Google Employees Secretly Live on Campus to Avoid Paying Rent | Hacker News Reader

Google Employees Secretly Live on Campus to Avoid Paying Rent

finance.yahoo.com

349 pointsthejteam264 comments

Silicon Valley: Where highly paid ($100-$200k+) engineers sleep in cars to save money on obscenely expensive rent.

Honestly, recently moving to Seattle has been refreshing to me in this regard. I find Seattle tech industry pay no less than SF, plus no state income tax, and for the same rent as SF you can practically live like a king/queen here.

I wonder how long the housing situation in SV can keep up until everything collapses under its own weight?

Don't extrapolate based on one sensationalistic article.

Most engineers employed at Google (or any other company) in Silicon Valley have enough to rent or even buy houses. Actually, a lot of other workers who make one half (or even less) that salary manage as well.

People who choose to live in cars or on campus have something else going on with them. It's not just about money, most of us will always choose to have their own place, no matter how small, than living this kind of life.

I don't doubt what the Quora discussion describes happens, I'm just claiming these are very few and far between exceptions.

As someone who lives and works in the bay area, you cannot buy a house with a software engineer's salary, not unless it is a very poor neighborhood, in which case you're contributing to gentrification, or you want to drive 2 hours from Pleasanton. I say that as a software engineer home owner who bought a house before the prices sky rocketed again in 2011. I wouldn't be able to afford my own house right now.

If you are an entry level software engineer, living alone, you could buy and afford a condo. I agree house prices are out of reach now unless you're a sr. software engineer. All I can say is rent a room for as long as you can (~800 a month or less) for now, and save every penny you can. Once the next housing market crash takes place you will have a downpayment ready. It worked for me.

The median home value in Pleasanton is 850k. 100k more than San Jose. If you are trying to save money, that's probably not the place to do it. Really you are looking at Antioch/Concord up 680 or over the Altamont on 580 to Tracy if you want to get significantly more affordable. Both are heinous commutes though.

As a kid, I had a parent that worked at the Almaden IBM campus. The commute from the Livermore/Pleasanton area was about 40-50 minutes going over 84. Crazy how much worse traffic is now, I can't imagine making that drive daily now. They've been working on the the 237/Mission exits on 680 for nearly 20 years and it has only gotten worse.

> I wouldn't be able to afford my own house right now.

Sounds like a good time to sell!

It's our home, not an investment, and where would we live if we sold?

In a van, evidently.

"in which case you're contributing to gentrification"

I guess keeping poor neighborhoods poor is a good think now?

Yeah, I also don't understand how buying a house within one's own means is gentrification. Is the definition of "afford" different between your "very poor" neighbors and you, the "software engineer"?

OK, I guess maybe the original point was that there are super-cheap and super-expensive houses, and software engineers could afford something in between. They have to choose a poor neighborhood where they are wealthier, or a reasonably-priced but distant suburb.

There is nothing untruthful about my statement. Butt-hurt people are down voting it...the usual for HN.

Yeah. Those Quora answers definitely show a sense of "it was interesting/fun".

"I'd definitely do it again..." and "I've always wanted to live out of a car, ever since my first station wagon..." are quotes in there.

I've been living in the Bay Area since the dotcom days and they've been asking the same question since I've been around. Until people in tech stop making money, I doubt SV will collapse, but it will go through boom and bust cycles. But the booms tend to be huge and the busts tend to be not as bad.

I had the opportunity to get a job in Seattle at Amazon about 10 years ago. I would have taken a paycut, but with the 0% state income tax and with the generous signing bonus it would have more than made up the difference. (I'm pretty sure property taxes are higher though.)

But then I had to contemplate exchanging 300 days of sunshine for 200 days of rain. At the time, I was playing rollerhockey outdoors at 8pm and came to the conclusion that I just couldn't do it because of the weather. And I grew up in Vancouver, BC so the rain didn't bother me as much, but I just got too spoiled by the amazing Bay Area weather. If you're not used to it, the rain in the Pacific Northwest truly is relentless, so it takes getting used to.

Mind you that was during the time when rent prices were high but not as ludicrous like they are now. Even during the dotcom boom there were similar stories of people living in their vans, so it's not really a new story.

But my friend was charged 5100/month for a 2 bedroom at mission bay, which doesn't make sense. If I had to make the same choice now, it would be a lot harder to make and Seattle is definitely compelling if you can get past the 200 days of rain.

I'm curious why the weather argument comes up so often. Aren't we, as "software people", under a roof and in front of a screen most of the time anyways?

Then again, I'm "deep inside" Europe, so I have no idea how bad the weather over there really is.

The weather in the Bay Area is essentially perfect. The scenery is beautiful, and you can see the ocean, the desert, magnificent forests and the mountains all in the same day. It doesn't get too hot, it doesn't get too cold, it rains only for a few months out of the year, and it never gets very humid. Living in the Bay Area makes you spoiled and lazy because it is too comfortable. As the piece [1] by Mary Schmich (and again by Baz Luhrmann) says, "Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft."

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-su...

It's strange. I grew up in the Bay Area (Santa Cruz and South San Jose) and am weather-neutral. I've had stints in Sweden, Portland and Arizona (all pretty extreme) and none of the climates really affected my life too much. Most of my friends are the same way. Anecdotal, but maybe the weather effect is more pronounced on transplants who don't take it for granted?

The reason I chose to move back has more to do with the sheer amount of stuff to do. And the good food :)

I wish I had your weather neutrality. I grew up in the bay (Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Tri-Valley) and spent a couple years in Portland, OR. I liked the city a lot and tried to get used to the weather but just couldn't. The rain wasn't the problem, the constant darkness was. I like the rain and loved how green everything was up there, but even when it wasn't raining, it was dark. Came back to CA and will put up with its faults in exchange for the climate and activities.

For your definition of perfect, at least. I love rain and humidity. I miss the 60+ inches a year in South Florida.

Plus, your ocean is too damn cold. :P

I don't know about that .. Humidity is the one thing that isn't fun :x

Yeah, my wife hates it, at least when it comes with high temperatures. She thinks Seattle's weather is great, though.

Even if you are indoors most of the day, the weather outside can make a huge difference on your mood.

It also encourages getting up and taking walks every now and then, which has various benefits (both mental and physical).

I lived in Seattle for six years. The environment is gorgeous. Lots of trails for hiking, ton of greenery... the thing is though, the weather made me not want to go out. And that can be horribly depressing.

Yeah, we're in front of a screen... when we're at work. The Bay Area has a big culture of outdoor sports, though, including for tech workers. Lots of bikers, lots of hikers, lots of lots of plain old hanging out in public parks.

And many of those "indoor" work spaces try as hard as possible to have natural light.

> Aren't we, as "software people", under a roof and in front of a screen most of the time anyways?

I would hope not, if we want to stay healthy.

Global warming (maybe?) could be changing this. It's been depressingly hot this year in Seattle. I moved here from the Bay Area (well, Pleasant Hill) to get away from the heat. Ugh.

http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/Seattle-Home-of-...

Rent in central cities is one of the unintuitive outcomes of the modern economy. SV might be an extreme example, but it isn't the only one. The world is far more globalized. People work with clients, customers, and coworkers mostly through the internet, even if they are in the same building or city.

Google's a good example. They have offices all over. They have clients everywhere.

Common sense would dictate that employees would be easier to hire for the same cost elsewhere where that salary affords a better lifestyle. With all due respect to SF (last time I visited I was 12), there are lots of places where a $140k salary will get you the best schools for kids, entertainment for the adults and palatial digs. It is quite literally like doubling you salary to take it someplace else, even within the US.

I wonder what the reasons are. Obviously clusters matter. There's the tautology that everyone wants what everyone wants. Being someplace vibrant and affluent is valuable to the resident & employees (or resident-employees). I also think that nominal salaries are important to people's decision making. A 25% pay cut from relocation resulting in a 10% cut in after tax salary but a real measurable and provable increase in purchasing power still feels like a 25% pay cut.

Interesting.

The cities where a $140k salary exist in the same quantity as in the bay area are roughly equivalent with respect to the cost to live there. A job in SF that pays $140k might fetch $60-$90k in most of the rest of the US, with higher salaries being more rare. So while there are lots of places where $140k is practically king-like, the number of positions with that salary are both hotly competed for and far fewer in number.

This is the paradox. You can phrase it as a question: Why don't blubsoft or blub.ly open offices in city X and continue to pay the same salaries there. Relocated employees would be richer and blub.ly should have an easier time hiring.

Obvious'y this doesn't happen even though a simple common sense "story" suggests that it should. Hence unintuitive.

