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Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

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Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

#401

Post by zarkov99 »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #362
kevstev wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mid 30s childless man I completely agree. We essentially sent people home on a Friday, told them to figure out a work from home situation, and then they were told welp your kids aren't going to school either, and whatever childcare you had lined up has now vanished too- and this is all happening in the course of a few days at most. So now you have kids to worry about all day, home schooling to oversee, focusing…

> Maybe I am making assumptions here on the general political leanings of those here, but if you are talking about supporting anything like Medicare for all, UBI, BLM, PPP or even just support the Democratic party in general, pulling a little extra weight for those in a time of need is IMHO a relatively small ask that you as an individual can implement compared to those agendas. I suspect a fair number of the complai…

I think you are on to something. Many people are happy to be generous with others time and money but less so with their own.

Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

#402

Post by quadrifoliate »

mc32 wrote: post #45
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #4

I am a middle-aged adult with no children who's worked at tech firms for the past couple decades. To be honest, the "resentment" of those without children have for "benefits" those with children get strikes me as extremely selfish, immature and displaying a total lack of empathy. This is time off specifically to take care of children, something now that has become exceedingly more difficult in Covid times. What's nex…

I agree. Parents are making sacrifices which benefit society as a whole. Those children the parents are taking care of now will be the ones who will provide for the one complaining now via taxes as well as services rendered to them. If anything, companies should be providing more childcare so that more women (as well as some men) will have less of a burden balancing career and caregiving. I see these people as being…

> If anything, companies should be providing more childcare so that more women (as well as some men) will have less of a burden balancing career and caregiving.

I think this is the crux of the matter; some people think that companies should not be doing this, society as a whole should through the age-old custom of voting. My other comment [1] on this thread elaborates.

> It's similar to "I don't take the bus, why should my taxes pay for public transit."

The difference is that public transit is a public utility. Anyone can use it if they want to. This is more like your employer offering transit that only parents can use. Everyone else is excluded – people who need to be caregivers for a relative, people who are suffering from depression, people who can't drive, etc. Naturally some of the latter group will think “What's so special about the parents that my employer who is a private company is making special concessions for them even when society isn't?” My solution to this would be basically just that – to open up more flexible schedules in general, and ideally based on what society as a whole wants. Unfortunately, any kind of attempts to make corporations give employees more flexibility by law are a non-starter in the US, which means that US society as a whole doesn't buy into this “We're all in it together” paradigm.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24414141

Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

#403

Post by nicbou »

tylerhou wrote: post #353
nicbou wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't fully agree with you. Back when I worked in retail or fast food, smokers could step out for a 5 minute smoke break every once in a while. As a non-smoker, I wasn't allowed to just sit there for 5 minutes. At the end of the day, we got paid the same, but smokers got 30 minutes off, courtesy of the non-smokers who picked up the slack. Likewise, parents are excused from work because they have children. I fully a…

Parents chose to have children with the assumption that childcare, schooling, etc. would exist. Almost no everyday citizen could have predicted that there would be a pandemic that would bring those services down for 1+ years. Life during COVID is not what parents expected (or reasonably could have expected) when they chose to have children.

I agree with you. I was thinking about remote work in the long, but this was hidden in the last paragraph.

> However, if this arrangement is to last, then childless employees should also get time for their personal obligations, whatever they might be.

Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

#405

Post by Aunche »

mc32 wrote: post #45
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #4

I am a middle-aged adult with no children who's worked at tech firms for the past couple decades. To be honest, the "resentment" of those without children have for "benefits" those with children get strikes me as extremely selfish, immature and displaying a total lack of empathy. This is time off specifically to take care of children, something now that has become exceedingly more difficult in Covid times. What's nex…

I agree. Parents are making sacrifices which benefit society as a whole. Those children the parents are taking care of now will be the ones who will provide for the one complaining now via taxes as well as services rendered to them. If anything, companies should be providing more childcare so that more women (as well as some men) will have less of a burden balancing career and caregiving. I see these people as being…

The difference is that the burden of taxes are distributed fairly (for the most part at least). If you need to pick up slack because your coworker is taking care of their kids, the burden is 100% yours. It would be like forcing you to foot your neighbor's cancer treatment.

Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

#406

Post by dk1138 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #18

It's simply depressing how parent/kid-hostile society has become... I'm not saying we need explosive population growth. But I feel one of the main purposes of society is raising and protecting children. If you're a human-future-optimist, you want some kind of generation that's better than us to continue on.... I'm not saying you NEED to have kids, but I feel it's part of society's collective duty to consider the next…

Oh man, this is all so many social issues in a pot that's boiling over.

First, as someone with kids, I appreciate everything my company is doing to help me manage workload and parenting. I've been impressed with my company. Not all are the same though. A friend, who is a child-less female who works with two other moms and a mom-to-be is constantly getting saddled with the work that her team members are dumping on her because of difficulties. She gets more work along the implication that because she doesn't have kids, she has plenty of free time. Is that equating to compensation? No. Does it make her feel like a second-class work citizen? How could it not.

