I can understand 3-4 people who are equals between themselves pulling this off, but with 24 people there's no way everyone likes the arrangement, so having everyone to be in it 24/7 is wrong.
I think it's safe to assume everyone there is pretty ok with it. It's not like anyone there doesn't have 3 recruiters/week asking them if they want a more traditional arrangement.
The negative reaction isn't because anybody thinks those engineers are being held against their will. It's to avoid the race to the bottom that could happen when some fad-addled PHB decides that nerd labor camps are the latest hot trend.
Mechanisms of social disapproval don't exist because anybody cares overmuch for the choices of a few people. They exist to forestall potential trends.
I'd say it's more a matter of "preventing others from dragging down society to competing at a level we as a group don't find socially acceptable." This is a legitimate function of society, and opprobrium and derision is a key tool for enforcing social norms that keep a check on undesirable behavior.
Start-ups have been hot-housing like this for years. I have friends who went through YC who did it. PG even suggested in one of his essays "Ever notice how much easier it is to hack at home than at work? So why not make work more like home?" [1]
This is just a scaled-up version of what has already existed for years. The reason it's not more common is because it's logistically difficult to organise. I doubt that difficulty will suddenly decrease. The majority of people will always have families or different lifestyle preferences.
So I'm doubtful that society will be "dragged down" to a point where this is the social norm.
Hence, I think that the opprobrium and derision in this thread is stronger than it needs to be.
Apply your logic to another group which is dragging down society to competing at a level "we" don't find socially acceptable. Yay for slut shaming?
(For the record I don't advocate slut shaming and enjoy the company of promiscuous women. Just pointing out that Rayiner's logic applies equally well here.)
At virtually every company I've worked with, there's something fucked up. (Can't even afford to be unaware of it, as it affects the work.) Yes, I've been privileged enough to leave... for yet another fucked up company.
(So no point in speaking for everyone, like managers typically do. "At our company, we think...")
Like others, I'm very curious how it works with non-work relationships like families and friends.
did you watch the video? nowhere does it imply you're forced to work 24/7 - it's a huge house, I suppose you can just go somewhere else when you need some time alone.
Yeah, it's pretty unfortunately that they interview people without telling them about this situation, and then people get there and boom, they are involved in a cult!
OK, so I'm being sarcastic there, but seriously, isn't it nice for a free society that there are a lot of different kinds of workplaces, and if people don't want to work in one situation, then they have the option to quit that job and work in a different one?
Yup. We're all liberal pluralists. Live and let live.
Except, of course, for employment choices. We all agree that traditional working environments with all their industrial era baggage sucks, but if I don't leave on the minute after a 40 hours work week, and I don't get paid overtime (so much for the industrial era baggage) it's incontrovertible evidence of rampant exploitation. Employees to claim to like their workplaces are brainwashed because the only reason you like your workplace is if you drank the koolaid - and of course hating your job is evidence of incompetent management. Remote work is the thing of the future, except companies that provide for easy remote working are under deep suspicion for tricking their employees to work during their free time.
HN is really, really schizophrenic on work. The middlebrow is strong with this one.
I'm neither a liberal nor a pluralist, so I totally feel comfortable calling this abberent and cultish. I don't think this is healthy for the kids involved, and I doubt they're getting paid enough to make the sacrifice worthwhile. It just seems like preying on some young males who don't have much of a social life and putting them in a situation that precludes them from developing one. This happens a decent amount in other fields. My friend is a chemical engineer in the middle of nowhere, and while he doesn't live on a cult campus he has a similar problem of social isolation, and its really hurt his mental state. And of course all the young guys working on oil rigs and whatnot. But those guys are often in a situation where they have few other options.
Anything can be made to sound bad if you oversimplify. Any community can be made to sound incoherent if you collapse the opinions of very different people on top of one another.
It's pretty obvious that the article is describing an unusual arrangement that won't suit everyone - although it's not specific to tech, there are other jobs where you get stuffed into a remote, often mostly young male, community for months at a time. Oil, the military, certain religious and agricultural communities.
I agree. There is a lot of baked in dishonesty relating to careers and jobs and such.
It's very tied in to people's identity and realities often unpleasant to deal with. Many of us spend most our lives in a way we don't like. That's a tough pill. Some aspects of it can be dehumanizing emasculating (for men, of course) or demeaning in other ways.
In any case I think working life feeds you ills that are hard to swallow without a little delusion. Employer want passionate employees. What if you're not passionate? Are you supposed to grin and lie, delude yourself or go find a job spec without passion in it?