I'm not saying that individuals don't have their reasons for doing what they do, that's not the interesting part. It's interesting that we don't see digitization and globalization take the pressure off high rent areas and encourage a migration of firms and employees to lower rent (for equivalent of better quality of life) areas at a systemic level.

High rents is an effect of bigger corporate dynamics, not the cause.

Corporations generally locate the highest-priority projects in the head office to minimize communication costs. The executives are at the head offices, the largest concentration of staff is there, and you can pick the top employees from a larger pool. That means that if you're an ambitious young professional, you go to where the highest-priority projects are, because they will benefit your career the most in the future. This further reinforces the need to locate high-priority projects at headquarters.

I saw this play out at Google. The most ambitious, career-oriented young employees would move from NYC, Pittsburgh, or Boston to work in Mountain View, where they could have their pick of projects. Meanwhile, more family-oriented employees would move from Mountain View to Pittsburgh, Michigan, etc. to enjoy a higher standard of living and be closer to family. Who gets promoted with a big raise? The folks who work on the highest-priority projects. What does that do to area rents? It makes them rise in line with the highest-paid employees in that area.

You might ask why corporations don't move their whole headquarters to another location. Some do - Wells Fargo moved most of its operations from San Francisco to Minneapolis in search of cheaper labor. However, the same dynamic between employees within a company also plays out between companies within an industry. Google can't move its headquarters and operations because most of the interesting developments in the tech industry - startups to buy, startups to fund, new technologies to keep up with, key employees to hire - are in the Bay Area, and moving to say, Detroit means that they'll miss out on the cross-pollination of ideas that keeps them relevant in their industry. Note that this is not a serious issue for Wells Fargo, whose entire brand is based on "We're stolid and conservative, and we may not be in the forefront of financial innovation, but we will keep your money safe."

This dynamic played out a hundred years ago too - Detroit became Motown, USA because everyone involved in automobile manufacture was incentivized to move there, Hollywood became Hollywood because everyone in the film industry was incentivized to move there, etc. When those industries were vital and growing, they faced the same pressure on rents and economics as the Bay Area does today.

Doesn't Google do that? I'm pretty sure salaries at their Pittsburgh office are pretty much on par with their NYC office despite Pittsburgh being half as expensive (or less).

Not sure why Google insists on staying in such an expensive place, rather than moving. Some possibilities:

1. There are synergies to having much of the staff working together at the same place. And the only place an employer the size of Google can find enough staff who are up to Google standards is the Valley.

2. Once you get to the Valley, anywhere else is cottage country. Google is by necessity somewhat geographically distributed, but its senior management is completely centralized. Last I checked, all the SVPs were in Mountain View. It's easy to mistake the best place for the only place.

3. Google started in the Valley and grew up there. Moving their main operation anywhere else would be very disruptive. Getting employees to move is hard at the best of times; getting highly sought-after engineers to move away from the center of their profession, where they have many many options should they decide to stay, would be brutal.

> Why don't blubsoft or blub.ly open offices in city X and continue to pay the same salaries there.

Because they could open offices in city X and pay smaller salaries in absolute value, though equivalent relative to living costs, and get the same hires for less money. I don't see the paradox here; you could phrase it as a question: why should blubsoft or blub.ly pay more for something, when they can pay less and still get it.

They don't have to be in silicon valley. The only reason for Google to be anywhere is employees and to a lesser extent investors, lawyers and other service providers of the cluster. It's mostly employees though.

Why are they there, paying high salaries if they could be getting the same for less elsewhere?

Or, what might they be getting (or think they're getting) that they wouldn't (think that they would) be able to get elsewhere?

Maybe they're concerned about lead times for hiring new people (stealing someone from a competitor vs all new employees needing to move first)?

Supposedly one of the reasons that Silicon Valley did so well, is that California doesn't allow non-compete agreements. Perhaps there's actually some benefit to exchanging employees with your competitors more often? (But then, what about the no-poaching agreements that companies were getting sued over recently?)

Maybe they're concerned that being the only shop in town would make managers more reluctant to fire people who need it (does corporate location preference correlate to corporate culture regarding expected length of service)?

Maybe having offices in less expensive locations hurts the company image (for customers, or potential employees, or both) enough that the extra salary cost is worth it?

There's a benefit to everyone in the industry for exchanging employees with your competitors often, but there's a cost to your company. Hence, geographical areas where that happens do well overall, but the individual companies involved hate it and want it to stop. It's very much a prisoner's dilemma situation.

Similarly, technological developments that benefit everyone in the industry are good for the industry as a whole, but bad for each individual firm in the industry, which now face increased competition. That's why big companies often try to spread FUD around "open" alternatives to their core business.

> "if they could be getting the same for less elsewhere"

Maybe it's because they can't get the same for less elsewhere

They could if they were willing to leave the CS chauvinism behind. There are plenty of non-CS engineers, mathematicians, scientists and even non-STEM liberal arts majors who are not just capable, but competent or very competent computer programmers and software developers.

Granted the concentration is likely to be higher in the Valley, but it's not that much higher. Then there is the argument that "if you build it, they will come."

Markets reward efficiencies and punish inefficiencies, "CS chauvinism" or otherwise

A possible answer is that they often do. And those companies that do relocate discover that they can pay less, and book the difference.

Obviously there are examples of companies and individuals doing all sorts of things. But there is still a huge spread in cost of living between places. The reasons for that spread existing are diminishing. Meanwhile, the spread is growing, not shrinking.

There are companies that hire in the top-20 (as opposed to top-5) markets. They usually have their own idiosyncrasies (like taking 3 weeks to schedule an onsite interview), but they are out there.

I'm on the job hunt now and hiring is still a huge mess as it ever was.

There's a great book exploring this: The New Geography of Jobs

http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Jobs-Enrico-Moretti/dp/0...

He talks about why things have not gone 'flat'.

Care to do a spoiler?

Does he have an interesting reason why not?

Because proximity to other people still matters a lot, especially in terms of "cross-pollination", in the sense of more random interactions than you might get if you just hired a few people to work remotely on a specific project. You could even call it an 'ecosystem' despite the word's abuse.

It's been a while since I read it, but I didn't think it was all that revolutionary... it just mostly made sense.

http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2012/10/the-new-geogr...

> Silicon Valley: Where highly paid ($100-$200k+) engineers sleep in cars to save money on obscenely expensive rent.

I've known quite a few people who have lived exactly like this for a while. You know what? None are from Silicon Valley and are all from different walks of life. You have your people who ended up in difficult situations, people strapped for cash, people who were ultra minimalist, people who were looking for adventure, people who didn't want to be tied down, people looking to save up money for a couple years. None had Google's perks/free meals. All different motivations. Some by choice, some not.

To generalize that Silicon Valley is somehow responsible from one article about one subset of people is disingenuous.

Well first you'd need NY to collapse to prove that dynamic work locations collapse under their own weight. Young people (fresh out of school) really have few needs and so will put up with a lot for the experience of working with great people for great companies. It doesn't hurt that the weather is also fantastic (weather crushes NY but culturally NY has so much more to offer). It's only when they hit their 30's and (if they do) start thinking about children that broader quality of life issues come into play. Those that are very successful can afford to stay there. Those that aren't will move on to cheaper metros or somewhere else. Many that are successful will still realize there are other options (the realization that Tahoe never is closer than a 6 hour commute unless you leave at 4am or 10pm) and move away (making way for the next generation).

There's a reason those trains to CT are so full of people every night.

It's weird. There has always been some water-cooler talk among the engineers about how it would be possible to live on campus. But these journalists actually found people who've done it. And they're engineers; most of our speculation focused on interns.

This isn't really journalists, this is Yahoo reposting Business Insider reposting some people's claims from Quora.

BusinessInsider seems to be taking the BuzzFeed "news" sourcing approach. They are certainly good at getting their links onto aggregation services. It's a very annoying combination.

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

I don't disagree, but the upside is that it eventually finds its way to HN and generates interesting discussion. This saves me from having to visit quora, businessinsider or yahoo news.

Back in '98 was my first visit to the valley, and I had dinner with a tech writer from Netscape. She told me about an engineer that had just been fired after they'd found he lived in the office. I think you'll every now and again find the odd case at many larger companies; especially companies that offers amenities that makes it easy, and campuses large enough that it becomes easy to avoid standing out too much.

It's coming to Seattle too. I moved away from SEA 3 years ago and the rent on my old apartment has gone up by 50%. If you want to stick around, consider buying.

Anecdotally I've been hearing more Valley-style anti-tech sentiment coming out of Seattle lately. If not careful Seattle can just as easily turn into the same us vs. them, haves vs. have-nots story of San Francisco.

It'll just be the MS Connector instead of the Google Bus instead.