Second, especially in the Bay Area, there's a growing divide of who can afford to have kids and those who cannot. We can all espouse the importance of children to maintain the human race and build a better world blah blah blah. But that's all going to shit both literally and figuratively. Nationwide, costs of child care are impossibly high. Cost of housing is impossibly high. Healthcare costs to have a child are impossibly high. Parental leave is near non-existent. Tech firms can solve for parental leave and healthcare, but they can't and don't solve for day care and housing. The people having kids where tech firms are located are, indeed, privileged--because they're making enough money to counter the other two needs.

Finally, I've had my own challenges over the past few months trying to gaze into the future as climate change and fires make the air outside today look like a scene from the Fallout franchise. The government is inept. Science is disregarded unless it makes someones internet load faster. A bunch of dumb shits decide they want to ride their motorcycles and infect 250,000 and cause $12b in damages, while at the same time huge portions of students who don't get food at home can't even get the school meals they deserve? Did I make a mistake having children? What is this shitshow of a world I've brought them into? I'll be honest, we're already a world fraught for resources and maybe we all need to think about the duty to the next generation is to not have kids.

Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

#407

Post by yakz »

briandear wrote: post #382
kevstev wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mid 30s childless man I completely agree. We essentially sent people home on a Friday, told them to figure out a work from home situation, and then they were told welp your kids aren't going to school either, and whatever childcare you had lined up has now vanished too- and this is all happening in the course of a few days at most. So now you have kids to worry about all day, home schooling to oversee, focusing…

The thing is, there is a contingent of people that support the Democratic Party assuming they benefit or, at the very least, have someone else pay for it. As an example, if you took a cross section of supporters, if they had their taxes increase by 100% to support $some_policy, they would be less inclined to support that increase. But if you say “the rich” should pay for XYZ, then support grows substantially. There a…

I don't see how this applies to the Democratic Party any more than the Republican Party.

Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

#408

Post by lotsofpulp »

ShroudedNight wrote: post #340
dheera wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the real broken part of this system is that people are not getting legally-protected personal time. A big part of the resentment is that a person who chose to have children ends up being able to be excused from work to take care of children, while a person who has no children is not as easily excused to do what they want to do, because it is deemed low priority compared to children. We need to be prioritizing peo…

While giving every employee personal time may well be the right answer, I also believe that we should acknowledge that, at least up until recently, there was an on-going social contract that society had that provided parents with additional time as an on-going investment into the health of our social fabric, and that, in a sense, we have already benefited (at least in aggregate) from the dividend payed by the previou…

I think most societies around the world didn't and don't provide parents with any additional time. It just so happened the that most people had children and elders/women could raise them while the men kept working. Not to say that women didn't work, but whatever they did allowed them to keep an eye on kids, or relatives/neighbors did.

Also, increasing the population is one of the most damaging things to the environment, so there's an argument that not having kids is paying it forward to future generations also.

Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

#409

Post by lotsofpulp »

briandear wrote: post #382
kevstev wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mid 30s childless man I completely agree. We essentially sent people home on a Friday, told them to figure out a work from home situation, and then they were told welp your kids aren't going to school either, and whatever childcare you had lined up has now vanished too- and this is all happening in the course of a few days at most. So now you have kids to worry about all day, home schooling to oversee, focusing…

The thing is, there is a contingent of people that support the Democratic Party assuming they benefit or, at the very least, have someone else pay for it. As an example, if you took a cross section of supporters, if they had their taxes increase by 100% to support $some_policy, they would be less inclined to support that increase. But if you say “the rich” should pay for XYZ, then support grows substantially. There a…

>When a policy hits close to home: more work, higher taxes, reduced disposable income, suddenly support isn’t quite so robust.

Yes, because I'm not going to put my family at a disadvantage versus others in society unless everyone is going to chip in. That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold.

Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19

#410

Post by DoreenMichele »

goldenchrome wrote: post #6

I sympathize with the parents but this is just how life goes. If you have kids, you’re going to be more occupied than people without kids since we all have limited time on this Earth. And of course your career will be negatively impacted. There are good things about having kids and bad things. This is one of those potential bad things. If you don’t want to deal with this possibility then simply don’t have kids.

If you don’t want to deal with this possibility then simply don’t have kids.

This attitude -- which is pretty common in the US -- never fails to astound me.

First, a lot of babies are not planned. Birth control failures happen or young people learn the hard way the facts of life because they fooled around ended up pregnant before they had a good idea of how things worked and some people are essentially brainwashed from birth into believing that using birth control will send them straight to hell. And sometimes people think "I will take my chances just this one time" and that one time turns out to be enough to result in pregnancy.

That's without getting into the reality that a woman can end up pregnant as a consequence of rape.

Second, if all people successfully take this advice and simply don't have kids, then there is no one to take care of us in our old age as our species dies out, having promoted the idea "You only live once and you should live for today and just indulge selfishly."

Children are the social capital of the future. They are future workers and future tax payers and future caregivers that people who are currently hail and hardy will someday need -- unless you want to follow up this policy with "Let's just start executing people who fall ill with anything that could require long term convalescence and, also, start executing people when they hit a certain age so we don't have to deal with the frailty of old age."

(No, I am not being extremist. I'm really not.)

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