This article's main topic is just "tech companies are building big offices", dressed up in some purple prose. And they're also to blame for high rents. But if they build apartments to help ease the housing shortage, that's a "company town" and we can't have that either. And Amazon is a "commandeering leech" which "suck[s] up our resources and refus[es] to participate in daily upkeep", but when Google offers Mountain View neighborhood benefits, that proves it's "seeking to wrest control of the city from its government".
I suppose the next step is to blame the Google buses for being "elitist" and "gentrifying", while in the next paragraph, blaming Google for putting cars on the road and making traffic worse....
“Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, a priest who heard the confessions of condemned witches, wrote in 1631 the Cautio Criminalis (‘prudence in criminal cases’) in which he bitingly described the decision tree for condemning accused witches: If the witch had led an evil and improper life, she was guilty; if she had led a good and proper life, this too was a proof, for witches dissemble and try to appear especially virtuous. After the woman was put in prison: if she was afraid, this proved her guilt; if she was not afraid, this proved her guilt, for witches characteristically pretend innocence and wear a bold front. Or on hearing of a denunciation of witchcraft against her, she might seek flight or remain; if she ran, that proved her guilt; if she remained, the devil had detained her so she could not get away.”
These people only know how to tear things down. I don't like FB or even Mark personally. But this is ridiculous and would not unfairly be characterized as sour grapes or simply not wanting progress at all to spite some good careers.
Society never moves at the pace of life. It always lags --even in command economies like China's or to a degree S Korea and Singapore. Adjustment takes time. At the same time as you point out, often times it's damned if they do, damned if they don't.
It's almost as if they would feel better if FB automated all the jobs away --not just manual labor low hanging fruit, but all jobs so that they would not have anything to blame on FB --except now everyone who used to work for them is now unemployed (presuming much of the industry learns from FB and also automates --in a purposely extreme example)
Why don't FB/Google/Apple/etc expand to Auburn, CA? Or Lincoln, CA? or Lincoln, NE?
I really don't think that putting the next 5000 employees next to the last 10000 employees improves productivity. Spread out. Spread the wealth and the pain. Make yourself less vulnerable to a single point of failure.
It's not just about productivity from the employer's side, but also about the negotiating power from employees. When FB/Google/Apple are all in the SF Bay Area, one of their elite employees can more easily get competitive offers from the others.
The bus thing is not the only example those people are contradictory against themselves. They blame techies for the hike of real-estate price, which to certain degree is justified. But at the same time they also oppose any construction of high density accommodation, blaming the company for destroying the neighborhood culture, talking about the good old days with orchards and trees.
I think what is really important here is, story like this fits into the narrative that big companies are inherently evil, and live their success on the misery of everyone else. I think you will be surprised how wide-spread it is, even on HN.
My biggest issue is their motivation: it is completely destructive. The only resolution, if according to them, is to reverse this, which I don't know how to accomplish, without severely disrupting the local economy, but I guess they don't care either, they got the clicks already. shrug.
They blame techies for the hike of real-estate price,
[...] they also oppose any construction of high density
accommodation
My theory is there are three parties in this discussion.
Renter Roy can't afford a house, and thinks tech companies' money is bidding up prices. Homeowner Harold has lived and worked in this neighbourhood for 40 years and doesn't want its character to change and his house's value to fall. Techie Tammy wants somewhere to live, she'd prefer not to spend a fortune to live in a hovel while her neighbours shame her for gentrifying.
Any pair of Roy, Harold and Tammy can get on OK - but it's just not possible for all three of them to get what they want.
There seems to be a contradiction - but that's because any time Roy and Tammy are about to agree, Harold is motivated to enter the conversation and disagree - and the same thing happens when Harold and Tammy are about to agree.
Seems like only Bay Area homeowners lose out if big tech companies decide to stop colocating all their workers in a handful of zip codes. And they won't get much of a say in that case.
> Any pair of Roy, Harold and Tammy can get on OK - but it's just not possible for all three of them to get what they want.
But this is a dilemma (or in this case a trilemma) only for individuals, "don't change the nature of this neighbourhood" shouldn't be something policymakers care about.
Actually, does Harold ever agree with either party? Tammy and Roy both want low housing costs, and Harold doesn't.
Sure, you can get to an armistice with Harold and Tammy: Housing costs are high but your salary is such that even spending 66% of your pay on housing leaves you with an ample amount of money.
But I wouldn't call that agreement anything other than begrudging.
> Actually, does Harold ever agree with either party? Tammy and Roy both want low housing costs, and Harold doesn't.
This seems like the essential problem. Harold isn't actually a buyer in the housing market; he locked in a fixed-rate mortgage 20 years ago. If he's planning on retiring somewhere outside the city, or to a managed community, he might never be on the buyer's side of the market again.
But he's definitely a seller - that house will presumably be sold or passed on to his kids. Property taxes are a pain, but they're a manageable one for a house bought as an investment. Harold is actively opposed to Roy and Tammy; if their rent doubled that would be a good outcome for him.
We keep treating this like all the residents of the city are a group, but that's not true. Renters own zero units of housing, homeowners own one unit, landlords own multiple. It's not at all guaranteed that homeowners align with renters more than with landlords.
There is a limit to the extent which the higher property taxes are tolerable and most people aren't really investors. However, as I understand it (I am on the East Coast), in California's case your property tax is actually locked in at the time of purchase regardless of appreciation.
While there are people who oppose high-density construction in general, the writer of this article isn't necessarily among them. There's a difference between the arguments "we shouldn't build high-density housing" and "having employees' housing, shopping, and most of their other needs provided by their employer has lead to some bad things in the past".
Appreciate the scare quotes, but company towns aren’t much fun for many employees to live in either.
Lots of people want to be part of a community that feels diverse and functional, rather than be part of some weird polarizing over-class just because they took a job.
