Here's why it's so easy to live at Google, from employees who have done it

Flickr/dahlstroms

A 23-year-old Google software engineer has been living in a truck in the company parking lot for the past ten months.

He's not the first to try it out.

For nearly two years, one employee and his wife lived in a small RV in the lot of the tech giant's Mountain View, California, headquarters.

After speaking with these Googlers, it's hard to argue with their logic. In addition to saving on egregious rental prices in the Bay Area, they've got a pretty sweet setup.

Here's why it's so easy to pull off:

1. They have 24/7 access to Google's buildings. This means every necessity is at their fingertips: showers, bathrooms, laundry, electricity, and the goldmine of other company perks.

2. They get free food. Googlers are well fed. In addition to healthy and gourmet breakfast, lunch, and dinner options, there are coffee and juice bars scattered throughout campus.

The most recent campus resident — 23-year-old Brandon, who has already saved over $10,000 since moving into the parking lot — tends to eat all three meals at work, he tells Business Insider. With essentially no housing or food costs, he hasn't felt guilty exploring San Francisco's restaurant scene on the weekends.

3. Security is chill. "It is very likely technically in violation of some obscure code or city ordinance," programmer Ben Discoe, who lived on Google's campus for over a year starting in 2011, wrote on Quora. That being said, the company isn't preventing it. "Google Security came by very early on, but once they determined that the guy in the mysteriously parked white van was just an eccentric Googler and not the Unabomber, they never came by again."

More recently, Brandon had a similar friendly run-in with security after getting home late from a movie one evening. He says he was greeted by about 10 security personnel that night, but after showing them his corporate badge — and even offering to move the truck — they apologized for waking him and even said he had a "sweet setup."

Flickr/dahlstroms

4. They can work out on campus. Employees get free fitness classes and gym access. Brandon has made it part of his morning routine to hit up the corporate gym before starting his work day, he told Business Insider.

5. The company is big enough to stay on the down low. Two of the "unspoken rules" of on-campus living are to park away from your building and to draw as little attention to your living situation as possible, the RV couple, Pete and Kara, told Business Insider. Plus, from a professional standpoint, you don't want to be known as "that guy" living in the parking lot.

Luckily, the size of the campus lends itself to abiding by this rule. Google says the number of employees based out of Mountain View is "about the sum of the first 200 natural numbers" (20,100).

6. They get free WiFi. The company's WiFi is accessible from the parking lot, meaning blogging, streaming, and surfing are all fair game.

What more do you need in life?

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