Unionization of the tech industry is long overdue.
Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
#682Earlier 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…
>they chose to have children, and I chose not to Up until the pandemic, my work schedule had almost never been affected by me being parent in any way. I chose to have kids knowing that my wife and I would be able to continue working without this significantly impacting our jobs (after the first several weeks after they were born, of course), and that has always been true until this. You are acting as though parents f…
I do not agree with this. Even side hustles have been adversely affected by the pandemic. Quite nearly everything in our lives has been. Parents deserve all the concessions that can be afforded, but people without kids should also be afforded the same. Having children is a personal choice in the end, it's a right, but nothing special in anyway. People should not be penalized for not making that choice, just like they should not be rewarded either.
Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cat in question https://ibb.co/ZVfjzB3
Cat made my day the rest of this thread is a dumpster fire
Couldn't agree more with you. It's been pretty eye opening to me just how toxic the general dude-bro workaholic culture in Silicon Valley / tech is. There is just astounding levels of lack of empathy amongst so many commenters here.
So glad I never moved to the West coast when I had the chance. Instead I get to live in a nice spacious house with a half-acre lot, a fenced in yard to enjoy with my kids and dog, and work at a great small-business/startup in ML with great colleagues, excellent work-life balance, and the main company motto being - Don't hire assholes, and don't work for assholes. It's been working fantastic for several years now!
Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
#684Earlier 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…
Perspective from someone with a child (1.25 years old): When my wife and I chose to have a kid, there was absolutely no reason to think that we would have any difficulty finding a nanny/daycare or that we would have to try to work in the same environment that our son is playing in. When COVID-19 restrictions went into effect, we had basically no notice that we would be expected to work from home full time, that our b…
> Basically there is no way to make any of this sustainable.
It's not just child care, the response to COVID is unsustainable period. People will continue to act out and single out things like this topic, but all in all, the current solution won't get the United States through the next year without a massive economic collapse.
There is no easy solution here, no magic cure, and the "let's just let the 30% who can work remote do so" is already collapsing in almost every vertical.
To come around to an actual point here, I think we're going to see COVID responses become much more "practical" which are going to be bad news in the short term for parents, when a company can practically say "you are not as productive as a person without children and we can't afford you", which will be an absolute truth in many cases. Lawsuits will be attempted, and some might succeed, but most will fail.
As someone who raised a child alone, without her mother, or an extended family from birth, you have my utmost sympathy and I wish I could say more than this: If you're not planning around your children and thinking of ways to make them invisible to your employment, you're putting them and yourself at risk. Yes, society should care, yes, you should get a break and understanding in dealing with the stress and physical reality of dealing with it, but no, capitalism won't allow for that for very long.
COVID should have brought the country together but it's thus far brought us further apart. I see no sign of that fact changing.
Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the argument I made above. If they get paid 100% of their salary for 80% of the output, so should everyone else. I compared it to smokers taking smoke breaks while non-smokers aren't allowed to take random 5 minute breaks.
At a place where smokers can take random 5-minute breaks, I can practically guarantee that non-smokers can as well.
I have a coworker who doesn't smoke but will call it his smoke break and take the 10 minutes and just go for a walk around the building.
Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
#686This feels like more of an effort to create a story than accurate reporting of what life is like inside tech firms right now. 1. Parents lives have been temporarily turned upside down as almost all childcare disappears. Temporary is turning out to be a long time... but still. 2. Most companies are composed of people of all ages and stages of life which means there are lots of parents. Particularly when you consider m…
No one is "creating" a story here. These are all valid points that are having real implications on workers. Just look at the dumpster fire that is the comments here on HN to see how polarizing this issue is when it really shouldn't be so controversial if you had any normal level of empathy for your fellow human beings. And it certainly doesn't come off as a "small minority of tech workers" when you read through these comments.
This is a totally meaningful topic to write a story on. To pretend it is a non-issue does a disservice to the problem at hand and how difficult this situation has been for many parents, especially those in companies with toxic work cultures (and there sure are a lot of those around in tech).
Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
Woodworking is a hobby. Raising kids is a full time job, no time off, no pay, no changing jobs.
Having kids is not a job.
Don't get caught up splitting semantic hairs: having kids takes a lot of work. That's all people mean when they refer to it as a "job"
Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know of two parents who have been let go during covid. All of the people on their team who had been let go were parents of young children.
Man that’s shitty, unless I guess that’s your thing. A few posters here would love to be in that environment
> A few posters here would love to be in that environment
I'm sure there are a few spiteful posters, but I think a lot of the posters would love to be in an environment where everyone would be okay with regards to food and healthcare even if they were let go.
Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
#689Earlier 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…
The biggest chunk is due to the US's (and much of the rest of the world's) lock-down policies.
I am not a parent, but I am disgusted that so many in society would wish to knowingly ruin childrens' lives all over the world just to continue living through this obscene assault upon humanity. Even if we were to buy the absurd notion that we will save substantial numbers of lives by forcing kids to go to school remotely, what the hell kind of cost is that? To immeasurably harm a kid's upbringing - where they need the guarantees of a stable and loving environment the most?
It is completely ludicrous, superstitious, and specious to shut down our public school systems over a respiratory illness that statistically kids do not commonly catch nor transmit. We have endured far worse than this while we simply sat and did nothing. And those times, we didn't end up with a battered economy and massive increases in famine in the developing world, like we are now.
Few countries in the modern world would be prepared to sustain the kind of long-term damage this lock-down policy is going to wreak upon us all. Especially not ones as large and sprawling as the US, with corporate interests and military campaigns ongoing all throughout the globe. There's no sense in discussing policy when clearly there's no policy on earth that could stand against the tyrannical stupidity of all the world's governments turning against their citizens.
Re: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
#690Earlier 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…
They get the perk of more flexibility because they're providing a service to society, raising children for the next generation. You don't get this perk because you didn't have children. Your contribution is more work because you have more time to do it.
people have children for selfish reasons, not because of some responsibility to society. That’s just hogwash.