For many people at the big companies, the job is the community that feels diverse and functional. It's just a re-drawing of boundaries. In many modern American cities or suburbs, you don't get community anyway; I can tell you (having experience on both the inside and the outside) that Google has a lot more community than Sunnyvale does.
Doesn't that seem a bit insane to you though? You're essentially saying the company is permitting you to continue your friendships. What about when they stop doing that?
I just go over to their houses or invite them over to mine. I've kept up with many of my Google friends, and we usually hang out over homemade pizza every 2 weeks. There are others where I go to their parties or other events or just invite them out for dinner every couple months.
Even in the most company-townish scenarios, I can't really see a company forbidding you from leaving the premises. If you wanna stay friends with a Googler, just invite them over.
Having to get a "visitor pass" to visit friends sounds like something that would happen with high school or college students living in dorms, not something that should be seen as normal or acceptable in the adult world.
The article is a badly written opinion piece that meanders through various topics, but your critique of it is beating a strawman.
It's not making the "you can't win" argument that tech companies should be critiqued whether or not they build housing.
Rather, it's that they're supposedly constructing "company towns" in the sense that the housing stock they build won't be for sale, and presumably only rented to employees. If you get fired you also get evicted.
Furthermore they'll own the nearby retail space as well. Will an Oculus competitor be for sale in the Facebook-owned chain of stores? Will someone trying to organize a Facebook union be allowed to use the meeting spaces at the Facebook town hall?
If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare, which in many cases is much worse. Though quite a number of Americans seem fine with that arrangement for some reason.
If I'm a healthy individual then the risk that I need my healthcare insurance are low (But it has a big impact on my economy if I do need it).
However the risk that I need some form of housing is 100% and the impact of not having it is huge which to me makes it a bigger risk. However YMMV depending on your situation.
I think the point is while losing healthcare insurance is absolutely a big problem, it's often not an immediate problem - there's a decent chance that a typical Facebook employee doesn't currently have a pressing need for healthcare, and even if they do, there's a decent chance they'll find new employment and be covered relatively quickly.
On the other hand, being evicted from your home is going to affect everyone, and there's no avoiding the upheaval - you're forced to find new housing in a famously overpriced market at the exact moment that you just lost your job.
That sounds like a case for health insurance. Just, you know, insurance. Not an account with a healthcare company with a subscription model (close to what the U.S. has now).
I'm married, things happened, and we ended up having a baby. Due to various circumstances beyond our control. That cost $100k.
As a healthy guy in my 20's, I suffered an injury through no fault of my own that led to me needing a serious back surgery. Net cost -> $250k.
Rolling the dice on something that fundamentally life altering, and expecting society to pick up the tab for the consequences of your risk management is bullshit. It is a good illustration of why you can't treat healthcare as a market driven thing unless you're willing to drop the moral obligation to preserve human life (and expect the providers to "absorb" it).
So you had a baby due to circumstances beyond your control? And you had an injury, again through no fault of your own? And the sum of those are over $350K.
Who is responsible for your health? I'd argue that the baby is entirely on you, and $100K for a delivery is insane unless you had incredible complications.
And if the back injury wasn't your fault, you could seek redress from whom is responsible. If it's work related, then work should pay. If it's an accident, then whomever is negligent should pay.
Unfortunately, no one wants to take responsibility, and expects "society" to make an individual whole after a loss.
How do you feel about people with debilitating genetic diseases/disorders? Through no fault of their own other than being born into this world, and no health care provider wants to anything to do with them. They are guaranteed money losers, and if insurance companies didn’t have to deal with pesky regulations, they would happily find and drop these patients.
I make no judgements on your moral character, but to follow your philosophy requires a fundamental acceptance that certain human life has less intrinsic value than other human life.
I have no issue with society picking up after people who truly have catastrophic illnesses (though that's really what health insurance SHOULD be, not the way it is currently.) My issue is with people expecting society to pay for health care that's not catastrophic nor "accidental." If I choose to have a child, I should expect to pay for it. My partner and I had to have IVF, and we paid for it.
The problem with litigation is that it takes forever. And while things are processing, you'll still be on the hook. If for example, you're the victim of a hit-and-run and the offender can't be found, you're still on the hook.
When this happens, the vultures will be circling. And this happens far too often.
I agree, there are lots of catastrophic events that can occur randomly. That's the ideal situation for real insurance (as opposed to what we have now). But statistically, most people use insurance for what amounts to either routine care, or care after they've neglected their health. And in the case of the poster I was replying to, he is basically giving up his agency and expecting society to make him whole.
What was out of control was a complication that nearly resulted in her death.
Those types of things happen. If you are married to someone who has a stroke, should you be sentenced to a lifetime of ramen noodles and destitution because your spouse needs care that costs $500/day.
Agreed. I was lamenting that it is seen as an essential part of the employer/employee relationship when the employer-as-landlord proposition seems so foreign and troubling. I thought drawing the connection would make people rethink the normal feelings we have about the American healthcare system.
Well, sure, I would like to see healthcare decoupled from jobs as well -- and frankly I'd think the startup lovers here would support it too, given that healthcare is actually a big barrier to entrepreneurship.
It's a bit different because it's a hidden expense when it comes to budgeting. Six months expenses looks different if sometimes you emergency fund needs to cover CORBA that changes over time in a way that is transparent to you. If it all came out of your accounts, you could literally measure expenses and judicially tweak from there.
I haven't worked for a company, Fortune 50 to small startup, in the past 20 years that provided medical insurance and didn't provide the employer covered cost data in an easy place for access on demand.
And that COBRA is not as free as people make it sound. In fact it's more expensive.
I pay $3.00/month for the group policy at work, but when I get fired I will also lose the company's payments to the plan on my behalf. So my expenses actually go up as a result of trying to take advantage of COBRA. Whereas if I were paying for my own policy, I would be aware of what it costs and would be paying the same price for insurance regardless of my employment status.
