I once worked 2nd and 3rd shift for a project that encouraged such hours because there weren't enough servers to handle the load for everybody during the day. A few mornings around 5:00 AM I heard a weird high pitched noise but it went away before I could figure out what it was. The next time it happened, I immediately hunted it down. I narrowed it down to the men's restroom and opened the door to find a man standing in the nude using a blow dryer. He was a contractor who had moved from another state. He had been sleeping in his truck and using the shower in the employee restroom every morning.
I became less enthusiastic about hunting down the source of weird noises after that.
Some years ago I worked at a large aerospace firm in the L.A. area. 20,000 people worked there and with that many people there are bound to be a few odd ones. Several lived in their cars in the parking lot. But the weirdest one was the guy who was living in the ceiling above his office. The story goes that one night a security guard noticed some movement in a hallway and went to investigate. He saw some wet footprints that led from the bathroom into an office and right up the wall. He pushed up the ceiling panel and found a room outfitted with lights, seat cushions and a sleeping bag. The guy had apparently been living up there for several months.
I really don't get this attitude. It's not for everyone, but it's a great way to save money. Do this for awhile and you can save up to purchase a home outright or at least have a sizable down payment.
I interviewed for a job in Chicago with a company where one of the employees lived in the office. Unlike the Salon article, this employee openly asked if he could live in the office to save himself the cost of rent. The employer had no issue with it. In his office there was a small basic cot that he slept on.
If cumulative happiness over your life is the goal then the first one is clearly the wrong approach. The probability that you will die/become incapacitated/have health issues before you can either build up or enjoy for a long period of time that F-U money puts a discount on the entire end state.
No, memories accumulate. And in my very normal and apparently common experience, rose colored glasses and "I earned my success by struggling" make up for any past lack of happiness I've experienced. Those memories are white-washed unless you've had some severe trauma.
So the only thing that really matters is if you currently happy, or if you are about to become happy. Nothing accumulates.
If you're the kind of person that likes to go up the ladder, every step up provides you with happiness so I don't think your story is a counter example.
That's a good question, but I wasn't privy to that level of detail. In that instance though it was good for the employee and he didn't have to worry about hiding anything.
I didn't know the guy but I heard he was an engineer and engineers were paid fairly well at that company so he should have had other options. Maybe he got taken to the cleaners in a divorce and was unable to afford a place to live. That was the issue with one of the guys who was living in his car in the parking lot.
Agree. I slept in the ceiling (rafters) of my ex-girlfriends house. She lived with her mom, her mom hated me, this was 10+ years ago. I had to be at her house every day no later than 6pm to get up there, once I was up, I was up. I had to stay extremely quiet. I got a lot done and the WiFi signal worked. I couldn't talk on the phone, only text.
In the end I ended up saving for an apartment and got my own place, and broke up with my girlfriend it just wasn't working out. It was a story and an adventure I'll never forget :)
Yep, every time I sign a check for Bay Area rent, I consider how I'm in the wrong industry, since the land owners have to do very little to continue to extract rent from their one-time-purchase of land (I know, tax is a thing too, but pales in comparison to the returns they must be getting on the land).
I'm not super interested in buying a house here, since >half a million for a tiny spot of land in the suburbs with a tiny 2-bedroom house that needs major repairs is absurd to me. I'd much rather live in an office while paying off a house in Fiji, then move into that in 20 years and work a lot less.
Another alternative is living in an RV. I've considered this, and since Bay Area rent can pay off a really really really nice RV in ~5 years, it's s viable option. The biggest hiccup is where to park it; national parks would be awesome, but they're not free, Internet access is spotty, and it'd be a long commute every day. Even working remotely, month-to-month RV park communities can be over $500 a month, so that doesn't quite feel like you're beating the game of rent-seeking by property owners as much as I'd like. RVs also require maintenance and probably won't last as long as a house, but even if you get 20 years out of it, or buy it used and sell it where the depreciation is much less per month than rent would have been, you can come out ahead.
There are people who stealth camp on the city streets in conversion vans or smaller Class C RVs. They never park in the same place twice, and once it gets dark, have to be careful to not give themselves away (interior lights, movement, etc).
Here's a plan I often thought about for living in the big city while skipping out on paying rent for an apartment:
Spend about 10k for a used casita travel trailer. The trailer fits in an area the size of a compact car. Rent/buy a parking spot and setup the trailer. In the big city you can get gym membership to cover sewage and showers. For internet you can easily purchase some sort of cellular or wifi service. Almost everything I need would be covered.