A knowledge company in 2014 is different to a factory in 1893 and they are both new on the grander scale. Before them we had lordships and serfodms, guilds, patrons, patriarchs, soldiers, knights, orders, ships, stations, slaves and lots of other things etc. Those things tended to be who you are in the way that we now think of being "A Canadian."
A company is a social structure. psychological conformity is a part of all social structures.
note: I also agree with your detractors. It's tricky pointing to hypocrisy in a community Different people's opinions are incompatible. The opinion of a group can be inconsistent without crossing into hypocrisy.
> A knowledge company in 2014 is different to a factory in 1893 and they are both new on the grander scale.
Yet this living situation isn't that much of a stretch from the dormitory-style housing you still see in China for factory workers, or the company towns you saw in the U.S. for mine workers and the like.
>> "Yet this living situation isn't that much of a stretch from the dormitory-style housing you still see in China for factory workers, or the company towns you saw in the U.S. for mine workers and the like."
You can't be serious. This is a Foxconn dormitory [1]. It's nothing like a beautiful mansion in the californian country side with swimming pool and tennis court.
I think there are interesting fundamental objections a lot of people seem to have.
Labour laws and conventions almost assume people do not have a choice in their place of employment. That's why a barman's right to a smoke free workplace is more recognized than a patron's. With that in mind I think people feel that employment needs to be accessible to everyone and that this is specifically designed for young singles.
There is also an objection to the cultish nature of this, the opposite of work-life balance. If an employer controls your work life and your home life… I think that's what rayiner is objecting to.
Think about it this way. In one case you have a high priced escort who takes on a select few clients and earns like a star stockbroker. On the other you have a lower end prostitute earning less, in worse conditions and probably and with all the associated social problems of prostitution. To many, they are fundamentally the same thing because being a hooker is the important part, not the consequences of being a hooker.
I'm glad to see experimentation like this. I think if some people really like it, that might outweigh the other cases where people dislike it. In the midst of such a demand for programmers, they should be able to leave.
I'm generally for strong labour protection laws but as you point out with such demand from programmers in the area nobody needs a job at this company, they take it because they want it and they can leave relatively easily at any time.
I agree completely. Why wouldn't we want to embrace this neo-feudal model where we can enjoy our life with a literal Lord of the Manor controlling our work and living all in one?
Fair point. So it is probably incompatible with workers who have their own families. And probably more 23 year old hackers are unattached than 35 year old ones.
EDIT: On a serious note, it is quite frustrating to me to read things like this. My colleagues so willingly giving up any life whatsoever, dedicating themselves to their company 24/7... How do you compete with such lunacy? I don't really fear much, I know these are fringe cases and most people are probably with me on this. But, the USA and this startup scene is definitely the last place on earth I would want to be. Proud drones, flaunting their having successfully reduced themselves to cogs in a machine. This is just so, so wrong.
Surprised at the negative attitude in this thread. It's certainly not an environment I'd like to work in but all the people working there don't have to, they choose to. It's probably also a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to rent in SF which I'm sure a lot of them like. Without knowing working hours/salary it's hard to say exactly how good or bad it is but the most important thing is that with so many companies having difficulty finding talented engineers all of those people are working there because they want to.
I can understand people considering it fucked up, but I've also done this on a smaller scale (my first startup - we were 5 people initially and 3 of us lived in the office, and the other two spent most of their waking time there too) and it can be awesome for a while if you're young, without dependents and enjoy what you're doing.
In fact, I'd recommend the experience for a year or two. It was a bit like an extension of university dorm life. And it was a lot of fun that first year.
Living in the office (we had our separate rooms, our breakfast table was in the reception area; our living room was also the meeting room...) and being used to bizarre sleeping patterns provided a lot of unintentional entertainment.
Like the time I happened to be up at 3am on a Sunday morning, and the support phone rang (we ran an ISP), and I decided I might as well pick it up, only to hear a lot of noise on the other end before a bewildered voice told me he'd called in pure frustration and didn't actually expect anyone would answer, and had gotten so surprised he actually dropped the phone.
And this is a bit sad, but one of my best memories from that year (1995) was staying up late at night to max out our little ISPs 512kbps line downloading Netscape 2.0 right after it had been put on the FTP site.. Font color, animated gifs and livescript/javascript!
So I suppose you were a founder of the startup, or at least an early employee with the expected benefits. It sure is great! Like this dear CEO of Meta, he wakes up with a big smile on his face thinking of his equity and all these employees who probably have little enough or none and put in just as much time as he does, and are presumably as immersed in it as he is.
Frankly, I felt filthy hearing him talk about productivity and evening brainstorming sessions and people talking in the kitchen, you know, furtively at 3am, about his great company and product. Does it occur to him that his employees are humans and might be interested in talking about other things? Every mention he makes of spontaneous social interaction involves "brainstorming and great ideas." The dream of every founder, that he could scale his (warranted) passion down to all those who have not nearly as much stake in it but should love it all the same! Yuck.