COBRA was cheaper than a comparable ACA plan for me. It was also WAY cheaper than what a comparable plan pre-ACA would’ve cost. If you just need “emergency” coverage, sure there’s cheaper options. But if you have a chronic health condition, COBRA will more often than not be a lot cheaper and offer better coverage with lower out of pocket costs.
1) The $600/month depends on how expensive the plan you had before. I've seen COBRA be as low as $350 to as high as $800, depending on the plan you had before.
2) Everything is relative. $600/month is certainly FAR FAR cheaper than the $10k/month the medicine I critically take costs. Comparable ACA plan w/o outrageous deductible is usually $700-900.
Lesson to be learned is, just because it isn't cost effective in your eyes, doesn't mean that many can't benefit from it! Feel lucky that your health needs are so basic, it almost certainly won't stay that way forever.
This is some William Gibson level stuff - in some of his stories the protagonists would be fixers who were hired to extract people from their companies they worked for.
I have been thinking about this with the Anthony Levandowski case.
How long does it take before someone has expertise valuable enough to go full Count Zero and extract them outside the reach of legal consequences? It's basically the approach Samuel Slater took, and I keep expecting to see it repeated today in either AI or biotech.
> This article's main topic is just "tech companies are building big offices", dressed up in some purple prose.
It seems to me that the article's main topic is that tech companies are building company towns, comprising not only housing units (The expansion of its headquarters will boast fifteen hundred units of housing, 15 percent of which it claims will be “offered at below-market rates.”) but also commercial spaces to provide town services such as retail stores and police stations.
The article goes on about what the author perceives as being the perils of a company town, complete with emotive platitudes regarding capitalism, but it is in fact an article about company towns, not "tech companies are building big offices".
I really don't understand how you were able to completely miss the whole point made in the article. Have you actually read it?
Yes, it’s annoyingly over-written. Some parts barely even make sense. I also question whether the author knows what the word “capitalism” actually means.
Alas, capitalism means many different things to many different people.
(As a mildly interesting example of a similar phenomenon: the pro-business libertarian / neo-liberal FDP party in Germany still proudly calls itself 'liberal'.)
it's shocking that this division exists. liberty requires freedom from ANY institution, whether state, church, or corporation, from having too much power over your life.
Agreed. I had to stop reading it. The subtitle gives you all the information you need: "Facebook, Amazon, and Google are reviving the ill-fated 'company towns' of the Gilded Age."
I am troubled by privately-owned "public" spaces but the writing of this article isn't doing anyone any favors.
I cringed at this: "Its CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos, has vowed to acquire four million more over the next five years, a muscular move meant to complement his midlife-crisis physique."
Is it just me or is Bezos' fitness a bizarrely common topic for tech-skeptic pieces? I swear I see it written and meme-d about more than basically any other single human-interest factoid about executives.
If that's true, it raises the question of why. The look isn't all that exceptional, he's just somebody who works out a fair bit, and didn't when he was younger. He's not exactly Erik Prince. So the focus on it, and the frequently malicious tone, sort of parse as "he doesn't look like nerds do anymore, that's suspicious".
This could all be apophenia, obviously. It just raises an eyebrow since I've seen athletic programmers greeted with "but you don't look like a programmer!"
With an average tenure of < 2 years at these companies now, subsidized housing may force people to stay in companies longer especially if they have families. I'm not sure they can recreate Kodak/Rochester type place as there are so many rich companies vying for the same people.
Even if that were the case if they included temps, contractors, etc. The towns brought that upon themselves due to their aversion to growth and 1960s suburban utopia idyll that remains in their master plans.
Oh Lord. A bunch of poor 19th century miners in a remote town is not the same as this at all. These are some of the richest and easily employable workers in the country living in one of the most populated regions.
They wouldn't have to do this if the local government wasn't so restrictive either. These companies don't care if their employees own their own homes or not. But unfortunately big companies are the only groups with enough power and resources to push through new housing development.
Well, there are a couple responses there. Obviously the mining towns are the most extreme expression of the problem, but is it not reasonable to say you might see smaller echoes of this in the tech companies' case? White-collar workers in general are working longer hours, etc., so I don't think we can say they write all the rules.
But perhaps a bigger question is, what about all the people who work at Google or Facebook who are not in-demand engineers? It seems like once you've established the principle it's easier to expand it to less prestigious positions.
"Google has backed down from a threat to deny badly needed housing in Mountain View if it isn’t given more office space for its futuristic new “Charleston East” campus."
I would tend to agree with the tech-ie opinion that unions are becoming obselete in the US. Unions existed to protect workers who were unskilled and interchangeable; the endgame of tech is to automate all those jobs. But obviously I’m not a labor scholar and this is just an unfounded opinion.
I very strongly disagree with the "unskilled" part. I am not a labor scholar either, but unions serve to federate common interests of workers who may not individually have leverage against their employer or relevant regulation body.
Because your employer in tech can afford to give you a lifestyle easily in the highest couple percentiles doesn't mean you aren't replaceable and that you won't need representation as a class of worker at some point.
Wages are high if the supply of labour is low and the employer has money for wages. If supply is low and the employer does not have money, then the job won't exist. This is why tech workers wouldn't benefit from a union very much.
It's not gonna last forever this way. Unions are not very useful for developers now, but you might want to have them already in-place by the time they become needed.
Unions are mostly there to keep out newcomers and non-union members. Eg strike breakers.
I'm internationally mobile, so I'm often the newcomer.
(And from a philosophical point of view, programmers are so well paid that even taking that down a nodge to the benefit of the general public would be fine. What we have to make sure is that forming new tech companies becomes easier and easier---so that any general cheapening of programmers benefits the customers and not the owners of companies.
Traditionally, unions are the very opposite of lowering barriers to market entry.)
> programmers are so well paid that even taking that down a nodge to the benefit of the general public would be fine
The problem is, taking that down a nodge will not benefit the general public. All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies.
