cyb - cyberpunk

End of the article kinda stuck with me. The fact that the next generation is in a position where autonomy is getting harder and harder to achieve is depressing.

>>19825
I didn't bother finishing the article.

The fact that I'm expected to live and die in this country, always staying in this system and doing what I'm told, scares the hell out of me. I don't understand why anyone would want to do it.

>>19827
some people are blinded by their beliefs.

others think it has to be this way.

others have simply given up making the world better.

and the majority are too tired to care.

That seems really dumb from an European perspective. Why not just build more apartment blocks in your cities? They don't have to be expensive to rent or buy

Americans have this strange obsession with children leaving their parents' home as soon as possible. They have to understand that there's nothing wrong with living with your parents until you start your own family.

I don't get why they don't move to Canada.

>>19842
Canada is only marginally better.

>>19844
But it's so close! and better than Mexico.

>>19835
Every European city I've ever been to has been expensive as fuarrrk if you want to live in anywhere where you don't have to do some serious commuting.

That being said commuting in europe is a lot more pleasant.

If you're a decent software engineer, sys-admin, etc. etc. etc. it's not hard to get a remote job where you can live and have your space VERY cheaply in a rural area and do all of your work over a VPN remotely or even just work from a git-style. If you live in a city you're choosing to give up your freedom.

>>19839
Where I live (a small city in Canada) it's completely normal to live with your parents until your mid 20's or even beyond if you're attending post-secondary school locally or if you just can't make ends meet on your own yet. Is the US really different?

>>19871

I moved from a significantly expensive suburb of a major city to a less expensive city. While everyone here is complaining about the price of rent, I'm still making my original salary working remotely. I could be doing even better in terms of frugal living if my significant other didn't work jobs where remote is completely impossible.

Working remotely is really the only way to get ahead unless you're very well connected or in a particularly well connected company.

>>19823
easy for people in cali or nice weather area, but for people who live in harsh area's like the midwest where weather is very cold many degrees below freezing you can't do that.

also in the U.S. they're is 5 empty homes for every homeless, so the answer is to make people live in their cars to save money,

>>19887
honestly it is really shamed on if you don't move out soon as possible (18 years old). in fact people in the U.S. say that there is a "epidemic" of people refusing to "growup" by staying with their parents for college.

>>19835
>That seems really dumb from an European perspective. Why not just build more apartment blocks in your cities? They don't have to be expensive to rent or buy

i areas where real estate is expensive, or existing owners have apartments and shit, new developments are hell to start. plus, it's not in the mindset of most people as people rather buy.

also niggers.

>>19835
>Why not just build more apartment blocks in your cities?

People fight tooth and nail to keep low-income housing out of their neighbourhoods, they won't even allow bus stops built nearby if they think it will allow poor people to exist within 500 yards.

>>19870
I guess, though you've probably been in the most major cities which will be more costly. And I don't know, what would you consider the threshold for -serious- commuting? I mean I hear tales about people driving for like an hour from their suburbs to downtown. I don't think thirty minutes on a train is too bad

>>19887
Living in the US most teenagers want to move out because they don't like having to listen to their parents, as well as being seen as unable to support themselves. I currently live with my brother, because my mom remarried and wanted to be with just her new husband. My father lives in his truck somewhere in the mid-states, idk where though.

>>19902
I can second this, in America the middle class for some reason acts rather snobbish to the people just below them. Even if it means making life easier for others, they don't like the idea of people less poor than them moving into their neighborhood. But on the other hand for some reason a lot of the lower class in America seems to be rather unsavory, and where they move soon becomes the new ghetto. Think Compton.

For me racism is not playing much into it though, where I live there is mostly just white crack-heads who might stab you for what you're carrying if you go out at night in the wrong area. All races on Earth are equally capable of being soykaf . But to keep it relevant, this has potential to be pretty cyberpunk, having to bolt and chain your door and keeping bars over your windows is damn close to the dystopian future we talk about here. There is simply less cyber and more punk as of right now.

>>19910
second sentence I meant more poor, not less.

>Brandon works at Google megacorp
speaking from experience, Brandon applied no less than 3 times for different positions at Google. He was waterboarded through six hours of interview every time with questions ranging from 'optimize this binary search' to 'how many drunk toddlers can you fit in a car dealership.' each interview happened no less than twice, so Brandon gave up about a month or more of his life for the privilege of homelessness. smart.

>Lives in his truck
which, depending on state and local law, is a felony. its also an option, not a necessity for brandon. there are plenty of companies in socal and beyond that pay google wages and dont insist you camp out in a truck.

