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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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! :>
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.
[+] [-] huhtenberg|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
If the logic is "everyone needs to prefer it or we go back to a 'normal' arrangement," normal becomes mandatory.
[+] [-] rytis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theorique|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] mseebach|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bakhy|12 years ago|reply
a bunch of commenters on a news site don't all have the same opinion on everything. go figure.
[+] [-] rodgerd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damncabbage|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bhhaskin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhgaghl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] activepeanut|12 years ago|reply
Is this the latest, legal, technique to discriminate against older workers?
[+] [-] theorique|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bakhy|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgerard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] goldfeld|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jboy|12 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] doesnt_know|12 years ago|reply
Sexism is a such huge issue (especially in this industry) that you should probably consider educating yourself before you vomit ignorant comments about it.
[+] [-] anjc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KennyCason|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not_paul_graham|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yardie|12 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] bakhy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnnnni|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Centigonal|12 years ago|reply
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.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Tech-entrepreneurs-rev...
[+] [-] anvandare|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woof|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gatehouse|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malux85|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] lennel|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] renang|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mjn|12 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PeonBob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quesera|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mojuba|12 years ago|reply
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.