Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work | Hacker News Reader

Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work

newyorker.com

43 pointsjeo123449 comments

Does anyone else consider these massive corporate arcologies short sighted? I mean, they're literally walling themselves off from the community under gigantic glass domes, an absurd design given the peninsula's mild Mediterranean climate.

Couldn't they consider something more, I don't know, _permeable_?

Though I have to admit the cyberpunk in me relishes the day we have smooth, windowless Googlecars shuttling 'plexmonks through automated checkpoints guarded by robotic Brinhounds.

As someone who lives in a Mediterranean climate, I certainly wouldn't have minded a dome over the college campus I attended. There's nothing fun about having to walk under intense rain between buildings, whose floors get all muddy if you have any kind of walkable grass.

And I don't see what it has to do with their connection to the community; after all, people don't exactly come flying in. Whether the campus will have outside visitors will have more to do with their policies (free or restricted entry, presence of public amenities, etc) than with the dome, in my opinion.

It really doesn't rain much at all: http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/mountain-view/californi...

The thing is that while it doesn't rain that much, when it does it rains really hard.

You know, we used to have institutions for well-paid knowledge workers to cloister themselves from outside concerns and devote themselves to work. We called them "universities".

I heard some of those knowledge workers even went out into the broader industry and started highly successful businesses! I wonder how they feel about what started their careers, today...

Are we still talking about college professors?

It really is a shame that modern academia has broken the promise of what it used to be, and what it still (often falsely) claims to be. With so many prospective academics and so few tenured positions, academia becomes a cutthroat fight to accumulate more publications at whatever cost in order to build up one's career. Lack of funding sources leads to many people fighting over a shrinking piece of the pie. Those who are funding give initial funding to multiple groups with the goal of continuing funding whoever is most impressive -- everyone wants a good return on their investment. As a result, there's a tendency to only focus on the next progress report, focusing on short term results that are visible and can get media attention. This leads to a focus on salesmanship and less on actually figuring things out.

Academia had a specific set of pros and cons that made it a distinct entity from industry. As time as passed, academia has been taking on more and more of the cons of industry (focus on short-term thinking) without taking on the pros of industry (higher pay).

Exactly, many modern universities (even top 10 ones) are sadly quite broken. Extremely inefficient usage of funds, loads of bureaucrats for no good reason, and loads of people that just optimize for number of papers. These tend to stick around doing politics to get their names well-placed in the paper du jour, despite not having done much for it.

Math, and to a lesser extent physics & CS departments are less broken. But applied sciences places where I have been tend to be a trainwreck.

Bureaucracy, specifically the political-correctness-supporting bureaucracy is out of control in the Ivy League.

It is pretty much everywhere.

Related to this, great article of E.W.Dijkstra: The strengths of the academic enterprise (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/E...)

"Well paid"? Not so much.

Looking strictly at salary maybe not, but the entire package of benefits, retirement, paid time off, near-impossibility of being fired, etc. is far from the worst.

I heard a manager at Google admit that he gave the shittiest work to state-school grads, not because they were less capable (they weren't, and he admitted as much) but because the Ivy Validation (as in Google being the Ivy League of your 20s) meant a lot more to them than it did to people coming from Harvard or Stanford.

I don't intend for this to reflect on Google (he was a level 7 or 8, not a person of significance) as I'm sure that this dynamic exists, to the same degree, at all the hot tech companies.

It sounds like Mountain View is being a huge pain in the ass... Maybe it's because I grew up in a redneck area that had no zoning or building codes, but the idea that the government can tell you that you can't build what you want on property that you own is infuriating.

Well, it makes sense if you want to build, say, a gasifier or a chemical factory... but it doesn't seem to be the case. Are they worried about environmental impact, social impact, or just tax revenue

There's resistance for things you'd imagine should be no-brainers. For example, an expansion of the Stevens Creek bike path is encountering major resistance: http://www.cyclelicio.us/2015/sunnyvale-nimbys-threaten-stev...

Cooperation is hard work.