Isn't a huge part of the housing issue in SV the zoning? I recall reading about how large swathes of land have been zoned away from residential, largely because of the influence of the wealthy who live in and near the area. Never underestimate the politics!

And that is the paradox. In order to make cheap housing you'd have to destroy all the open space and low density zoning that made all the tech and VC people want to live here in the first place. Besides the current economy isn't permanent at all. The tech bubble will bust and this will all go back to normal in a few years. People who are living here for the long haul, and not just for the gold rush don't want it to get overbuilt and spoiled. The funny thing about the bay area is that people are not really impressed by the economic benefits of further development because collectively people have an enormous amount of money in the wealthier bay area cities and no amount of money being waved in their faces will make them give up their quality of life.

I don't think it's really true. Do you think all those parking lots and single story buildings in downtown Mountain View are the attraction for tech workers and entrepreneurs? I think replacing all that junk on the Caltrain corridor with 3 or 5 story apartments and townhouses would solve the housing problem without consuming any more open space.

It would solve the problem for tech workers and entrepreneurs. It would piss off a number of retirees who have been in Mountain View since it was fruit orchards and like it because it's not SF. The latter group currently holds a lock on the city council.

Well, I think you're oversimplifying quite a bit. There are more options than {develop nothing, develop EVERYTHING}. Through politics, the former options has been selected. But perhaps a better options lies somewhere in-between.

Good luck waiting out the gold rush, it's been a part of the California way of life for more than a hundred and fifty years.

You should have seen it in 2002. The freeways were nice and empty and rents were cheap. Even as recent as early 2009 office rents were much much lower than they are now.

That is a silly generalization, I'm not going to generalize about people in Seattle who live on boats even though I know a couple of folks who do that.

There is a push afoot to get Google (and then by reaction everyone) to treat the perks they give as taxable income. I expect it is being "encouraged" by companies that don't want to pay for that kind of thing as a way of killing it. Unfortunately if they are successful I expect it to backfire, Google to continue to do it and to cover the tax aspects and the other companies being forced to follow suit.

No matter how high the income, you will find an obsessively frugal person given large enough group. Whether he/she will end up sleeping in car is more function of local security, available free facilities (toilette, shower) around and how much is his/her job image dependent.

Yeah, but that noncompete really sucks.

> I find Seattle tech industry pay no less than SF

The census arrived at a different conclusion.

edit: Engineering talent at AmaGooBookSoft are sometimes given pay in Seattle that is comparable to SF, however.

>I wonder how long the housing situation in SV can keep up until everything collapses under its own weight?

it has already couple times at least during my time here - since 2000 - only to emerge with higher rents and higher real estate prices. Buying is the best solution for your own housing - it moves your onto the other side of the wave where you just enjoy the ride (and yes, i've been under water, didn't care as i bought to live in it, not to speculate)

From the household perspective, if the partner also works in tech, their disposable income for a house would be about (200k to 400K). I could imagine that would rent you a nice house/flat for that money.

Is the problem mentioned in the post, typically, relevant to singles?

It's very silly of you to advertise this if you don't want to increase demand there, too.

We had a contractor in Xbox who was let go. They snuck back into the building and lived there for a number of weeks (not sure how many), pretending to work and hanging out in our various couch areas during the day. [Someone quipped: "Not much different than certain full-time employees."]

I've known a few people who lived in vans / RVs in the company parking lots. (Ironically, the guy whose van had the ATARI vanity license plate was one of the first to be let go in the crash of 1982).

A friend of mine lives in the Sierra mountains, and used to RV down to Silly Valley for a week or two at a time. Really pretty convenient. Once he was parked underneath the flight path for Moffet Field around the time that Air Force One was scheduled to fly in, and the Secret Service politely asked him to move his RV.

Did you just imply that you worked at Atari in the early 80s and also on the Xbox?

cool!

You can click on a username to view someone's profile:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kabdib

Does anyone else feels like we're really getting towards the cyberpunk universe ? with corporations that completely own the life of their employees by providing them with everything, and a violent lawless and miserable outside world.

And as always, it all started with the best intentions.

Keep in mind that factory / company mine towns used to be a thing. The cyberpunk dystopia you are alluding to is extrapolating company town lifestyle into the future.

All we need is the return of company scrip, which low-margin retailers are trying their damnedest to bring back.

Many countries have various types of vouchers (meal vouchers, purchase vouchers, etc..).

I get paid 20% of my salary in Meal Vouchers (I hate them) by Edenred, and an extra 2% in a voucher that can only be spent on certain stores.

Meal vouchers are commonly accepted because they have a 17% tax break, but retailers get 10% less than the face value (they're more expensive for them than credit cards).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal_voucher

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edenred

I don't think you can compare the two situation. Life as a miner was awfull, owners gave their employees just enough so that they could eat and have a roof.

Here the contrast is much bigger. Typical cyberpunk corporate workers have a dream life, but ows total loyalty to its company to keep it.

You mean China?

That isn't totally fair, but a lot of Chinese workers live in small shared rooms provided by their employer, they then send money "home" to their villages.

I wouldn't call China lawless, but it is is a bit miserable, particularly if you get fired from a job.

Or Europe (probably also the US?) during the industrial revolution. Worker housing really is nothing new. I can see the architectural remnants all around me. (The small town I grew up in was connected to the railway in 1863 and got a huge train repair complex. The red brick buildings that provided housing to the workers right next to where that complex used to be are still there today, now just ordinary apartments.)

Yup. My grandparents lived in an apartment owned by the mill my grandma worked at her entire working life. When the mill closed down in the mid-80s the buildings were sold off one by one. They bought the building they were living in, the one my great grandma was living in, and a few others for a great price.

Tech folks tend to live in their heads. Houses, etc, is just boring distractions.

This. Currently all my stuff fits into two backpacks (a big backpacker one and a small one for the laptop). The only thing I miss from my old stationary lifestyle is a regular gym, sparring partners and a coach.

The only thing I don't understand about living in the googleplex is sex. Logistics is everything - I remember once dealing with a month of involuntary celibacy due to a bad living situation. NOT an experience I want to repeat. I guess these folks just have much better game than I do.

Most people go through much longer periods of celibacy than that on a regular basis when outside of long term relationships. For most people, the singles life is relatively sex-less. Presumably living on campus isn't a choice that most people make in the first place when they are in long term relationships and/or have regular options of companionship.

Even people IN long term relationships go through much longer periods of celibacy than that. Illness, long distance relationships, military deployments...

Just curious, what is "longer periods"? Is celibacy for a year really a plausible outcome for most people in SF? And is it so likely that it makes living in a car worthwhile? I'm honestly curious.

Year-long celibacy is not super uncommon in India, but Indian culture is explicitly set up to make sure women don't have sex until their parents get them married off. I'm really shocked to hear that SF is that bad.

Why are you surprised to hear this? You're hardly the first person I'd expect to not realize the social stigma most men in the tech industry face trying to date; combine that with the supply/demand in the Bay and you should expect that most men will struggle to date at all (really, anywhere on the west coast except maybe LA.)

I've been to the bay area twice in my life. Most of my dating has been in either NYC or (recently) Pune, India. I'm aware the dating situation out west is unsatisfying, I just thought the issue was just that one might need to go out every night instead of only fridays and maybe compromise a bit on quality.

The fact is SF has women and no parental supervision. How could it possibly be this bad?

I'm honestly asking because I'm curious about the mechanics of it.

The mechanics are: you go to any bar and the ratio is about 10:1 on a _good_ night. All the girls are sick of seeing tech people and so will ask you what you do, and when they hear "Google", "Facebook", "tech", "engineer", or "programming", will walk away in disgust. (Literally. Hell, a friend went on a Grouper where the girls found out he worked for Google and immediately decided they'd rather wait the clock out on their phones than speak to him.)

There is no step 2, as far as I can tell. One of the many, many reasons I left SF. (For Seattle, which is...marginally better, but not good by any measure, in this aspect.)

I live in a similar large west coast city and I've gone 11 years.

More likely: much worse game and they don't bother trying to succeed. Dating while working at Google sucks.

Serious question I have always wanted to ask someone like you:

How many changes of clothes do you own? I don't have an extensive wardrobe, but I couldn't fit the clothes I wear in an average week into a bag of that size, let alone everything else I use regularly.

I have 4 pants, maybe 4-5 pairs of shorts, 6 button down shirts, and 15 t-shirts. On my most recent flight from India, I even managed to fit a suit in.

Let me emphasize that the larger backpack is not carry-on luggage. It's a $200 fancy pack, something like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00388W5KO/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...

I'm curious too.

