What a ridiculously overblown article. "The robber barons built entire greenfield company towns with a paternalistic controlling agenda! Facebook plans to build less than 400 housing units and obviously won't be able to do any of the controlling things we just described, but WHAT IF THEY DID?!" "What if every single Facebook employee lived here, which they don't, and what if they all voted as a single bloc, which they wouldn't?! CRAY CRAY TIME AMIRITE?"
I find it interesting that in creating this mimic of real life, they are effectively removing any chance of real innovation coming out of these companies. And I'm not talking about innovation coming from these companies, but from the people working there. Their perception of what life is like on a daily basis will skew it toward the people they surround themselves with.
Essentially, as an outsider, it seems like going to work there is asking to be sheltered from the real world. I cannot imagine it fosters much creativity.
I completely agree with this. It is often said that, "constraint drives creativity." Therefore, if everyone is bound by the same set of constraints, you limit the possible set of creativity.
AOL has had perhaps the softest landing of any obsolete tech company, because their dialup revenue has been declining very, very slowly, less than 10% per year. And that is partly offset by profit margins increasing every year. People seem to just not cancel. Some are still dialing up, but plenty of people have kept paying $10/mo for dialup service they don't even use. Perhaps they just forgot. Or they use the @aol.com email through the web interface, and don't realize that you can keep your email address after cancelling the ISP service (to be fair, that didn't used to be the case, and many people missed the change). So AOL's had many billions of dollars of basically "free" revenue to cushion their decline. Even in 2014, they had roughly $600m of ISP revenue, of which about 2/3 was profit.
Also, before Wi-Fi became as ubiquitous as it is today, the only reliable way to get an Internet connection in a motel room was to dial into an AOL POP, so anybody who would expect to take a road trip would keep their AOL accounts active.
I think by 2006, almost every motel had free Wi-Fi though... and that wasn't the case in 2003 (at least, that's what I remember from road trips in those years).
Edit: Actually, I remember now that Earthlink POPs were as reliable as AOL POPs, but AOL had better name recognition.
Ah right! Yes, that's definitely true, I remember using AOL dial-up a few times in the early/mid-2000s. My parents had kept their account because of the @aol.com email issue (AOL webmail only became free in 2005), so I used their account to connect from motels.
Why not? Microsoft did. Lots of once-innovative companies lose their edge, stop attracting top talent, and just become body shops shuffling to the graveyard.
I don't think Microsoft is a good example here. They're doing some pretty innovative stuff. Open sourcing much of the .NET stack, F#, and Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi.
Even at their worst they never really stopped acquiring top talent, and their revenue hasn't stopped growing [1](it's also about 7 times what Facebook's is).
I'm not going to address whether or not Microsoft innovates, but open sourcing existing projects is possibly the loosest application of the term I've ever seen
Is this any different from living on a military base? Government employees get cheap shopping, entertainment, restaurants, social services, and decent neighborhoods with playgrounds and pools. It does seem more noble to be patriotic than loyal to a company, but is it really any different? I rarely hear service men and women complain about base conditions, they're usually fairly nice.
I don't know that much about it, but I've heard more than a few complains that the military treats married servicemen and women so much better than single ones in terms of housing and benefits that it creates a huge incentive to marry pretty much anybody with a pulse just to get those benefits. Naturally this ends in quite a few miserable marriages and messy divorces.
Or rather, the military is the state, always has been, always will be.
It just appears to be a secondary, nested construct because often it outsources many of its non-core competencies to a civil bureaucracy.
For example, you can destroy the infrastructure, diplomatic service, civilian authorities, and civil society of a country, and the military will still collect the taxes and keep approximate order when it benefits by doing so (in fact this has happened rather commonly in history).
But if you get rid of the cops/armies, all the other state systems crash very quickly.
Are you implying that private corporations are more motivated to take advantage of their employees for profit, rather than just trying to keep them happy and productive? I doubt tech companies care much about the profits from these endeavors to risk losing employees through shenanigans. The motivation for both private and military seems to me to just keep happy, committed employees who will be productive for the cause.
"Are you implying that private corporations are more motivated to take advantage of their employees for profit, rather than just trying to keep them happy and productive?"
I'd say yes, of course they are, apart from very few exceptions. Isn't the illegal wage-fixing move by Apple, Intel and Google a prime example of that?
Cynically, wage fixing does keep people happy and productive, because it means they spend less time worrying about how much more they could make at some other company.
DoD members get screwed as well, as seen in several high profile instances, but you can't just point to a couple cases and think that indicates a trend. I'm sure surveys of large tech companies and the DoD would show that professionals choose their current employer because they're treated well. We have enough mobility in this country that large scale mistreatment would be met with mass exodus and ultimate failure of the employer.
The economy's only booming for those of us in tech. That's why there's all these wildcat labor actions, you see, which have finally resulted in wages growing across-the-board for the first time in decades.
The article mentions those old timey company towns cutting pay but keeping rent and food prices the same. What's to stop a company like Facebook from doing the same? Sure, they have no reason to do that now while the cash is rolling in and everything is gravy. But what about when the market turns and profits start to shrink?
I think it's very dangerous for the same for-profit company to control both people's pay and their rent and other living expenses.
People are only going to leave if they can get an equivalent job at a competitor. If and when the current tech bubble bursts, these companies will all have a hiring freeze at the same time, just as they're all in a hiring frenzy at the same time right now. We live in a feast-or-famine economy, and we tend to forget past famines while we're feasting.
