Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19 • Hacker News Board

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

#611

Post by manfredo » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:03 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #410

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 fr…

Women have the choice to whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term nation-wide. I'm sure you can identify edge cases where people aren't made aware about contraceptives and birth control due to an isolated community, but the overwhelming majority of the population it's correct to say that becoming a parent is a choice.

This advice that if if someone doesn't want to deal with the responsibilities of having children, then don't have children isn't going to result in the whole country's birth rate plummeting to zero. Demographic choices like these in a country of hundreds of millions don't change overnight. It'll be a continuation of the trend of developed countries' dropping birth rates. Humanity isn't in any danger of dying out [1].

While people of working age do support retirees, the idea that increasing population is an unqualified net good for society is a much more dubious proposal. Sustaining another human's life takes a lot of energy, on the order of hundreds of thousands of calories per day most of it from fossil fuels. Experiencing a declining population creates pressure to support retirees, but it's something Japan and European countries have been doing for a while now.

The rest of your comments seem to paint a very negative set of assumptions about childless people:

> ..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."

You assume that childless people are indulgent and live selfishly because...? Because they made different life decisions, you assume they selfish and indulgent?

> 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.)

Is this a joke? Because I fail to see how anyone can convince themselves that this isn't an extremist view. You're literally trying to equate childlessness with extermination of the elderly, and execution of people with illnesses.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-human-populati...

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

#612

Post by leetcrew » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:03 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #312

jdm2212 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone has to provide the goods and services you'll consume when you're old. Those people are today's kids, whose parents are doing you a big favor at considerable expense to themselves. Raising children isn't like smoking, a hobby, a side hustle, or other miscellaneous personal obligations. It's more like military service and jury duty -- an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we kn…

Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless? We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits. As I said elsewhere, there are mechanisms for supporting parents already. If you tried to let any other charitable endeavour take over your work schedule, you wouldn't expect your compensation to remain unaffected. I'm not resentful at parents. It just seems complete…

> Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless?

maybe? at my company we get a few days worth of "VTO" (volunteer time off) per year. so if you worked here, you could absolutely do that.

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

#613

Post by nemo44x » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #160

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 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…

We should prioritize people with children. The entire biological point of your life is to reproduce and we should value this. If you can’t reproduce (for a variety of reasons) but you take care of a child then this should be valued just the same. Society should prioritize people with children to raise instead of having a nihilistic philosophy of “ain’t my problem”.

The social benefit of well raised children benefits all. There are no benefits to having you get equal time off. You’re only serving yourself, not society.

Btw - smokers got to go outside to have a smoke break because we banned smoking from inside. Before that a smoke break didn’t exist. So it’s a trade off. Smokers stop creating second hand smoke in exchange for us tolerating them getting a “break” to feed their nicotine addiction so they can function. Cigarettes are legal and taxes are collected - we should tolerate them getting time to service their addiction so the rest of us don’t have to breath it.

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

#614

Post by quadrifoliate » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

albertop wrote: post #606

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…

We already have government schools that are closed by the edict issued by teachers’ union. How having government childcare would help?

> We already have government schools that are closed by the edict issued by teachers’ union. How having government childcare would help?

The government gives you money each month for each child you have, and forces your employer to allow you to work part-time.

> the edict issued by teachers’ union

This is greatly misinformed. Schools in the US are underfunded and have scarce resources to deal with the healthcare nightmare that is COVID. The unions simply are the medium through which some school organizations had to be convinced of this rather obvious problem.

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

#615

Post by throwta22 » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:07 AM UTC

throwawaybabies wrote: post #453

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'm probably going to get downvoted for being "selfish" but I absolutely do not care about the continuation of the human race and I want as much time off as my coworkers who made the bad life decision choice of making children.

I guess I'm out of the loop but I didn't realize that parents actually felt like they're doing society and the human race a favor by having several kids.

I always viewed it as the opposite. We're at no risk of extinction and companies should not subsidize people for having kids, at least not more than 1. Many people love taking advantage of that sweet sweet 16+ week parental leave.

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

#616

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:07 AM UTC

seattletech wrote: post #314

garden_hermit wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It starts to approach eugenics pretty quickly, which we as a society have pretty much rejected. But we do regulate the raising of children, to a certain extent. For example, we regulate school curriculum to install a certain set of values and knowledge in children. As a society, we also attempt to regulate certain kinds of parenting, by making certain forms of child abuse and neglect illegal.