What's the "turnover" with those clothes - i.e. how often do you buy new ones and throw out the old ones? Ever gotten any weird looks for running around in mostly the same outfits? What do you do when you need a suit?

What do you do about your data? Do you carry any additional HDDs in those backpacks? Don't you keep any spare hardware around for when things break to be able to replace them quickly?

What about legal documents (birth certificate, graduation certificates, tax declarations, etc.)? Do you store them somewhere safely, or keep them on you?

Also, do you have any allergies? One thing I allways seem to have too little of when travelling is napkins/tissues.

What do you do for more mundane things like scissors and paper and priting stuff?

Turnover is high. During my previous 6 months in India, I lost 2 pants, and pair #3 is dying. (My semi-girlfriend is telling me to replace it while I'm in NY.)

The backpack contains only a laptop, phone and tablet. I don't have massive amounts of data - I don't photograph every meal as some people do. When my stuff breaks, I pay a lot of money to fix/replace it.

Legal documents are stored with my parents in the US, except of course the passport.

I have no allergies and need no medication. The only tool I own is a leatherman multitool - I rarely need it, and it's good enough when I do. I don't use paper.

A whole month without sex? How awful!

Apparently a co-worker of mine was quite the fan of handicapped washrooms in the office. But still. Ew.

As a techie who just recently completed purchasing a house, I disagree. It's a reminder that there's more to life than what's in my head, and it's something I can call my own (well, mine and the banks).

Software folks, maybe. I have a spare bedroom turned into an overstuffed electronics lab, and I use my garage as a small shop. Many electrical and mechanical engineers are like me.

Yeah, this is a big deal, depending on your hobbies.

True, but environment matters. It affects your thoughts and ability to design. I'd be really sad if the 60' trees across the street were cut down. Also, sitting in a lovely garden thinking about how to solve a tech problem is nice.

That said, our home furnishings just kind of peter out for the reasons that you mentioned.

I'm sure some people are like that, but you can hardly say that most techy folks do that.

Yeah, I have that fear too. But more with the recent "sharing" movement.

People talk about sharing and stopping to own stuff you don't need. Which is probably a good idea, if one person owns a car and 10 use it when they need it.

But it stops when companies are in play. When they end up owning everything, we're all in trouble.

Cadbury (the chocolate people) built a rather nice sounding village for their workers when they moved out of the centre of a city so they could expand their factory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville

Cadbury was rather late to the game. UK companies were building villages for their workers all the way back to the late 1700s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_village

Some companies still provide (everything) for employees who are highly mobile. An obvious example would be container ship crew.

But I am also aware of defence companies that take on apprentices at 18, ship them across the country, and provide a room and free cafeteria meals. The company feel that, kids that age are still kids, and need looking after while they transition to independence in the same way as kids that go to university instead (dorms).

Reminds me of a book I read sometime back, where Employees lived on campuses, ate bio designed meat, produced bio engineered pets, products that enhanced artificial sense of well being while a biological catastrophe engulfed the outside world (mostly because of bio engineered products that these companies produced).

I can't see to recall the name of the book though. Soon enough we will be getting there though.

Sounds like the plot of Oryx and Crake (I did not like the book, but it was an interesting plot):

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46756.Oryx_and_Crake

... must not down vote ... all opinions are equally valid ... even when they're wrong ...

Thanks for not downvoting :) . I did not get if you liked the book a lot, or else if you found the plot awful :) .

I liked the book. A person who is so hurt by mankind's treatment of our world, that he attempts to destroy mankind while engineering a replacement (with more overt built in dependancies on the rest of the natural world) to repair the damage done but is ultimately foiled by mankind/nature's resilience. All narrated by the kind of ennui suffering character that makes up a large proportion of the first world. Written with the depth, biblical parallels, cyberpunk elements, etc that Atwood does so well. What's not to like?

Read that one for a sci-fi class in college. I think the teacher had intended to discuss it as describing technology run amok; I took it as capitalism run amok.

I'd be curious to know which one Atwood actually meant.

Oryx and Crake?

>corporations that completely own the life of their employees

Surely you don't mean Google?

You know that actually happened in the past?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Indentured slavery has a long history. The cyberpunk take on it just subverts the concept, where it becomes control of the mind instead of the body.

You contend that gainful employment is indentured slavery? I don't think the slaves you're talking about were getting paid $200,000 a year.

I'm referencing the "cyberpunk universe" mentioned, not reality. I agree with you: there is nothing about cyberpunk nor mind-control going on in SF.

>Does anyone else feels like we're really getting towards the cyberpunk universe

No. The current top voted comment in this thread is a guy who's telling everyone how to live out of a van. Hint: it's so safe outside the corporate safe zones that he can park his car in a parking lot and sleep there without worrying about being hassled by anyone.

I agree we are not there but, I think there is a real chance of this happening. Wasn't there a thread sometime back about a company, which asked all its employees to live together in a shared community accommodation?

The fact is - as cost of living goes up and commute becomes harder in big cities, Companies will adapt. I see primarily three ways:

a. Embrace the status quo and employees commute via trains/cars whatever. b. Companies allow people to work from home. c. Companies realize that, it is much more cost efficient if employees lived closer to their offices. Some projects can't be easily worked from home, so what will a company with billions of dollars in cash will do? I don't think companies owe anything to people in general - other than maximize profits for their shareholders, so it is quite viable that they provide housing to their employees.

nah, most housing problems can be traced to regulation, usually of the sort that if you dig deep enough is, we don't want their type here. Hide it behind protecting the environment, quality of life, or whatnot.

Deleted comment

Someone disagreed.

Well, the author has clearly never car camped or worked operations before:

"It's not clear what the Googlers like Discoe did when they had to go to the bathroom at night."

They went to the bathroom of course, just like you would in the day. Its not like toilets are solar powered and don't work after dark. If you work there and have an ID and walk past the guard at 2am and walk past leaving a couple minutes later, they simply don't care. "He must have been called in to reboot a server or something". Also although I am a morning person the world has no shortage of night persons and my experience in a 300 person building is I never heard of it being empty although it could happen, and at a 800 person building I don't think we ever, not even on holidays at 3am, dropped below six people.

Can't Google just setup dormitories? It's halfway on being it's own city, so why not go all out and have cheap living quarters?

And thus, Google becomes The Circle completely.

I'm being a bit flippant, but really the last thing Google employees (and every other successful tech businesses to be fair) need is to be more isolated in their ivory towers. Meeting people outside of the tech industry keeps you grounded and stops you forgetting that there are vast numbers of people who aren't so intelligent and happy with massive changes every couple of years. If a tech is going to be inclusive and produce a better society in to the future it's important that the people making things are integrated with the rest of society.

"Meeting people outside of the tech industry keeps you grounded"

But does where you sleep affect that at all? Even where I am, many people live in apartments or houses and yet have almost no social interaction outside of high tech. I'm sure that's at least as true in Silicon Valley, with its corporate citadels and meetups and apartment complexes that specifically court techies with fast networks etc.

Civic/community/social engagment is driven by where you spend your time between work and sleep (assuming you have any). It's family, old friends, neighbors, fellow sports team members or music fans or craft companions who aren't all from the same few companies. You can interact with all of those people even if you live in your car, whether that car is in the Google parking lot or elsewhere. You can fail to interact with them even if you live in a real home.

The only way your choice of sleeping arrangements might matter is if the security folks think it's odd when you come back from elsewhere and go straight to your car without going into the building first. That's not a normal commuter pattern, so it might pique their interest. On the other hand, as one of the Quora commenters said, if you just show them your company ID they don't care any more.

I see your point, but I'd still venture living on campus or in dormitories is worse.

I used to live in an apartment building Seattle that was immensely popular with Amazonians and Microsofties. Social interaction there was very limited to high tech (to an annoying degree), but at least we ate at local places, drank at local places, visited local grocery stores and barbers, etc.

So yeah, "insular techies" can't be fully solved by simply having people live in regular apartments, but I'd argue dormitories or campus-living is strictly worse.

I guess the problem is that we define "living at" Google to mean sleeping there. In many ways eating there is more relevant. Someone who sleeps in a car in the Google parking lot but eats elsewhere at least gets that modicum of outside interaction. Someone who eats at Google before going to a real home and flopping straight into bed does not.

Of course, companies like Google know this. The whole reason they provide the meals is so that people's attention stays focused within Google instead of elsewhere. That probably leads into a whole 'nother discussion of whether meals at work are really a good thing, but I'll just leave it there for now.

> But does where you sleep affect that at all? Even where I am, many people live in apartments or houses and yet have almost no social interaction outside of high tech. I'm sure that's at least as true in Silicon Valley, with its corporate citadels and meetups and apartment complexes that specifically court techies with fast networks etc.

