You can object to it if you want, but it's a well known phenomena - starting to build buildings is often a bad sign for the company's long-term future prospects. And since we're talking about companies peaking, the size of the company isn't particularly relevant.
It is, of course, not a universal law, but lavish new office spaces are one of those things that don't seem to go well.
"Pouring huge money into overly glorious new headquarters — “The Edifice Complex” — then repeating two years later. There’s also a danger in signaling to employees “we’ve made it, we’re amazing” (and while everyone hates the cramped but collaborative space when they’re in it, they miss it terribly after the move)."
You had asked for data that it was a well-known phenomena. A major business publication and a well-known VC firm both referring to it by name is decent data for it being well-known, and the best you're going to get without paying me.
I think the original term comes from a headquarters where the company leaders want to express themselves. "Utility" buildings are pretty common and dictated by function for the most part.
This happens to governments when they decide to build the "New City Hall". It generally goes really badly.
The BI article [1] you linked to only shows a correlation between a handful of companies' failure and their new buildings. They failed because of other factors; new buildings only accelerated their downfall.
If this is the norm we wouldn't even have Google (and FB, Apple, Microsoft, Apple, etc) campuses today.
I think perhaps starting to build buildings is a sign of a company's maturity, and that separately many companies that achieve this maturity end up struggling to maintain the focus they enjoyed during their growth.
So maybe it is that big successful companies tend to build buildings, and that success sometimes is the downfall of an innovative company.
Exactly. I at least view this phenomena as more likely signaling a peak than a downfall.
It's often a sign that some of the people at the top believe they have nothing better to do than immerse themselves in creating a special building. They are by definition not as focused on the company's business. If this is happening with Google, it doesn't signal doom, but, as you say, a degree of maturity.
"Exactly. I at least view this phenomena as more likely signaling a peak than a downfall." - You do realize that a "peak" inherently implies a decline, yes?
Yes, but peak does not necessarily equal "downfall", it could be the start of a plateau, which can be very consequential, especially for a previously high growth tech company. I'm also using it loosely, it could also, after a while, be followed by another growth period. Or a decline could be slow, Google's business isn't necessarily of the sort where a fall would be quick.
A lot of is to work around the limitations imposed - like not negatively impacting the habitat of burrowing owls. So it may just be a really weird solution for a series of really weird problems.
It does seem not unusual that, at their peak, technology companies embark on a project that will eventually be their tomb. However, closer inspection reveals that this is really just survivor bias, as many companies continue on post tomb building. Apple built the Infinite Loop campus, Sun built its Menlo Park campus but really didn't "die" until after the Agnews complex was being built.
Interestingly for me, they are getting bigger and bigger. The space ship complex for Apple (and this proposed Google setup) are both quite large. So harder to lease out as a unit to the next company that comes along.
Still, if you have the extra cash laying about companies like IBM have proven that investing in real estate is a good hedge against the future. They have several really beautiful campuses.
I think Atari had plans for such a building, they were scattered all over the valley and wanted to consolidate. But they got distracted by a couple buyouts and ended up dying before they could do it.
I work for Google in Mountain View, and I'd prefer to work in a filthy basement in Kansas. The commute would be better, and the cost of living lower...
Can confirm: It's certainly not a filthy basement, but it is in Kansas. Commute is great and CoL makes me wonder why anyone would want to live in SF/NYC :)
Move to Mountain View? For the 5 years I was at Google, I never lived more than 2 miles away, my commute was 15 minutes by bicycle, and for half that, rent was only about $1400/month (it started rising rapidly in the last few years).
But wait, it's not SF? Well, neither is Kansas, and as far as urban life & young people go, Mountain View is a lot better than Kansas.
Interesting how you refer to that as "only". That's like 40% of the average American salary. But if you work at Google and you indicate $1400 with "only" I cannot help but assume Google employees are far above the average national income.
Rents for a 1BR in SF are now around $3000/month [1]. Mountain View has gone up significantly in the last few years, a sibling comment indicates it's around $2300/month, but comparatively speaking, it's still "only".
Yes, this is insane. But people can pay them. Tech company employees are indeed far above the average national income.
You don't have to assume that, the data is pretty freely available. Google tells me that the average national wage is $26k, google entry-level average = $128k.
Granted, if you're a software engineer at Google that's not too horrible, but it sucks that so much of your big salary goes to renting an average little apartment.
Uhm, well, you might think so, but it does get really old.
I worked at a place that was doing important work, and when I started I had a nice office on the 5th floor. It had a beautiful view.
A couple of months later I, and the rest of the group, was moved to an underground office. Now, I don't mean basement. I mean the "company" had emptied out a huge underground oil bunker[1], built a false floor and interior walls, installed fans behind the walls to deal with fumes[2], then build a small cube farm. Radios and cell phones did not work in the new area, and the faint sound of wind behind the false walls was a bit distracting. That is a mighty big negative to balance the worth of a project.