If you want communal living, there are cooperatives and similar arrangements with equal stakes. If you want to play capitalism, don't play fucking coy.
Many of the comments in this thread are depressingly similar to same-sex slut-shaming.
"I can't or don't want to do that, so I don't think you should be allowed to do that either. I'm going to judge you and speak badly of you, to try to punish you for doing something I don't want to, and discourage you and others from doing something I don't want to."
Meta is a start-up (cool) creating augmented reality (very cool) hardware (even more cool) for interactive interaction with virtual overlays (just unbelievably cool). I'm a computer vision / computer graphics guy, and everything about this project looks technologically awesome, with potentially world-changing applications.
They went through YC and are still getting positive press, so the start-up is looking about as successful as a start-up at this stage can be.
I bet you that every single one of the employees loves this idea, loves working on it, and honestly believes that Meta is going to change the world and be the next Apple. When I was in my twenties, I worked crazy hours and slept under my desk for a lot less.
EDIT: Added the word "same-sex" before "slut-shaming" to clarify the comparison I'm making.
The comments in here are absolutely nothing like slut-shaming. It's insulting you even equate the two.
Sexism is a such huge issue (especially in this industry) that you should probably consider educating yourself before you vomit ignorant comments about it.
Your mention of sexism in the technology industry suggests to me that you interpreted my comment as men slut-shaming women. I agree that sexism in the technology industry is an important and sensitive issue.
My comment wasn't intended to suggest one gender slut-shaming the other gender; people of a gender can (and certainly do) slut-shame members of that same gender to control them and keep them in line. This is the comparison I was making.
In retrospect, I see that my comment was not sufficiently clear in this regard. Please re-consider my comment from this clarified point of view.
My point is that many of the comments in this thread suggest that Meta is like a cult or a sweatshop, or that the situation is "fucked up", etc. The commenters are implicitly trying to punish Meta for engaging in a behaviour with which those commenters do not agree.
What is wrong with someone choosing to devote themselves to a start-up about which they are enthusiastic? What's wrong with believing in something and devoting yourself to it for a while? Does it hurt anyone other than themselves? Why then is it so important for other people to disparage that person's choice so vocally?
Likewise, what is so wrong about a company where enthusiastic employees live in this arrangement? If you accept my axiom that the employees are enthusiastic about the start-up (based upon the reasons I outlined in my original comment), then why is this arrangement "fucked up"?
I hope you will re-consider your assertion that I am uneducated and that I am vomiting ignorant comments.
Beautiful residence, but it's still striking me as an overbearing set up. I suppose people are choosing to be there. He says they're getting 3x more work done, but i'd love to know why, in terms of work hours etc.
At Datarank we spent our first two years living together. The first year was four of us in one big house, and the second year we lived in two neighboring two-bedroom apartments. While at times you can definitely feel cramped, 99% of the time it's pretty awesome. I do believe that living/working together increased our productivity a lot. It also made brainstorming ideas much easier as we would often times spend late nights in the kitchen/living room talking about our company, whereas in a traditional office setting that may have ended at 5-6pm everyday. Props to Meta for making it work with 24 people, that seems intense. :)
This seems like a good solution when all your employees are young males without spouses/kids. Also works if most of the folks living together are founders (vs early employees).
Personally I'd probably not want to be part of a young company where there was so much peer pressure [1] to stay with the founders and other team members in a cramped up apartment. But then again maybe I'm not the target hire anyway. Also, I'm not claiming to speak for all females on the planet, but most of "my" female friends would probably avoid working at such a company.
Of course if you are starting a start-up you gotta do what you gotta do to survive and minimize expenses, and all that but it seems like a practical arrangement if you are the founder and not an early employee with meager equity.
[1] Fear of missing out on critical decisions that happen before the slumber party for instance.
I can completely understand. Our initial motivation was to just conserve cash as we were still very early in the design/conception phase and weren't really ready to attempt to grow. Also being married, I couldn't imagine doing this anymore haha
After university I hunted for and found my 1st 1bedroom apartment. Even in my little dorm room I didn't feel cramped and I definitely got along with my roommates in most cases. But there are so many tangible benefits to living on your own.
- Personal hygiene: my roommate wasn't the cleanup. In fact, the only time he got into it was when he had company (a girl) coming over.
- Personal finance: I was able to get the landlord to split the rental but this was not the case for heat, electricity, cable, and internet.
- Personal space: We were both guilty of this. Our girlfriends, unofficially, moved in at some points. Normally, not a problem but if you've ever had to wash your face in the kitchen sink because the bathroom was occupied for hours sometimes.