I suppose there are two ways to view this - putting up barriers to entry vs. preventing wages from being driven down by encouraging everyone and their dog to become coders. At this point I sort of see it as both at the same time.
The reasons unions could be useful in the future is both to preserve a reasonable standard of living for tech employees and to help oppose unethical demands from employers. Right now, tech employees have some leverage over their bosses. Without unions, this will eventually end.
Nice to see something like this adapted to the US, I've seen comparable proposals in Germany [0], also build on a similar base of taxing land value/production facilities.
Imho it seems like pretty valid approach considering land is one of the few resources we recognize as actually being finite, so it's a good place to start for building a "base".
On the other hand it's quite frustrating how accepting we have become of creating "wealth" out of nothing by printing paper money but if we try to do the same thing based on something actually tangible, like land, people lose their shit going "you can't just make up money", sure we can, we do it all the time.
I don't see the connection between paper money and land value tax. One of the reasons economists like taxing land is that the supply is perfectly inelastic---literally fixed to be precise. So a tax can't distort the market.
> [...] All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies.
That's why we need to keep working on lowering barriers to entry. (Not just in software but all industries.)
Whenever there's an industry where owning a company confers outsized excess returns, I want a hundred copycats to come in and compete away the margins. (For lots of industries one of the most straight-forward way to get that is to make entries by foreign companies easy. This way a country can benefit without necessarily having to grow a local ecosystem of startups first.)
I am happy to encourage everyone and their dogs to become coders, if they can hack it. Over the long run and average over many people, income is ultimately determined by productivity. Let's grow the pie.
You're assuming that wages are the only thing worth arguing over. Work environment, tools, work/life balance are all things that you might want, and where you might need leverage to get them.
Also the stuff about age discrimination. It's weird to me that so many people here are unconcerned about that because, like... we're all going to be old someday (hopefully).
It's a bit hard to talk about unions in general. Eg the Americans have these unions for people working in the entertainment industry (eg actors guild or so?), and those people usually work on a project basis, don't they?
On a historical note, I am currently reading A Generation of Materialism. The book has some very interesting bits about the early history of unions in Europe.
Of course. If I think of cases where people might expect to have the same employer for life I think you'll be more likely to find unionization there. Not that it cannot happen outside of that condition.
They don't make sense for knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are rarely interchangeable, so standardizing contracts, job titles, pay schedules, working conditions, etc., makes little sense. There is also the chance for protectionism (closed shops) that runs counter to the freelance culture in tech.
Some sort of worker-administered group could make a lot of sense. But maybe a guild or cooperative instead.
Services that would be useful, especially (or only) if employers weren't paying the bill:
* Personal negotiation agents
* Career consultants. Lots of engineers are very underpaid and need some help holding their boss accountable. Or finding the next job.
* (Re)training. Engineers shouldn't specialize themselves into early retirement.
* Lobbying and marketing. Do you want BigCo telling your congressman what you think?
* Independent research and reporting on work environments. Some push back on penny-wise, pound-foolish facilities decisions.
* Charitable technology work not under a corporate brand
* Insurance, modulo whether competitive tax advantages can be arranged. Setting up pools for disability and life insurance, at least. Maybe healthcare if the tax advantages can be worked out.
A guild is just a union by another name. The Screenwriters Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, and the various professional sports unions (e.g. NFLPA) are all good examples of unions representing highly-paid, non-interchangable workers.
I actually had those in mind as close to what might make sense. Though agent responsibilities might be assumed by the guild as well.
However, the organizations you list have gone in strike as leverage in collective negotiations. That is an aspect I doubt makes sense for tech outside of basic health or ethical concerns. Both the collective bargaining and the striking.
I never thought I was underpaid until a year ago when I asked for double my previous salary (now in low six figures) at a new position and nobody blinked. I had been leaving a LOT of money on the table and didn't know it!
> They don't make sense for knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are rarely interchangeable, so standardizing contracts, job titles, pay schedules, working conditions, etc., makes little sense. There is also the chance for protectionism (closed shops) that runs counter to the freelance culture in tech.
If that was the case, no one would have been whining about H1B import companies killing US knowledge jobs.
I think your conclusion is premised on a false dichotomy: that either tech jobs are standardized or H1B visas are harmless. There are many ways both can be false at the same time.
> Unions existed to protect workers who were unskilled and interchangeable
I think that's pretty offensive to a lot of tradespeople. If you think plumbers, carpenters, or electricians are unskilled, try doing what they do. Unions protected both skilled and unskilled workers. Whether they continue to do so, or whether they can serve in that role for information workers, is quite an interesting question, but skilled vs. unskilled is not at the crux of it.
They are definitely interchangeable. What currently is happening is that the bottom 95th percentile of people in software engineering and product are discovering that they are also completely utterly interchangeable.
It would be creepy having to live in a employers' housing unit. But if it is subsidized enough many would jump on it.
The interview process at many of these company is already geared to bring in college graduates. So a dorm of sort would make sense. Then they could outfit them work spaces so you could live there and maybe work remotely (but only from a company provided housing unit).
How about just letting people work from home to begin with so they don't all have to be crammed into one town or one building so that they can then all type on a computer? It is rather interesting I think these companies sell digital connectivity, collaboration, -- but when it comes to themselves they like to shove everyone into buildings.
Japan has a lot of this, but it's usually a building in the middle of a city so you're not like... completely surrounded. But your neighbors are probably from the same company.
Many companies have appartments to rent for their employees, especially bigger companies in things like civil engineering. They'll usually let you rent for a super low rate (like $100/month), and though obviously your salary is given with an understanding you'll stay there.
And isn't Japanese corporate culture, for all of its repressive and overworked ways, at least compensating its workers with guaranteed lifetime employment, pensions, etc.? Whereas in the U.S. You may be fired at any time.