1) it had been used by a electric plant that had been torn down
2) seems oil will "bleed" from concrete walls for some time and the air flow would get rid of the dangerous fumes, or so I was told
When I worked for a large financial institution as a contractor, they moved me to floor negative 2. A few weeks later, they announced that my contract was ending. Then, a new project came up, it was un-cancelled, and I was moved back to being with the rest of the group.
A year later, they moved me to floor negative 3. A few weeks later, they announced my contract was ending.
So, being moved to the basement is a clear sign you are not getting respect. The next time I'm moved to the basement, I immediately start actively looking.
well, that's certainly some tremendous architecture. however... conspicuously missing from the office space album is pictures of actual offices. maybe i just didn't see them.
but as far as revolutionary concepts go, how about just giving your employees an office with a window and a door that shuts?
It's crazy, theres 10 minutes of inspiring (read: empty) talk and all of the renderings show completely empty buildings with just a bunch of floors that you can walk down one side and fall to your certain death.
Also, America, no wonder your commute is long, theres a 10 lane highway surrounded by a bunch of single-family homes. If you want to put more people into the same space, what you usually do is go up in height.
Mountain View (all of Silicon Valley, really) has the bad habit of approving anything that brings in new jobs while simultaneously rejected housing commensurate to the number of jobs added. Many of the residents of the valley want their cities to remain de facto suburbs (designed for cars). Throw in prop 13, a substantial number of well paid transplants, and you have a recipe for the extreme cost of living in the Bay.
I would guess that by reducing property tax you've made it possible for housing prices to go ever higher. This makes housing SEEM less affordable for sure (since the prices can continue to rise higher), and might also actually make it less affordable too as people are happy to build ever more expensive housing since the property tax rates are lower.
A certain niceness of a house in a certain market will tend to sell/rent for $X per month, no matter how you arrive at $X. So if property taxes are high, it tends to reduce the actual price of the house since people don't just pay a mortgage, but rather have to pay everything associated with the house; mortgage, insurance, taxes, etc.
This is a similar phenomena to the low interest rate, high property price that we've witnessed over the last decade or so in the US. At 4% a 200k house costs about $1k/mo once you roll in some kind of property tax and PMI. At 8% $1k/mo buys you less than 100k of house again assuming the same property tax and PMI.
Prop 13 limits property tax to the value of the house when you bought it unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value.
So what happens in other locations is that demand for locations starts going up, housing prices go up, taxes go up and people who can't pay those taxes get displaced. Developers buy those houses, raze them in favor of apartment complexes and eventually you get density.
If people can stay in their single family 1.5 or 2 million dollar homes and pay property taxes on the 30k they bought it for 30 years ago density won't happen because those are the people that vote and they'll keep voting for municipality limits on building to "keep the character of the neighborhood".
> Prop 13 limits property tax to the value of the house when you bought it
No, it restricts increases in the basis value to which the tax rate is applied to a maximum of the value after purchase (or other qualifying event) + 2% per annum.
> unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value.
A number of other states have Prop 13 like limits to the annual increase in tax basis value, and some others do full market valuation but split the increases over a several year period so that the tax basis value lags the increase, and other places just have fairly infrequent reassessment except at purchase (which, in effect, also causes tax basis value to, on average, trail behind increases.)
dragonwriter covered most of the details, but they key one he missed in Prop 13 is that every other homestead law I am aware of has an owner occupancy requirement that Prop 13 lacks. In Florida, which has a very generous homestead law, the ad valorem tax limits apply to the owner-occupied primary residence. You move and rent the place, your valuation spikes up to market rate. Own two houses? Pick one, because the other is getting taxed at market rate. It also does not apply to commercial property whatsoever.
Because of California's lenient qualifications, someone who bought that $30k house can move to North Carolina and collect massive rent checks without seeing their property taxes jump to reflect reality. The owners of apartment complexes have a vested interest in keeping their properties as they are, since a major renovation or addition would trigger a revaluation. Same for owners of office and retail space who aren't big enough to cut tax deals with the various levels of municipal government.
Home owners have the perverse incentive to stop all new construction to the detriment of their community. Their net worth continually increases so long as the price of real estate increases. There is no downside!
Furthermore, property taxes normally force some people out of their homes; this isn't as bad as it sounds - in SF at least, they would get a hefty windfall. On average, the property would be used more efficiently by the new owner.
NIMBYism is the biggest problem in SF. Every year, 20K people or so move into the city while we only build enough housing for roughly one tenth of them. Housing has increased by ~10-15% a year for the past decade or so.
Looks like want to cover big parts of mountain view with a see-thru tent, and turn north-of-101 into a new downtown. Life under the dome. I absolutely hate it.