It's not for everyone but for myself, I have no qualms about small spaces, so I'd totally execute this plan if it wasn't for the complication of accessing the power grid. There's really no easy way to get a power line up into the trailer if it's in some parking garage. Perhaps solar? but that leads to other complications.
The Victorian era had the concept of "retire with competence". basically means building up a portfolio that one could live of the interest/rent/dividends from.
Problem is that it could barely work as long as the nation was a globe spanning empire.
I used to do this when I was an executive at a software firm in Boulder, Colorado. I maintained a home in another state but commuted to Boulder every week. For a while I had a great deal on a shared condo but when the owner sold it I was faced with staying in hotels or... sleeping in my cubicle under the desk. There was a shower for employees so I would just get up early and be ready to go by 6 am. No one ever discovered me in my sleeping bag.
Why didn't you telecommute? I've often considered taking a high salary job in a high cost of living area ie san francisco, boston, or new york. And maintaining a residence somewhere cheaper. If one could arrange a schedule of four ten hour days it might be doable.
The obvious problems are part time housing and travel ie air fare. How did you handle this? Has anyone done this?
It's funny, for a lot of us, affording living in most of Boulder County (bar Longmont) is unfeasible even on a decent engineering salary. It's still crazy to me that housing prices and affordability near Denver/Boulder are starting to go the way of the Bay Area.
I read a couple of essays from googliers who did this. Google provides nearly all your needs in office- free food, recreation, laundry- save a many hour sleep spot. And people work and hang out 12, 15 hours then. So why pay high rent only to sleep and put up with terrible commute traffic. In the open office environment of new techs finding sleep spots is harder. But many sleep in their vehicles in a climate rarely freezing or roasting.
I'm surprised this isn't already a perk at working at some of these companies, but then again I'm assuming they'd be subjected to a whole swarm of regulations regarding living conditions.
If I got paid a Google salary, there's no way I couldn't afford to find an apartment in Santa Clara County. Note I didn't say fancy condo, 3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn, or townhouse.
>If I got paid a Google salary, there's no way I couldn't afford to find an apartment in Santa Clara County.
Sure, an a google or facebook or linkedin salary, you can afford a place to live in the area, no question. But two or three grand a month, post tax? That's still a lot of money. I mean, it's not the choice I would make, but I can totally understand why someone would want to live in the office, even though they could instead spend a lot of money on rent.
There's a lot of reasons why you'd want to save that money; Just one reason: How many of us remember 1999? If this is anything like that, a lot of us will only have a few years in this industry, or we will have a few years in this industry, then spend half a decade doing jobs that pay dramatically less before the economy recovers to the point where we can work in this industry again. Salting away as much cash as you can while the hunting is easy is not a bad idea.
I talked to a google recruiter a couple years ago and if I took the job and moved to mountain view, my current lifestyle of "3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn" would be utterly impossible, so goodbye.
This was very close to the national peak of the housing bubble, things may have gotten better since then.
It's pretty much impossible to find even the crappiest home here for under half a million. For what you describe, even if it's next to a freeway in a "bad" neighborhood with a crap school district, that'd be a few million easy.
The main problem I see that led to this situation is the author picking one of the most expensive places in LA to live, Venice Beach. The author could have chosen a much less expensive (but less glamorous) area, say in Koreatown or somewhere else inland. There are lower rent areas in LA, you just need to compromise your lifestyle a bit.
Google Maps says Koreatown and Venice Beach are 15 miles apart. Some time late in the 21st Century or early 22nd Century humans will realize that great mass transit can really make life more enjoyable, and that'll be a 15 minute commute. It's pretty amazing how bad things have to get before people wake up.
You would think so, but the traffic and public transit in LA doesn't work that way.
It's too congested even for buses to quickly get by. I've walked/biked 5+ miles faster than it took a bus to get where I was going during peak traffic hours, and I am no avid runner/biker.
I've spent 30 minutes trying to go 1 mile.
I've been stuck in completely stopped traffic at 3AM caused by multiple concerts let out at the same time
One time I remember walking to the bank 2 blocks from my house. It took about 5 minutes because I was taking it slow. By the time I got out of the bank, and went outside to walk home, an impromptu Katy Perry concert had started (That's Hollywood & Highland for you) and there wasn't even walking room for blocks in every direction. I ended up having to loop around everything and it took me 20+ minutes to get home.