Not normally, but if you sleep at work then definitely yes. If you never leave the Google campus what are the odds you'll interact with people who don't work for Google?

I find it interesting that you implicitly treat sleeping there as the last step toward full isolation. I understand that "sleeping" at work might also include things like morning showers and laundry. Still, doesn't the idea of eating every meal every day at work - not just lunch Monday through Friday - strike anyone else as equally anomalous? Isn't that just as much an indicator of having no separate life? If so, then why it assumed to have come before that "final step" of sleeping there as well?

In theory, no. But we're all a little lazy. If you live at the CompanyX campus, surrounded by other CompanyXers, and have to drive a bit to get to the rest of the community, then people mostly won't do it. Maybe you'll mean to, but gradually you'd have busy or tired days here and there and not have time to do it, and you start to miss things and lose touch with people, and gradually the people and places closest and most convenient become your social circle. Maybe not for everybody and not right away, but it'll happen.

Spread those same CompanyXers around a larger community at random, and you get the opposite effect of them tending to form social groups more with people outside the company who do other things.

Your good solution cannot be implemented by handing a rent check to the apt manager every month. My bachelor pad experience with dropping off the check to someone other than my employer was not as intellectually and emotionally stimulating as your goal.

A good analogy to google barracks would be .mil and I was in the USAR in the very early 90s starting about a year after the first middle east war, as what boils down to a very low level DBA / sysadmin MOS (which due to reorg no longer exists) and the weird parts of living on base would definitely be security checkpoints and knowing your job and your housing are inextricably linked, making looking for a new job a little weird. Oh and your day time "boss" inspects your living quarters occasionally, so there is no separation between work/life, although, weird as it might sound to non .mil people, it wasn't really a problem.

I wouldn't sign a lease contract to live on-base at google without an airtight employment contract to get paid by google. I can't imagine how weird it would be to get a new job or get fired or get downsized and still have to live with now ex-coworkers.

I could see a google half way house, where you just immigrated from the other side of the planet this morning or the girlfriend kicked you out last night, so chill out on campus for a week or maybe a month till you get your stuff together. Part of a google hotel, perhaps, for business meetings. Or just a partnership with zillions of existing hotels and extended stay hotels.

Absolutely agreed. A happy world is at least a tiny bit suboptimal.

If I could save rent by living in my office, I would. Hell, I would have double the income to put in my "let's have fun!" budget.

But wouldn't you eventually get burnt out? For me at least, going home every day is my release from the pressure and stress of work.

I even have a real-world example: My boss is getting divorced, and as the president of our small company, he has the alarm codes and keys to every door. We have a full kitchen, multiple bathrooms, etc. The only thing we don't have is a shower. He figured he could sleep on the conference room couch, shower at the gym since he goes there every day before work anyway, and wouldn't have to pay rent in an apartment while making house payments too. That lasted about a week before he became so sick of being in the building he was ready to quit. He's now living in a hotel while he searches for an apartment.

Maybe they could start building apartments which would be open for rent for public as well?

Where you unlock the doors by signing in with your G+ account?

Scary because that would so be the case.

This could give a whole new meaning to Google Hangouts.

The whole reason for the housing bubble is that companies who want to build apartments are prohibited from doing so.

If zoning laws were relaxed, the bubble would disappear real fast.

No; though they desperately want to, Mountain View strictly regulates how much housing can be built, and where.

Why? Because only the people who already live there get to vote for local representatives, so everything's biased toward what's best for established homeowners -- not struggling would-be homeowners.

This. The root conflict of interest in the whole bay area housing issue. Existing residents vote on propositions to block new construction that were approved 20 years ago. New residents prop up the region's economic vitality with new industries benefiting existing residents and existing residents further restrict housing supply, further increasing their own home values while preventing new residents from coming in.

Do you think they haven't thought of that already?

> if it could house employees on federal property, those people could work, eat at Google cafes, and go home again without ever leaving Google’s island.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-g...

If I recall, the local municipality shot down the idea.

Those cities are all notoriously anti-building, which is why housing is so expensive in the first place.

This is very common in Japan. I lived in a company dormitory during a one year internship at NTT Data. Was nice as a foreigner. Meals provided in a cafeteria, and lots of opportunities to get to know my coworkers out of the office.

Having company dorms seemed almost a necessity for young workers, until they had saved enough for the enormous deposit needed for an apartment. Maybe that's the direction Silicon Valley is headed.

Or they could just move out of the polically dysfunctional SF-bay area.

Seriously, why do so many companies put up with the broken real-estate market and government that completely fails to manage it?

The comments here that express positive sentiment toward Company Towns ought to be a clue. There is a large supply of qualified people willing to subject themselves to such conditions here--much larger than these companies will find practically anywhere else. It boils down to this: the environment is extremely advantageous for the very wealthy.

Yes that's true, but viewing the whole thing daily via HN from 3,000 miles away, it seems like there's much more than just wealth about it: there's adventure, mystery, the Unknown as well as camaraderie, being around optimistic, productive people like ones' self, and being part of a bigger thing at a critical time in (tech) history.

I ponder daily ditching my utterly satisfying life Here for SV but mainly family and the housing prices keep me away. I, like you, think the over-corporatization is unhealthy.

I would argue that this could be counter-productive. 24/7 immersion in an employer-owned and operated environment doesn't sound healthy from a work/life balance perspective.

Not in the long term certainly, but there are lots of people in the military, on cargo ships, etc who do that. Back when I was working at Lincoln Labs I considered going out to Kwajalein for a year.

Antarctica

If you're looking for a moderately entertaining light read try a book called "Big Dead Place". The author's life is pretty dark but the book is funny light reading.

Its basically the movie "old school" with a lot of snow and a screwed up male/female ratio, combined with a bit of Dilberts PHB is both your boss and your landlord with predictable results. His writing is more or less reportedly true with the obvious exception of the "blind men talking about the elephant" issue where you get 1000 people and none of them have the whole total story and experiences will vary.

The author had a pretty interesting blog which responds with a blank white page today. Its worth your time to read it off the wayback machine. The books name is big dead place so search for bigdeadplace.com

He eventually got banned from working in Antarctica because of his writings, and then suicided, shotgun from what I heard. Long term addiction to alcohol didn't help much.

People on cargo ships or oil rigs still usually have regular homes that they live in when they are not working which is often for weeks or months at a time. Google uses it's employees year round.

I wonder if this might be a good solution for the software industry to avoid burnout. Have people live in SV for designated "crunch" periods where you work for 70 hours a week for 2 months, then go home to somewhere cheaper for 2.

You couldn't pay me enough to work 8 back-to-back 70-hour weeks.

I on the other hand would love that. I can't see it working for my job, but from a personal time point of view I'd love it. Everyone's difference.

If you've been following local news, the local city council hasn't been enthusiastic to let them do it:

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/09/08/mountain-view-city-cand...

Can't. They would have done it a long time ago and stop clogging the freeway if they could but Mountain View doesn't allow zoning of any additional residential areas in the city. Typical bay area NIMBY-ism.

What a sad life it would be.

Hah, it seems worker housing (from the times of the industrial revolution, when many employers attempted to control every aspect of their employees’ lives) is coming back.

That "tradition" actually goes back a little further to cotton operations in the deep south, and for that matter feudalism in the middle ages.

That tradition is still at least minimally present for Ag workers today.

Didn't the hotel owners lobby make such things illegal?

I did this on a 6 month contract as an experiment over a mild winter in the UK in 2011. You can pretty much do this anywhere.

Couple of tricks: 1) Get a small camper/van that can park in one car parking space with a diesel heating system. Kitchen is irrelevant. Bed/toilet/heating system/space to sit and type/space for clothes to hang.

2) You need a toilet but usually you time your bowel movements to only need to use it as a urinal unless you decide to go for a crazy hot curry

3) Find a local sports centre (not gym) with a sauna. Go for a swim in the morning, spend the evenings working out or hanging out in the sauna (you get regulars).

4) Bank of leisure batteries in your van (to drive the heater and give your laptop power), can give you the power to live for weeks inside your van. Luckily I went home every weekend to recharge them. If you can't get a power source connection (friend etc.), then consider covering your roof in solar power cells.

5) Unlimited mobile data plan that allows tethering.

6) Clubs/Meetup/Work social groups (CRITICAL).

7) No it's not 'hot' to invite a girl back to your van in a car park.

8) Scout the areas and work out where to sleep. Sleeping on a road can mean you get traffic buzzing you from 5am. Go find a really quiet road or lay by. Use retail park car parks if they don't have security patrols. Remember you're parking up at work during the day. You only really turn up after the gym at 8pm or later and leave by 8am.

