The Google Employee's Dudley connection

Trading at 460; could this be Mr. Horton's 21st century backroom?

A New York Times style article about Google's expanding New York office and the Silicon Valley 'campus' culture:

You could be forgiven for not knowing that a satellite Google campus is growing in downtown Manhattan. There is no Google sign on the building, and it's hard to catch a glimpse of a Googler, as employees call themselves, on the street because the company gives them every reason to stay within its candy-colored walls.

From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners…Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan…

All the free food has created a problem familiar to college freshmen. "Everyone gains 10 or 15 pounds when they start working here," said James Tipon, a member of the sales team, who actively contributes to the four pounds of M&Ms consumed by New York Googlers daily.

Two quick notes. (1) I know it's not the mid-90s anymore, but I hope everyone has read their Microserfs (errors reprinted, 310-311):

At 21, you make this Faustian pact with yourself that your company is allowed to soak up 7 to 10 years of your life but then at 30 you have to abandon the company, or else there's something WRONG with you.

The tech system feeds on bright, asocial kids from dive backgrounds who had pro-education parents. We ARE in a new industry; there aren't really many older poe in it. We are on the vanguard of adoldescence pro…

But just think about the way high tech cultures puropose protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s,. I mean, all those NERF TOUYS and FREE BEVERAGES! And the way tech firms won't even call work "The office:, but instead, "the campus"

2) Do you remember all those social awareness episodes of 80s television shows where the kid's best friend would get molested? I think the classic one was when the bike shop owner Mr. Horton got the better of Dudley from Different Strokes. (why oh why isn't this episode on youtube?)

Remember how in all those episodes the guy would lure in the children with cool toys, neat electronics and lots of candy? Am I the only one who feels a creepy connection between that and the same lures for high-tech programmers? I've been in a few of the new-not-at-all-like-the-old office "campuses" and I've gotten the same vibe you get from seeing Mr. Horton's backroom. It's the sense of "Gee, thanks for all the free nerf stuff and M&Ms, but at what point are you going to try to take pictures of me in the bathtub?"

I don't know what it says about an industry and its employees when the incentives to hire and retain the best and the brightest are indistinguishable from the techniques used to lure in children and sexually assault them.