>millennial generation is now becoming encouraged to live it rough

correction. People living in northern california are under artificially constructed condition of hyperinflation and speculative investing being insisted upon to live in squalor and like it. If you're stupid enough to take a job that requires living in or near San Francisco, then be prepared to submit to your corporate masters in full. Locals of san francisco are the ones we should be talking about.

Locals that have lived in SF for 20 years or more are being squeezed out in favour of megacorp wageslaves. low income housing isnt being invested for two reasons, 1. there isnt any space left in san francisco. 2. low income housing isnt an attractive offer for any investors because the returns are 1/5th what you would get for a luxury apartment complex. capitalists cant market it.

>>19903
I know someone who commutes like 200 miles by train to work in NYC.

I know the guy that wrote that, he was the founder of an anarchist group I was in in college. He's a total trust fund kid and is only able to support himself as a writer in NYC because of checks from mommy and all he writes about is this generation conflict soykaf .

I think he's totally wrong about this because it's not like this guy is the first to do this, tons of googlers live in cars or vans, and most of them are older than this kid, but that doesn't fit into his worldview so fuarrrk it.

>>19930
This guy gets it. That said, its totally legal mountain view. You can see legions of vans on street view, ironically enough.

I think it's also unfair to portray the Google interview process like that. Google has a pretty standard phone screen + day of interviews procedure. Google flew me out and paid for my hotel for my onsite, it was 4 technical interviews, one hour per, plus lunch that was just an opportunity to talk to a Googler.

It's also not like Google encourages people to live in a truck. Google probably had some of the best emphasis on work life balance in the whole valley. Bigger corps focus more on hiring stable people so Microsoft, Google, IBM, all have great work life balance. The real wage slaves are the startup gamblers.

>>19934
The googlers that aren't living in trucks or paying 3-5mil for a house in south bay are commuting 2.5 hours each way from SF.

Everyone wants to be in these cities, and for good reason, because now that we have the internet we know how soykaf everywhere else is.

>>19970
the google interview process seems...subjective then. Interviewing twice for two different teams distilled my decade of experience into a pop-a-matic bubble of insulting questions and unsolvable riddles. I was gifted with a coffee cup and encouraged to never stop trying. the pittance a megacorp pays to handle your travel and lodging isnt worth being treated like an invalid. Google wanted a third interview, and I wanted a weekend outside of an airport screening line.

it says a lot that sergei still has to approve every hire, but youre right about startups. worked for one of those and never again. 90 hour weeks and performance reviews from sociopaths.

google always seems like a really cultish place to work, they make you do all this degrading soykaf so only people who don't mind or want to be assimilated into the google hive ever get past the initial stages, give everything a new name which forces you to think in "google speak" and they artificially reinforce people's desire for a group and to feel important:
you're not a new employee you're a "noogler"
then you move "up" and you are no longer just AN employee you are a "googler" and you get to look "down" on the "nooglers", "I used to be one of them" and by extension everyone else must therefore be even worse than a "noogler" so any thoughts of leaving immediately becomes a step "down" in your own self worth.

>>20020
No offense but if they had you do multiple days of offsites that means you're a candidate they weren't sure about. I didn't find the interviews that difficult, they were pretty standard technical interviews even if they were very comprehensive and broad.

It's sort of irrelevant what experience you have, it's barely relevant for what you'd have to do at Google so it's not like you could have just skipped the interview process.

But on the other hand there is a fair deal of internal awareness that it favors people who can solve puzzles and probably excludes a lot of good devs.

>>20023
This really couldn't be further from the truth. It's true that there's an air of being in an elite class by being a Googler, but there isn't any stratification internally. Nooglers aren't disrespected in any way.

Google is essentially an anarchist communist organization internally. They cultivate an atmosphere of everything being free except the few things that couldn't be (cluster quota, pretty much), and encourage employees to work on anything they think is interesting. There's a huge amount of internal mobility, because once you're a Googler, you're just a Googler, it's assumed you could have any role. I think their overt goal, even if not said in so many words, is to immediately get you up the pyramid of needs so that you can be not just maximally productive, but also maximally creative and inventive.

I can see how this looks like a cult, especially from a cynical perspective, but I actually think that the post-capitalism world will look a lot like Google, except without the separate slave class cooking the food and vacuuming the buildings.

>>20024
Do you work at Google?

>>20023
I interviewed not at google but at a similar startup-gone-megacorp with assloads more money than they know what to do with. I definitely got the cult vibe. Anyone who didn't completely buy into the corporate culture (both inside and outside the company) was very looked down upon. The employees seemed infantilized - all their needs were provided by the company (including a massive suburb of copy-pasted houses full almost exclusively with employees) and in return they worked 80+ hour weeks on salary. Most seemed to have no social lives outside the company.

