> Unless Google allows him 24 hour access, he doesn't have a bathroom at night or on weekends.

Google allows 24 hour access, unless that's changed recently.

He probably really enjoys being in the office and produces a lot now. It could be a great deal for Google, just as it is for him.

Yeah, large companies seem to allow badged access after hours.

A chemical toilet is also a wonderful thing.

Large companies? Any company leasing office space with a badged security system (is, any modern office tower) would allow this.

Everywhere I've ever worked allowed 24 hour access. Never worked in an office tower though. Never lived on the West Coast.

Really not all companies even with a badged security allow this, in many places you need an authorization/pre-registration if you are going to come in late (say 2-3 hours past normal work day) or during weekends.

Well, clearly you're not in the valley, where people are expected to sleep under their desks and thank their employer for the privilege. ;)

Agreed, certainly at any company that has strong security policies (I'd imagine telecom, for example, is a lot more strict in this regard), after hours access might be an issue.

Nope and I would probably never want to work under those conditions :P

Most office buildings I've seen have restrictions, the office tower i work at in London (Reagent's Park) requires you to enter and sign in with security from 7pm till 7am and if you want to enter during the weekend you need to register explicitly for the day and tie and it has to be approved.

And this is pretty much the case for most shared offices / office towers I've worked in, if you own the campus and want to keep the same level of security staffing during the night as you would during the day I would think that 24/7 access wouldn't be an issue to facilitate in all other cases they rather that you wouldn't be hanging around.

Yep, $EMPLOYER requires a very good business reason for after hours access - safety / security are concerns.

Hope he got a good parking spot, then; either he's walking a mile at night to use the facilities or seriously irking whoever maintains the lawn.

He's got the middle of the night to get a good parking spot. After a few nights he'd easily have the best non-reserved/handicapped spot possible.

> Comfort and time off of work are essential to a well-balanced and healthy life.

It has been shown that reducing commute time significantly increases your happiness. Besides, I'm sure there's a higher purpose for what he's doing, otherwise it would be intolerable.

In his blog, he mentions that some of the time he spends "at work" is spent eating meals, exercising, or socializing. It's not a complete lack of work/life balance.

>It's not a complete lack of work/life balance.

To me, doing all of your life at work is work, with no life. I need to disconnect, and I can't do that in the place where I work. Is this a corporate culture thing now? Work for Google, socialize only with Googlers, eat/sleep/breathe work?

> To me, doing all of your life at work is work, with no life. I need to disconnect, and I can't do that in the place where I work.

Indeed, at my new job I can get free meals, a free gym, free health clinic (not just a band-aid station, a fully staffed urgent care center with its own dispensary), showers, and so on. And this is not even corporate, it's a government job. But after a few weeks of just partaking of the free lunch/dinner, I decided to stop using the freebies. I felt like I was living there (12 hour shifts contribute to that feeling of course) and so I began leaving for lunch breaks and decided not to use the other facilities unless absolutely necessary. Given it's a government gig, it already feels like they "own" me as it is (mandatory uniform, strict rules about social media use even off the clock, etc).

You work for the military? Who else has this kind of rules?

Local government.

The Circle!

It is irrational to pay current Bay Area rents, especially if you plan on living here long-term. The only way to avoid eviction for sure is to buy, and that's going to cost you roughly half a million dollars at the low end. Better to minimize your expenses and ramp up to that than set half your paycheck on fire to pay the inflated rent.

I'm living in the east bay, and was recently running calculations on home purchasing... Take a 30 year mortgage, calculate the total interest+property taxes paid over the 30 years, and divide by 30*12 to get the amount of money per month not going into equity. Turned out to be pretty close to my rent, in most cases.

It also turns out that the appreciation of housing in the US has been negligible up until the post-2000 housing boom. From the 1920's to 2000, the average increase in a house's value was 0.6% per year. So the part that isn't going to the bank is going into a possibly really poor savings fund. And one that can burn down... At this point, I'm thinking it probably still makes more sense to rent, and do the usual index fund thing.