Well we tolerate eugenics in some ways though. Look at the prevalence of Down's syndrome children now vs. the advent of accurate prenatal testing

I was curious what you were trying to say. I assumed you meant that Down's Syndrome is down due to testing and abortion. But I found this:

The vast majority of screen-positive results are false, yet encourage invasive diagnostic procedures that pose additional risks to unborn babies. As a direct consequence many babies who do not have Down syndrome are lost. We estimate that current screening practice in England and Wales reduces annual live births of babies with Down syndrome by around 660 and leads to the losses of 400 babies without Down syndrome. Although prenatal diagnoses are becoming more frequent, more babies with Down syndrome are being born (up 25% over 15 years).

https://library.down-syndrome.org/en-us/research-practice/12...

Families with known risk of genetic disorders often take the issue very seriously and it's a complicated topic.

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

#617

Post by renewiltord » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:08 AM UTC

jdm2212 wrote: post #274

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…

Someone has to provide the goods and services you'll consume when you're old. Those people are today's kids, whose parents are doing you a big favor at considerable expense to themselves. Raising children isn't like smoking, a hobby, a side hustle, or other miscellaneous personal obligations. It's more like military service and jury duty -- an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we kn…

> Someone has to provide the goods and services you'll consume when you're old. Those people are today's kids...

Or immigrant labour. I'm not a parent-hater or a child-hater (One Billion Americans Go Go Go!) but you can import a lot of people. Heck I'd boost the economy by sustained long term importation of labour to bolster birth so that we can target long term of a billion Americans.

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

#618

Post by ak217 » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:08 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #235

tbatchelli wrote: post #57

How much of this issue is related to having a part of the population think that people having children is solely a private question? "You had children, why should I bear your burden!" If none of us had children there would d be no economy to support anyone's life in, let's say, 40 years from now. People making and raising new sane and healthy people should be considered a social and common good, for the sake of all,…

As I understand it, we already subsidise child-rearing through taxation. Single, childless people are taxed at a higher rate. This is fine. However, this is happening at a smaller, more arbitrary scale. It's not "I support our future through a legally defined contribution", but "my colleague is working 25% less and still gets paid the same, but I need to take PTO to get a haircut". I think it depends on how you frame…

Not disputing your other points, but:

> we already subsidise child-rearing through taxation. Single, childless people are taxed at a higher rate

In the US, being married is a tax advantage only if one partner earns much more than the other. Otherwise it's a wash.

In the US, the child tax credit is $2K per child per year. In most cases, this does not come close to covering the costs of raising a child.

So, no, for most people being discussed in the article (generally, dual earners in HCOL US areas), child-rearing is not significantly subsidized through taxation (at least not at the income tax level as you implied).

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

#619

Post by shard » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #459

rootusrootus wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the obvious downsides for a moment, I'd happily trade places with one of my childless coworkers right about now. This morning I went up and down the stairs at least ten times while trying to get my 7- and 9-year old kids successfully established in their first remote learning session, simultaneously participating in two consecutive Zoom meetings with coworkers, and figuring out how to solve a nagging issue i…

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…

Childcare, although helpful for those parents who cannot WFH, would seem to present a choice to those who can: either put your children into a riskier environment, or accept that you will be less productive than your colleagues who are willing to take that risk. That's a terrible choice for a parent to make. The safest method would be to permanently assign one child care professional to a family, to limit any transmission, but I doubt there are enough child care professionals to do that.

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

#620

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #502

subsaharancoder wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This feels like more of an effort to create a story than accurate reporting of what life is like inside tech firms right now. This is very true. The genesis of the story is that at one of the FAANGs (I work for one of them) someone posted a question that kind of made it sound as "parents vs single employees" issue, the media (the NYTimes got the ball rolling) have jumped on this and are fanning the flames at a time…

How is the media fanning the flames if they’re reporting on something that actually happened? Perhaps to you it may not be a big deal, but FAANGs are now a crucial part of the lives of Americans and the Public is naturally interested in what goes on in these companies. To a certain extent, this kind of media attention is an offshoot of the success of the Industry.

[deleted]