Basically, the traffic/transit in LA is not a predictable monster. When it comes to getting from point A to point B, no quick glance at a map can help you guess how long anything will take.
> Some time late in the 21st Century or early 22nd Century humans will realize that great mass transit can really make life more enjoyable, and that'll be a 15 minute commute.
Nah, the second phase of the Expo line will be complete in a few years, and the purple line will be finished long before then, too. Won't be quite 15 minutes, but should be under 25.
LA had an excellent bus system. I've been riding it almost every day for 7 years now. Also, the author already said he had a 20 minute commute, but didn't say to where.
Having commuted to work in Brussels, a city often described as having great mass transit (and when it's not busy, that's absolutely true)
Here's my observations :
1) despite not paying for itself (the state pays hundreds of millions yearly to make up for the losses of the public transport system) it's a little bit more expensive, per kilometer, than taking a car (train + metro vs gas). Even for longer distances, planes are actually cheaper than trains. If you get a company car and just pay for fuel, it's half the price. Otoh, parking in some places drives the price back up (but then you can park near a metro station and only use public transport for the last kilometer or so. Or a folding bike, I've had colleagues who did that).
2) when you want to use them to commute, they're not just busy, they're off the scale full. You can only stand and sometimes you miss your train because you literally can't squeeze in. (I tried first class for a week, but that makes it a multiple of the price of using a car, and you still need to stand)
3) the comfort level, compared to a car, is off the scale worse. You can take things along in a car, whereas there is a clear and very small capacity limit to what you can take on public transport. 40kg, backpack size, no more, groceries for a week is doable, furniture, electronics, not really doable (I tend to put those on a bike and walk home beside it). And I'm a 200 pound guy, I'd hate to think what the limits are if you're 80 pounds.
4) In Belgium you have one or two days per year where cars can't actually get around in the capital (frozen snow on the road combined with a lot of sloped roads makes it just too dangerous for cars, even if you walk you'll probably fall down painfully). A few more days accidents on the highways will mean you're late by 2-3 hours (I was once 7 hours late due to traffic). That is less than the days public transport doesn't work due to union actions. Because of the amount of times this happens, your boss will not, in fact understand. 5-10 days a year you can't get to work using public transport. With a car, 5 days a year you'll be 2 hours late and 1 day you won't show up.
5) If you calculate cars versus public transit capacities, it is obvious : cars scale better (I think this is mostly because car capacity expansions are cheaper for the government to implement, so they happen every time a rightist government comes to power in a given municipality, car capacity expansions happen, usually by diverting traffic. Public transport expansions happen once in a decade at best, and one line at a time. Recently a public transport line to the airport made traffic on a few lines much better)
Imho, the solution to public transport is fast, efficient, driver-less, door-to-door, car sharing. That can work, and won't be bogged down into a morass of substandard service by unions. We need to improve matters, and I no longer believe buses and trains and even metros are the answer.
Cars are terrible at scaling. The core problem is roads take a lot of surface area so adding traffic lanes reduces density which forces longer commutes. Add to that you need parking at both ends which reduces density further. http://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/car-vs-bike-vs-...
They are also worse for the environment and kill lot's of people.
PS: Cars also have huge direct and indirect subsides, consider who pays for your parking space while at work? Hypothetically in a major city ~2 * 100$ parking spaces + ~100$ insurance = ~300$ a month or 15$ per workday day even if your car, gas, and roads where free.
You're absolutely right that cars don't scale well in theory, but when it comes to expanding capacity when that is necessary, cars outperform public transport. This is mostly because space is not often in short supply, but money always is.
Cars seem to have much better support for their expansion from governments, and that this results in better real-world scaling. It seems to me this is in no small part because car infrastructure is way cheaper per extra person of capacity than mass transit.
Both cars and mass-transit have huge subsidies, at least in Belgium.
Belgium has decent public transit and is below the point where cars have issues with scaling. It's really more an issue with sprawling mega city's where the suburbs can only expand in one direction. So ocean / mountains on one side, north and south huge city's so everyone is coming from one direction.
little bit more expensive, per kilometer, than taking a car (train + metro vs gas)
The TCO of a wholly-owned personal transportation vehicle is substantially more than the cost of fuel. It's hard to come out ahead, financially, unless you're a semi-decent mechanic, don't mind buying old machinery, and don't value your spare time very highly. Something bombproof and frugal, like a C90 underbone, could do well. A car, not so much.