> Turned out to be pretty close to my rent, in most cases.

Let's take this house: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Oakland/2822-Myrtle-St-94608/home/...

Property taxes according to Redfin are $2,471 a year, for a total cost of $74,130. A thirty-year mortgage at 4.5% interest will see you paying $350,229 in interest over 30 years.

Together, that's $1,178 not going into equity.

Here's a Craigslist search for homes with 4 bedrooms or more in the same neighborhood:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/eby/apa?nh=64&bedrooms=4

Note that there aren't any comparable places to rent, but even the ones that are close are more than double our "amount over equity per month" figure.

This also assumes your rent over 30 years is going to stay fixed the same way your mortgage payment is. It won't:

https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-oakland-rent-tren...

I couldn't find good data on housing appreciation for the Bay Area, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it doesn't mirror the U.S. overall.

And either way, appreciation only matters if you're thinking of your home as an investment. Assuming you're thinking of it as a place to live, it makes sense both in pure cost terms and for some things that are harder to put a price on.

For instance -- how much is having a permanent address worth to you? Or the price of never having to move again, never having to sit in another group housing interview again, never being able to be evicted by "owner move in" or whatever shibboleth is currently popular in Bay Area eviction bootcamps? (this is a real thing: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Lawyer-pumps-up-S-F-la...)

You're comparing a two bed room house (at the low end of what's available for price, I'll add) to four bedroom rentals. I'm currently in a shared four bedroom house with five people; together, my wife and I pay $1500/mo for rent. Sharing one of the cheaper 4br houses equally amongst four housemates gives $800/mo. So, meh.

We are planning to get things together to buy a house; the quick survey just convinced us that it didn't make sense to rush in. We also feel that there's a decent possibility that the housing prices actually are bubbly, which makes us less inclined to rush out and buy something. Overall, the exercise convinced us to wait a bit and get together enough to shoot for a 20yr mortgage.

Read the ad again, its a 4 bedroom house split into two units. And you just went from "it costs you just as much to rent as it does to buy" to "cutting my monthly payment in half isn't a strong enough motivator."

I stand by what I said -- renting is irrational. The kid in the box truck is smarter than every Bay Area software engineer blowing their money on rent.

The property tax is almost certainly off by a factor of 2. You will be paying 1% of the purchase price of your home to start out, as that's definitively the market value at time of purchase in an arms-length transaction.

Buying a house in the Bay Area is an investment that you should only do if you absolutely believe that there's not a technological bubble and that tech companies in the area will continue to pay the highest salaries in the world for the next 30 years.

>Equity and saving for the future are things you do after you've established a home.

He has established a home, it's just not a traditional one. It's a really-not-up-to-code tiny house on wheels.

If he were living in a Winnebago or a trailer would you feel differently?

If this were a story about migrant workers employed by Google, would you feel differently? I suspect so; our standards for living spaces are not arbitrary. That this man chooses to forgo them despite his salary is certainly his prerogative, but this "hack" drawing admiration points to a central failure of both housing in the bay and the culture at large that values future profits over basic living.

I think if this story were about migrant workers I would feel differently about it because it would be an entirely different story—it would be about people not being paid much and forced to live in a truck versus a story about somebody being paid a lot and living an alternative lifestyle.

I'm perhaps looking at this differently because I am into the financial independence movement[1], and I also quite like tiny houses. I like the idea of saving as much as you can so you don't have to work for the rest of your life, and I also like the idea of reducing your ecological and physical footprint.

So that's how I'm seeing this story. This guy seems like a "mustachian" more than he seems like a guy forced to live in his car. I don't know how much he gets paid, but I'm certain he could afford an apartment—ridiculously expensive though it may be.

I absolutely agree with you that the housing situation in the Bay area is bonkers, though.

[1] See Mr. Money Mustache http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

I was thinking that: why didn't he buy a Winnebago?

A truck is stealthy. It doesn't necessarily look like anyone is living there, which means you're much less likely to be hassled by the police. Compare carcamper's experiences below.