How is it /cyb/ to work 40+ hrs a week and be forced to live in a van? It's dystopiaan that he'd be forced to do that but I really think it's just masochism - I'm sure he could find a room to rent in SF, maybe not his perfect appt but still.

It reeks of theatrics. Playing poor as an adventure. Or some kind of weird virtue in working like a slave and living like soykaf .

>>19871

This is the correct /cyb/ answer imo. You don't have to work many hours to make a livable wage.

>>20024
>Google is essentially an anarchist communist organization internally.

except for the part that the employees are still employees of Google.

>>19969
>I know the guy that wrote that, he was the founder of an anarchist group I was in in college. He's a total trust fund kid and is only able to support himself as a writer in NYC because of checks from mommy and all he writes about is this generation conflict soykaf .

>I think he's totally wrong about this because it's not like this guy is the first to do this, tons of googlers live in cars or vans, and most of them are older than this kid, but that doesn't fit into his worldview so fuarrrk it.

Really, because I know the guy that wrote that and he was not the founder of an anarchist group while you were in college. He's not a total trust fund kid and is not only able to support himself as a writer in NYC because of checks from mommy and he doesn't only write about this generation conflict soykaf .

I think he's totally right about this because most googlers don't live in cars or vans, and most of them are as young as this kid, but that doesn't fit into your worldview so fuarrrk it.

In light of my evidence, it's obvious that you made everything up.

>>20024
>Google is essentially an anarchist communist organization internally.
No, that's Valve. Enough of Google's management system and pay raise system has leaked out into the news to show the company hierarchy is not flat. When people talk about having bosses and supervisors, the company is not flat. When there's more than one title, the company is not flat.

>>19839
I thought most places the kids will try leave around 18 after they've finished High School. If you're going on to tertiary education then you'll often need to move out to live near the University or whatever. If you're going right into a job then you may need to move for that too, or now that you're earning money you can pay rent somewhere so you'd rather have your own space etc.

I moved out when I was 17. I would have been in a much better position financially now if I'd stayed, but who wants to live with their parents?

>>20053
I know a guy who's a sysadmin at valve. I hear good reviews of working there.

>>19823
In all honesty a small box-like house is something I'd like. Ultra-minimalism. You don't need a twenty story mansion with a fancy lawn, a ferrari, and a fountain. You just need a room where you can eat, sleep, cook, shit/piss, and shower. Most of us will probably never get married anyway and if we do, we can just buy another box house and join the two.

>>19835
You should really specify your Europe. Paris, London and similar are crazy expensive.

And "building more apartment blocks" is not exactly the solution. People build when there is possibility of profit, otherwise, there's no reason.

>>20053
He said "essentially", not literally/actually. They may have used the model of anarcho-communism as a base before making tweaks.

Anarcho-communism's most fundamental feature is its absence of hierarchy, yes? Well, what if hierarchy was just minimised rather than removed? Would it not still carry the essence of anarcho-communism? Would it not be a valid imperfect expression of those ideals?

>>20152
>I would have been in a much better position financially now if I'd stayed
would you or would you have just pissed away your money some other way

related thread: >>15510

>>19842
Cause the cost of living is, on average, more expensive than the US

There's also the fact that urban housing markets (Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary recently) are heavily inflated

Vancouver is basically San Francisco North: insanely expensive (one of the priciest places to live in NA, maybe the world), geographic constraints on building, cultural/climate similarities too that I won't get into
Only difference is San Fran has the tech industry while Van has to deal with foreigners (mainly Mainland Chinese) buying property as an investment and leaving it vacant

>>19823
I know it's anti-/cyb/ but whenever I see stuff like this I want to buy some cheap land in the boonies and grow my own food or s/t romantic like that

>>20053
Flatness isn't everything. The managers and tech leads at Google are trained to lead without authority and there's very little done without the consensus of the team, at least in my area (developer infrastructure).

>>20029
I'm currently an intern there, but I interviewed for a full time position when I graduated.

>>20033
>I'm sure he could find a room to rent in SF, maybe not his perfect appt but still.

Dude, why would you pay 2k+ a month for an apartment you don't even like? Anything less than that and you'd have to share a room or sleep in the living room.

Acting poor though, very spot on. It's only really the rich that can engage in this sort of theatrics and enjoy it because they know the money is going to keep coming in from Google and they might as well live a little.

>>20052
Google Malcolm Harris, asshole. Stop brewing soykaf.

>>20211
I actually don't think they used anarchism at all as a base, I think that by iterating on how to best run their organization they converged on something like anarchist communism. It's easy to see why this works so well in Google's situation: lots of smart, motivated people with all their material needs met.

>>20247
I meant literally a room, renting one out of a house or sharing a large apartment with someone.