
Robber Barons Would Have Loved Facebook’s Employee Housing - carlchenet
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/robber-barons-loved-facebooks-employee-housing/
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outsidetheparty
What a ridiculously overblown article. "The robber barons built entire
greenfield company towns with a paternalistic controlling agenda! Facebook
plans to build less than 400 housing units and obviously won't be able to do
any of the controlling things we just described, but WHAT IF THEY DID?!" "What
if every single Facebook employee lived here, which they don't, and what if
they all voted as a single bloc, which they wouldn't?! CRAY CRAY TIME
AMIRITE?"

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jasonlotito
I find it interesting that in creating this mimic of real life, they are
effectively removing any chance of real innovation coming out of these
companies. And I'm not talking about innovation coming from these companies,
but from the people working there. Their perception of what life is like on a
daily basis will skew it toward the people they surround themselves with.

Essentially, as an outsider, it seems like going to work there is asking to be
sheltered from the real world. I cannot imagine it fosters much creativity.

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vkjv
I completely agree with this. It is often said that, "constraint drives
creativity." Therefore, if everyone is bound by the same set of constraints,
you limit the possible set of creativity.

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spiritplumber
And so the cycle continues. AOL was an innovative place to work at some point,
I'm sure.

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yuhong
Facebook is not likely to end up as bad as AOL did.

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beat
Why not? Microsoft did. Lots of once-innovative companies lose their edge,
stop attracting top talent, and just become body shops shuffling to the
graveyard.

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learc83
I don't think Microsoft is a good example here. They're doing some pretty
innovative stuff. Open sourcing much of the .NET stack, F#, and Windows 10 on
the Raspberry Pi.

Even at their worst they never really stopped acquiring top talent, and their
revenue hasn't stopped growing [1](it's also about 7 times what Facebook's
is).

[1] [http://www.extremetech.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/FY2002...](http://www.extremetech.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/FY2002-20131.png)

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oldmanjay
I'm not going to address whether or not Microsoft innovates, but open sourcing
existing projects is possibly the loosest application of the term I've ever
seen

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TheBeardKing
Is this any different from living on a military base? Government employees get
cheap shopping, entertainment, restaurants, social services, and decent
neighborhoods with playgrounds and pools. It does seem more noble to be
patriotic than loyal to a company, but is it really any different? I rarely
hear service men and women complain about base conditions, they're usually
fairly nice.

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kyllo
Is the military trying to make a profit off servicemen and women?

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TheBeardKing
Are you implying that private corporations are more motivated to take
advantage of their employees for profit, rather than just trying to keep them
happy and productive? I doubt tech companies care much about the profits from
these endeavors to risk losing employees through shenanigans. The motivation
for both private and military seems to me to just keep happy, committed
employees who will be productive for the cause.

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jmngomes
"Are you implying that private corporations are more motivated to take
advantage of their employees for profit, rather than just trying to keep them
happy and productive?"

I'd say yes, of course they are, apart from very few exceptions. Isn't the
illegal wage-fixing move by Apple, Intel and Google a prime example of that?

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TheBeardKing
DoD members get screwed as well, as seen in several high profile instances,
but you can't just point to a couple cases and think that indicates a trend.
I'm sure surveys of large tech companies and the DoD would show that
professionals choose their current employer because they're treated well. We
have enough mobility in this country that large scale mistreatment would be
met with mass exodus and ultimate failure of the employer.

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kyllo
_We have enough mobility in this country that large scale mistreatment would
be met with mass exodus and ultimate failure of the employer_

This is only true when the economy is booming as it is right now. No one was
saying this in 2009.

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eli_gottlieb
The economy's only booming for those of us in tech. That's why there's all
these wildcat labor actions, you see, which have _finally_ resulted in wages
growing across-the-board for the first time in _decades_.

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tomjen3
That headline really needs to be toned down. Yeah company cities have been
tried before, but this isn't anything Pullman would have liked. For one
Facebook can't afford to turn cannons on its own workers and without cannons
attacking your own workers, you just can't be a real robber baron.

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beat
Employee mobility matters. Most people working at Facebook could take their
skills and easily get a job somewhere else. The story was different for the
company town workers of a century ago.

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msandford
The only way this turns Facebook into robber barons is if they're able to
drive developer's salaries down as a result. But the only way to do that would
be to build many thousands of units. The housing situation in SF isn't just a
little bit short, it's a lot short on supply. And even that would probably
just bring developers salaries down from the heavens to more normal levels
rather than somehow magically making them all indentured servants.

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beat
That really only applies to staff not already living in the Bay area (who can
presumably afford wherever it is they live), and staff willing to live in
whatever kinds of apartments they're providing. That way lies the army of H1B
mediocrity.

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eli_gottlieb
Well, the basic problem is that the city councils of Valley "cities" (ie:
overgrown, egotistical suburbs) keep refusing to build the kind of dense
housing, mixed-price developments, and mixed-usage buildings that make _real_
cities function. In fact, they often explicitly refuse to build any new
housing at all, insisting that transplanted tech employees just _find
somewhere else_.

So the companies have to build their own damn housing.

Welcome to the outcome of NIMBYism.

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beat
Menlo Park is determined to protect its "village feel". They don't _want_ to
be a "real city". They won't even allow buildings over two stories tall in the
quaint little downtown area. Trying to overlay dense housing and mixed-use
buildings onto a wealthy "village" is incredibly difficult, and some giant
corporation muscling the city council is likely to provoke the residential
antibodies.

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eli_gottlieb
And precisely this is why I'm adamant about never, ever moving to the Bay
Area. It's full of tech companies to work at, neat people to hang out with,
and has an excellent climate with plenty of nature to bike through... and the
local governments do their damnedest to ensure nobody will ever be able to
afford any of it except for them.

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michaelochurch
My issue with the Bay Area is that _and_ the baseless professional downgrading
that's usually involved with that move. Because you didn't do it _in the Bay
Area_ , they shave one or two ranks off your title and your salary suffers
(and, presumably, you don't get the best projects). Sorry, but I know more
than your VPs about technology and how to build a company, and so I'm not
going to take a junior role for the "privilege" of living in California. If
winter gets to me, I'll take two weeks and go to Mexico or Bonaire; problem
solved.

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blt
I need to visit the Bay Area tech scene and see what's going on. From the
outside, via media and this site, it seems like it's drifting away from the
real world into its own cultural bubble... but maybe I'm just hatin'

