Google Preparing To Launch G-Town 251
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google's aggressive online growth increasingly has a counterpart in bricks and mortar, with the company's Mountain View HQ mushrooming in the past four years to occupy more than 4 million square feet. And that's just for starters. On Silicon Valley's NASA Ames base, Google is preparing to build a new corporate campus with fitness and day care facilities and — in a first in the valley — employee housing, adding 1.2 million sqare feet to Google's real estate holdings. 'I don't want to say it's the new company town,' said commercial real estate VP Gregory M. Davies of Google's role, 'but it's not far from it.' Presumably, no anti-suicide nets will be needed for this one."
obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's how I got my start in SV (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in Colorado for a company headquartered in Sunnyvale. They used to fly us out from CO and we'd work in silicon valley for Colorado wages, staying in corporate housing. I loved it because I sublet my apartment in CO out so I was essentially staying for free. Top that off with all the overtime I was working in a place that I didn't technically live (yet) and thus didn't have many friends to go out partying with.
Then they wanted to bring some of us out to CA to live permanently, but didn't want to give us the cost of living adjustments. In order to pacify us they let us stay in the company housing with less than cost-of-living raises, making less than we should but compensating the low pay by covering the housing cost. It worked out really well for a while and was a great start. I had to quit the company when I wanted to move out though because they wouldn't budge on giving any of us raises if we moved out.
The living wasn't bad, I had some interesting room mates that were smart people, but some were crazy or just odd characters. They were bringing in Taiwanese engineers that couldn't speak just about any english and urinated all over the bathroom in the middle of the night. Thankfully we had housekeeping three times a week. I also had these two drunk party-crazy room mates that would tear the place apart. One of them came home drunk and drank a half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and went blind for like a day or two. Another one would get drunk and go steal fruit off the trees in people's yards. One time they got in a flour fight and when I woke up it was like a ghost had walked all over my apartment. Another one went crazy on drugs, lost a rental car, got sent back to CO but never made it because he got arrested on his Phoenix layover for trying to disassemble a metal detector or something (though he wasn't technically my room mate.)
Ah, the good old days of technology, per diem, overtime cash and partying with other nerds in Man Jose. Can't say they weren't interesting, but I'm glad they're over.
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There is a novel waiting to be written there. :)
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I worked in Colorado for a company headquartered in Sunnyvale...
Then they wanted to bring some of us out to CA to live permanently, but didn't want to give us the cost of living adjustments.
Well yeah, do you have any idea how much the company must be spending on vampire and demon insurance?
Oh... SunnyVALE. Nevermind...
Well, actually... (Score:2)
There was a long software project that involved us testing and refining a child safety filter, which included many months on end of surfing pornographic websites and filtering about 80,000 domain names. Not strictly gay sex, but extremely sexual none-the-less...
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Considering the cost of home ownership(and rentals for that matter) in the Bay area/San Jose area, this is pretty obvious. They attract a lot of people out of college who simply can't afford to live within any reasonable distance of the facility. So they rent/buy in places like Tracy, which are 90+minutes away. It would be nice if more companies did this.
Stanford University has a similar setup; not bad for a Junior University.
Re:obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be nice if more companies did this.
You are joking, right? Or do you actually like the idea of your employer not only being able to fire you at will, but simultaneously kick you out of your place of residence? There is not a chance I would ever give a corporation that much power over me, and I've never even left an employer on anything other than good terms.
Re:obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be nice if more companies did this.
You are joking, right? Or do you actually like the idea of your employer not only being able to fire you at will, but simultaneously kick you out of your place of residence?
I'm reminded of Saltaire in Bradford, UK
It's when they start paying you in their own currency that can only be spent in company stores that you have to worry.
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I seem to remember a certain part of US history where a steel company had company housing and would evict fired workers as well. Of course, it's been about 20 years since that class so I don't remember all the details.
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Reminds me of the wonders of the "Socialst Society". This was a standard practice by all large employers in the communist block. As there was no housing to go about this pretty much meant you slaving for life in a single job with the average time a person was in one job in excess of 20 years.
