Fucking company town. Google has become a real shit company. Switch your default search to duck duck go or anything else people!
searx
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!
yeah, using a someone elses public searx (like i do ) just seems unhygienic.
Google sucks, search with ducks!
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.
Thank you for defining the crab bucket mentally for everyone here!
You must have just missed my edit
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.
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.
“If you lived here, you’d be at work by now!”
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?
“Because fuck you, that’s why.”
-Google
At $99/night it’s like renting for $3000/month. Even in silicon valley that’s pricey.
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.
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?
live to work,
why e/se
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.
Nah man, this is cheaper than a lot of rent near Google campus in the bay. Shits crazy
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.
Well how else are you going to monitor “fair use” of the unlimited shower.
S1ep2 of black mirror?
Didn’t gage company towns making a comeback on my 2023 Bingo card
I remember my internship at google 10y ago, with all the free perks, service to make you forget about chores, the cool attitude, etc…
Are you Vince or Owen?
it took me 5s but I got it :) I never saw the movie, though even though I really those two comedians.
That’s a far cry from now :/
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.
Reminds me of company towns. We’re definitely regressing.
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.
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.”
I agree. These are all great reasons to not work there anymore. There are other workplaces that don’t operate like a plantation, and are happy to pluck googles best and brightest from the clutches of an unappreciative plantation owner. This biggest difference is Google employees are not enslaved, and can leave at will.
It’s clear google doesn’t want their working class to work there. Fantastic idea!
Charging employees $99/night for the pleasure of staying on the masters plantation is a stupid test, and the best way to pass is not to play.
I’m … I just … is this satire ?
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 $99 a night. This isn’t at all like company script, and I’d much rather be the developer being asked to return to their office job than the housekeeper employed at Hotel Google figuring out how to pay rent in California. I’m not sure that people realize this but hotels take a lot of staff (housekeepers, front desk, laundry workers for sheets/towels). II’d hope that Google is paying them fair wages, but if I had a bet, they’ve contracted a hospitality company for this. Those workers are probably underpaid.
This kind of feels like what-a-bout-ism, but techy spaces like this seem laser-focused on what are basically white-collar worker problems. Comparing charging for a hotel to working in a coal mine for script is deeply out of touch.
So If you need to work overtime, now you also need to pay 99$ if you want to sleep a few hours before the next day?
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
Lmao imagine calling at-will employment with an extremely generous salary a “semi-slave” state
*Saint Peter, don’t you call me 'cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store*
the fact that google is charging employees more than motels on the side of the road is surprising, 99 a night is still about 3k a month. granted i know its for temporary until the employee can relocate but, not much of an incentive.
Gtfo I thought I let my job take advantage of me
God this dystopia is so boring
And evil.
