I remember my internship at google 10y ago, with all the free perks, service to make you forget about chores, the cool attitude, etc…
That’s a far cry from now :/
All these comments comparing this to company scrip are profoundly ignorant, and are downright insulting to the victims of robber barons and capitalism in Appalachia. Google pays salaries in USD. They don’t pay a worker 10 GoogleBucks per ton. Google doesn’t force their workers to live at Google tenements or stay at Google hotels. Hell, they don’t even force you to go into a Google office. All they’ll do is make a note on your “permanent record” at performance review time if you were in the office less than 60% of the time. In coal country, if you showed up at a picket line instead of the mine, they’d send in Pinkerton goons to murder you, and the mayor too.
Call me a bootlicker, I don’t care, but I actually think this is brilliant on Google’s part. Median rent in Mountain View for a 1br is $3600/mo. They’re renting rooms to their high-paid employees for ~15% less than market rent, right on campus, avoiding them from pricing out another local family if all they need is a place to sleep. Sillycon Valley is a terrible place to live. It’s a place to go for a couple years, make a bunch of money, live worse than a broke student, and GTFO as soon as possible. It’s like working on an offshore oil rig, with the gender ratio to match…
Unlike the coal towns’ usurious pricing to a captive market (another day older and deeper in debt), Google is almost certainly losing money on this hotel. They don’t care. They shell out twice as much for a temporary apartment with every corporate relocation package they give to new hires.
Google would like to build more market rate housing to meet demand. Unfortunately, building any new housing is illegal because the real estate cartel runs City Council, so Google takes over an existing hotel and prices it like an apartment. It’s the reverse Airbnb. You love to see it. It’s not a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets when the cartel cornered the local housing market 15 years ago, but every little bit to undermine their stranglehold on power helps. FDR and Stalin were natural enemies, and yet they both recognized in that moment, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Same goes here. Critical support for Google.
I completely agree with this take. These developers, if they don’t like Google’s hybrid work policies can just change jobs?
Like, I’m happy for developers who can figure out how to work from home, and it sucks when their job changes so they can no longer do that. I hope they can fight for their rights so they can continue to work from home.
But let’s be realistic: It’s a hotel that is optional to stay at for $99 a night. This isn’t at all like company script, and I’d much rather be the developer being asked to return to their office job than the housekeeper employed at Hotel Google figuring out how to pay rent in California. I’m not sure that people realize this but hotels take a lot of staff (housekeepers, front desk, laundry workers for sheets/towels). II’d hope that Google is paying them fair wages, but if I had a bet, they’ve contracted a hospitality company for this. Those workers are probably underpaid.
This kind of feels like what-a-bout-ism, but techy spaces like this seem laser-focused on what are basically white-collar worker problems. Comparing charging for a hotel to working in a coal mine for script is deeply out of touch.
A kinder version of a company town is still a company town, in the same way high-paying wage labor is still wage labor.
This is not Google being charitable and caring about housing prices in the surrounding area. These are the people most able to work remotely; Google is bringing them back to their expensive office to justify its existence and saying “this time I’ll be your landlord, too.”
$99 a night for company rooms? Around here we can get a shitty room, AND a hooker for that price. Not to mention drugs being readily available in the parking lot.
isnt this the opposite direction prospective employees would be going? who the hell is looking to live at their job?
This is unfortunately really common in East-Asia. Samsung employees live in Samsung apartments, ride the Samsung metro to work, pay for things with their Samsung wallet, while they listen to Samsung controlled news. Google would love to become the Samsung of the West.
I’m fine with all of that if Samsung is paying.
Where does Samsung’s money come from? Like all corporations it comes from extracting the value of its laborers. If you’re working for Samsung, you are paying for the Samsung services, even if it’s not directly apparent.