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You are joking, right? Or do you actually like the idea of your employer not only being able to fire you at will, but simultaneously kick you out of your place of residence?
We're talking about California here. It takes at least a month to evict someone. Terminating their lease is only the beginning.
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They attract a lot of people out of college who simply can't afford to live within any reasonable distance of the facility.
$85k/yr + $15k signing bonuses are not little, doubt any large company pays much less than that for tech workers in the bay area.
So they rent/buy in places like Tracy, which are 90+minutes away.
Recent college graduates don't generally have a wife and three kids.
It would be nice if more companies did this.
Or they could use that money to pay higher salaries instead which employees could then use to pay for their housing of choice. I know, an amazing concept. Of course then companies wouldn't be able to compel people to not switch jobs by holding their housing ransom.
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Or they could use that money to pay higher salaries instead which employees could then use to pay for their housing of choice
I think the point is that this is cheaper. They could pay you the cost of providing the accommodation, but then you'd pay a cut of it to the bank in interest or to the landlord in his profit. If Google lets the accommodation, then they do so at cost (or below, since they can probably write it off against tax), so $1000/month goes a lot further if no one is skimming off a profit from it.
I probably wouldn't want to live somewhere like that long term, but it might be nice for the first year in a new plac
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Re: topic
Similar stuff happens in academia already. It's cheaper for universities in expensive places (like NYC) to subsidize housing for graduate students / some staff than it would be to pay out extra location bonuses.
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Remember the simpsons (Score:3, Funny)
http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Cypress_Creek [wikia.com]
G-town (Score:2)
"I don't want to say it's the new company town, but it's not far from it".
"Check out the new G-Spot Bar on the corner of Page Avenue and Brin Alley".
Also, http://www.theonion.com/video/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-protect-privacy,14358/ [theonion.com]
They did this already. (Score:3, Funny)
Don't think I'd want to live there.. (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think I could live in a town that will probably stay in beta forever.
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"from the owe-my-soul-to-the-company-store dept." (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"from the owe-my-soul-to-the-company-store dept (Score:5, Insightful)
I launched sixteen droids and what do I get? A cubicle bedroom and deeper in debt.
Re:"from the owe-my-soul-to-the-company-store dept (Score:4, Funny)
Better than being unemployed and asking, "Brother, can you spare an IPv4 address?"
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Google probably owns the "souls" (online personalities) of its employees more than any country in the world.
Really?
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i'm not exactly seeing how this has Google owning their "physical" lives. these employees have the choice to live either in off-Google-campus housing, which might be far and/or expensive, or in this new housing. they can choose to work for Google, or they can seek employment somewhere else. indentured servitude this ain't. Google employees' freedom to contract hasn't been eroded in some way. i'd say the only negative factor in all this (and it is a significant one) is Google's gobbling up of previously independent communities. but even there, Google can't just take over peoples' homes and businesses, they have to purchase them just like everyone else.
call me when Google starts making work a contracted requirement for basic living necessities or builds unmaintained, dilapidated tenements, then there'll be something worrisome.
Not yet, but...
Come and work in silicon valley for $60,000. Your choices for housing: getting two roommates and sharing a 2 Bedroom apartment or living on Campus. No brainer! Of course, it's a great deal for you, and you'll graduate out, but ten years from now, new graduates coming into the company will earn less and pay more for the privilege, but still enough so that it seems like a great deal compared to housing off-campus. Except... there's only enough net income for a small amount of expendables.
I wonder how this will end... (Score:4, Interesting)
History is full of stories of very powerful companies (Standard Oil, IBM, etc.) that exerted great influence in their time. However, over their life, their influence was either diluted by regulations or the company changed completely. An example would be IBM -- they had a complete lock on the mainframe, a huge advantage in the "business machines" side of the business, but almost lost their place in the 90s by not reacting fast enough to the changeover to PCs and lower-end servers. Now they're a powerful consulting company and STILL have their lock on the mainframe, so they're still OK. Another example would be AT&T -- total monopoly on phone service, had enough money and leeway to support a complete basic research lab (Bell Labs) and had to totally reinvent itself to bexome a wireless carrier on a much smaller scale. (Yes, I know ATT handles all the iPhone contracts in the US, but that's a far cry from dictating the phone service standards for the world.)
