https://gizmodo.com/google-invites-employees-to-sleep-on-campus-for-a-fee-1850709102
Google is charging its employees $99 a night to stay at its on-campus hotel to help "transition to the hybrid workplace."
You might want to mark that NSFW. Don't want to be caught reading some discussion with the word union in it.
We need unions for many reasons, but an employer offering optional housing onsite really isn't one of them. It's not like it's required to rent from Google to work there.
Tell me you know nothing about the history of worker's rights in the US by saying something fucking stupid.
These days, that's cheaper than a lot of places rent for and you get free maid service. Fucking Google might have accidentally stumbled upon something helpful. And $99 a night is not profitable for the sort of hotel their employees would actually want to stay in, so they still lose!
This is only a temporary promotion. Tge price is not going to stay at $99/night, and it's not an alternative to rent, but in addition to it. This is not permanent housing, they're fucking hotel rooms.
But then you can't siphon off 99$ a night from them!
Come on, everyone! We gotta get those profits up!
It has nothing to do with profits. It's more profitable to have everyone work from home. Upper managers and executives simply prefer having everyone in the office because they like it. It's their preference.
Can we please think of the billionaires? What are they gonna do when their office buildings are empty? They need their property value! /s
They want to force attrition. They over hired and need to reduce headcount but they don't want the negative press of laying more people off.
Whilst it wouldn't surprise me at all if this was the case, I've seen similar things at other companies, it's a completely brain-dead strategy. The people who leave are the most qualified and capable employees who can easily find a job elsewhere and you're just left with all the people who the company swept up in the boom period where they were hiring anyone with a pulse.
Isn't that the dream for a capitalist! Labor that sleeps at work. Google takes it a step further and asks employees to pay for being able to sleep at work.
They just need to implement a full company score!
Edit: Meant company store, but I'll leave the original
The score is just soulless "lo-fi beats" type of music played all over the grounds to avoid any one person ever having to sit alone with just their thoughts as background noise.
Holy hell boss.
I thought you meant something like china's social credit score.
Get more points, you get a better chair and OLED screen or even a chance at a promotion.
Points go down, you get sent to a shitty cubicle at the far corner of the office. Then a verbal warning, followed by a written warning...
Holy hell boss.
I thought you meant something like china's social credit score.
Get more points, you get a better chair and OLED screen or even a chance at a promotion.
Points go down, you get sent to a shitty cubicle at the far corner of the office. Then a verbal warning, followed by a written warning...
Companies will start using crypto as a way to recreate what scrip was back before it was banned. Meta made a play for that a few years back but luckily they failed.
Say what you want about crypto in general, but it'd be an extremely bad choice for company scrip...
Depends on the implementation, you can make contracts do anything, and if the bulk of the currency is premined and in the hands of the corporation, they can manipulate its value freely. Not every cryptocurrency works the way Bitcoin or Etherium work, some are quite centralised (see XRP for example).
Meta could demand that ads on its platform are paid in metabucks, pay employees (partly) in metabucks and manipulate the market by controlling liquidity. Essentially they'd be their own sovereign corporation issuing its own currency.
All true!
You should consider transaction fees though: someone's gotta pay 'em. "Run their own chain" you might say, but then just use a database. Don't need crypto-economic security when you're the issuer and primary retailer.
That leads into having a public ledger. Great for public blockchains, but if you're issuing company scrip, you probably don't want outsiders auditing transactions.
Yeah, transaction fees can go to the issuer, so the corporation could double dip.
And as for transactions being publicly available on the ledger, SEC filings are public too, corporations openly bragged about raising prices beyond inflation and making record profits and they still had most of the populace convinced that the cause of inflation was just those darn lazy Millennials that didn't want to work any more.
In the modern manufacturing consent era, it doesn't matter that the truth is publicly available as long as you control mainstream media (which a corporation like Meta can easily do, first on their own platform and secondly by buying ads in the right newspapers).
Sooooooooooome people say man is made out of mud, the poor man's made out of muscle and blood. Muscle and blood, skin and bone, a mind that's weak and a back thats strong.... You move 16 tons... whadaya get? Another day older and deeper in debt... St. Peter don'tcha call me because I can't go...
