Name: Why Facebook is Building a City
Uploaded: 2019-09-19T03:16:21.000Z
Duration: 8 min 53 s
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South of San Francisco, in Menlo Park, the heart of Silicon Valley, lie a series of unremarkable

They have creative names like “Building 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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

The Great Recession changed the entire purpose of education.

The number one reason people chose to go to college in 2006 was “to learn more about

In 2009, it was “to get a better job”, and has stayed that way ever since.

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

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

Computer Science, specifically, has absolutely exploded.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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