13 things that only happen in Silicon Valley
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Silicon Valley is probably the only place in the world where you can survive on Soylent, live out of a van, and befriend a mall-cop robot.
To celebrate the area's triumphs and weirdness, we rounded up the most Silicon Valley things that happen in Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area.
Penny-pinching tech workers live in vans.
Zach BothAs real estate prices soar in the Bay Area, tech workers are converting vans into mobile homes. These so-called "van dwellers" lead a nomadic and legally precarious lifestyle, and sometimes risk being found out by their employers for parking on company lots.
Some of the most well-known cases of Silicon Valley van dwelling involve a software engineer at Google who lived in a truck in the company's parking lot, saving 90% of his income, and a Tesla employee who paid off $14,000 of student loans by living in a van for five months.
Company emails remind people to not have sex in the stairwells.
Shutterstock.comIn the ultra-casual, open-concept workspaces that dominate startup culture, some rowdiness is bound to slip in.
Zenefits, a scrappy payroll and HR platform provider based in San Francisco, threatened to pull employees' "stairwell privileges" earlier this year when it learned the stairs were being used as love nests.
"... Several used condoms were found in the stairwell. Yes, you read that right," the director of workplace services wrote in a company-wide email. "Do not use the stairwells to smoke, drink, eat or have sex."
People shave their heads to make wearing virtual reality headsets easier.
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/721168338840195072
Only in Silicon Valley: "I had to buzz my hair for VR. I put on my Oculus Rift 20+ times a day" @ChrisTauziet ???? pic.twitter.com/6f6T9wUDpU
Christopher Tauziet, a designer at Facebook who works on social virtual reality applications, allegedly got this haircut to avoid the dreaded "Oculus hair" that comes with wearing the headset too long.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider