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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

#491

Post by dheera »

wonderwonder wrote: post #424
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…

I would posit that no one should be working until 11 and everyone should be comfortable saying its 6pm, I'm going home. It's not the parents fault there is resentment its everyone else's for allowing themselves to be abused into working until 11. We turn on each other when we should really be focused on those making us work the late hours.

Yep, this is exactly what I proposed in the first line of my comment :-/

Yet HN people are downvoting me to oblivion, yet again, for proposing a reasonable solution: "legally-protected personal time". I guess they all enjoy working till 11pm.

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

#492

Post by knolax »

Mirioron wrote: post #319
RHSeeger wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in non-pandemic times, they're subsidizing the continuation of society for the childless, to their own detriment (less free time, less self time, less money, less social life, less sleep; the list goes on and on and on).

Except children benefit their parents. Before social security, children were your social security. This mechanism hasn't disappeared. Childless people already pay more taxes that are used to subsidize other peoples' children, but they don't get nearly the benefit from that that parents do.

Yes but we live in a time after social security, where old people, regardless of whether or not they have children, are often completely subsidized by the current SS taxes of young people.

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

#493

Post by jively »

It helps if the founders have kids - both my co-founder and I have young children and we founded the company on the principles of work/life balance being paramount (Tyk.io).

If you accept that people can be productive when scheduling their own time, you find that there's actually better participation and buy-in, since everyone has flexible time, the benefits for parents vs non parents are the same.

Need to take time to take care of your sick cousin? Sure. Need to move to a different country to help your wife go to a specialist? Sure. Been on the waiting list for two years to go on a special hiking course? Go for it.

People can be productive whenever if you let them. But everyone needs to be able to take the same approach to their own work/life balance.

It's the humanist way to work, and if a company doesn't flex to let their employees flourish you're not doing your employees justice.

Folks forget it's a value exchange between employee and employer not a one-way street. That's too easy to forget in the modern work environment.

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

#494

Post by MrGando »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #473
rhizome wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A BIG chunk of all that drama is due to the US social safety net not including childcare. That's the thing disturbing thing about these stories: employees are turned against each other when it's a) the company; and b) your tax dollars, not providing any kind of built-in childcare for society. In France, kids can go to preschool and have pre- and post- school childcare, which has to be paid, but it's only like $500/mo…

Yes but isn't that childcare in france gone?

no it's back. It will probably be gone again if things keep spiraling out of control, but child-care is back in France.

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

#495

Post by tunesmith »

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…

If your conception of Democrats is that they will only vote for tax increases on people richer than them, then you have a pretty inaccurate conception of Democrats.

Yes, Democratic politicians will try to tailor their tax increases to not hit the middle class, but that's because they are trying to attract more voters than just Democrats.

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

#496

Post by outworlder »

oblio wrote: post #386
room500 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this sentiment. Farming is critical for society. However, we don't require everyone to pull on their overalls and work the land. Security is critical for society. However, we don't expect every person to pick up their machine gun and jump in a trench. Society is nowhere near a population level that is dangerously low. In fact, we are more concerned with overpopulation and overconsumption. If you ha…

Modern technology means that 2% of the citizens of a developed country can feed the rest. That's why nobody wants/needs the average J. to farm. Modern technology means that only a small percentage of citizens are enough to defend the rest. That's why nobody wants/needs the average J. to fight. If all of a sudden, say, 50% of the people having children now, in developed countries, would decide to not have children, we…

> Modern technology

Modern technology means that we need much less labor than we previously did, while doing much more. That rate is increasing. Jobs are disappearing.

Why do we need to add so many people? We are at almost 8 billion and growing very rapidly.

> If all of a sudden, say, 50% of the people having children now, in developed countries, would decide to not have children, we'd probably have societal collapse

Maybe. Maybe not. Because the effects won't be felt for a while. It's possible that society would collapse, but it is also possible (and very likely) that it would adapt.

If it turns out that we can't adapt to this, then it means that humanity's days are numbered anyway. Because we can't keep growing indefinitely. One day this cycle has to end, one way or another.

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

#497

Post by ashtonkem »

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’ve seen some incredibly petty behavior about fairly minor differences in benefits, never underestimate the ability for well paid employees to bicker over comparatively small things.

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

#498

Post by Viliam1234 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #425
CydeWeys wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In modern society it's basically required that both parents work full-time jobs. It's not the 50s anymore; you can't support an entire household with children on one income. So you can't have the expectation that one of the parents give up a large chunk of their salary just to have kids. If you do structure society in this way then you get rapidly declining birth rates and very bad long-term population demographic pr…

Ok, it is not the 50s but why could people do it in the 50s and why can't we do it now? We are hearing "automation will destroy jobs" left and right and for some reason, we can't afford stay at home moms. The "universal child care" argument makes me feel uncomfortable. It one step short of a dystopia. One where women would surrender their child to a state sponsored center where child care specialists make them produc…

> Ok, it is not the 50s but why could people do it in the 50s and why can't we do it now?

Because on the job market you compete against your neighbors. You can't do it now, because you can't get the neighbors from the 50s.

When most of your reference class have one income per family, the labor market will adapt so that you can feed the family from one income, because your neighbors will refuse to work for less. Then also you can get an income sufficient to feed your family.

When most of your reference class have two incomes per family, the labor market adapts so that now you need two incomes to feed your family. Your neighbors are willing to work for half the cost, and to remain competitive so do you.

(Here, "feed your family" is an euphemism for... basically the total cost of living on the same standard as your neighbors. That includes literally food, but also the cost of housing, schools for kids, health care, etc. A part of it you can save by living more cheaply than your neighbors, for example always cooking at home and never going to restaurants. But you can't do much with the housing costs, and that is a large part of the family budget.)

> Why not just let mothers be mothers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma -- if all mothers stay at home, they can. If half of them chooses career, the other half has to.

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

#499

Post by outworlder »

YarickR2 wrote: post #254
CydeWeys wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parents are making sacrifices which benefit society as a whole. 100%. We need people to have kids (and for it to be financially possible to do so) because kids are literally the future generations of human society, and if no one is having kids then we'll see a very rapid collapse. This is, incidentally, why it pisses me off when people complain that their pets don't get the same kind of accommodations that children…

Pets are optional ? I didn't expect myself to hate this statement so much

> Pets are optional ? I didn't expect myself to hate this statement so much

They are just as optional as kids.

Some of the comments here make it sound like they come from an alternate post-apocalyptic reality where they are trying to re-populate the planet. Not from this reality. You know, the one were we have a planet struggling to support the current and ever increasing population.

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

#500

Post by rayiner »

maxerickson wrote: post #478
rayiner wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect a fair number of the complainers are people with Democratic leanings, and I think I can describe their thought process to you. > I think their problem is that a private company is doing this, not the Government. Is that a Democratic take? I think it's a liberaltarian take on it. Here's the conservative libertarian response: raising children is one of the primary functions of society, and social norms that…

What's the conservative libertarian take on what to do when those norms are gone and haven't been replaced?

Reinstate the norm because we haven’t come up with a better idea and are unlikely to do so.
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