> For example, an expansion of the Stevens Creek bike path is encountering major resistance

But how could you not love that bike path!? It gets you practical places and it's beautiful!

My God, fucking NIMBYs.

In the context of the entire population, very few enjoy biking. Maybe they object to spending a ton of money on something that benefits a very small percentage of the population.

Given the hell that is morning traffic on the 101, the bicycle path is actually the easier and more pleasant commute alternative for a lot of people. Before claiming that only "a very small percentage of the population" benefit, we should look for numbers on how many people actually do use the bike path.

Obnoxious and cranky people, of the kind that often get banned from online forums, sit in planning meetings and have their way.

I bet that NIMBYKiller 3D would be a popular FPS in California.

Bonus points for realism in the burning hedges-- if you "New Game+" it and have the flame-thrower when you get to the Atherton level.

Let us not speak of things like expanding BART all the way to San Jose, and the traffic relief which that could bring.

The article implies that there is an in-total limit of new office space that has been adopted for some time period, which probably is based largely on ability to expand infrastructure to deal with added needs (e.g., commute traffic.)

Why the decision was made to alot the lion's share of that alotment to LinkedIn rather than Google, I don't know.

(Determining the actual cost to address the impacts and setting the cost of approval to recoup those costs, rather than setting hard limits, would seem a more efficient mechanism, if it could be done fairly and accurately, but that's not easier or less prone to political manipulation than setting limits and allocating within those limits.)

California seems like paradise for NIMBY:ers.

Maybe, if you own a significant amount of property, which is extremely expensive. So, in other words, if you're rich AF; yes.

The Bay Area specifically is a NIMBY paradise.

Parts of California, e.g., the Bay Area, have quite large concentrations of people who are secure enough in tgeir basic immediate needs to focus energy on more peripheral and/or longer-term concerns. NIMBY concerns are one of many such things.

It's infuriating until it prevents your neighbour from building a chemical factory right next to your house.

Like it or not, what you build often substantially impacts your neighbours.

Ok, something with noxious elements, yes. (Although I think it should be private neighborhood organizations to prevent this, not government).

All they wanted to build was a couple of office building and bike path.

Traffic impacts that are created by increasing occupancy faster than new infrastructure can be built have adverse impacts on everyone using the transport infrastructure just like a polluting industry has an adverse impact on the area (also, it has a pollution impact, whether or not infrastructure is adequate, but that's probably generally not as big of a concern.) So, scale can make new office space a noxious impact, and the article seems to clearly indicate that a preexisting overall scale limit was applied and Google, who had asked for most of it, got far less, and LinkedIn got the lion's share.

> Although I think it should be private neighborhood organizations to prevent this

How? Here's a way for me to speculate in this:

- Buy properties around the edge of said private neighborhood, set up all kinds of highly offensive things all surrounding the neighbourhood.

- Buy up properties in said neighbourhood as the price drops until I can get effective control of said organization.

- Remove the aforementioned offensive things and wait for property prices to rice again.

> All they wanted to build was a couple of office building and bike path.

Which impacts policing needs, fire services, traffic, public transport, garbage collections, postal services, and many others. It is also likely to have indirect effects on the local housing market, and through that an effect on local schools, hospitals and others.

There's no such thing as just a couple of office buildings when it comes to urban planning.

I'm not proposing abolishing the courts, so presumably the highly hypothetical scheme you've just described world be litigated in court.

Your second argument, based on logistics, is much stronger and bears consideration.

The highly hypothetical scheme I just described would be legal absent government planning regulations so there'd be nothing to litigate.

That doesn't tend to be what happens though. Factories need a lot of land, and they don't want to pay residential market rates for it, and current owners will want to maintain their property values. In a free market, the self-interest of current property owners and developers tends to self-regulate. The government then operates as more of an enforcer of private covenants and restrictions.

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/archives/...

It doesn't tend to be what happens any more because pretty much every developed country in the world, and many underdeveloped countries, have planning and zoning frameworks that creates severe obstacles to it.