If a company controls your paycheck, it's hard enough to leave. If they control both your paycheck and your housing, it's much harder to leave. If you want to leave and you put in your two weeks' notice, are they going to respond with notice that you're being evicted? So now you have to handle a job change and a sudden move at the same time?
Sudden? If you live in a company-owned house, would you really expect to stay after quitting?
If you want to leave, you plan your move along with your change of job. If for some particular reason you may think this will be exceedingly problematic, you can move before quitting.
But surely profits gained from a marketable product are >> than profits gained from cutting corners at employee expense? Risking the loss of top talent would seem to be a losing strategy.
That headline really needs to be toned down. Yeah company cities have been tried before, but this isn't anything Pullman would have liked. For one Facebook can't afford to turn cannons on its own workers and without cannons attacking your own workers, you just can't be a real robber baron.
Employee mobility matters. Most people working at Facebook could take their skills and easily get a job somewhere else. The story was different for the company town workers of a century ago.
The only way this turns Facebook into robber barons is if they're able to drive developer's salaries down as a result. But the only way to do that would be to build many thousands of units. The housing situation in SF isn't just a little bit short, it's a lot short on supply. And even that would probably just bring developers salaries down from the heavens to more normal levels rather than somehow magically making them all indentured servants.
That really only applies to staff not already living in the Bay area (who can presumably afford wherever it is they live), and staff willing to live in whatever kinds of apartments they're providing. That way lies the army of H1B mediocrity.
Well, the basic problem is that the city councils of Valley "cities" (ie: overgrown, egotistical suburbs) keep refusing to build the kind of dense housing, mixed-price developments, and mixed-usage buildings that make real cities function. In fact, they often explicitly refuse to build any new housing at all, insisting that transplanted tech employees just find somewhere else.
So the companies have to build their own damn housing.
Menlo Park is determined to protect its "village feel". They don't want to be a "real city". They won't even allow buildings over two stories tall in the quaint little downtown area. Trying to overlay dense housing and mixed-use buildings onto a wealthy "village" is incredibly difficult, and some giant corporation muscling the city council is likely to provoke the residential antibodies.
Interestingly San Jose has had some controversy over the opposite issue. The city has a bit of an inferiority complex about not being perceived as a "real city" despite having ~1m people, so has been trying to encourage more high-rise development and fewer sprawling office parks. The goal seems to be to turn itself into a globally known tech hub, rather than being perceived as just the southern suburbs of San Francisco. Part of the city (the North San Jose redevelopment area) is targeted as a new high-rise central business district adjacent to the BART extension, and part of that redevelopment plan included minimum height guidelines, in which new developments were supposed to be at least 14 stories tall. There was considerable pushback from developers, though, because they wanted to build office parks rather than 14-story buildings, so the guideline has since been waived.
That... sounds like a perfect place for me to live. I'm just salivating at the thought of living in a town that doesn't allow buildings over two stories. If I didn't love Texas (and my current job) so much, I'd seriously consider moving there now.
Hmm... I think one of my ex-coworkers from my last job is from that town. Maybe I'll ping her and ask her about it...
And precisely this is why I'm adamant about never, ever moving to the Bay Area. It's full of tech companies to work at, neat people to hang out with, and has an excellent climate with plenty of nature to bike through... and the local governments do their damnedest to ensure nobody will ever be able to afford any of it except for them.
My issue with the Bay Area is that and the baseless professional downgrading that's usually involved with that move. Because you didn't do it in the Bay Area, they shave one or two ranks off your title and your salary suffers (and, presumably, you don't get the best projects). Sorry, but I know more than your VPs about technology and how to build a company, and so I'm not going to take a junior role for the "privilege" of living in California. If winter gets to me, I'll take two weeks and go to Mexico or Bonaire; problem solved.
As somebody who lives in the burbs (in Texas, not SV), I live here because I actively prefer a suburban lifestyle, and the presence of the kind of developments you want would make me move out to the exurbs.
I don't want to live in a "real city". I chose to live in the suburbs because I prefer suburbs.
Fine! But you shouldn't be allowed to squat on desirable locations (ie: places where lots of people work), soaking up the property taxes from business growth while telling everyone who works at the business you love taxing to get out of your suburb.
You want the suburbs? Fine: live in a real suburb with little to no industry, and let the rest of us know how you're keeping the schools and municipal services funded.
Otherwise, let some housing be built, so that people have a place to live. Because the world isn't just about you: it's about everyone else, too.
As someone who will have to relocate to the bay area soon, all of this is incredibly worrying. I thought it was just SF that had major opposition to new development. I didn't realize that issue extended to the south bay as well.
It's much worse in parts of the peninsula (e.g. Palo Alto) than it is in SF proper. Mountain View just got a pro-development city council though, so there is hope.
Taking 40 years to build an extremely useful bit of public transportation is kind of 'exhibit A' for screwy politics in my book - and I know something about it, living in Italy!
I don't have the exact statistics as hand, but SF has actually had moderate growth in the housing stock— the real issue is that there was essentially 0 housing growth in Silicon Valley other than San Jose.
I need to visit the Bay Area tech scene and see what's going on. From the outside, via media and this site, it seems like it's drifting away from the real world into its own cultural bubble... but maybe I'm just hatin'