9) It's quite liberating. Want to wake up next to the sea and go for a swim....yes you can.

10) Be proud of what you are doing. The limited space you have frees you from clutter.

11) Do crazy things...like continue to run an ebay magic card sales business inside the van!

12) Cold is your enemy. When winter hit hard, the issue was the driver cabin and the rear doors. Two cheap double duvets insulated the rest of the van from those cold spaces.

13) Go stealth mode if possible. No windows on the sides of the van, roof windows are perfect. You want somebody to think there is no one in the van.

14) Layout can be interesting, but I prefer bed at back on a removable platform, storage under neath, rear door 'insulated'. Sliding door opens into a space with bench and toilet under bench. Blackout curtains between driver cabin and rear area. Lockable from the inside.

15) Always go for a van you can stand in.

16) Check your drinking laws. In the UK sleeping in the back of a van is legal if drunk.

17) Going to repeat this. Scout out your area and work out great un-disturb-able places. A quiet car park in the centre of town may have a lot of pedestrians walking through it at 2am going back from clubs. Go for those parks/spaces that are not natural through routes. You will get into a routine. You'll end up parking in the same place on the same night of the week.

18) Be social. Get out of that space. Do not go back to the van and lock yourself away and watch stuff on the internet. GET OUT.

[edit] This was the van: https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/v/t1....

Slightly on the big side, but it worked at the time. If I was going to do it again, I would custom build. Height for me being 6'2 is always going to be an issue. I would consider a normal height van but bending over all the time is not my thing.

You made The Verge! http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/9/6126305/tech-employee-lives...

So I guess The Verge doesn't care if I copy-paste large chunks of their articles (along with their copyrighted photos) on my web-page? Good to know...

welcome to modern internet 'journalism'

Hey Tomp - I wrote that post. I cited the author, linked extensively, and gave credit in multiple places. If there had been a contact on his HN bio, I would have reached out that way as well.

You're preaching to the choir - I wish all IP law was either abolished or changed significantly so that it actually promoted innovation.

However, that's completely besides the point. That's not how copyright works, what you did is most likely illegal, and the organization you represent would most likely not condone such behavior if the tables were turned.

As long as it's treated as a block quote, it's a legal gray area. There's a concept called Fair Use in America that may often cover cases like this. It's possible the UK laws are more strict in this regard.

The DMCA is your friend. :)

https://nppa.org/page/5617

Lol I never. :D

So over or under on Ben Popper not contacting awjr before writing his arti-err ... copy-paste job.

For 16, does this mean that you can't ordinarily sleep in the back of the van, but they allow it if drunk to discourage drunk driving, or that you're not considered to be drinking and driving if you stay in the back?

I'm just amused at the idea of keeping a bottle of around for emergency legal compliance.

In some places (including much of the US, I believe), you can be arrested for drunk driving even if you're not in the driver's seat. Here's some info on California's laws [1].

The idea is that you are in the car and capable of driving it, even if you're not in the driver's seat yet. According to the urban legend, the trick is to get rid of your keys if you need to sleep in the car while drunk (i.e., swap keys with a friend who's in a different car), since you can then argue that you did not have the ability to drive the car.

[1] http://www.rencherlawgroup.com/Practice-Areas/DUI-Defense/Pa...

Germany seems to be more lax. When I started to drive I got this advice: Always keep a half-empty bottle of vodka (or anything) in your trunk. If you have an accident while driving drunken. Get the bottle before the police arrives. Tell them: That accident was such a shock, I had drink something.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. I never tested this. Do NOT drive drunken!

In the UK, there was concern that people asleep in camper vans could be 'got' as in charge of a vehicle. I do still believe being in the back of a van drunk parked on the road would be putting yourself in a 'legally' risky position.

To be honest just be sensible. Use parking lots, lay-bys, and quiet roads, oh and have a couple. In the morning you are driving again!

Most places aren't too bothered about you sleeping over night (and will state if they are on the parking lots). What they dislike is you staying in the same spot. Not an issue if you are driving to work in the morning. ;)

I love that social groups are critical and so it seems that swimming and saunas, but when taking a piss, or having a kitchen are ``irrelevant'' topics.

Well technically your clothes are hanging up in the space your are cooking in. You don't really need to be known as "Mr. Bacon".

Toilet is critical. You will need it (knew a friend that decided to not install one and rely on public loos while staying at a ski resort...lasted two weeks.) It's just that you don't want to take a dump unless you absolutely need to. This is less to do with then, but more when you need to 'empty' the waste. You will be peeing and you can either do that in a lay by, but with snow on the ground and 3 in the morning....then somewhere to pee in the van that also can be 'sealed' to contain the smell is critical.

As someone else who lived like this for a few months (except out of the back of a much smaller Land Rover Series III), pissing is done in hedges (and the odd beer can), shitting in public toilets or food restaurants and cooking on a gas bottle outside.

Mine looked like this: http://www.carandclassic.co.uk/uploads/cars/land_rover/30328...

Going for swim acts as an opportunity for showering.

It's great fun after you get over the initial shock of creature comforts requiring planning and thought.

I eventualy gave in I found that the chassis had a huge hole in it and I had to start putting in as much oil as fuel.

Sounds like your set up was more rural. I was doing it in the middle of a city mostly, so really had to have everything self contained. Definitely would consider having the rear doors open and ability to pull out a cooking area and pop up an awning for those times when you are sitting on a beach and need coffee and a bacon roll.

Must admit it's a pretty good way of living but not sure I would do it for years on end.

Now canal boats....now that I could see myself doing one day.

I was doing it in Leyton/Woodford in East London so borderline city/suburbs.

I'd do it again, 100% of the time but the three children, wife, mortgage and inevitable responsibilities that come with these things make it difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Narrow boats and widebeams are horrid. I lived in a narrow boat for a month. They rock very slightly, smell awful, are damp as anything (even the nice ones), cost a fortune to keep afloat and the neighbours aren't particularly nice people I've found. Very clicky, suffer from a major superiority complex and are terribly bureaucratic. Thames barge perhaps but narrow boats; never again!

Dammit you ruined the canal boat dream! Must admit, renting one for a month or two would probably be worth considering before buying one. I hear it's all about finding a mooring space.

Yeah I would rent one for a bit first, preferably long enough to try and get water out of a diesel tank and empty the sewage tanks!

You might enjoy it, but I certainly didn't.

Also, literally everything went rusty. Even stainless steel and my windows mobile 5 phone at the time went rusty.

With regards to taking a dump, you could use one of those self contained composting toilets - maybe even using the digested remains as methane gas for cooking ;)

I was of the impression that in the UK sleeping in the back of your car when drunk could still lead to a charge of "drunk in charge of a vehicle". Could you elaborate on why it's different with a van, please?

UK caravan club got the clarification from the police years ago. The driver cabin is considered separate to the rear. They are two distinct 'rooms'. Unsure when you have a swivelling captain chair, but in my van the seats were fixed.

Excellent -thank you very much for the details. Looks like I need to upgrade my vehicle :)

Just make sure it's a camper van and not a van ;)

Great article. My ex and I refurbished an older GMC bus with a fully functioning everything years ago.By that I mean an actual toilet, kitchen, bath, etc. which is different and more difficult to park. We moved it here and there so we didn't get ticketed or worse. It was basically an RV...A couple of suggestions that apply here: Visibility of activity can get you ticketed or worse in SF where I live. Cover back and side windows with silver Mylar. It lets light in,you can see outside fine, but it is opaque from the outside. Also, you need to address dampness so you don't end up mildewed and moldy! A small heater, even Coleman lanterns help dry the air. Check camping stores or sites for the latest developments for that problem.Good luck!

So you only did this as an experiment? If it was a forced thing, do you think it would be any different? Also, this could be amazing to go camping or short vacations with friends. Thanks!

Well, I'd bought a camper van in the summer, and a contract came up too far away to realistically commute. So I could have stayed in a B&B during the week, however I felt that this would work out. My wife was not quite in love with the idea of the camper van as much as I was. It would save a lot of money which we needed at the time.

So I went down there in September for a 3 month contract that got extended by another 3 months.

The most complicated issue was that the Webasto diesel heating system (2kw heater and amazinf) required leisure batteries to be at a certain level to work safely and would shut down. So I started off with an 80w battery by the middle of December I had added another two 110w batteries and bought a industrial strength battery charger to enable me to top the batteries up within a 24 hour period.

If I was living in the van permanently I would have mounted two 250w solar panels on the roof. Complete independence would have been worth it.

One thing, having a home base also gave me a place to empty the chemical loo.