I wonder if Google will even have to adapt. At their heart, they're just an advertising agency that happens to serve search results to millions of users every day. For all the neat stuff they "give away" for "free", I don't know if people realize that all their usage data for these tools are being used to improve the core advertising business. If the Web 2.0 no-privacy thing proves to be the new way of the world and not just a fad, Google could concievably keep its lock on the advertising market as long as "common users" never have to pay for anything.
Looking at some of the current Google news stories such as the Street View flap, and how underwhelmed most people were about it, I really think they could continue collecting any information they want without being challenged. I'm not super-old, but I really am amazed about the difference in generational attitudes about privacy. I'm not a tinfoil hat guy, but I really wonder about some of the implications of one company controlling a lot of the advertising market and having a pretty accurate profile about you to share with its customers. Advertising is annoying, but take it a step further and think about life insurers, potential employers, etc. etc... A little far fetched, but I wouldn't totally rule it out.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I wonder how this will end... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Funnily enough, the thing which crushed railroads managed to do so while convincing us it's crucial, needs to be heavily subsidized...and bailed out again, and again, and again. It does seem that whims of people is all that matters.
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The worry for me was never a company getting it, but the government.
Google isn't going to sell the info to the government-- they don't need to; and it would mean betraying their users' trust.
So it doesn't bother me so much.
Nobody has the time to look at YOUR file either, they're just doing statistical analysis on the data mined.
Where World's Collide (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Where World's Collide (Score:5, Insightful)
Dead on! One might note that Google's campus up until now was the old Silicon Graphics campus - and its construction just about coincides with the beginning of SGI's slide. Campuses are like cocaine for companies - God's way of telling you you have too much money.
google define:morass (Score:2)
How ironic that morass is what Google is doing, yet they live on the eastern side of 101, the muddy wetlands by the salt percolators of the South San Francisco Bay, next to the landfill.
Parkinson's Law (Score:4, Interesting)
C. Northcote Parkinson described this in his landmark work "Parkinson's Law." He noticed that British bureaucracies were most effective when young, dynamic, focused, and invariably housed in makeshift quarters.
As these bureaucracies matured, they arranged better housing for themselves, and the completion of a grand edifice, complete with statuary, limousine parking, &etc. they had invariably achieved institutional senility, becoming utterly ineffective.
While dated, Parkinson's Law (1958) is still relevant today; it's simultaneously too funny to be true, yet too true to be dismissed as humor.
gawbl
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Re:Where World's Collide (Score:5, Insightful)
A tar baby is a baby made of tar, from the stories of Uncle Remus. In the story, Br'er Fox created one and persuaded Br'er Rabbit to fight it. The result was that Br'er Rabbit becomes hopelessly stuck to the tar baby and is caught. He escapes by using reverse psychology to persuade Br'er Fox to throw him in the brier patch.
It's been an idiom for a sticky situation for most of a century. The fact that some hypersensitive people choose to take offence at it is no reason to stop using it.
Bell Labs (Score:2)
It could get ugly.... (Score:2)
Corporation: The Future of Roleplaying (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought G-town was a social network (Score:2)
that Google was launching to counter Facebook. Guess I was wrong. People don't live on a virtual network when they could live in a real one.
Nightlife .. (Score:5, Funny)
Does that make the local nightclub the G-Spot?
Re:Nightlife .. (Score:5, Funny)
You can't google that one (Score:2)
You can't google the solution to that one! Sure, they'll give you the instructions, but unless you have experience you don't really know the ins and outs, if you known what I mean, and there are no console error messages to lead you in the right direction either.