Last time I checked, Facebook, Google et.al where not philanthropic organizations.
For it to be less evil they should build the houses, then sell the properties, not rent, for below market prices.
It's exactly these biggest companies that should take moral responsibility and relocate / redistribute their work to various cities on the one hand, and if they want to go through with the idea of company towns, campuses etc, they need to move way out of the SF area - there's huge wads of unused space in the US, they could found their own city if need be. Probably not something very attractive to their employees, but it is one possible solution; especially if they can build it near SF, with e.g. only a 30 minute hyperloop or maglev train trip required to get to HQ.
> Probably not something very attractive to their employees...
I keep hearing this meme and I'm skeptical. Far more people live outside the Bay Area than inside it. Are they all poor saps who are waiting to move to Silicon Valley but haven't yet figured out how?
I see this attitude from new yorkers a lot. There are only two types of people: those that live in NY and those that failed to live in NY. Because they aspire to live in a coastal metropolis obviously everyone else does too.
> Far more people live outside the Bay Area than inside it. Are they all poor saps who are waiting to move to Silicon Valley but haven't yet figured out how?
Usually when people claim that companies should try to recreate Silicon Valley in some cheaper "heartland of America", they are talking about flyover country. And demographically, many people still in flyover country may well be poor saps who haven't yet figured out how to move to the coasts, as statistics show a steady drain of young people to the coasts or at least a few major metropolitan areas in their part of America.
>Are they all poor saps who are waiting to move to Silicon Valley but haven't yet figured out how?
I hope this comment was not made in earnest, because this attitude is exactly why SV is a dumpster fire that I have no desire of taking part in. I'll continue living my poor ramshackle existence here in flyover country, thank you very much.
Such lazy, barren journalism. Automatically slanted towards racism, Marxism, and other hot topics of the day. This didn't inform me in any way other than the author's personal agenda.
If you're clicking a link to the Baffler expecting something other than a withering critique of some aspect of modern society it's your own fault. It's not intended to be "journalism" in the sense you mean it.
HN is criticizing the article wording but completely ignoring its point. This article coupled with the other one on the dystopian reality of San Francisco[1] have me feeling completely disgusted at the current state of the tech industry.
Simply put: these tech giants are making too much money. They are losing touch with the average people and simply put with reality itself. It wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly how all "evil" companies of the past became evil themselves.
Making money is not evil. Wall street makes money, pharma makes money, lawyers make money, insurance makes money, automobiles, consumer goods, real estate - all huge industries. Now that tech is being used on a massive scale of course the tech companies are making money. So what? It doesn't make sense to equate rich with evil - either for companies or for people.
SF (and many cities in the US and across the world) have always had poor people. The world has always been very unequal with kings and paupers and everything in between. Now some of them are in the same town and it freaks people out.. welcome to the real world. Anyone who has ever lived in NYC has seen the same inequality.
Making money is not evil, but social class increases likelihood of utilitarianism. Being a tech elite in the valley arguably makes one more likely to be more of a utilitarian. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201304/the-rich.... Large scale usage does not increase likelihood of profit, either. There aren't any hard disk drive billionaires, for example. Also they aren't in the same town; those who are trying to make it or work in the 'supporting cast' take BART from oakland or richmond, or do extreme commuting from the san joaquin valley.
This argument seems a little surreal. Is the take here seriously "utilitarianism is so intrinsically bad that wealth is evil because it causes utilitarianism?"
Utilitarianism is an exceedingly broad category; hedonistic, rule, preference, and negative utilitarianism all recommend different behaviors. But none of them equate to selfishness or abuse of others.
I mean, the article does give us "Piff’s earlier work suggests Richie might act in a way that neither a utilitarian nor a non-utilitarian would support, benefiting himself at the expense of others." But that's a completely different, contradictory argument being thrown in as though it bolsters the main point about utilitarianism. Also, it relies on a truly wild series of leaps from "people taking anti-anxiety drugs" to "psychopaths" to "rich people".
(That older paper linked is setting off all my alarm bells for shitty social psych research. The second one doesn't look promising, but is paywalled.
- "We derived the ethics of the rich from an online quiz" is a bad sign.
- "We didn't control for education" is a problem in its own right.
- PNAS is a bad sign.
- 'Neutral primes' versus 'greed is good primes' is a disastrously bad sign, it's not even clear if those things work.
- Human-coding of driver behavior is questionable at best.
- Deriving human ethics from groups of ~100 Berkeley students is almost cartoonishly bad.
My baseline here is "forking paths plus massive bias risks got us a catchy headline".)
You are biased against social psych research, as I think we all should be, but I'm not sure singling it out is the best strategy. The issues of reproducibility and 'p-hacking' among others are a big problem in a variety of disciplines right now, and there is a good synopsis of just one aspect of the problem in hard sciences here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis. For a non-paywall link to the original research this is better: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short
> those who are trying to make it or work in the 'supporting cast' take BART from oakland or richmond
At this point BART or other mass transit access to your workplace is itself a sort of privilege, perhaps not for the tech elite who wouldn't take mass transit anyway, but for rank and file skilled employees.
For many of them, mass transit is preferable to hours spent in car traffic. I'm one of those who feels privileged to be able to take BART to work.
It's service workers who have often been pushed out beyond the Bay Area into mega commutes.
"This time around, though, that community will be bridled with union–busting and data-harvesting apparatuses sure to make even the most paranoid techno-tyrant salivate."
This is what worries me the most about something like Facebook running the town. I can imagine their Zuck-net would have plenty of mining to flag "potential unionizers" and snuff them out before they have a chance to begin.
Unions are really the only answer to balance the corporation's power and I fear they won't stand a chance.
This is such a ridiculous impasse. Why don't the authorities do what most sensible countries do i.e. build multi-storied apartments with decent public transportation? Yes I know in the US that equates to the ghetto/projects/low income housing (which is a mindset that needs to change).
