[peter303]

I read a couple of essays from googliers who did this. Google provides nearly all your needs in office- free food, recreation, laundry- save a many hour sleep spot. And people work and hang out 12, 15 hours then. So why pay high rent only to sleep and put up with terrible commute traffic. In the open office environment of new techs finding sleep spots is harder. But many sleep in their vehicles in a climate rarely freezing or roasting.

[mikelat]

I'm surprised this isn't already a perk at working at some of these companies, but then again I'm assuming they'd be subjected to a whole swarm of regulations regarding living conditions.

[patmcguire]

Yeah. South Bay hates housing, loves offices.

[ZanyProgrammer]

If I got paid a Google salary, there's no way I couldn't afford to find an apartment in Santa Clara County. Note I didn't say fancy condo, 3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn, or townhouse.

[lsc]

>If I got paid a Google salary, there's no way I couldn't afford to find an apartment in Santa Clara County.

Sure, an a google or facebook or linkedin salary, you can afford a place to live in the area, no question. But two or three grand a month, post tax? That's still a lot of money. I mean, it's not the choice I would make, but I can totally understand why someone would want to live in the office, even though they could instead spend a lot of money on rent.

There's a lot of reasons why you'd want to save that money; Just one reason: How many of us remember 1999? If this is anything like that, a lot of us will only have a few years in this industry, or we will have a few years in this industry, then spend half a decade doing jobs that pay dramatically less before the economy recovers to the point where we can work in this industry again. Salting away as much cash as you can while the hunting is easy is not a bad idea.

[VLM]

I talked to a google recruiter a couple years ago and if I took the job and moved to mountain view, my current lifestyle of "3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn" would be utterly impossible, so goodbye.

This was very close to the national peak of the housing bubble, things may have gotten better since then.

[seanp2k2]

It's pretty much impossible to find even the crappiest home here for under half a million. For what you describe, even if it's next to a freeway in a "bad" neighborhood with a crap school district, that'd be a few million easy.

[ZanyProgrammer]

The problem is that you insist on living the mid 20th century American Dream.

[lawnchair_larry]

Not really. That's current day for most of the US. It's SF that is broken.