I owe my soul.... to the company store.....
If you see coming better step aside, a lot of men didn't and a lot of men died. One first of iron and the others steel if the right don't get you then the left one will...
Fucking company town. Google has become a real shit company. Switch your default search to duck duck go or anything else people!
As awesome as it is, it's still a meta search engine so you'd have to remember to exclude Google. Otherwise hosting your own search engine is mega cool!
So this is absolutely a scummy move by google, no doubt, but google employees are some of the highest paid people in the world at this point. Boycott them if you want, but don't feel like you have to right this injustice done to their employees, because they've still got it really good.
Edit: Just so this doesn't come across as a crabs in a bucket type scenario, I am in this field and I am fortunate enough to make similar money, not as much, but equivalent in my country's market. We are not the people that need fighting for, we're the ones that should be fighting for others to have similar opportunities.
No I just mean the this is yet another item in a LOOOOOOOONG line of things where Google has gone the pure shit route.
In the last couple years, Google serves me more ads as search results than actual relevant results. The enshitification of the internet is real and I finally see it. I’ve have enough. Between Reddit, twitter, Google, SEO, Facebook and friends, Amazon becoming wish.con, etc everything is just going to shit. Maybe it makes me some old boomer dreaming of the glory days, but I’ve had enough. I refuse to be a product and I refuse to put any money towards these shitmaster overlords if there’s any way I can help it.
Your edit doesn't do it for me. You guys managed to get remote work, and now it's being taken away. Do you think the pay scale has anything to do with what's going on here?
Google still has fully remote employees, they're asking non remote employees back into the office a few days a week. Last I heard you can still apply to transfer to fully remote.
We are not the people that need fighting for
At least not yet. Wait until the capitalists start replacing us with cheaper AI
The advertisement entices workers to make the jump, even for a short while, to its on-campus hotel, saying: “Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning and instead, you could have an extra hour of sleep and less friction,” CNBC reported.
Did these stupid motherfuckers read their own ad??
No commute and extra sleep? That sounds great!
No wonder everyone is trying to WFH - the very same reasons you just listed.
It may be cheaper than a hotel or apartment, but why should an employee have to pay to go to work when they could be working remotely?
This hotel has been there for a while for visiting employees, paid for by the company. People wanted this option if, for example, you lived in Brazil, wanted to visit the US, but didn't have any reason to book a business trip because you don't work with anyone at headquarters. I'm going to guess that most paying guests won't be reporting for work during their stays, but will be grabbing a solid 3 meals a day, plus snacks.
No way. I don't want my employer to also be my landlord. Nothing good could come of that.
You commit 16 lines, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
Some people say a man is made outta blood. A code monkey's made out of Fritos and crud. Fritos and crud and skin and bone. A back that's weak and a mind that's strong...
Sounds illegal until I realized its tech workers who refuse to unionize and think they are getting paid bank but to live like a virtual slave.
As one in the industry, it's incredibly frustrating. Colleagues have been saying "oh, we get all of these perks and get nice salaries, we don't need a union" while others are bucket-crabbing with "you make big money, why do you need a union?", both overlooking the immense amounts of unpaid overtime that are endemic. Then, there's the push for RTO, which does nothing to benefit employees and would be readily prevented by strong unions.
it's very easy to ignore social inequities if you spend all your time working for a shitty company making absolute bank
A lot of companies used to run company towns. Toyota still does, as far as I know. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a return of that sort of thing with real estate prices getting absurd and companies wanting to drive people back into the office.
No no you don't understand. It's work from home but work IS the home! You see it makes perfect sense.
Hah, I actually did that when I first started working for a small company.
The co-founder also rented out a house he owned as a duplex.
Actually wasn't that bad, he charged slightly below market rate, and was pretty attentive. But definitely felt weird and I was happy to move out after a few years. It's just an unnecessary source of potential drama.
Now my manager lives there, and has for five years.
The good that comes from that, from the perspective of the boss-landlord is that if your employee-tenants start getting the idea to strike, you control both their income and their shelter, so they reconsider.
Then you offer on-site housing to your scabs.
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.
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.
