I would argue that this could be counter-productive. 24/7 immersion in an employer-owned and operated environment doesn't sound healthy from a work/life balance perspective.
Not in the long term certainly, but there are lots of people in the military, on cargo ships, etc who do that. Back when I was working at Lincoln Labs I considered going out to Kwajalein for a year.
If you're looking for a moderately entertaining light read try a book called "Big Dead Place". The author's life is pretty dark but the book is funny light reading.
Its basically the movie "old school" with a lot of snow and a screwed up male/female ratio, combined with a bit of Dilberts PHB is both your boss and your landlord with predictable results. His writing is more or less reportedly true with the obvious exception of the "blind men talking about the elephant" issue where you get 1000 people and none of them have the whole total story and experiences will vary.
The author had a pretty interesting blog which responds with a blank white page today. Its worth your time to read it off the wayback machine. The books name is big dead place so search for bigdeadplace.com
He eventually got banned from working in Antarctica because of his writings, and then suicided, shotgun from what I heard. Long term addiction to alcohol didn't help much.
People on cargo ships or oil rigs still usually have regular homes that they live in when they are not working which is often for weeks or months at a time. Google uses it's employees year round.
I wonder if this might be a good solution for the software industry to avoid burnout. Have people live in SV for designated "crunch" periods where you work for 70 hours a week for 2 months, then go home to somewhere cheaper for 2.
Symmetry|11 years ago
VLM|11 years ago
If you're looking for a moderately entertaining light read try a book called "Big Dead Place". The author's life is pretty dark but the book is funny light reading.
Its basically the movie "old school" with a lot of snow and a screwed up male/female ratio, combined with a bit of Dilberts PHB is both your boss and your landlord with predictable results. His writing is more or less reportedly true with the obvious exception of the "blind men talking about the elephant" issue where you get 1000 people and none of them have the whole total story and experiences will vary.
The author had a pretty interesting blog which responds with a blank white page today. Its worth your time to read it off the wayback machine. The books name is big dead place so search for bigdeadplace.com
He eventually got banned from working in Antarctica because of his writings, and then suicided, shotgun from what I heard. Long term addiction to alcohol didn't help much.
jiggy2011|11 years ago
I wonder if this might be a good solution for the software industry to avoid burnout. Have people live in SV for designated "crunch" periods where you work for 70 hours a week for 2 months, then go home to somewhere cheaper for 2.