Google is charging its employees $99 a night to stay at its on-campus hotel to help "transition to the hybrid workplace."
https://gizmodo.com/google-invites-employees-to-sleep-on-campus-for-a-fee-1850709102Open linkView original on lemmy.world1032
Comments178
Sounds like Google is trying to reinstate company scrip.
You might want to mark that NSFW. Don't want to be caught reading some discussion with the word union in it.
We need unions for many reasons, but an employer offering optional housing onsite really isn't one of them. It's not like it's required to rent from Google to work there.
99$ a night so maje it a round 100 so only 2200$ a month. thats a steal!
Ah the 22 day month.
22 workdays in an average month.
They can just sleep on the streets on weekends.
they hopefully have some home and people to go to.
But they can pay their employer for the rest of those days.
These days, that's cheaper than a lot of places rent for and you get free maid service. Fucking Google might have accidentally stumbled upon something helpful. And $99 a night is not profitable for the sort of hotel their employees would actually want to stay in, so they still lose!
This is only a temporary promotion. Tge price is not going to stay at $99/night, and it's not an alternative to rent, but in addition to it. This is not permanent housing, they're fucking hotel rooms.
I wasn't being serious.
Hard to tell, honestly. Too many people saying shit like that unironically these days.
There are some companies that provide this for free.
What an absolute joke. Just let people work from home, you absolute dinosaurs.
But then you can't siphon off 99$ a night from them!
Come on, everyone! We gotta get those profits up!
It has nothing to do with profits. It's more profitable to have everyone work from home. Upper managers and executives simply prefer having everyone in the office because they like it. It's their preference.
It's not though. None of this back-to-office stuff is for real estate.
Uhh, yes it is? I mean, if you take a look at how much real estate San Francisco has just in its downtown area that should tell you something.
Can we please think of the billionaires? What are they gonna do when their office buildings are empty? They need their property value! /s
They want to force attrition. They over hired and need to reduce headcount but they don't want the negative press of laying more people off.
Whilst it wouldn't surprise me at all if this was the case, I've seen similar things at other companies, it's a completely brain-dead strategy. The people who leave are the most qualified and capable employees who can easily find a job elsewhere and you're just left with all the people who the company swept up in the boom period where they were hiring anyone with a pulse.
Isn't that the dream for a capitalist! Labor that sleeps at work. Google takes it a step further and asks employees to pay for being able to sleep at work.
They just need to implement a full company score!
Edit: Meant company store, but I'll leave the original
The score is just soulless "lo-fi beats" type of music played all over the grounds to avoid any one person ever having to sit alone with just their thoughts as background noise.
Then they can start paying in scrip! Just like the robber-barons of old!
Holy hell boss.
I thought you meant something like china's social credit score.
Get more points, you get a better chair and OLED screen or even a chance at a promotion.
Points go down, you get sent to a shitty cubicle at the far corner of the office. Then a verbal warning, followed by a written warning...
Holy hell boss.
I thought you meant something like china's social credit score.
Get more points, you get a better chair and OLED screen or even a chance at a promotion.
Points go down, you get sent to a shitty cubicle at the far corner of the office. Then a verbal warning, followed by a written warning...
Labor that PAYS to sleep at work.
Mexico be like “tenemos siestas…”
Next they will start issueing company scrip, then a company town around the YouTube mines.
Companies will start using crypto as a way to recreate what scrip was back before it was banned. Meta made a play for that a few years back but luckily they failed.
Say what you want about crypto in general, but it'd be an extremely bad choice for company scrip...
Depends on the implementation, you can make contracts do anything, and if the bulk of the currency is premined and in the hands of the corporation, they can manipulate its value freely. Not every cryptocurrency works the way Bitcoin or Etherium work, some are quite centralised (see XRP for example).
Meta could demand that ads on its platform are paid in metabucks, pay employees (partly) in metabucks and manipulate the market by controlling liquidity. Essentially they'd be their own sovereign corporation issuing its own currency.
All true!
You should consider transaction fees though: someone's gotta pay 'em. "Run their own chain" you might say, but then just use a database. Don't need crypto-economic security when you're the issuer and primary retailer.
That leads into having a public ledger. Great for public blockchains, but if you're issuing company scrip, you probably don't want outsiders auditing transactions.
Yeah, transaction fees can go to the issuer, so the corporation could double dip.
And as for transactions being publicly available on the ledger, SEC filings are public too, corporations openly bragged about raising prices beyond inflation and making record profits and they still had most of the populace convinced that the cause of inflation was just those darn lazy Millennials that didn't want to work any more.
