking where people live. It makes no contextual sense, and has no relevance to this discussion. Asking people where they live is not, in itself, discriminatory or unlawful.
It would be great if you would detail exactly why you think Meta's policy may be unlawful, and do so by reference to actual law, not apparently-random HR policies that you don't seem to want to explain the supposed basis of.
I don't understand - what does the "norm" have to do with anything? Are you asserting that some underlying legal principle demands that all employers stay within spitting distance of the average?
If not, I don't see how this policy would even fall within some sort of disparate impact theory. As far as I know, disparate impact lawsuits apply to selection processes. I.e. if the employer hires fewer members of a protected class, a process is bad. But if fewer members of a protected class accept job offers, that doesn't fit into disparate impact.
But there are people like me, who just aren't good at the "real life" stuff. Give me a place to sleep, eat and exercise (wow - they have a pool!) and I'd gladly spend the rest of the time hacking on a start-up ... especially if it was cool technology like Augmented Reality
I find creative thinking and critical analysis often comes from engaging in disparate actions (as compared to full immersion in work), here I would imagine group think and not seeing the mistakes you are making as a group could be amplified easily.
That's actually a plan I am making with some friends/coders. We may rent a nice villa somewhere in Spain for two weeks. Get some buzz and some work done. Would be nice to have ideas flowing and in the end we may leave with a product.
In a more researchy direction, there's a German institute that organizes these kinds of events. They have a castle in the middle of nowhere, Schloss Dagstuhl, which accepts proposals from people who want to use it to organize 1-week residential seminars on different subjects: http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/dagstuhl-seminars/
Many/most towns would frown on the number of unrelated people living in a unpermitted hotel, operating a business with more than a certain number of employees in a non commercial district, etc.
Legal or not, it sounds like fun for a couple years, if you're young enough to see appeal in dorm life.
We did something like this some 14-15 years ago when we were a 7-8 employee startup, but it was voluntary. Want to stay in the house? Be my guest, we have plenty of bedrooms. Wanna commute? Any time, but be sure to spend at least 6 hours daily in the office house. Worked like charm.
But I am thinking--where would I put my Ham Radio Antenna?