The area around San Antonio & El Camino looks like it may end up gentrifying into an urban center in the near future. There are mid-rise residential towers going up, and a number of shops in a walkable shopping center.
North Bayshore would obviously be better for Googlers, but there seems to be a lot more resistance to building housing there, for whatever reason.
These really curved, artsy spaces remind me of Xanadu House and similar poorly received architectural experiments of the 70s. It often seems to me that designs of this type tip too far away from function and too much into form. (Plus what's the long-term maintenance requirements?)
But if anyone could pull it off, it's probably Google!
For those without 10 minutes to spend watching the video, the architects are BIG and Thomas Heatherwick. <strike>I really wish they'd give them written credit -- they're the ones who did all the work!</strike> (It's actually there, I just missed it. :-/)
> It's the first time we'll design and build offices from scratch and we hope these plans by Bjarke Ingels at BIG and Thomas Heatherwick at Heatherwick Studio will lead to a better way of working.
How often do buildings get to look like what the architects envision? I feel there is an often a disconnect similar to how many cars are initially designed to look futuristic and sleek, but later end up looking quite ordinary.
Quite often I think buildings turn out to be what they look like in renderings if you look at form/layout/materials in isolation.
The problem is the full vision: architects love tossing in an unrealistic amount of people having loads of fun that's almost impossible to have in such a spontaneous way. They stage social utopic scenarios in their renderings which almost never describe how the public ends up utilizing and interacting with the public spaces provided by the project.
I'm reminded of the San Francisco Federal Building. It was designed with many of the same goals to "bridge the indoors and outdoors" and do away with traditional concepts in favor of being green and environmental.
It won many design awards, but later required massive retrofits to install traditional HVAC and ultimately was a complete failure.
The render on the blog post shows huge amounts of sunlight, curved geodesic, and the indoor path curving over the 'entrance', increasing the distance for someone on the inside to get out.
I work at Google in MTV and this is very exciting to me. I think the higher-ups at this company have the vision to pull this off, I hope I stay engaged here long enough to see it.
The real concern (which Google can't fully solve) is housing. If you add 10k or 20k more employees in these beautiful new offices, where do they all live? I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live at work.
I currently commute to MTV from SF. I have a shitty apartment, i pay 2x as much as it's worth in any other city, and I commute 1.5hrs each way on a clogged highway. I hope it's doesn't get much worse.
In the hardcore-communist days of China the setup was usually: factory on one side, block of flats for workers on the other, school and hospital adjacent. The kids played in the courtyard.
For the first few months the commute made me miserable. I was just in a bad mood after every 90minute bus ride. And when there would be an accident or god water from the sky (see: rain) the commute could easily go over 2h each way.
Recently I have found ways to keep my commute negativity way down. I started going into work earlier when the traffic is lighter And much more predictable. I leave at 6:50 and I'm in by 8:00. And I started using the time on the bus as time to read, which has been great. Having 3h a day to just read books means I am tearing through my 'books to read one day' list. Sometimes I even look forward to the bus ride, it's personal time for me.
They could build housing then immediately sell those home by means of a loan to a non-profit created for this purpose. Who then pays off Google via rents.
Only issue is for legal reasons anyone could live there Google employee or not. However that is a good thing in the sense that if you lost your job your housing remains.
That was one of the biggest culture-shocks for me when I arrived in the Bay Area. Everyone was like "So you'll be working in MTV?", a bunch of the local mailing lists were prefixed "mtv-", all the conference rooms were labeled "MTV-43-2-...", and I was like "What's this MTV....ohhhh, Mountain View". It's sorta like "The City" clearly means San Francisco to anyone living in the Bay Area, while it means New York City to anyone living in the Northeast.
Well, if enough people say it, it'll catch on. I'd bet that Google is rapidly becoming more important to most people than Music Television anyway.
For what it’s worth, I live on the east coast, am not particularly keyed in to the Silicon Valley world like most HN readers, and knew (assumed) immediately that MTV = Mountain View based on the context of the article and the comment. I think it’s pretty obvious given the overall context here.
For what it's worth, I live in Sunnyvale just next to Mountain View and I have never seen or heard this abbreviation used. I thought "I work at Google in MTV" described some internal Google department, and it wasn't until I saw "commute to MTV from SF" that it clicked.
> I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live at work.
The cool thing about Google building housing is, it benefits you even if you don't want to live at work. Plenty of people (myself likely included) would enjoy living close to work in a lively apartment building surrounded by like-minded people. But if you're not one of them, you still win, by virtue of not having to compete with these people for housing elsewhere.
I work from home and it's pretty nice never having to commute. I miss other people though. If Google built nice apartments or condos and rented them at discounted prices to employees, you could wake up and get dressed, take some little robotic electric vehicle to the nearest cafe, get a free breakfast, and then pop into work. To me this sounds amazing, because it's like working from home but with other humans to interact with.
I never went to University, but took my daughter for her interview at a large UK institution this week. I watched the students wander from lectures to the gym and coffee shop then to halls of residence all within strolling distance. Made me think this was the way I'd love to live.
> I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live at work.
In the industrial revolution, it wasn't uncommon for major industrialists to build "model villages" [1] to house workers. The best examples include Bournville (Cadbury's chocolate), Saltaire (wool) and Port Sunlight (Lever Bros soap etc).
They were attractive places to live, compared with Victorian slums. You got a healthier, happier workforce living within walking distance of their jobs. Sir Titus Salt's Saltaire is now a World Heritage Site.
There's no reason why Google couldn't do the same, at least for a proportion of its workers. It looks as those Facebook will....
In general, it's much easier to build office space than housing. Cities like it because it generates revenue but they don't have to provide additional support services such as schools, police officers, etc.
It's nothing if not bold. It seems to be drawing a fair amount of inspiration from the Metabolist movement of the 1960s, particularly in its emphasis on modularity and even mobility. I have to wonder how practical that's going to be – the only truly modular building to come out of Metabolism is Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower (http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07...), but in four decades, none of the capsules have ever been moved or replaced.
Google currently doesn't have space. MTV offices are packed, there's little space left to seat new employees, and no parking (pretty much have to rely on valet service)
Google has only 3 options:
1. find existing buildings nearby, but this increases sprawl even more
2. move to another city or only open space in other cities
3. build new buildings on land holdings you already have
#1 and #2 have the downsides of making it harder to collaborate.
It's not "Edifice Complex" if you have no choice but to build more space. And so, if you're going to build new buildings, why not get what you want to satisfy your requirements rather than a cookie cutter design?
wouldn't it be better to use existing structures, like all the abandoned malls in the usa? why not distribute the workforce so people can live in an affordable, commutable area? and it bugs me further they couldn't find a way to locate walking distance to bart or caltrain.
Google management must feel there is a benefit to having their employees clustered into a small number of campuses. Maybe mountain view isn't the optimal place for that, but uprooting the campus and distributing it among failed shopping malls throughout the world or building a giant googleplex in Montana is probably not a good strategy to keep the bulk of their employees.
I used to work for a company that leased spaced out of an old mall. They also built their own huge new corporate office campus and moved everyone into it while I was there.
I actually preferred the mall space. There was a movie theater and a drivers' license annex in it, and some lunch-friendly restaurants. The commute was faster. Parking was never a problem. City buses stopped there.
The new corporate headquarters was in the middle of nowhere. You had to drive for 15 minutes to get anywhere else that you might want to be, including spiraling up all those ramps in the underground parking garage. It was well done architecturally, and very pretty, but I don't care about that while I'm working. And when I'm done working, I want to go somewhere else, and do something that is not work.
The supposed benefit to collaboration was not realized by reducing the walking time between offices. The people that worked together most often were still seated the same distance from each other, and from their regular conference rooms. Anyone not physically present was still brought in via conference call. The increased distance to anything else made it more likely that you would miss someone who was out to lunch, at an appointment, or on a personal errand. The start and end of ordinary business hours created localized traffic congestion.
So yes, it would be better to have a more distributed workforce.
I work near a wall of windows, which is quite nice. But every morning I'm pulling and adjusting the blinds to avoid being blinded by the morning sun. I also wonder about what it will sound like when it rains. I guess with that will the curved roof transmit sound very long distances, such that you can hear quiet conversations across the building.
I'm don't mean this as negatively as this probably sounds. Google has done a lot of innovation in things like data centers, and I am hoping they have similar innovations for the problems I have raised.
It's interesting that Google's office plan is garnering a lot of negative feedback.
When Apple announced a plan to make one giant office building to house its entire corporate workforce, the general consensus was positive. Even Cupertino's politicians praised its ambition and assumed wealth it will bring to the city. Has anyone been in Cupertino recently? It feels like almost every single office building in that city is occupied by Apple now :-|.
Not saying any of it is bad, unless you consider a scenario with Apple needing to sell its "mothership" to any future potential corporation.
Google's office plan does seem a bit overly optimistic but clearly pitched in a way to win support of Mountain View. Right now I don't see anything in the blog post that speaks to engineers and managers who actually WANT to work in the buildings, so I hold judgement until they share more about that part.
> Not saying any of it is bad, unless you consider a scenario with Apple needing to sell its "mothership" to any future potential corporation.
Seriously, that's exactly what an iconic headquarters [1] is supposed to speak to - a defiance of ever being acquired, and if acquired, then to never be assimilated. In the case of both Apple and Google, I don't think it's hubris to think they'll be around in 50 years.
I applaud both campuses. The downstream implications of congestion, shopping needs and residential impact are not to be downplayed, however - and its not clear how those are being addressed in either proposal/project.
Neat concept, but I can't help finding it ironic that this would make an actual reality of the stereotype that Googlers and tech companies in general are living in a bubble cut off from the rest of society.
Also hopefully they won't throw stones after they move in to their glass house!
Facebook's new building is a big open-plan office space, with some stuff to break up the visual sight lines. Since they're currently open-plan, that probably won't affect productivity much one way or the other.
There's the anti-edifice complex company - Intel. Intel built their own office buildings to their own design, which was to have acre-sized floors with bullpens.[1] Grey bullpens. Grey walls. Grey carpet. It's depressing just to visit. I'd hate to work there.
Apple's new mothership[2] definitely indicates an edifice complex. It could work out, though. Apple is currently spread over a large number of modest buildings separated by busy roads. The mothership is a big round building with a lot of underground parking. Just getting most of their people within walking distance will be a win. Of course, that assumes Apple allows them to talk to each other.
The city of Mountain View insisted that Google put 5,000 housing units into their plan. That should help.
The classic edifice in Silicon Valley is IBM Almaden Research, from the 1960s. You enter through a modest gate and drive through rolling hills for a mile, until you reach the big glass and steel complex atop the mountain. The cafeteria looks out on miles of unblemished parkland. A lot of good stuff came out of there, including three Nobel prizes. Today, it's a shadow of what it once was. Part of it is rented out.
Overdoing this sort of thing is rare in the US today. Moscow, Dubai, and Beijing, though...
The city of Mountain View insisted that Google put 5,000 housing units into their plan. That should help.
Citation? I'm seeing conflicting reports. One article says Google wants to build them; One has a councilman suggesting it. I don't think it's required -- that would be weird.
"“It needs to be a neighborhood in Mountain View,” the video above says. That’s a contentious point, as Google has long wanted to build north of 5,000 housing units in the area, which the city council has resisted. The inability to co-locate or build housing in line with the company’s growth has put pressure on cities to the north like San Francisco."
Google’s plan to redesign the city’s North Bayshore area will bring even more workers to this suburban city. Mountain View city councilman Leonard Siegel said he wants to add 5,000 new housing units to the plan.
Cubicles get marketed with the same modularity idea, but in practice hardly anyone actually moves them around after the initial installation. Do they really expect to move buildings?
Reminds me of the following passages from Masters of Doom[1]
"When the elevator doors finally opened into the penthouse, it felt as though Romero was standing on top of the moon. The two-story, 22,500-square-foot loft seemed to spill into the stars. The space was bare but surrounded by a wraparound window view of the city and a seemingly endless sixty-foot arched glass ceiling.
But there were problems, the agent explained. The space was so big and windowed and close to the sun that it was extremely difficult to air-condition.
Even the glass ceiling they toiled beneath became a problem, specifically, a nightmare of light. Next to vampires, no one hates the light as much as gamers; there’s nothing worse than a big, bad glare blinding down on a computer screen. Nobody could work. The architects were immediately called in to install stylish spoilers on top of the cubicles. But they proved hardly dark enough to suit the gamers’ finicky tastes. Instead, they caravanned to Home Depot and returned on a mission. They whipped out the staple guns and fastened thick sheets of black felt over every cube in the office. They didn’t just work in the shade, they worked in the black. To get into their cubes, they had to part their drapes of felt like photographers entering miniature darkrooms. It became an awesome and ironic sight; walk through the glass dome of gamers’ paradise and all one saw were rows of caves."
Ok, sign me up for the new Google Domed City with integrated weather, parks, transportation (self-driving cars), housing, office space, entertainment, and local governance. Would like one here here in Ft. Worth, it is snowing a lot today.
Anecdotally, referring to things that are not typically viewed in a sexual light, as "sexy" (or not), is fairly common parlance. Like so many things, the meaning of the word has evolved with its common usage to become more context dependent ; using it in this setting is perfectly normal.
Also - I have to ask (genuinely intrigued) - who is this language supposed to be offending, and why?
i worked in offices, cubes, and now in the south facing open space with bad AC and lightning (result of a very expensive with all the latest fads remodel). I am at the state of office nirvana - i know it just can't get worse than that, so whatever "rethinking" is going to happen in the office space - let them, i don't care.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] thread¹not speaking for my king^H^H^H^Hemployer
Mind you this is a $400 billion company.
It is, of course, not a universal law, but lavish new office spaces are one of those things that don't seem to go well.
Do you have any data to back it up or did you just made it up?
Or from a16z:
"Pouring huge money into overly glorious new headquarters — “The Edifice Complex” — then repeating two years later. There’s also a danger in signaling to employees “we’ve made it, we’re amazing” (and while everyone hates the cramped but collaborative space when they’re in it, they miss it terribly after the move)."
