Techies are paying $700 a month for tiny bed ‘pods’ in downtown San Francisco::px-captcha
It's funny to me how many of the things we were told communism would bring about are now being experienced under the current economic system.
But that's obviously because of the socialist elements left in the system. /s
The USA is better than this. We should not be forcing people to live in tiny little dorms to work in our tech hubs due to housing costs. Build more apartments, fund it through corporate taxes and actually make San Francisco affordable for our brightest tech workers.
Tech workers shouldn't be working from an onsite location unless they're touching hardware…there shouldn't be a central location they're all at anyways.
I would love to see incentives to have people work from home in towns that need the population. I think a lot of people would like to live somewhere more rural if they didn't have to commute… but we would need to fix public transportation if we did that. Otherwise we're just adding more cars and miles.
I live rural, and wfh and have been for nearly a decade now. My cars get way less use than when I had to go into the office. Rural doesn't mean more traveling and cars if you're working from home.
I can’t see the locals in such places taking kindly to any formal program to move people there. We can say “these areas need population” but they will say “it’s driving up rents and they’re a bunch of city slicking tech bros and we hate them.”
The areas that truly, undeniably need population are so bombed-out that no one with any other options will live there.
I don't know about shouldn't. I think that there should always be the option to work remotely, but I much prefer to work in an office where I can have a separate mental space from home and be able to build meaningful relationships with my coworkers.
Ok but most of this can be solved by going to literally any co-working space.
And as far as getting to know coworkers–wouldn't you rather pick your friends from people you can choose to be around?
Sorry, don't take my spicy opinion personally. I think I've read too many dumbass return-to-office mandates that use stuff like your preference as leverage. Obviously, it's not your fault they do that.
It’s not about picking friends. It’s about building trust and connection with the people you are already spending all this time with. It’s hard to tackle big challenges with people you barely know and don’t trust.
Co working space? No thanks. That’s like a motel versus a home. They’re dirty and noisy. Our employer keeps a great office space with everything we need and no coworking space can compare. It’s also a permanent space we know after years of working there. And I’ll bump into more distant coworkers there just by chance. With co working spaces you basically have to plan specific days to meet specific people somewhere, and it cuts down on serendipitous connection.
Working in a coworking space has all the problems of office working without any of the benefits.
I don’t need to be friends with my coworkers, but having non-scheduled interaction with them makes working with them much much easier. I worked on 3 different remote teams and I honestly don’t even think I could name most of my former coworkers, let alone recognize them.
While a co-working space would indeed help with having a separate work environment, I disagree that it would help with the social part of my problem with remote work. Not only do I feel far less like I am "part of a team" when I'm with a remote team, but often it leads to a lot of friction on collaboration in my own work. I'm quite headstrong and have trouble reaching out for help when I'm stuck with things, and part of addressing that is lowering the friction involved in getting help as much as possible. Idk, this is all anecdote and maybe isn't as applicable if you're not doing software development, but it's what I've experienced.
My old company is a great example. They love to say collaboration and shit as a reason to be in office, but you need to ask your CO for permission to speak in office
Wouldn't it be incredible if smaller tech companies spread out a bit? There are plenty of small towns in America that could use any form of industry to keep them alive.
There aren’t many skilled workers in those areas though, and you’d need a lot of money to convince people to move to a less desirable area just for you.
History suggests that the USA really isn't better than this. If you ignore the post WWII boom period, workers being treated terribly is the norm.
Well, no. Im not going to ignore the last 80 years. Of course progress takes time and future-looking we can still do much better. We have the means, we have the land, we have the know how.
Workers have been treated progressively worse since the Reagan era. You're really only talking about a few decades of labor progress in the last century followed by decline.
And that was only because they had to beat the nazis and afterwards prove that capitalism wasn't worse for common folk than communism. Once that credible bogeyman was gone, we were left with TINA, so they went back to screwing everyone over.
Part of the housing problem: https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o?si=zupttseljqhz07RO
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o?si=zupttseljqhz07RO
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Can't they work remotely? Why live in downtown SF? Seems like a waste of money.
These look little more luxurious than the low-income housing in Beijing.
Return to work is all about keeping money in the financial district.
I don't dislike the idea of people living in dormitories, but with a price of $700 it seems that should have a full height room.
Can't even stand up to get dressed in one of these
This is just a shittier capsule hotel like they have in Japan. At least there they don’t charge you an arm and a leg for it.
They have much better standard, they have a door you can close, not just some curtains, the SF one is like a hostel.
Some have curtains in Japan as well.
Coffin Motels.
The term was coined in Neuromancer I believe.
I swear I remember a location like this in one of the newer Deus Ex games, which take place in a cyberpunk ish dystopia
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Adam Jensen, the game's protagonist, searches for a computer hacker named Van Brugen and finds him hiding out in a place called Alice Pods in Hengsha, which is essentially a "hotel" composed of coffin-like closable pods with beds in them. Each guest rents a pod and can make use of the on-site facilities. It was communal living on a shoestring budget (or in Van Brugen's case, hiding from the Pharmaceutical Megacorp trying to assassinate you).
The funny part is that the fictional Alice Pods actually had more amenities than this real-life pod hotel does. They had washers and dryer units, private shower stalls and toilets, and even late-night food trucks in the common area serving up food.
A cyberpunk dystopia actually wasn't dystopian enough to match reality.
Rather a converted van, cheaper and serves two purposes as can guarantee that $700 does not include parking.
Presumably part of the draw for living in downtown San Francisco is you don’t need to pay for the upkeep and feeding of a car
Yeah but it avoids the hassle of having your home impounded for being illegally parked.
So sad. I am also afraid that in the future those kinds of accommodations will be thriving with people even more squeezed. Dystopian future.
$550 is the most I ever paid for a room there, but that was in 2000. My dad loves to talk about his $12 apartment on Sanchez back in 1965.
