[throwaway1460]

    > Apple's new spaceship building (in the middle of a faceless suburb)
    > will cost $5 billion and have 2.8 million square feet of space

… that no employee below VP level can afford to live near. It's OK, though; Apple doesn't have to pay them for the tenth of their lives they waste commuting.

And above the entrance these words appear: “My name is Jobs, CEO of CEOs: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

[mwfunk]

They can absolutely afford to live near it. Based on my own anecdotal experience at least, the people who work for the big tech companies in the South Bay with the long commutes are generally the ones who choose to have long commutes so they can work in the South Bay but live in SF. If affordability were their concern, they could save a ton of money by just living nearby in Sunnyvale or Campbell or wherever.

I also know people who work for those same companies who have long commutes for affordability reasons, but they seem to be the exceptions rather than the rule. Even in their case, it's usually for reasons other than there's just no way they can afford to live in the South Bay. More often, it's because they are determined to have a really big house with a really big yard and are unwilling to concede on that (such a thing is quite a luxury in the South Bay). Even then, they're accepting the commute for because they want to, not because they have to. It really sucks that housing is that ridiculous in the Bay Area, but it's not like any of these huge companies are going to pick up and leave and build their giant new campus out in the middle of the desert or something.

[throwaway1460]

  > not like any of these huge companies are going to pick up and leave and
  > build their giant new campus out in the middle of the desert or something.

Or something.

Typically a programmer's daily work product can be moved half way around the world in a fraction of a second, for a fraction of a cent.

Perhaps there should be an addition to Latency numbers every programmer should know:

  Programmer drives to work .... 3,000,000,000,000 ns

[objclxt]

I don't think it's the affordability that's the problem - or rather, I know plenty of people at Google / Facebook / Apple / any other company in the valley who make the choice to commute not because of any cost saving, but because they don't want to live somewhere with very little going on socially and pretty much constant need for a car.

[strlen]

> … that no employee below VP level can afford to live near.

San Jose, Santa Clara, Campbell, and even parts of Cupertino and Sunnyvale are far more affordable than SF. This is especially so for couples and families.

(Suburbia is a far cry from SF in terms of culture, obviously, but that's a different topic)