Of note, it completely changed my view of sealed sachets of ketchup and coffee. As you are in a box, you can build up a lot of moisture during the night (easy to remove during the day) but just means windows are dripping or even frozen with moisture.

I can remember firing up the heater and directing the heat into the driver cabin via a funnel to help melt the ice that had formed over night on the inside of the screen, leaving the van and going for a walk along the beach while it cleared itself.

subscribe to reddit.com/r/vandwellers. for pooping, you could resort to biffy bags.

This seems tempting. But i can't live without gaming on a big screen :(

I was heavily into SWOTOR at the time and that was a driver for an increase in my battery capacity, but honestly, the place I worked at was pretty chilled and I could sit and play after work if I wanted (on my laptop).

There is nothing to prevent you having one wall of your van being a white projector screen. You just need to consider how you power such an environment for a night of gaming.

TBH it's not that unfeasible to have a projector mounted on the roof and a pull down screen.....one worth thinking about.

There's always the Oculus Rift.

THAT is what stops you?

Are you sure about that? :)

1/ or you know,just find a housemate/roommate if you cant afford to rent a place alone... sorry but sleeping in a van doesnt "scale",and is not that economic.

EDIT:the downvote mob is out for blood,as usual.I just said that sleeping in a van for 6 month is the worse thing to do,nobody can to tell me with a straight face that one should do that,especially in winter.

I used it as a way to explore Exeter, Devon and the surrounding coast. It was fun. One hell of an experiment and life hack.

Would definitely do it again, but I would probably build my own van rather than buy off the shelf as I have that luxury to do that.

Note old camper vans can be realistically be bought for around £2k and they don't lose money. I sold mine for more than I bought it, but that covered the cost of the batteries I had installed.

If sleeping in a van wasn't all that economic and finding a housemate was so simple for everyone in every situation then we wouldn't have homeless people.

There are lots of homeless people who don't sleep in vans either.

Of course they can. You provide no counter-arguments to the facts that it's cheap and convenient.

I sleep in a Previa fairly regularly, often with my kayak next to me. I only need it for sleep and charging gadgets so don't need a loo, heater washing stuff or a cooker. Never done more than a couple of nights in it but can't think of a good reason why I wouldn't if required.

>just said that sleeping in a van for 6 month is the worse thing to do,nobody can to tell me with a straight face that one should do that,especially in winter.

Once again, as I've written in my other post, known a bunch of people who did it, some very willingly and rationally. Far from "the worst thing in the world." Why don't you talk to some of these people and ask them their experiences. Perhaps not your cup of tea but don't speak about everyone.

This is not "a perk". This is homelessness plain and simple.

(Tech) People glamorize campus life but at least in campus you have a bed, clubs, parties and other interaction opportunities, etc

In most other jobs, if you could not afford to make rent, or had other commitments that drained your income, you could not find the resources at work to even attempt this.

If they are lenient on this sort of thing, you could use this for other purposes. You decide to move and your leases don't quite line up, saving money to buy a house (as mentioned in the article)...

I would certainly classify this as a perk.

Really?

I worked at McDonalds in high school. One of the other guys there (in my estimation, one of the smartest) was homeless. He was about 17 years old, and had run away from home. We were in NJ, I believe he was from the Carolinas. He used to work FT at McDonalds, and then I would spend most of the rest of his waking time at the library or a QuikCheck in town. I wasn't totally clear on where he slept, but I believe he mixed sleeping outside with crashing on another guys couch that worked at McDonalds. I don't know what happened to him, but I hoped things worked out. I moved on to another job and never talked to him again.

I would have had absolutely no idea he was homeless before he told me. It was an eye opening experience for me.

OK, I will be more specific: In most jobs, you cannot choose to be homeless and still live in middle class conditions.

> at least in campus you have a bed, clubs, parties and other interaction opportunities, etc

I think Google has all of the above.

Google has clubs as in nightclubs where you can pick up women?

Or clubs like chess clubs and stuff?

You are correct

Interaction with other people, not the Google circle.

Concerts, arts, picnics. No, taking your Google buffet food on a table outside does not count as a picnic. Going to the Starbucks on Shoreline is not a social outing.

Was thinking of the latter. Shows what kind of person I am, I guess.

I did this for a couple of months at my university, having failed to secure accommodation at the end of a rental period. Slept variously in an electron microscopy suite, a darkroom, and a rarely used bathroom. Wasn't too bad, though there was the omnipresent fear of campus security twigging on. As this was in London I saved quite a decent wad of cash in rent. Wouldn't do it again though unless I was particularly desperate.

A friend and ex-cow-orker of mine had a nice little space in the ceiling tiles in one of CMU's machine rooms (probably late 1970s). He had a bed, a microwave oven and some other creature comforts.

I knew a programmer who did this in Baltimore, a much less expensive city, particularly then. In his case, it was probably the domestic uncertainty brought on by late-onset adolescence--he was forty or so and divorced. Even allowing for the expenses that brought on, he could probably have afforded to rent a rowhouse in a safe-enough neighborhood, but I think he couldn't quite focus on that.

I can speak to this happening at a major visual effects facility in the Los Angeles area. There was one developer (a guy who developed Academy Award-winning volumetric rendering software) who was able to live out of a mobile home parked in the main parking lot. This was around '99-01 or so - they're no longer in the same location and I'm sure the current ownership would throw a fit if someone tried it today. You could pretty much get away with anything at Venice Beach in the 90s.

If you have to resort to living in your car while working at Google or other such big companies, there is something wrong with the way one looks at life. Unless there are exigent circumstances, like you were bankrupt for whatever reason, or you are a fresh grad with nothing but time on your hands, this is not ok.

work is not everything. there is life to be had

I think one should spend their time on whatever one is passionate about. It seems some people have jobs which are so interesting and engaging that they are essentially aligned with their passions. I think it's great!

Perhaps behemoths like Google could literally build company towns in the vicinity of their campuses with heavily subsidised rents. I'm not even being sarcastic here - I live in Ireland and until recently worked as an engineer for Google in Dublin. With 3k+ folks there - most young and single and not much into commuting - a few square miles around the campus is just a 'Google ghetto'. Some folks even happily connect to the office wifi using various contraptions. The only difference between that and a 'company town' is higher rents. I'd imagine that would work even better in SV where rents are outrageous as compared to Dublin, IE.

With regards to the original article I can testify to knowing a guy on the MTV campus who did that for a little while. To be fair his manager eventually got involved and told him to find either an apartment or a new job.

They want to, but mountain view and other peninsula districts have generally resisted new housing at the scale needed to accommodate the tech workforce.

http://www.spur.org/publications/article/2012-12-18/corporat...

One reason NOT to do it would be that it puts workers with families or those who need something different than a 'standard corporate housing unit' at a disadvantage - if single professionals can get subsidised housing it effectively increases their take-home salary.

The author William Vollmann comically wrote about doing this at a San Francisco (I think?) software shop when he was young and writing his first novel. Living off of vendor-machine candy bars, dodging the janitor, etc ... Probably my favorite parts were how he confessed having no bloody clue what he was doing when faced with the thing he was being paid to do: write code ...

As with any fiction author, the details are probably exaggerated, and he particularly tends toward a certain kind of luxuriant self-deprecation, so, pinch of salt and all ...

I believe the dueling meta-narrators of his first book, You Bright and Risen Angels, were also programmers, or something like that. It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember Electric Emily's origin story and the parts where the programmer-narrators fucked with the "source code" of the narrative being my favorite parts.

I guess I'm wondering if Google actually cares. Seems like if they think it will help employee productivity to let them hangout at work 24/7 then seems like a win for everyone. Maybe they formalize it and set up a few bunk beds with lockers or something. Doesn't seem out of the question.

I guess they are officially disapproving but turn a blind eye as long as it's not a common occurence. Unofficially letting someone live at work every now and then is helpful for everyone, but if they tried to formalize it, then a lot more people would like to save on rent like that and all the benefits for the company could quickly disappear.

Not to mention legal issues, liability, zoning, and insurance and all of that stuff.

Heh I came up with this idea at another large company decades ago in another city.

Unfortunately they were in no way tolerant of it and when security eventually caught on they reported me to my manager and that was the end of that.

Google sounds far more laid back but I suspect if too many people do it, the loophole will come to an end.

Honestly, not that surprised. I basically live at my co-working space. Showers, lots of comfy desks, couches and bean bag chairs, well equipped kitchen (gotta buy your ingredients though), well heated, even at night.

Apparently someone lived there for a couple months before someone found out.

maybe change the link to the quora thread?

The article adds literally nothing.

http://www.quora.com/Which-Googler-holds-the-record-for-livi...