In the modern manufacturing consent era, it doesn't matter that the truth is publicly available as long as you control mainstream media (which a corporation like Meta can easily do, first on their own platform and secondly by buying ads in the right newspapers).
Paddy's dollars.
Sooooooooooome people say man is made out of mud, the poor man's made out of muscle and blood. Muscle and blood, skin and bone, a mind that's weak and a back thats strong.... You move 16 tons... whadaya get? Another day older and deeper in debt... St. Peter don'tcha call me because I can't go...
I owe my soul.... to the company store.....
Obligatory reference to the Joe VS the volcano version of 16 tons
If you see coming better step aside, a lot of men didn't and a lot of men died. One first of iron and the others steel if the right don't get you then the left one will...
For the uninitiated: https://youtu.be/74WvUV7H8Nw
Someone beat me to it
That South Park montage was genuine art, I swear.
First thought that went through my mind as well lol
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.
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.
Edit: Just so this doesn't come across as a crabs in a bucket type scenario, I am in this field and I am fortunate enough to make similar money, not as much, but equivalent in my country's market. We are not the people that need fighting for, we're the ones that should be fighting for others to have similar opportunities.
No I just mean the this is yet another item in a LOOOOOOOONG line of things where Google has gone the pure shit route.
In the last couple years, Google serves me more ads as search results than actual relevant results. The enshitification of the internet is real and I finally see it. I’ve have enough. Between Reddit, twitter, Google, SEO, Facebook and friends, Amazon becoming wish.con, etc everything is just going to shit. Maybe it makes me some old boomer dreaming of the glory days, but I’ve had enough. I refuse to be a product and I refuse to put any money towards these shitmaster overlords if there’s any way I can help it.
All fair reasons to use another service if that's a deal breaker for sure
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.
At least not yet. Wait until the capitalists start replacing us with cheaper AI
Lol shiiit stay away from my job ChatGPT!
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.
LMFAO the only ones really pushing it are the ones invested in real estate
"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.
What if I paid to live there, but still worked remotely from my apartment or wherever?
Never pay your employer to do your job, are we in another great depression?
This hotel has been there for a while for visiting employees, paid for by the company. People wanted this option if, for example, you lived in Brazil, wanted to visit the US, but didn't have any reason to book a business trip because you don't work with anyone at headquarters. I'm going to guess that most paying guests won't be reporting for work during their stays, but will be grabbing a solid 3 meals a day, plus snacks.
In other news, Google opens the cheapest hotel in California
You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.
No way. I don't want my employer to also be my landlord. Nothing good could come of that.
You commit 16 lines, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
Some people say a man is made outta blood. A code monkey's made out of Fritos and crud. Fritos and crud and skin and bone. A back that's weak and a mind that's strong...
Nice, I like it. My back feels called out though.
Sounds illegal until I realized its tech workers who refuse to unionize and think they are getting paid bank but to live like a virtual slave.
As one in the industry, it's incredibly frustrating. Colleagues have been saying "oh, we get all of these perks and get nice salaries, we don't need a union" while others are bucket-crabbing with "you make big money, why do you need a union?", both overlooking the immense amounts of unpaid overtime that are endemic. Then, there's the push for RTO, which does nothing to benefit employees and would be readily prevented by strong unions.
it's very easy to ignore social inequities if you spend all your time working for a shitty company making absolute bank
Objectively, they are.
Henry Ford did that.
A lot of companies used to run company towns. Toyota still does, as far as I know. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a return of that sort of thing with real estate prices getting absurd and companies wanting to drive people back into the office.
No no you don't understand. It's work from home but work IS the home! You see it makes perfect sense.
Hah, I actually did that when I first started working for a small company.
The co-founder also rented out a house he owned as a duplex.
Actually wasn't that bad, he charged slightly below market rate, and was pretty attentive. But definitely felt weird and I was happy to move out after a few years. It's just an unnecessary source of potential drama.
Now my manager lives there, and has for five years.
The good that comes from that, from the perspective of the boss-landlord is that if your employee-tenants start getting the idea to strike, you control both their income and their shelter, so they reconsider.
Then you offer on-site housing to your scabs.
What if you got to lord it over the other tenants and didn't pay rent?
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.
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.
live to work,
why e/se
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.
You load 16 tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIfu2A0ezq0
♫ You do 16 POSTs, whaddya GET? ♫
♫ Status code 200, pride and accomplishment ♫
Status code 200
Status message: 500 internal server error
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.
While I get your point, here's the other issue with how this is framed.
I can imagine that, at least except for the rooftop deck. Working from home. Without having to pay $99/night.
They could avoid this whole thing by simply just not forcing people to go back to the office.
A kinder version of a company town is still a company town, in the same way high-paying wage labor is still wage labor.
This is not Google being charitable and caring about housing prices in the surrounding area. These are the people most able to work remotely; Google is bringing them back to their expensive office to justify its existence and saying "this time I'll be your landlord, too."
how is this shit upvoted? cool they're not as bad as they could be. doesn't make it a good idea.
they're gonna go the classic corporate route of attracting people to a new system with nice benefits and relatively reasonable prices, only to enshittify it once people are attached to it
I'm ... I just ... is this satire ?
So If you need to work overtime, now you also need to pay 99$ if you want to sleep a few hours before the next day?
The whole comment literally just explained how this benefits employees too, but you chose to ignore all that and say something completely irrelevant.
I mentioned valid concern. Overtime is bad, but in reality it happens. And it looks like workers will have to pay rent if they stay and want to sleep a few hours in bed.
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.
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
Ironically, you sound incredibly petulant whenever you refer to someone else you're trying to argue with as 'boy/girl'. It also doesn't lend the air of maturity that you may think it does.
Oh, I forgot the /s, sorry.
Lmao imagine calling at-will employment with an extremely generous salary a "semi-slave" state
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.
Well how else are you going to monitor "fair use" of the unlimited shower.
You get two rooms for the price of one! One for you, and one for the friendly Stasi officer next door.
S1ep2 of black mirror?
Wait till they start 3 shift bed rotation like in chinese factories. For the discounted price of 59.99
Ah so the Dakota's pipeline setup?
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.
I thought the same, but it looks like there's actually quite a few nicer options for cheaper
Link to hotels.com search
I wonder if hotels have gotten cheaper in the seven years since I've had to travel there for business or if somehow I wasn't finding these.
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.
I go to Furcon at a hotel near Google's offices every few years; it's only like $50 more expensive and isn't a shit hole.
I'm surprised. I used to travel there for work about seven years ago and the cheapest I could get then was about $250 a night. But now that I check, the hotels really are cheaper than they used to be. I wonder if that has to do with covid-related changes to where people work.
Hard to call people qualified to work at Google dumbass.
If they pay $99 per night to stay at your place of work, then it's not hard at all.
Sillicon Valley reinvents Company Scrip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip#Lumber_company_scrip
Wow, and here I thought deep rock galactic just made up a word
That's shady af
I remember my internship at google 10y ago, with all the free perks, service to make you forget about chores, the cool attitude, etc...
That's a far cry from now :/
Are you Vince or Owen?
it took me 5s but I got it :) I never saw the movie though. However I really like those two comedians.
Didn't gage company towns making a comeback on my 2023 Bingo card
Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
Meanwhile, at my government job, we are paying people to live in our government supplied houses because we need people on sight.
Gotta keep them in the crosshairs!
Govt is a completely different beast with a different set of rules as opposed to corps however
Yeah, the pay is crap but at least we get guaranteed holidays.
You could always try the banking industry
You know, that isn't a half bad idea
We've gone from "work from home" back to "live from work" at an astounding pace. That's... good? No, wait, the opposite. Fuck this society and the parasitic husks who direct it in this manner.
$99 a night for company rooms? Around here we can get a shitty room, AND a hooker for that price. Not to mention drugs being readily available in the parking lot.
Not enough drugs in the world could make me interested in that hooker.
How about an entire bottle of Viagra taken at once?
I think I'd be more interested in finding a cardiologist at that point.
and a dermatologist
I'm guessing there's no shortage of drugs on the Google campus.
God this dystopia is so boring
And evil.
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.
Not exactly; in that area, a Motel 6 costs around $300/night. California, man.
oof that is rough, yea motels cost between 75-120 a night around here depending on cost. I guess it's better than I thought it would be lol
SurprisedPika.jpg
Yep, I worked for a university for a while and I had to pay around $120 a year for parking too. Even better, I got laid off a month after I renewed and was told there were no refunds. Also, it was a 10-minute walk from where I could park to my office unless I wanted to pay even more for a premium spot. Really fun in mid-winter when the temperature was below zero.
Providing parking is incredibly expensive. The true cost of providing that much real estate for a car for a year would be in the thousands. Why not charge the true cost of a service?
To incentivise the use of more efficient modes of transport. When every employee effectively has an expensive parking space made available to them gratis why would they take any other kind of transport?
Ride a bike.
$99 a night? That's cheaper than most apartments there....
Yeah wtf I just looked and it says avg 1bdrm is $3500+
That doesn't make it ok.
Yes, if you just don't build houses for anybody but the wealthiest, you make more money for less work.
People gotta realize that the housing crisis was the "free market" solution.