As far as the bay area goes this is possible since most residents are foreigners or 1st and 2nd generation Americans who are probably more open to the idea of living in a skyscraper.
Maybe instead of complaining about how facebook and google have the made the area popular, you should take aim at the entrenched owners who refuse to allow higher density housing to actually relieve the pressure on the market.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] threadI suppose the next step is to blame the Google buses for being "elitist" and "gentrifying", while in the next paragraph, blaming Google for putting cars on the road and making traffic worse....
“Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, a priest who heard the confessions of condemned witches, wrote in 1631 the Cautio Criminalis (‘prudence in criminal cases’) in which he bitingly described the decision tree for condemning accused witches: If the witch had led an evil and improper life, she was guilty; if she had led a good and proper life, this too was a proof, for witches dissemble and try to appear especially virtuous. After the woman was put in prison: if she was afraid, this proved her guilt; if she was not afraid, this proved her guilt, for witches characteristically pretend innocence and wear a bold front. Or on hearing of a denunciation of witchcraft against her, she might seek flight or remain; if she ran, that proved her guilt; if she remained, the devil had detained her so she could not get away.”
Society never moves at the pace of life. It always lags --even in command economies like China's or to a degree S Korea and Singapore. Adjustment takes time. At the same time as you point out, often times it's damned if they do, damned if they don't.
It's almost as if they would feel better if FB automated all the jobs away --not just manual labor low hanging fruit, but all jobs so that they would not have anything to blame on FB --except now everyone who used to work for them is now unemployed (presuming much of the industry learns from FB and also automates --in a purposely extreme example)
I really don't think that putting the next 5000 employees next to the last 10000 employees improves productivity. Spread out. Spread the wealth and the pain. Make yourself less vulnerable to a single point of failure.
from your HN profile
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The bus thing is not the only example those people are contradictory against themselves. They blame techies for the hike of real-estate price, which to certain degree is justified. But at the same time they also oppose any construction of high density accommodation, blaming the company for destroying the neighborhood culture, talking about the good old days with orchards and trees.
I think what is really important here is, story like this fits into the narrative that big companies are inherently evil, and live their success on the misery of everyone else. I think you will be surprised how wide-spread it is, even on HN.
My biggest issue is their motivation: it is completely destructive. The only resolution, if according to them, is to reverse this, which I don't know how to accomplish, without severely disrupting the local economy, but I guess they don't care either, they got the clicks already. shrug.
Renter Roy can't afford a house, and thinks tech companies' money is bidding up prices. Homeowner Harold has lived and worked in this neighbourhood for 40 years and doesn't want its character to change and his house's value to fall. Techie Tammy wants somewhere to live, she'd prefer not to spend a fortune to live in a hovel while her neighbours shame her for gentrifying.
Any pair of Roy, Harold and Tammy can get on OK - but it's just not possible for all three of them to get what they want.
There seems to be a contradiction - but that's because any time Roy and Tammy are about to agree, Harold is motivated to enter the conversation and disagree - and the same thing happens when Harold and Tammy are about to agree.
But this is a dilemma (or in this case a trilemma) only for individuals, "don't change the nature of this neighbourhood" shouldn't be something policymakers care about.
Who do you think votes for those policymakers? (And donates to their campaigns)
Sure, you can get to an armistice with Harold and Tammy: Housing costs are high but your salary is such that even spending 66% of your pay on housing leaves you with an ample amount of money.
But I wouldn't call that agreement anything other than begrudging.
This seems like the essential problem. Harold isn't actually a buyer in the housing market; he locked in a fixed-rate mortgage 20 years ago. If he's planning on retiring somewhere outside the city, or to a managed community, he might never be on the buyer's side of the market again.
But he's definitely a seller - that house will presumably be sold or passed on to his kids. Property taxes are a pain, but they're a manageable one for a house bought as an investment. Harold is actively opposed to Roy and Tammy; if their rent doubled that would be a good outcome for him.
We keep treating this like all the residents of the city are a group, but that's not true. Renters own zero units of housing, homeowners own one unit, landlords own multiple. It's not at all guaranteed that homeowners align with renters more than with landlords.
Lots of people want to be part of a community that feels diverse and functional, rather than be part of some weird polarizing over-class just because they took a job.
Of course that might be just a best case scenario..
Even in the most company-townish scenarios, I can't really see a company forbidding you from leaving the premises. If you wanna stay friends with a Googler, just invite them over.
I moved internationally so often, I'm used to building new circles of friends.
Harder to comeback to a job and much more awkward to hangout around old coworkers.
It's not making the "you can't win" argument that tech companies should be critiqued whether or not they build housing.
Rather, it's that they're supposedly constructing "company towns" in the sense that the housing stock they build won't be for sale, and presumably only rented to employees. If you get fired you also get evicted.
Furthermore they'll own the nearby retail space as well. Will an Oculus competitor be for sale in the Facebook-owned chain of stores? Will someone trying to organize a Facebook union be allowed to use the meeting spaces at the Facebook town hall?
If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare, which in many cases is much worse. Though quite a number of Americans seem fine with that arrangement for some reason.
I don't think I know any family without a member of it having some kind of medical condition. (bad turn of phrase, but do I get the point across ?)
On the other hand, being evicted from your home is going to affect everyone, and there's no avoiding the upheaval - you're forced to find new housing in a famously overpriced market at the exact moment that you just lost your job.
I'm married, things happened, and we ended up having a baby. Due to various circumstances beyond our control. That cost $100k.
As a healthy guy in my 20's, I suffered an injury through no fault of my own that led to me needing a serious back surgery. Net cost -> $250k.
Rolling the dice on something that fundamentally life altering, and expecting society to pick up the tab for the consequences of your risk management is bullshit. It is a good illustration of why you can't treat healthcare as a market driven thing unless you're willing to drop the moral obligation to preserve human life (and expect the providers to "absorb" it).