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Troubling trend in employer running your life (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been seeing a scarry trend in employers like Google trying to run the lives of their employees. It goes something like this:
You get a student out of University where the University was like their parent (provided their housing, food, rules, activities, goals to achieve, etc) and you recreate that in coporate life so they don't have to adjust to being an adult. You provide their food, their housing, their banking (through your own employee credit union), their healthcare and their activities/goals. It is almost like a cult.
In the end, it makes it difficult to distinguish your personal life and your personal space from your work and it makes it that much harder to leave that job because you'd also need to find a place to live, a new bank, a new health plan/provider and all of the rest of living in the real world as part of the process.
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Don't forget employer provided cell phones and other technogadgets, employer subsidized exercise facilities, tuition reimbursement...
Are Google employees paid in dollars ...? (Score:2)
... Or are they paid in GoogleQuatloos, Google's own currency, which can be spent at GoogleStores? If Google did launch their own currency, I would expect that it would be accepted for all debts, public and private everywhere anyway. The local McDonald's where I live used to have a sign up posting their exchange rate for dollars to the local currency, because a lot of US servicemen would come in with nothing else in their pockets. The McDonald's dropped this, because servicemen tend to stay on base these
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Employers in most places can pay in whatever way both they and the employee agree on.
You saw what happened with the streetview drive by (Score:2, Insightful)
I always thought Google was the real Maas/Neotek (Score:2, Insightful)
Sheriff Required (Score:3, Interesting)
Google, Inc requires the services of a sheriff for its new company town.
1) Fast paced and dynamic environment.
2) Unmatched benefits.
3) Accomodation in a nuclear bunker.
4) Occasional travel in time and to other dimensions.
Pleas click the 'Apply Now' button below.
Re:Sheriff Required (Score:4, Funny)
6) Ability to not be evil
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(*) During second hour of job interview, the town may be overrun by test zombies.
I always wondered what name Googlers gave to unsolicited alpha testers.
( You know, the rare occasions that you see a slightly different resultspage with features that turn out to be only available to everyone several months later. )
If its anything like Eureka... (Score:2)
We're in big trouble. Especially if Google buys stock in Global Dynamics....
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Especially if they can go back in time, prevent the rise of Microsoft, Apple and Linux. Can you imagine a world where all the music, TV shows and movies are free to watch and unlimited, all paid by ads?
Wait, how do I feel about this again?
What Philips did. (Eindhoven, Netherlands) (Score:2)
Somewhat related, how this turned out for Philips and the place they did this (Eindhoven, Netherlands) in the previous era;
It is where Philips first put up office. Housing its own staff is what Philips did en masse after WW2 in the city of Eindhoven. These days the housings are part of Eindhoven itself, and the offices and factories are put to other uses. I especially like how Strijp (the former Philips campus ground) is now a cultural nexus for talented art, design, and tech folks with regular renowed fest
Sqare ? (Score:2)
Once again, a simple typo has not been corrected in the summary.
What are the editors doing ?
Screw the gym facilities (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Think bigger (Score:4, Interesting)
Why start your own country when you can buy (representatives of) existing countries?
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That was the theme of the Heinlein novel "Friday". Well, that and a bit of genetic engineering, but it was another bit of Heinlein forecast that came through. I wonder how much else he's got hidden ...
Honestly, love him or hate him, reading through Heinlein's novels is sometimes a bit like reading a more coherent Nostradamus, one who studied logic instead of funny mushrooms.
Poverty! (Score:3)
Hah! Poverty in Google Town, that's a good one!
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But you'd be happy. After all, you found your G-Spot. Tough to find, I understand.
Re:Poverty! (Score:5, Funny)
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But their girlfriends will be happier for it.
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Do "Virtual Girlfriend" simulators have G-Spots?
or
"You had me at 'Electric Sheep'..."
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Do "Virtual Girlfriend" simulators have G-Spots?
or
"You had me at 'Electric Sheep'..."
Hang on while I ask a New Zealander.
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Shows how far YOU got.