Also the costs the state incurs for the train include things like laying and maintaining miles of tracks, you'd have to roll road maintenance into your auto's tco to make a comparison.
Car : euro 0.4/km, travel time into brussels during heavy traffic : about 50 minutes, 30 if I'm willing to work 6am-3pm (I'm not). 21 (working days per month) * 35 (kilometer) * 2 (there and back) * 0.4 = 580 euro/month, 700 if you finance it using a loan (I don't need to). This pays for a comfortable "monovolume" car (big enough for a family, but certainly not a big car by Belgian standards). Note that this effectively comes with all sorts of bonuses, greater comfort, protection from the weather, and much cheaper and quicker groceries. I don't need parking where I work, but if I did it'd be another 50-100 per month everywhere except the European quarter. If we're talking a company car (tax deductible for companies in Belgium and thus very common), cost drops to 200-300 euros, and some companies (ie. if you're willing to do IT consultancy), drops to 100-300, depending on car, deducted from pre-tax pay. This is assuming the car's value goes to zero over a period of 4 years, whereas in practice I've always sold my cars for between 3-4000 euros after 4 years.
Public transport travel time : at least 2 hours (mostly due to waiting). Cost of bus card + train card (for one trajectory only during week days) = 150 to 300 euros (bus, depending on whether you need bus in one or two cities, so if you can get from home -> station without bus or from work -> station without bus, it's 150, otherwise 300. For me it's 300), plus 150 for the train. Add to that the cost of various other trips that you'll need to make that aren't covered by this, but are covered by having a car, and you easily get to 600 euros per month (groceries, going to town, visiting people, ...). Since I drop off kids at school using the car, if I included the cost to do that using public transport too, it'd be over 700 (2*60 euros per month to have the school bus pick them up on a street where I would worry every day they they might get killed, plus it would prevent me from leaving for work until they are on the bus).
It's not a contest. Car is way cheaper, even disregarding the difference in comfort. Is that because of government subsidies for the car ? Yes. Otoh, the government also sponsors the mass transit quite a bit. How does it stack up in "real" costs ? I don't know. How much would the other disadvantages of using public transport add up to ? Don't know, but I don't think it's zero. (much less free time, less time working because of the kids limits, ...)
Of course it depends on the trajectory you take. If I had to "cross" Brussels (east-west or north-south), I'd take the train, and I know people who do so, but I'd also find another job or move, because it's simply not doable.
Must have been pioneer in this area. A bit over ten years ago I once had a good job in Santa Monica, but was tired of paying ridiculous rent for a shoebox that I was never at.
So I packed up, slept in the underground parking garage, and went to the gym every day.
Was in the best shape of my life and saved 40k that year, which I later turned into a 2-year trip around the world. Was definitely worth it.
Doesn't this affect your health? An year is a pretty long time to spend sleeping in a car seat, that is definitely less comfortable than an actual bed. Plus there is to consider that in an underground garage humidity levels should be pretty high, which can cause headaches (to say the least) and make the entire thing of sleeping in a car seat even worst for the back. How did it work out for you? (geniune question)
I was able to stretch out between the front and rear seats folded down and a sleeping bag. The first night or two is uncomfortable but then you quickly get used to it. The other issues didn't occur, SoCal is very dry.
At $40K/yr savings, as long as you spend less than $770 per saturday night hotel rental you come out ahead (assuming you get lucky every single saturday night...)
Something to think about when you have that kind of savings going on, is taking a weekend getaway every single weekend is quite affordable.
I think I was single the first half. I did meet a nice girl the second, but i strung it a long for a while, and even then she had low self esteem an so she didnt give me a hard time about it.
I wonder what would happen if this form of housing became more popular. Maybe soon we'll be reading accounts about two office-overnighters who inevitably found about one another.
A capsule 2.2m high by 2.2m wide by 5.2m long will fit one to a 20' standard container, two to a 40' standard container, and three to a 53' road trailer. This is important to remember if you intend to build where manufacturing is cheap and transport to where land and rent is expensive.
The name is misleading, they're just very small apartments with a design carefully chosen to minimize regulatory constraints & tax burden. They go for about $600 a month.
Cursory look on Craigslist showed a bunch of apartments for less than $900 in Queen Anne area, with ~$600 around Freemont. Not sure I see the need for "pods".