In any normal case i'd agree, but Quora is just a straight out terrible place to share stuff because it's essentially a paywall. (paying with money or a registration doesn't really make a difference for this situation).

Woah it seems that it no longer requires a registration to see all of the answers. Not sure when this changed.

I think it changed when Google started enforcing that sites can't present different content to Googlebot (to show up in results) then live users (to try and make them register once they click through).

Put ?share=1 on the end of the link to get past the nag-wall:

http://www.quora.com/Which-Googler-holds-the-record-for-livi...

There are browser extensions to automatically add it:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/?...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quora-unblocker/pc...

Any query string works. So, "?s=1" or "?x=1" for instance. If you're feeling lazy.

I've started to see a trend, first on Forbes and now here, where "journalists" are scraping Quora for content rather than creating fresh copy. I get that it's tempting but c'mon.

I've noticed it's very common too. Seems to me that Quora, now in YC and having a mid-life crisis, should just start their own publication/blog featuring their best content.

The article definitely adds a narrative which isn't there in a forum discussion.

I also don't think the Quora link should replace the current one given Quora's practices in the past.

Most of the narrative consists of direct quotes from the top two Quora answers.

I did this for a while when I was working at Sun but it wasn't to avoid rent (I paid rent) it was to avoid my commute. When I was in full on work mode I viewed the commute as too much of a time drain (I lived in San Francisco, Sun was in Mountain View, 30 minutes without traffic, closer to an hour with. Each way. Blech.)

I had two VW vans parked next to each other, one was set up as a "bedroom", the other was set up as the "living room" and was also my daily driver. It worked pretty well if you don't count social life (I didn't have one).

I lived in an office for a few months once. I did not have a car, so I was actually staying inside. It was not worth the savings. Especially since the rent in that city was far lower than in the places discussed in the article. No bed. Worrying about security (even though I made friends with the main night-shift guard). Worrying about people finding out. Worrying about people finding my caches of possessions. Etcetera. Not worth the stress.

As an executive at a nonprofit, I was renting an apartment several blocks from my office. The apartment building was purchased by a developer who proceeded to convert them to condos. I was offered some money (I think $1500 or so) to end my lease early. I was planning on leaving the country in a few months anyway, so I took the money, and just moved all my belongings into my office.

I stored my clothes in an otherwise-unused filing cabinet, took showers at a gym a few blocks away, and slept on the floor, with just a blanket and pillow. The biggest problem was laundry; the nearest laundromat was pretty far away and I didn't have a car. I ended up strapping a sack full of clothes to the back of my bicycle and riding a couple miles to the laundromat every weekend.

I had a private room with a door that closed, but everyone at the office knew what I was doing. The only conceit was that I claimed that it was only temporary until I could find the right place to move into; in reality I found it so convenient and cheap that I stayed for over a year (until I did, in fact, leave the country). One Friday night, I even had a friend stay over; he slept on a couch in someone else's room.

Our organization rented a suite in a larger building, and every morning when I woke up and went to the restroom, I saw other people seemingly doing the same thing. One guy even went to the restroom every morning in a bathrobe. From about 6-7AM it reminded me a truck stop restroom, with people brushing their teeth and giving themselves sponge-baths at the sink. There are zoning laws that prohibit people from sleeping in offices, but I think the property manager didn't really care as long as everyone was reasonably discreet.

There were a few significant disadvantages. First, there was no kitchen. I had an electric kettle that I used to cook ramen, which I would add eggs and canned meat and vegatables to, but that was about it, except for eating out. There were plenty of nice restaurants nearby, and I had plenty of extra money from not paying rent, so it was not a huge problem.

Second, personal mail. The US Postal Service has a policy of not forwarding mail, addressed to an individual at a commercial address, to a residential address. This meant that when I forwarded my mail from my apartment to my office, I couldn't later forward my mail from my office to somewhere else.

Third, the gym was not open on holidays. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, I went to my parents' house anyway, so I just took a shower there. But for other holidays like Labor Day and Independence Day, I had to do without a shower.

I would do it again. Actually, I would even consider just renting an office instead of an apartment to live in. Generally speaking, office space is cheaper, easier to rent, and more centrally located than housing. These days though, I'm married, and my wife would not be so enthusiastic.

>Second, personal mail. The US Postal Service has a policy of not forwarding mail, addressed to an individual at a commercial address, to a residential address. This meant that when I forwarded my mail from my apartment to my office, I couldn't later forward my mail from my office to somewhere else.

You could get around this by renting a PO box for the duration of your 'stay' at your office.

Must be kind of hard to bring a date home to... a car in some corporate parking lot, with the windows blacked out.

But I guess for Googlers, that's not such a high priority.

Rent a room in a nice hotel for a night and generally aim for dates that will appreciate the pragmatic approach to spending living in a van demonstrates :).

If you are a Google engineer, you can afford to rent an apartment. Living out of your car/van making that kind of money is silly.

The original comments suggested that those Googlers were saving money to buy things like a house, etc. It's a very pragmatic attitude from my POV. Earning a lot of money only to spend most of it on housing anyway seems kind of defeating the whole purpose of earning a lot of money.

Yes, highly paid employees do deliberately go homeless in the Bay Area. This isn't unique to Google. If you own the right vehicle, sleep in it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were ordinances in place to discourage/prohibit that though.

It seems like every Wal-Mart has a sign now for this. I imagine their big empty parking lots might have received decent use a few years back.

While we do not offer electrical service or accommodations typically necessary for RV customers, Walmart values RV travelers and considers them among our best customers. Consequently, we do permit RV parking on our store parking lots as we are able. Permission to park is extended by individual store managers, based on availability of parking space and local laws. Please contact management in each store to ensure accommodations before parking your RV

from: http://corporate.walmart.com/frequently-asked-questions

I currently live in a van. It's a 1996 Plymouth Voyager. The back is converted into a bed with storage. I absolutely love it.

Currently in bed in Brooklyn!

It sounds like Google will be making some rapid changes to their security policy.

Part of me feels bad for the guys who just got ratted out. Homelessness is a pretty disorienting thing.

Part of me feels like this is just another way of saying that there's a bay area housing shortage...

I doubt they'll do anything. Google management seems to be pretty leery of rocking the boat where the perks are concerned. As long as living on campus is a rare thing -- and it is -- they'll turn a blind eye.

It's well known that Google's free meals policy is widely abused. At the end of day, you'll see lots of people getting on the bus home with their dinners, sure. But it gets a lot worse; some people bring home enough food to feed their whole families over the weekends. Management knows about it, and doesn't do anything.

Inevitably if you're generous with enough people, someone will try to take advantage of you. At what point do you stop being generous?

It's nice to know that management at Google isn't blind to what's going on. I suppose they'll find a clever way to curtail anything that gets really out of hand.

Well, if they find that someone abuses company perks, they can just take them to a meeting and politely explain them that they can either play fair or say goodbye to their job. It's not neccessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I wouldn't really compare homelessness to being employed at Google and choosing to sleep in the parking lot.

Of course not. Have you been homeless before?

I've been homeless. Long story.

If you've been sleeping in a parking lot and now security has caught on, you're homeless. Are you judging them because they happen to have some money saved up?

Good for you for being able to have more compassion towards these people than I do :)

People save on rent all the time: crashing at friends, moving in with their BF/GF, moving back with their parents, etc... so this is nothing new and I have no problem with the money saving aspect. I just don't equate it with homelessness.

I lived in a coworking center for about 6 months. Slept on a couch in a dark room, got up at 7am and showered before anyone else got there. Wasn't too bad, really.

Why secretly? I mean, Google should seriously offer this as a perk. In this way, you have your employees 100% of their time on campus.

Supposedly some pilots live in RVs at LAX.

Shouldn't the pay be good at Google? Or what are the rents over there? (Sorry, German here)

And at the same time Yahoo doesn't want employees working from home...

I remember reading a similar article about yahoo employees some years ago.

Not so secret any more.

They offer everything else, why not offer barracks?

Moscow University main building has cafes, shops, dormitories and even a barber's shop. I've heard rumors that some students spent months without leaving the building.

On campus this should be even easier, come on.

At MIT, it's a badge of honor how many days you spend during finals living in the library, studying all day, every day. Students literally move into the library and live there. There was even a student that secretly built his own dorm room in the steam tunnels. It's on the unofficial tour as the "Tomb of the Unknown Tool".

Having worked in Cambridge steam tunnels during the winter, I suspect the "room" wasn't actually all that close to any steam pipes, because otherwise they would have found his (her?) corpse.

Is his name Lazlo? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa8kCQQUjHM

"It's not clear what the Googlers like Discoe did when they had to go to the bathroom at night."

Can #1 and can #2?

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