The idea that cost prevents it is a fantasy. It may prevent it in your neighbourhood, and it may prevent some of the most extreme situations, but there are plenty of areas where I live (London suburb) where factories etc. and residential neighbourhood are right next door to each other, and where the land costs are equivalent and it would not at all be a cost problem for many "objectionable" businesses to set up shop right next door to your house if zoning allowed it.

True, factories generally get quickly squeezed out of the inner cores of large cities, but residential and industrial areas often collide in the poorer parts of towns.

The example of Houston is interesting, but not that relevant in the overall scheme of things, given that Houston is very low density for a city, and low density and according reduced competition for space certainly makes it less attractive for people to fight battles over land use.

Despite that, let me quote the addendum:

>Right after I posted the above item I got an email from Nancy Sarnoff, a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, pointing out that land use remains a very live issue in Houston. Mayor Bill White, for one, is trying to stop construction of a 23-story high-rise in a neighborhood of single-family houses.

The government manages the externalities.

For example, the sheer volume of office build out between the Shoreline and Rengstorff exits from 101 essentially installed a plug on 101 between those exits (really from Embarcadero to Moffet). MV council prefers plans that address that more. (The same problem, in reverse, happened when RWC tried to allow wetlands to be replaced with housing without improving the freeway infrastructure, which would simply have led to a clog not only for the residents but for everyone passing through).

Another monoculture risk is to allow one company to use too high a percentage of the real estate...meaning if they go under or move there's suddenly a glut of office space with all its own trickle down problems as well. It's in the city's interest try to have a diversity of employers. It's good for the general infrastructure as well.

(BTW I suspect your redneck area nevertheless had building codes at least for electrical and fire codes).

Point #1 won't be fixed by trying to interfere with smart growth, instead, Google will end up leasing more office space spread around MV and traffic will continue to grow worse.

Those companies are going to continue to hire more and more employees. Either the politicians actually work with them to come up with smart plans for growth to relief traffic pressure, or they can stick their heads in the sand hoping it'll go away.

There have been proposals IIRC to improve freeway infrastructure around MV, but those were shot down by anti-growth members of the council. In fact, the council often votes to make traffic clogs worse: http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/06/19/cycle-track-to-repla...

You seem to believe that the government of Mountain View has no control over the number of employees commuting into Mountain View, but isn't restricting the total square footage of office space in MV is a fairly effective way of doing that?

(Google leasing more office space around MV would be cancelled out by other employer's leasing less office space.)

So, like what happened when SGI left (and Google eventually moved in)? Or Sun -> Facebook?

The Bay Area has a lot of trophy spouses who cover up the shame of unemployability by "serving" on the sorts of boards and councils that have the power to go hard-core NIMBY and fight progress and make it impossible to develop a housing density appropriate to the demand and job market. They do this because the artificially low housing availability spikes prices. They don't actually care about their communities; they just want to keep their houses priced at 5 times what they're actually worth.

Of course, the breadwinners in those families (who finance the NIMBYs) get some karma when their trophy spouses (the ones pushing the NIMBY rules that prevent new development) give them stupid kids who'll require expensive and emotionally exhausting string-pulling in order to get them into schools. It's not enough, but it is something.

All that comes to mind is "Larry-5 report to Carousel."

I'm reminded of the observation that when a company declares a plan to build a giant, glorious new headquarters, it is time to sell your shares of that company.

The theory being that it marks an outbreak of hubris and will distract the upper management for years.

I don't know if the theory explained the mechanism behind it, merely the correlation. There's simple regression to the mean, or the fact that you have to achieve a certain level of success to build one of these glorious headquarters, and that seems to be around the natural limit for company size.

Yes; The Edifice Complex.

Oracle's hard drive styling of their silicon valley hq on Ralston road looks very dated now...suspect the google architecture will look very odd in 20 years time

Eh, I think many people still get that it's the "database" icon. http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/31784/what-is-the-orig...

This is eerily similar to what Cadbury did for its workers and employees.

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