And for the a16z stuff you quoted, the first paragraph says "10 ways to damage your fast-growing tech startup".
Thanks for classifying Google as a fast-growing tech startup, but I think the startup phase was over a long time ago.
I'm a bit dubious when the top google link of this well known phenomenon is an urban dictionary definition.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's geolocation-based.
This happens to governments when they decide to build the "New City Hall". It generally goes really badly.
If this is the norm we wouldn't even have Google (and FB, Apple, Microsoft, Apple, etc) campuses today.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/poorly-timed-headquarters-200...
So maybe it is that big successful companies tend to build buildings, and that success sometimes is the downfall of an innovative company.
It's often a sign that some of the people at the top believe they have nothing better to do than immerse themselves in creating a special building. They are by definition not as focused on the company's business. If this is happening with Google, it doesn't signal doom, but, as you say, a degree of maturity.
But it seems that's stalled.²
¹ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/googles-uk-b...
² http://www.techworld.com/news/startups/google-rent-offices-a...
Interestingly for me, they are getting bigger and bigger. The space ship complex for Apple (and this proposed Google setup) are both quite large. So harder to lease out as a unit to the next company that comes along.
Still, if you have the extra cash laying about companies like IBM have proven that investing in real estate is a good hedge against the future. They have several really beautiful campuses.
But wait, it's not SF? Well, neither is Kansas, and as far as urban life & young people go, Mountain View is a lot better than Kansas.
Interesting how you refer to that as "only". That's like 40% of the average American salary. But if you work at Google and you indicate $1400 with "only" I cannot help but assume Google employees are far above the average national income.
Yes, this is insane. But people can pay them. Tech company employees are indeed far above the average national income.
[1] http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/10/06/mapping_the_median_...
Yeah, but now it's
> The average cost for a 1-bedroom apartment in Mountain View is $2,356, according to myapartmentmap.com
http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2014/10/29/rent-control-off-the...
Granted, if you're a software engineer at Google that's not too horrible, but it sucks that so much of your big salary goes to renting an average little apartment.
I worked at a place that was doing important work, and when I started I had a nice office on the 5th floor. It had a beautiful view.
A couple of months later I, and the rest of the group, was moved to an underground office. Now, I don't mean basement. I mean the "company" had emptied out a huge underground oil bunker[1], built a false floor and interior walls, installed fans behind the walls to deal with fumes[2], then build a small cube farm. Radios and cell phones did not work in the new area, and the faint sound of wind behind the false walls was a bit distracting. That is a mighty big negative to balance the worth of a project.
1) it had been used by a electric plant that had been torn down
2) seems oil will "bleed" from concrete walls for some time and the air flow would get rid of the dangerous fumes, or so I was told
A year later, they moved me to floor negative 3. A few weeks later, they announced my contract was ending.
So, being moved to the basement is a clear sign you are not getting respect. The next time I'm moved to the basement, I immediately start actively looking.
but as far as revolutionary concepts go, how about just giving your employees an office with a window and a door that shuts?
Also, America, no wonder your commute is long, theres a 10 lane highway surrounded by a bunch of single-family homes. If you want to put more people into the same space, what you usually do is go up in height.
A certain niceness of a house in a certain market will tend to sell/rent for $X per month, no matter how you arrive at $X. So if property taxes are high, it tends to reduce the actual price of the house since people don't just pay a mortgage, but rather have to pay everything associated with the house; mortgage, insurance, taxes, etc.
This is a similar phenomena to the low interest rate, high property price that we've witnessed over the last decade or so in the US. At 4% a 200k house costs about $1k/mo once you roll in some kind of property tax and PMI. At 8% $1k/mo buys you less than 100k of house again assuming the same property tax and PMI.
So what happens in other locations is that demand for locations starts going up, housing prices go up, taxes go up and people who can't pay those taxes get displaced. Developers buy those houses, raze them in favor of apartment complexes and eventually you get density.
If people can stay in their single family 1.5 or 2 million dollar homes and pay property taxes on the 30k they bought it for 30 years ago density won't happen because those are the people that vote and they'll keep voting for municipality limits on building to "keep the character of the neighborhood".
No, it restricts increases in the basis value to which the tax rate is applied to a maximum of the value after purchase (or other qualifying event) + 2% per annum.
> unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value.
A number of other states have Prop 13 like limits to the annual increase in tax basis value, and some others do full market valuation but split the increases over a several year period so that the tax basis value lags the increase, and other places just have fairly infrequent reassessment except at purchase (which, in effect, also causes tax basis value to, on average, trail behind increases.)
Because of California's lenient qualifications, someone who bought that $30k house can move to North Carolina and collect massive rent checks without seeing their property taxes jump to reflect reality. The owners of apartment complexes have a vested interest in keeping their properties as they are, since a major renovation or addition would trigger a revaluation. Same for owners of office and retail space who aren't big enough to cut tax deals with the various levels of municipal government.