Sometimes you have to pullback and focus. If you are constantly surrounded by the same faces it can be easy to do "work" without actually doing anything productive.
That's really the first thing that comes to mind, isn't it?
I mean, I feel like it could go either way: eccentric jazz musician Sun Ra's Arkestra lived (and still mostly live) communally in a Philadelphia row house, and they haven't gone insane. On the other hand, the demands of a business are different from those of a musical group.
It seems like, for young tech people, the pendulum is swinging in the direction of communal living. Co-working spaces, specialized housing for groups of tech-entrepreneur-types[1], and more holistic workplaces (Google providing day-care, lots of startups bringing a chef on board to do meals in-house) seem to be in vogue right now. This looks like a particularly extreme extension of that trend (especially since they're leaving the city, a fundamental fixture in the SV startup culture), but I guess we'll see how it works out.
Reported to HR for not loving and worshipping Dear Company and devoting every single moment of your existence and every fiber of your being to increasing Its Holy Profits and Stock Value! :>
That's a good question. Lumberjacks and pipeline workers are not required to live in company dormitories; the North Dakota gas boomtowns have cheap family housing, and, presumably, subsidized housing provided by employers is considered employee compensation. Workers on oil rigs have no choice but to live on-site. What's the argument that says you can rig a software company in such a way as to precluding hiring people with families?
Lumberjacks and pipeline workers are often required to live in encampments near the work site. Some jobs require living in isolation.
These jobs don't "preclude hiring people with families". If a person with a family worked there he'd probably do the same thing as the oil rig worker - live on site and skype his family at night.
The only difference I can see between this job and oil rig work is that the software guy probably has a few recruiters/week emailing him opportunities he likes more.
That's not the only difference. Pipeline workers who work at remote encampments work in shifts, like truck drivers; they get prolonged time back at home. That's not how a software job works; that time at home is like PTO.
Also, pipeline workers need to work on remote sites. Software developers do not. That will matter at trial.
What if the company is based in northern Alaska? What if work hours are 2000-0400?
It's hard to make out a disparate impact claim to begin with. Doing so on the basis that you don't like the living arrangements would seem impossible. What limiting principle would the courts apply that wouldn't result in legal liability for every company that doesn't allow employees to telecommute?
It doesn't seem possible that all the people live in the house, I think they might be glossing that over a bit. Although their jobs page for open contracts it says "food and accommodation are included" haha.
I would do this. I understand it's not appropriate for some people (families / children etc)
But there are people like me, who just aren't good at the "real life" stuff. Give me a place to sleep, eat and exercise (wow - they have a pool!) and I'd gladly spend the rest of the time hacking on a start-up ... especially if it was cool technology like Augmented Reality
It would be interesting to be able to measure burnout rate, employee turnover and just general psychological indicators over time in such a setup.
I find creative thinking and critical analysis often comes from engaging in disparate actions (as compared to full immersion in work), here I would imagine group think and not seeing the mistakes you are making as a group could be amplified easily.
I see myself doing this for a short period of time, say one or week.
That's actually a plan I am making with some friends/coders. We may rent a nice villa somewhere in Spain for two weeks.
Get some buzz and some work done.
Would be nice to have ideas flowing and in the end we may leave with a product.
That kind of "retreat" is a bit more conventional I think. It's fairly common at large companies to occasionally send a team to Vail or Hawaii or a cruise or something for a week for team-building / brainstorming / etc. But you don't usually bring your family and actually move in with your coworkers; it's more of a business trip.
In a more researchy direction, there's a German institute that organizes these kinds of events. They have a castle in the middle of nowhere, Schloss Dagstuhl, which accepts proposals from people who want to use it to organize 1-week residential seminars on different subjects: http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/dagstuhl-seminars/
I don't know about Portola Valley zoning regs, but I hope this article doesn't draw unwanted attention to Meta's arrangement.
Many/most towns would frown on the number of unrelated people living in a unpermitted hotel, operating a business with more than a certain number of employees in a non commercial district, etc.
Legal or not, it sounds like fun for a couple years, if you're young enough to see appeal in dorm life.
I bet they won't even consider married candidates, or even anyone over 30.
We did something like this some 14-15 years ago when we were a 7-8 employee startup, but it was voluntary. Want to stay in the house? Be my guest, we have plenty of bedrooms. Wanna commute? Any time, but be sure to spend at least 6 hours daily in the office house. Worked like charm.
I can understand 3-4 people who are equals between themselves pulling this off, but with 24 people there's no way everyone likes the arrangement, so having everyone to be in it 24/7 is wrong.