Who is responsible for your health? I'd argue that the baby is entirely on you, and $100K for a delivery is insane unless you had incredible complications.
And if the back injury wasn't your fault, you could seek redress from whom is responsible. If it's work related, then work should pay. If it's an accident, then whomever is negligent should pay.
Unfortunately, no one wants to take responsibility, and expects "society" to make an individual whole after a loss.
I make no judgements on your moral character, but to follow your philosophy requires a fundamental acceptance that certain human life has less intrinsic value than other human life.
You likely didn’t pay for the prenatal care after the first trimester, and likely didn’t pay for the delivery beyond coinsurance.
When this happens, the vultures will be circling. And this happens far too often.
What was out of control was a complication that nearly resulted in her death.
Those types of things happen. If you are married to someone who has a stroke, should you be sentenced to a lifetime of ramen noodles and destitution because your spouse needs care that costs $500/day.
Not in the US, at least not for 18 months anyway. It’s called COBRA and is available to anyone with work provided insurance.
I haven't worked for a company, Fortune 50 to small startup, in the past 20 years that provided medical insurance and didn't provide the employer covered cost data in an easy place for access on demand.
I pay $3.00/month for the group policy at work, but when I get fired I will also lose the company's payments to the plan on my behalf. So my expenses actually go up as a result of trying to take advantage of COBRA. Whereas if I were paying for my own policy, I would be aware of what it costs and would be paying the same price for insurance regardless of my employment status.
2) Everything is relative. $600/month is certainly FAR FAR cheaper than the $10k/month the medicine I critically take costs. Comparable ACA plan w/o outrageous deductible is usually $700-900.
Lesson to be learned is, just because it isn't cost effective in your eyes, doesn't mean that many can't benefit from it! Feel lucky that your health needs are so basic, it almost certainly won't stay that way forever.
How long does it take before someone has expertise valuable enough to go full Count Zero and extract them outside the reach of legal consequences? It's basically the approach Samuel Slater took, and I keep expecting to see it repeated today in either AI or biotech.
It seems to me that the article's main topic is that tech companies are building company towns, comprising not only housing units (The expansion of its headquarters will boast fifteen hundred units of housing, 15 percent of which it claims will be “offered at below-market rates.”) but also commercial spaces to provide town services such as retail stores and police stations.
The article goes on about what the author perceives as being the perils of a company town, complete with emotive platitudes regarding capitalism, but it is in fact an article about company towns, not "tech companies are building big offices".
I really don't understand how you were able to completely miss the whole point made in the article. Have you actually read it?
Thank you for sharing this. I wish other people could look at all articles through this lens to see the biases that authors have.
(As a mildly interesting example of a similar phenomenon: the pro-business libertarian / neo-liberal FDP party in Germany still proudly calls itself 'liberal'.)
I am troubled by privately-owned "public" spaces but the writing of this article isn't doing anyone any favors.
If that's true, it raises the question of why. The look isn't all that exceptional, he's just somebody who works out a fair bit, and didn't when he was younger. He's not exactly Erik Prince. So the focus on it, and the frequently malicious tone, sort of parse as "he doesn't look like nerds do anymore, that's suspicious".
This could all be apophenia, obviously. It just raises an eyebrow since I've seen athletic programmers greeted with "but you don't look like a programmer!"
citation needed :)
Matches my experience at FB & Apple. I spent about 2 years at each.
They wouldn't have to do this if the local government wasn't so restrictive either. These companies don't care if their employees own their own homes or not. But unfortunately big companies are the only groups with enough power and resources to push through new housing development.
But perhaps a bigger question is, what about all the people who work at Google or Facebook who are not in-demand engineers? It seems like once you've established the principle it's easier to expand it to less prestigious positions.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/02/google-backs-down-from...
"Google has backed down from a threat to deny badly needed housing in Mountain View if it isn’t given more office space for its futuristic new “Charleston East” campus."
Might I suggest cameras and tracking sensors to further optimize my luxurious company accommodations. /s
I would tend to agree with the tech-ie opinion that unions are becoming obselete in the US. Unions existed to protect workers who were unskilled and interchangeable; the endgame of tech is to automate all those jobs. But obviously I’m not a labor scholar and this is just an unfounded opinion.
Because your employer in tech can afford to give you a lifestyle easily in the highest couple percentiles doesn't mean you aren't replaceable and that you won't need representation as a class of worker at some point.
I'm internationally mobile, so I'm often the newcomer.
(And from a philosophical point of view, programmers are so well paid that even taking that down a nodge to the benefit of the general public would be fine. What we have to make sure is that forming new tech companies becomes easier and easier---so that any general cheapening of programmers benefits the customers and not the owners of companies.
Traditionally, unions are the very opposite of lowering barriers to market entry.)
The problem is, taking that down a nodge will not benefit the general public. All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies.
I suppose there are two ways to view this - putting up barriers to entry vs. preventing wages from being driven down by encouraging everyone and their dog to become coders. At this point I sort of see it as both at the same time.
The reasons unions could be useful in the future is both to preserve a reasonable standard of living for tech employees and to help oppose unethical demands from employers. Right now, tech employees have some leverage over their bosses. Without unions, this will eventually end.
That can easily be fixed by plugging tax evasion loopholes and generally taxing higher.
If there's a will then there's a way, the problem is pretty much finding the way everybody agrees on.
Imho it seems like pretty valid approach considering land is one of the few resources we recognize as actually being finite, so it's a good place to start for building a "base".
On the other hand it's quite frustrating how accepting we have become of creating "wealth" out of nothing by printing paper money but if we try to do the same thing based on something actually tangible, like land, people lose their shit going "you can't just make up money", sure we can, we do it all the time.
[0] http://www.wissensmanufaktur.net/plan-b
If you can read German and like some historical musings in this direction (including about money), do read Silvio Gesell. https://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/gesell/nwo/nwo.pdf
That's why we need to keep working on lowering barriers to entry. (Not just in software but all industries.)