Furthermore, property taxes normally force some people out of their homes; this isn't as bad as it sounds - in SF at least, they would get a hefty windfall. On average, the property would be used more efficiently by the new owner.
NIMBYism is the biggest problem in SF. Every year, 20K people or so move into the city while we only build enough housing for roughly one tenth of them. Housing has increased by ~10-15% a year for the past decade or so.
North Bayshore would obviously be better for Googlers, but there seems to be a lot more resistance to building housing there, for whatever reason.
But if anyone could pull it off, it's probably Google!
They did.
The problem is the full vision: architects love tossing in an unrealistic amount of people having loads of fun that's almost impossible to have in such a spontaneous way. They stage social utopic scenarios in their renderings which almost never describe how the public ends up utilizing and interacting with the public spaces provided by the project.
It won many design awards, but later required massive retrofits to install traditional HVAC and ultimately was a complete failure.
The real concern (which Google can't fully solve) is housing. If you add 10k or 20k more employees in these beautiful new offices, where do they all live? I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live at work.
I currently commute to MTV from SF. I have a shitty apartment, i pay 2x as much as it's worth in any other city, and I commute 1.5hrs each way on a clogged highway. I hope it's doesn't get much worse.
You may be happier living at work than you realize, (yes, I joke, but not as much as you'd think).
Unfortunately, the higher ups really like a short commute from their suburban homes.
At least Amazon and Twitter are urban.
Actually not that bad of a setup...
Recently I have found ways to keep my commute negativity way down. I started going into work earlier when the traffic is lighter And much more predictable. I leave at 6:50 and I'm in by 8:00. And I started using the time on the bus as time to read, which has been great. Having 3h a day to just read books means I am tearing through my 'books to read one day' list. Sometimes I even look forward to the bus ride, it's personal time for me.
Only issue is for legal reasons anyone could live there Google employee or not. However that is a good thing in the sense that if you lost your job your housing remains.
To everybody else it means MTV, making the things you say very confusing.
Well, if enough people say it, it'll catch on. I'd bet that Google is rapidly becoming more important to most people than Music Television anyway.
MP - Menlo Park (Facebook) PA - Palo Alto MTV - Mountain View (Google) SJ - San Jose SF - San Francisco
The cool thing about Google building housing is, it benefits you even if you don't want to live at work. Plenty of people (myself likely included) would enjoy living close to work in a lively apartment building surrounded by like-minded people. But if you're not one of them, you still win, by virtue of not having to compete with these people for housing elsewhere.
In the industrial revolution, it wasn't uncommon for major industrialists to build "model villages" [1] to house workers. The best examples include Bournville (Cadbury's chocolate), Saltaire (wool) and Port Sunlight (Lever Bros soap etc).
They were attractive places to live, compared with Victorian slums. You got a healthier, happier workforce living within walking distance of their jobs. Sir Titus Salt's Saltaire is now a World Heritage Site.
There's no reason why Google couldn't do the same, at least for a proportion of its workers. It looks as those Facebook will....
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_village
http://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2012/07/13/google-housin...
In general, it's much easier to build office space than housing. Cities like it because it generates revenue but they don't have to provide additional support services such as schools, police officers, etc.
Google has only 3 options:
1. find existing buildings nearby, but this increases sprawl even more 2. move to another city or only open space in other cities 3. build new buildings on land holdings you already have
#1 and #2 have the downsides of making it harder to collaborate.
It's not "Edifice Complex" if you have no choice but to build more space. And so, if you're going to build new buildings, why not get what you want to satisfy your requirements rather than a cookie cutter design?
I actually preferred the mall space. There was a movie theater and a drivers' license annex in it, and some lunch-friendly restaurants. The commute was faster. Parking was never a problem. City buses stopped there.
The new corporate headquarters was in the middle of nowhere. You had to drive for 15 minutes to get anywhere else that you might want to be, including spiraling up all those ramps in the underground parking garage. It was well done architecturally, and very pretty, but I don't care about that while I'm working. And when I'm done working, I want to go somewhere else, and do something that is not work.
The supposed benefit to collaboration was not realized by reducing the walking time between offices. The people that worked together most often were still seated the same distance from each other, and from their regular conference rooms. Anyone not physically present was still brought in via conference call. The increased distance to anything else made it more likely that you would miss someone who was out to lunch, at an appointment, or on a personal errand. The start and end of ordinary business hours created localized traffic congestion.
So yes, it would be better to have a more distributed workforce.
I'm don't mean this as negatively as this probably sounds. Google has done a lot of innovation in things like data centers, and I am hoping they have similar innovations for the problems I have raised.
