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  • South of San Francisco, in Menlo Park, the heart of Silicon Valley, lie a series of unremarkable

  • offices.

  • They have creative names likeBuilding 57”, “Building 40”, and wait for it!

  • none other than the Employment Development Department!

  • There's a plan, though, to turn this 59-acre office park into a more-or-less fully self-contained,

  • city called Willow Village.

  • It'll have a grocery store, pharmacy, retail stores, playgrounds, hotel rooms, a community

  • center, and 1,500 housing units.

  • Oh, and one more thing it's 100% owned by everyone's favorite company.

  • No, not Equifax.

  • Not Comcast or Enron.

  • Worse: Facebook.

  • In just a few years, Facebook employees will be able to work, eat, play, shop, and now,

  • sleep, all without leaving the property of the world's most trustworthy company.

  • Google, meanwhile, plans to build over 10,000 homes in Mountain View,

  • And Apple just finished the 6th most expensive building in the world, behind Singapore's

  • famous Marina Bay Sands.

  • As companies expand their physical presence, the line between public and private is being

  • blurred, and local governments find themselves not governing but being governed by more powerful

  • corporations.

  • And it all stems from one simple economic problem.

  • College majors are generally fairly constant.

  • About the same percentage of students choose physics, or psychology, or English from one

  • year to the next.

  • Generally.

  • Up until 2008.

  • The financial crisis had an immediate, and so far, it seems, permanent effect on colleges.

  • When the sun is out and jobs are abundant, like right now, the relative value of more

  • education is lower.

  • Your goal is to get employed as fast as possible and ride the wave.

  • When times are tough, the opportunity cost is much lower - it's harder to get a job,

  • keep it, or get promoted.

  • So, you do the opposite - go back to school and pick the most marketable major available.

  • And that's exactly what happened.

  • The Great Recession changed the entire purpose of education.

  • The number one reason people chose to go to college in 2006 wasto learn more about

  • things that interest me”.

  • In 2009, it wasto get a better job”, and has stayed that way ever since.

  • First, students left the humanities.

  • In the ten years after the recession, U.S. English degrees dropped 22%, Education 19%,

  • and Philosophy or religious studies, 15.

  • Meanwhile, Health-related degrees have doubled, Biological and biomedical sciences have increased

  • 61%, and engineering, 60%.

  • Computer Science, specifically, has absolutely exploded.

  • It's not hard to see why.

  • If you find yourself getting mediocre grades, often missing class, and with totally unremarkable

  • skills, congratulations!

  • As an average U.S. computer programmer, you can expect to make $50-55,000 a year, right

  • out of college.

  • No experience or graduate degree required.

  • In other words, to earn more than 64% of the country, all you need to do is stay in school

  • for 1,460 days.

  • If you keep doing average work, don't go back to school, but manage to keep this up

  • for a few more years, congratulations again!

  • Now you have experience.

  • You're looking at a median salary of $105,000, making more than 88% of the country.

  • Now, I'm no economist but, something about this doesn't seem quite right.

  • Students are picking majors based on their career prospects now more than ever, salaries

  • are off the charts and credentials, quick to obtain, which means, the market should

  • be absolutely flooded with Computer Science students, increasing supply, allowing salaries

  • to fall, and soon reaching an equilibrium.

  • The problem is that demand for Computer Science has grown really quickly, even compared to

  • other engineering majors, but universities are slow.

  • If they could snap their fingers and produce more professors, they would.

  • But the lag time is incredibly long.

  • If you're a new high school graduate who sees demand for Computer Science teachers,

  • it'll take at least nine years to get a bachelor's, then master's degree, then

  • doctorate, and by then, things have may have changed.

  • More importantly, if you can make six figures with just a bachelors degree working for a

  • company, why spent five more years only to make the same or lower salary?

  • Schools are competing for professors with the very companies whose high demand for graduates

  • has created the problem in the first place.

  • They can only increase class sizes so much before it starts to hurt the staff-to-student

  • ratio, which lowers the school's ranking.

  • At the University of Washington in Seattle, only a third of students who apply to CS programs

  • are accepted.

  • To be clear, that means two-thirds of freshman and sophomore students who are already accepted

  • to the school can't get into their desired major because it's full.

  • As of 2017, about 530,000 open jobs are fighting for about 60,000 new graduates a year.

  • Employees, even mediocre ones, but especially the most talented among them, have most of

  • the leverage here.

  • Not only do they always have the promise of high salaries, signing bonuses, and stock

  • options elsewhere,

  • But because tech companies are so concentrated in Silicon Valley, changing jobs is really

  • easy.

  • You won't have to move to a new state, or climate, maybe not even a new house.

  • Apple Park is a 15-mile drive from Stanford, Tesla Headquarters, 3 miles, Facebook, 9,

  • and Google, 7.

  • Software companies, therefore, have about the same turnover rate as McDonald's.

  • The average Tesla employee, for example, lasts 2.1 years, and three is considered quite good.

  • So tech companies have to go out of their way to make workers happy.

  • That means free food, gym memberships, cellphones, unlimited vacation days, laundry, bikes, childcare,

  • yoga, nap rooms, luxury lockers, and massages.

  • Google, Apple, and Facebook will even pay for women who aren't ready to have children

  • to freeze their eggs.

  • Still, it's not enough.

  • Especially for Facebook, whose poor reputation has reportedly made it much harder to attract

  • talent.

  • According to CNBC, nearly every applicant Facebook offered a job to in 2016 accepted,

  • while only about half do today.

  • The ultimate way to keep employees, though, is to involve yourself in every aspect of

  • their lives.

  • It's much harder to leave a company when it owns your house and those of your friends

  • and family.

  • Already, Facebook offers at least $10,000 to live near the office.

  • Apple and Google, meanwhile, drive employees who live in San Francisco to work in luxury,

  • WiFi-equipped busses.

  • For the employee and the company, all of these things make sense.

  • But they often come at the expense of the community as a whole.

  • By using municipal bus stops to load and unload, they use public infrastructure without supporting

  • or improving the quality of public transportation.

  • They've also made housing unaffordable, not only around their campuses but in neighborhoods

  • as far away as San Francisco.

  • And, as their physical presence grows, they begin taking over some of the roles of government.

  • In 2014, for example, Facebook paid for a new police station next to its campus, along

  • with the $170,000 salary of an officer.

  • That should be a red flag.

  • It's time for the country to reevaluate the power big companies have over government,

  • and maybe not the time for Facebook to try replacing the US Dollar.

  • If you're as curious as I am about why Facebook wants to dominate payments in developing countries

  • like India, let me recommend watchingWhat Facebook Knows About Youon CuriosityStream.

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