Whenever there's an industry where owning a company confers outsized excess returns, I want a hundred copycats to come in and compete away the margins. (For lots of industries one of the most straight-forward way to get that is to make entries by foreign companies easy. This way a country can benefit without necessarily having to grow a local ecosystem of startups first.)
I am happy to encourage everyone and their dogs to become coders, if they can hack it. Over the long run and average over many people, income is ultimately determined by productivity. Let's grow the pie.
On a historical note, I am currently reading A Generation of Materialism. The book has some very interesting bits about the early history of unions in Europe.
They don't make sense for knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are rarely interchangeable, so standardizing contracts, job titles, pay schedules, working conditions, etc., makes little sense. There is also the chance for protectionism (closed shops) that runs counter to the freelance culture in tech.
Some sort of worker-administered group could make a lot of sense. But maybe a guild or cooperative instead.
Services that would be useful, especially (or only) if employers weren't paying the bill:
* Personal negotiation agents
* Career consultants. Lots of engineers are very underpaid and need some help holding their boss accountable. Or finding the next job.
* (Re)training. Engineers shouldn't specialize themselves into early retirement.
* Lobbying and marketing. Do you want BigCo telling your congressman what you think?
* Independent research and reporting on work environments. Some push back on penny-wise, pound-foolish facilities decisions.
* Charitable technology work not under a corporate brand
* Insurance, modulo whether competitive tax advantages can be arranged. Setting up pools for disability and life insurance, at least. Maybe healthcare if the tax advantages can be worked out.
However, the organizations you list have gone in strike as leverage in collective negotiations. That is an aspect I doubt makes sense for tech outside of basic health or ethical concerns. Both the collective bargaining and the striking.
If that was the case, no one would have been whining about H1B import companies killing US knowledge jobs.
I think that's pretty offensive to a lot of tradespeople. If you think plumbers, carpenters, or electricians are unskilled, try doing what they do. Unions protected both skilled and unskilled workers. Whether they continue to do so, or whether they can serve in that role for information workers, is quite an interesting question, but skilled vs. unskilled is not at the crux of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store
It would be creepy having to live in a employers' housing unit. But if it is subsidized enough many would jump on it.
The interview process at many of these company is already geared to bring in college graduates. So a dorm of sort would make sense. Then they could outfit them work spaces so you could live there and maybe work remotely (but only from a company provided housing unit).
How about just letting people work from home to begin with so they don't all have to be crammed into one town or one building so that they can then all type on a computer? It is rather interesting I think these companies sell digital connectivity, collaboration, -- but when it comes to themselves they like to shove everyone into buildings.
And you'd pay with zuckbucks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
I keep hearing this meme and I'm skeptical. Far more people live outside the Bay Area than inside it. Are they all poor saps who are waiting to move to Silicon Valley but haven't yet figured out how?
Usually when people claim that companies should try to recreate Silicon Valley in some cheaper "heartland of America", they are talking about flyover country. And demographically, many people still in flyover country may well be poor saps who haven't yet figured out how to move to the coasts, as statistics show a steady drain of young people to the coasts or at least a few major metropolitan areas in their part of America.
I think the causality is at least more complex than the aforementioned meme implies.
I hope this comment was not made in earnest, because this attitude is exactly why SV is a dumpster fire that I have no desire of taking part in. I'll continue living my poor ramshackle existence here in flyover country, thank you very much.
Simply put: these tech giants are making too much money. They are losing touch with the average people and simply put with reality itself. It wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly how all "evil" companies of the past became evil themselves.
[1]: https://www.mhudack.com/blog/2017/10/1/san-francisco-now-wit...
SF (and many cities in the US and across the world) have always had poor people. The world has always been very unequal with kings and paupers and everything in between. Now some of them are in the same town and it freaks people out.. welcome to the real world. Anyone who has ever lived in NYC has seen the same inequality.
Utilitarianism is an exceedingly broad category; hedonistic, rule, preference, and negative utilitarianism all recommend different behaviors. But none of them equate to selfishness or abuse of others.
I mean, the article does give us "Piff’s earlier work suggests Richie might act in a way that neither a utilitarian nor a non-utilitarian would support, benefiting himself at the expense of others." But that's a completely different, contradictory argument being thrown in as though it bolsters the main point about utilitarianism. Also, it relies on a truly wild series of leaps from "people taking anti-anxiety drugs" to "psychopaths" to "rich people".
(That older paper linked is setting off all my alarm bells for shitty social psych research. The second one doesn't look promising, but is paywalled.
- "We derived the ethics of the rich from an online quiz" is a bad sign.
- "We didn't control for education" is a problem in its own right.
- PNAS is a bad sign.
- 'Neutral primes' versus 'greed is good primes' is a disastrously bad sign, it's not even clear if those things work.
- Human-coding of driver behavior is questionable at best.
- Deriving human ethics from groups of ~100 Berkeley students is almost cartoonishly bad.
My baseline here is "forking paths plus massive bias risks got us a catchy headline".)
At this point BART or other mass transit access to your workplace is itself a sort of privilege, perhaps not for the tech elite who wouldn't take mass transit anyway, but for rank and file skilled employees.
For many of them, mass transit is preferable to hours spent in car traffic. I'm one of those who feels privileged to be able to take BART to work.
It's service workers who have often been pushed out beyond the Bay Area into mega commutes.
This is what worries me the most about something like Facebook running the town. I can imagine their Zuck-net would have plenty of mining to flag "potential unionizers" and snuff them out before they have a chance to begin.
Unions are really the only answer to balance the corporation's power and I fear they won't stand a chance.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
As far as the bay area goes this is possible since most residents are foreigners or 1st and 2nd generation Americans who are probably more open to the idea of living in a skyscraper.