When Apple announced a plan to make one giant office building to house its entire corporate workforce, the general consensus was positive. Even Cupertino's politicians praised its ambition and assumed wealth it will bring to the city. Has anyone been in Cupertino recently? It feels like almost every single office building in that city is occupied by Apple now :-|.
Not saying any of it is bad, unless you consider a scenario with Apple needing to sell its "mothership" to any future potential corporation.
Google's office plan does seem a bit overly optimistic but clearly pitched in a way to win support of Mountain View. Right now I don't see anything in the blog post that speaks to engineers and managers who actually WANT to work in the buildings, so I hold judgement until they share more about that part.
¹http://www.metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/January-2014/In-P...
Seriously, that's exactly what an iconic headquarters [1] is supposed to speak to - a defiance of ever being acquired, and if acquired, then to never be assimilated. In the case of both Apple and Google, I don't think it's hubris to think they'll be around in 50 years.
I applaud both campuses. The downstream implications of congestion, shopping needs and residential impact are not to be downplayed, however - and its not clear how those are being addressed in either proposal/project.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longaberger_Company
[1] http://youtu.be/AvEqfg2sIH0
Also who is going to clean all those windows? New automated self cleaning window robots?
Also hopefully they won't throw stones after they move in to their glass house!
There's the anti-edifice complex company - Intel. Intel built their own office buildings to their own design, which was to have acre-sized floors with bullpens.[1] Grey bullpens. Grey walls. Grey carpet. It's depressing just to visit. I'd hate to work there.
Apple's new mothership[2] definitely indicates an edifice complex. It could work out, though. Apple is currently spread over a large number of modest buildings separated by busy roads. The mothership is a big round building with a lot of underground parking. Just getting most of their people within walking distance will be a win. Of course, that assumes Apple allows them to talk to each other.
The city of Mountain View insisted that Google put 5,000 housing units into their plan. That should help.
The classic edifice in Silicon Valley is IBM Almaden Research, from the 1960s. You enter through a modest gate and drive through rolling hills for a mile, until you reach the big glass and steel complex atop the mountain. The cafeteria looks out on miles of unblemished parkland. A lot of good stuff came out of there, including three Nobel prizes. Today, it's a shadow of what it once was. Part of it is rented out.
Overdoing this sort of thing is rare in the US today. Moscow, Dubai, and Beijing, though...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZmos0GSCWE [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2784069
Citation? I'm seeing conflicting reports. One article says Google wants to build them; One has a councilman suggesting it. I don't think it's required -- that would be weird.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/google-hq/#Vd7nAQ:64H
"“It needs to be a neighborhood in Mountain View,” the video above says. That’s a contentious point, as Google has long wanted to build north of 5,000 housing units in the area, which the city council has resisted. The inability to co-locate or build housing in line with the company’s growth has put pressure on cities to the north like San Francisco."
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/26/google-taps-heat...
Google’s plan to redesign the city’s North Bayshore area will bring even more workers to this suburban city. Mountain View city councilman Leonard Siegel said he wants to add 5,000 new housing units to the plan.
It's very distracting to the overall flow and feel of the video?
I wonder how long it'll take for the first buildings to come to fruition?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdhJxAmUu3Y
Starting sentences with "So..." and ending with questions is annoying indeed.
"When the elevator doors finally opened into the penthouse, it felt as though Romero was standing on top of the moon. The two-story, 22,500-square-foot loft seemed to spill into the stars. The space was bare but surrounded by a wraparound window view of the city and a seemingly endless sixty-foot arched glass ceiling.
But there were problems, the agent explained. The space was so big and windowed and close to the sun that it was extremely difficult to air-condition.
Even the glass ceiling they toiled beneath became a problem, specifically, a nightmare of light. Next to vampires, no one hates the light as much as gamers; there’s nothing worse than a big, bad glare blinding down on a computer screen. Nobody could work. The architects were immediately called in to install stylish spoilers on top of the cubicles. But they proved hardly dark enough to suit the gamers’ finicky tastes. Instead, they caravanned to Home Depot and returned on a mission. They whipped out the staple guns and fastened thick sheets of black felt over every cube in the office. They didn’t just work in the shade, they worked in the black. To get into their cubes, they had to part their drapes of felt like photographers entering miniature darkrooms. It became an awesome and ironic sight; walk through the glass dome of gamers’ paradise and all one saw were rows of caves."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom
Ok, sign me up for the new Google Domed City with integrated weather, parks, transportation (self-driving cars), housing, office space, entertainment, and local governance. Would like one here here in Ft. Worth, it is snowing a lot today.
https://beta.googledomedcity.com not resolving, darn.
When is the Beta launching near me.
Couple of feature requests: don't forget to include greywater recycling guys. And voting.
There is no need to write "Not the sexiest title for a blog post, I know." when there are equally valid constructions that eschew the sexual.
Also - I have to ask (genuinely intrigued) - who is this language supposed to be offending, and why?