Gtfo I thought I let my job take advantage of me
Jokes on them if they think I would be “to proud” to just sleep in a conference room, at my desk, etc if the only other option is actually paying them for the privilege of staying there.
I wonder what the rules are, like what would happen if you rent a room and just had a booze fueled rager several nights a week, leaving the room trashed.
Or sublet it out to a third party for more than $100/night as a side hustle.
15 million merits, coming soon!
You move 16 tons and what do you get...
Google employees are not brain dead. They made google to what it is today
I'm sure that pretty much no Google employee is happy with this. But it's the classic "I don't want to lose my place near the top of the industry which I've spend my entire life getting to, so I can't criticize my employer or the direction the industry is going in any way." Self policing and going along with whatever the man decides so you don't lose your job and means of supporting yourself and your family. Same with a lot of the people working on the Web Integrity thing I imagine.
There are a lot of different places in the industry where these Google developers could work. I am employed by a company where developers have flexible schedules, no overtime work (except in unusual circumstances), and three days a week of work-from-home. The catch is that my company pays a lot less than Google does - still enough for an upper-middle-class lifestyle, but less. So our developers tend to be people who have children and want to spend more time with their families, and they're willing to take a pay cut to do that. (Note that by the time you're the sort of person who has the option of working at Google, "supporting your family" means working less, not more.) Google's developers are people who prefer higher pay and/or a more fast-paced environment. They might not like this policy, but they don't want to leave. They could if they wanted to.
Google is pretty brain dead today tho.
"what it is today" a tax-evading, weapons-manufacturing, privacy-invading, wannabe monopoly, that's continually fucking up their core products and radicalizing people into the far right for profit?
ya gotta agree at least significant parts of those workers' brains are dead
I owe my soul to the company store...
You know, I used to respect Google. Used to.
For 99 bucks there better be a great bed, amenities and other hotel like services. What a joke
Stalag Google! Welcome: "You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave"
I owe my soul to the company store
https://odysee.com/@IWantMusic:c/Johnny-Cash---Sixteen-Tons-%28Official-Music-Video%29:d
😡
Seems reasonable enough to me as an option staff can take up, but don’t need to if they have other accomodation or would rather live somewhere not operated by their employer.
Based on the article it seems the cost is reasonable for the area. Having a cost on the accomodation rather than it being free probably helps stop an influx of people with suitable accommodation already cancelling lease or subletting, to come stay at that building and limiting access to those that need it more. That and no doubt people who couldn’t take it up may feel shafted that their colleagues are getting a $700 a week perk if Google made it free.
No doubt one can argue the often polarising merits of office work versus remote, but if they’re going to have people come to the office having accomodation available, paid or not, no doubt would be helpful and something many other employers going through a similar transition may not be able to offer.
Dude, you are never going to be in their club.
Google isn't getting into the hotel industry to help out an overburdened housing market. This is solely designed to make their immigrant workers more reliant on the company than they already are, while creating a legal loophole to pay them less than the agreed upon rate.
It also suggests they intend to up the usage of immigrant workers, which will further displace the local housing situation and likely further rise homelessness within the county (and I imagine a rise in white supremacist thinking and action in response.
This isn't rational on Google's part, this is a potential human rights crisis in the making that we really need to speak out against. 21St century company towns will not be different from 1800s company towns in any true meaningful way.
When we poach the top talent from other countries by selling them on the American dream, we can't bring them here to have them be an invisible class fully dependent on private corporations. We have to actually let them have the American dream we sold to them.
Tell me you know nothing about the H1-B program without telling me... If Google terminates an H1-B worker, they get at most 60 days to find a new sponsor or they get deported. It's already an extremely exploitative situation.
Housing precarity is the norm for every renter in that area, unfortunately. This is not moving the needle at all. Hell, I'll take it a step further: not being stuck in a lease is actually a good thing in this situation. They were living in a furnished hotel room, probably literally out of a suitcase. They have minimal things to pack. They can find a cheap short term rental in the Central Valley. They don't need to be paying $4k a month for a 1br apartment in Mountain View while job hunting 12 hours a day. All that's doing is digging them a deeper hole. They also don't have to pay thousands of dollars (that they might not have) to break a lease if they find an employer to sponsor them in NY or TX.
My understanding is that a sponsor is generally expected to honor the timeline of the agreed upon conditions of the sponsorship unless a fireable offense on the part of the sponsee was comitted, upon which a review for possible deportation would be opened.
I also dont think.most people consider housing security as a burden.
Corporations do not care about you. They care about money.
cheaper than most hotels, and certainly cheaper in any city the Google has a campus location at.
google ecosystem is better than anything else out there, prove me wrong