Well, huge factories of 19th / early 20th century did build living quarters for their workers near to the factory's premises. I think only the draconian zoning and building codes of California prevent Facebook or Google to do the same near their own offices.
>I wonder what would happen if this form of housing became more popular.
Simple. Due to liability/insurance/fire-safety concerns, it would be cracked down upon. Where not cracked down upon, it would develop into a shady black market.
This was not rare in college. One school had a 364/24 library and students took over a study correl with their books and a few belongings. Others lived in closets or cars. I think the janitors knew but did not care. I did this a few times myself when there were gaps between residences and I run out of placed to crash.
When I was in grad school, one of the other grad students lived in his office. We all looked the other way when he shifted the desks around (leaving a couple of the other grad student desks kind of cramped) to make room for a sofa. "Yeah, that'll be real comfortable to... sit on... while doing math. That's what it's for!"
I'm pretty sure all of the faculty and staff in our department knew about it too.
I think there's a difference between doing this in your office, and an office you share with others.
If I needed to stay late to study, or grade assignments, or whatnot, I would be pretty annoyed if my office-mate asked me to leave because it was his bed-time.
It might change for me in the future, but at this point in my life commuting seems really inefficient and annoying. It's not just the time lost while in your car (I listen to music anyway) but the stress of having to basically exist in two places.
I appreciated the Thoreau references in the article. Perhaps moving into my office isn't the best simplifying solution, but it's a nice parable for improving daily routine.
At the end of the 1980s, I worked with a guy who was forty, newly divorced after about twenty years of marriage, and out to have the early twenties that he considered he had missed. After hearing about a late-night burglar alarm once or twice in the building, I asked the programming section's administrative assistant whether this guy was living in his office. She looked away, and didn't want to discuss it. I don't think that he was destitute, just thrifty. He had, he said, a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, but I suppose he couldn't stay with her all the time.
I lived in my car under similar-ish circumstances. Was getting a company off the ground, needed to be in Silicon Valley to raise money, was unwilling to pay $800/month for a single terrible bedroom, and had read a lot of Thoreau and already given away almost everything I owned to vagabond around China.
It's kind of a pain living on $200-300 a month, but it's really not that bad. You start to realize that most of the stuff people spend their whole lives working to buy they don't need. The forced routine of going to a gym is one I've tried not to get out of the habit of. I actually think it's a very healthy way of life, assuming you find a way to eat well.
Now I have an apartment (am married with a baby on the way), but I put about half of what I earn into killing debt/building a savings. I'll be debt-free next month with 10k in the bank, having had 0 savings and 20k in debt a couple years ago. I only pay myself 50k/yr.
I did that for just a little while, when going through a divorce. It was kind of fun. I had what I needed at work: shower room, place to sleep, Internet access.
A fridge to keep groceries and a microwave oven too.
I ate canned food, combined with fresh vegetables.
I discovered that using a microwave, you can easily bring water to a simmer in a plastic container, and by that means, you can cook pasta very nicely. (I'm sure it saves energy compared to stove top pasta boiling. It takes about ten minutes (same) and the wattage of the microwave is not only lower, but you don't use it on full power.)
Toaster ovens help too. If your office doesn't have one, just go out and buy one. You can revive a store-bought frozen casserole dish in one of those things.
I lived in a grape cooler on a grape farm for several months once (in the non-cooled part). It had a bathroom but no shower. I made one out back on a cement slab with a hose, a garden water wand and a tarp.
I've slept in my office a few times and could probably do it for a month or so without anyone being mad about it. I'm not a morning person at all so being first at the office is a great feeling.
One day I got into work much earlier than usual. I didn't think anyone else was there until I started typing. A programmer who had fallen asleep in his chair awoke with a startle, then started typing himself.
Funnily, he always left early in the day and was lauded by his teammates for doing the hard work in the morning when no one was around so he could concentrate.
I don't recommend doing it in a small startup in a small office where people come in early and stay late - we had someone trying to live and work nights in our office in Shoreditch years ago, and he did get noticed after a while.
I've heard people who live with their parents proclaim how great it is. They don't have to pay rent or do their own laundry or anything us terrible materialistic people do. It's great for saving money. For reasons that I hope would be obvious I'm not interested in that sort of "lifestyle choice".
This guy is worse because at least people who are mooching off their parents aren't literally stealing from them.
I became less enthusiastic about hunting down the source of weird noises after that.