I mean if you wanna play it like that, the money all comes from the consumers, so they should be allowed to stay in Samsung's hotels for free, right?
Next up will be these tech companies offering company script to buy things at the company store while paying that rent to the company room. You know, to help transition into the new indentured working environment.
You load 16 tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.
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.
While I get your point, here's the other issue with how this is framed.
The advertisement entices workers to make the jump, even for a short while, to its on-campus hotel, saying: “Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning and instead, you could have an extra hour of sleep and less friction,” CNBC reported. “Next, you could walk out of your room and quickly grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts.” It adds that after the end of the work day, “you could enjoy a quiet evening on top of the rooftop deck or take in one of the fun local activities.”
I can imagine that, at least except for the rooftop deck. Working from home. Without having to pay $99/night.
They could avoid this whole thing by simply just not forcing people to go back to the office.
A kinder version of a company town is still a company town, in the same way high-paying wage labor is still wage labor.
This is not Google being charitable and caring about housing prices in the surrounding area. These are the people most able to work remotely; Google is bringing them back to their expensive office to justify its existence and saying "this time I'll be your landlord, too."
how is this shit upvoted? cool they're not as bad as they could be. doesn't make it a good idea.
they're gonna go the classic corporate route of attracting people to a new system with nice benefits and relatively reasonable prices, only to enshittify it once people are attached to it
So If you need to work overtime, now you also need to pay 99$ if you want to sleep a few hours before the next day?
The whole comment literally just explained how this benefits employees too, but you chose to ignore all that and say something completely irrelevant.
I mentioned valid concern. Overtime is bad, but in reality it happens. And it looks like workers will have to pay rent if they stay and want to sleep a few hours in bed.
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.
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.
Oh, my little boy/girl, if they do it, they're never going to lose money in the end. Their business is not hotelling; it's ads powered by software. If maintaining the workers in a semi-slave state works for them, this is a minor cost for them
Ironically, you sound incredibly petulant whenever you refer to someone else you're trying to argue with as 'boy/girl'. It also doesn't lend the air of maturity that you may think it does.
Lmao imagine calling at-will employment with an extremely generous salary a "semi-slave" state
Wait till they start 3 shift bed rotation like in chinese factories. For the discounted price of 59.99
New product: Google Landlord
Also, just based on the fact that they're a data analytics and AI company, and their public privacy and security track record with their services, I'd genuinely be worried what kind of "guest experience analytics" is going on at that "hotel." Is there a camera in the shower? You don't know.
You get two rooms for the price of one! One for you, and one for the friendly Stasi officer next door.
Everyone who pays that is a dumbass. I'd rather sleep in my car or spend that money at a regular hotel not associated with my employer.
Anyone who pays that has fuck-you money, they work at Google.
That said, "transition to the hybrid workplace" is something I wouldn't do.
You'd be paying at least two-and-a-half times as much for a regular hotel around there, and it wouldn't be a very nice hotel.
Edit: apparently I'm wrong.
and it wouldn’t be a very nice hotel.
I worked at Apple while living 45 miles away about 10y ago. I got into a habit of staying in hotels like the Hilton when I had to pull long hours. The cost was less then than it is now. Even now, a quick search on Google Maps show these hotels to be in the $200 range or less. Probably cheaper on weeknights. It's not one-for-one analogous to Mountain View, but it's the same general area.
I'd rather double the cost and have my own space away from my employer if I had to crash nearby because it didn't make sense to do a long drive. I especially would rather double the cost than give back part of my paycheck to my employer. That's just insane mechanics, imo.
I thought the same, but it looks like there's actually quite a few nicer options for cheaper
I wonder if hotels have gotten cheaper in the seven years since I've had to travel there for business or if somehow I wasn't finding these.
I go to Furcon at a hotel near Google's offices every few years; it's only like $50 more expensive and isn't a shit hole.
I'm surprised. I used to travel there for work about seven years ago and the cheapest I could get then was about $250 a night. But now that I check, the hotels really are cheaper than they used to be. I wonder if that has to do with covid-related changes to where people work.
If they pay $99 per night to stay at your place of work, then it's not hard at all.
Sillicon Valley reinvents Company Scrip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip#Lumber_company_scrip