I blogged about something similar about a year ago, Are we too poor for communism: http://douweosinga.com/blog/0407/2004Jul13_1. I now work for Google, which arguably is both a big company and a dotcom survivor and it is a case in point. Especially if you travel in between engineering offices - you visit the New York office and your badge is your passport - it gets you an appartment, free food and instant friends. At the same time, there is of course a huge difference in wealth between Googlers, depending on their stock option situation. But I think that the bottom line is that for a lot of engineer type of persons, a lot of material things are just pesky details that are not worth it to spend time on, so a situation where the company arranges for these things just makes sense.
Douwe On 7/2/05, David Mandl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This is a fascinating subject. A few comments, if this thread isn't > cold yet: > > The days of the paternalistic corporation are over in the U.S., but a > handful of companies still provide a pretty warm cocoon for their > employees. These tend to be some of the bigger and more elite > financial companies, and so the beneficiaries tend to be pretty > privileged workers, but it's still surprising what goes on at some of > these places. (The top executives at nearly every company live in a > virtual parallel universe that few people outside of their circle even > know anything about, and those people are getting more and more lavish > perks all the time, but that's another story.) <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