Re:Poverty! (Score:5, Funny)
Isnt g-spot is that red spot found on Thinkpad just below the 'G' key?
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Hah! Poverty in Google Town, that's a good one!
I worked with a guy who had owned USD$500,000 in stock options. He had nothing again, both of us were working for no salary on some miserable startup. You don't buy anything with stock options, you know.
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Why start your own town when you can start your own country?
Maybe this is a good time to get a deal on one of those countries that's being swallowed up by a rising ocean?
A great spot to pile all that stuff that doesn't recycle so well, or to be someplace special for those that don't believe in global warming. Move them there and bring along their favorite tv network to make it feel like home.
Smaller can be better (Score:2)
Think G-spot. I guess that name was taken.
Re:Security Risk? (Score:4, Informative)
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It seems that its on Moffett Field, not actually at Ames itself. Moffett is the old air base that plays host to Ames as well as other facilities. In order to get into Moffett, I believe that only a picture ID is required.
However, even if it were on Ames itself, Pete Worden is a unique administrator and if anyone could find a way to make it work, its him.
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I had a brief stint at NASA Ames (protip: don't work for NASA) and I seem to recall that getting a badge involved taking a fingerprint of all 10 of my fingers and showing a valid US passport.
You don't want to mess with the folks at the gate either, since they each carry two handguns.
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Completely Off Topic Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are you using a url shortener in a non-twitter-like environment? You could have just copied the URL, just like any other URL instead of passing it through Google, so they'd get click tracking.
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Hm, true (though also: lately /me semi-automatically assuming that an URL from Wiki might be non-ASCII / this one [goo.gl] gave issues on /. recently...). At least surprise sort of fits with the content of the two above.
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According to "one drop rule", close to which your place likely still operates, we all are (recent African origin of modern humans, et al)
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"Shown"? (plus - if you'd put away tinfoil hat and checked at least the third, to which you reply, you'd see how using URL shortener is the fastest way to make URLs with certain types of characters work on /.)
Re:Completely Off Topic Question (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just about click tracking by Google, it's about having some idea about where the link I'm about to click on will take me.
Even without slashdot's anti-troll inclusion of domain names, you can mouse over a link to see what the actual URL is. But what is "QTRlo" and "rRDok"? Is it something that's going to get me fired? Should I not have eaten before clicking? Is it another "N guys/girls, 1 X" shock site, or an 80's one-hit wonder?
If you know how to use HREF tags and aren't artificially constrained to 140 characters, use the proper URL. Please.
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Proper URLs with non-ASCII characters tend to have...quirks, on Slashdot. Quite a few of them at Wiki.
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Yes, but you probably had the ability to choose whether you would attend that university, live in that dorm, or leave campus.
Re:I doubt anti-suicide nets would be needed (Score:5, Interesting)
Foxconn has about half a million employees.
The USA has a suicide rate of about 10-14 per 100k: http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html [suicide.org]
If you have 500000 employees, one shouldn't be so surprised if 50 of them kill themselves every year.
utterly useless statistics. (Score:2)
Pointless statistic made by overly defensive fanboys.
Let's break this down by demographic shall we. In the west, if we take away the unemployed and youth suicides you are left with about 2 or 3 per 100K. In Australia youth suicide makes up about 40-50% of all suicides (this is the sub 18 category). After that typically comes mental illness then old age. The suicide rate amongst healthy working adults is pheno
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Some of those were probably "copy-cat" suicides too.
Foxconn also had a suicide payout policy which might have convinced some of those to suicide so that their families get money.
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If Google, or any other company in the Bay Area, thinks their employees might need suicide nets, then they should probably be funding these:
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Funding-for-Golden-Gate-Bridge-suicide-net-proves-elusive-52559197.html [sfexaminer.com]
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So far Google employees seem to be happy in their condition for the most part. Any employer which is not a cooperative is taking advantage of you. Is there any evidence that this will lead to abuse in this particular case?
If things get much worse I think you'll find that G-Town is an oasis. Assuming it even happens.