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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

#751

Post by robbiemitchell »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #734
Waterluvian wrote: post #291

One thing I wish I could make my childless peers grok is that THERE IS NO VACATION when you have young kids. I’m taking this week off and people speak as if I’m on vacation. Please please hear my words literally: my job is my break. Weekends are more physically and intellectually exhausting than weekdays when I get to $&@# off to work for eight hours. My paid time off is a way to give us a fighting chance at laundry…

> One thing I wish I could make my childless peers grok is that THERE IS NO VACATION when you have young kids. As a childless person who has nevertheless helped a lot with childcare while growing up in a different country, here is a simple family-based solution – ask your family's older members to move in and help with childcare if possible, or move close by. Or ask a cousin or an aunt or a sister to move in with you…

One example for you:

My parents are dead or gone. We moved in with wife's parents for a few months. It was a lifesaver. But (a) they were still not quite retired and couldn't help much, (b) they're older and don't have a lot of energy, (c) they were "over it" with Covid relatively quickly and wanted to take way more risks than we did.

Oh, and they have four kids, three of whom have multiple kids. We can't all just ask them to move in.

Life is not at all simple.

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

#752

Post by ramraj07 »

bitexploder wrote: post #715
ramraj07 wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Society ultimately needs children to function. At some point it can’t always be a zero sum game where everyone thinks it’s totally fair. People with kids pay less taxes. There is an implicit understanding that children are a burden we bear as a society. I have a hard time being upset with concessions parents need right now when this is ultimately the federal governments fault. They let this fester into what it has be…

I plan to have kids as well. I'm just not convinced that parents in well to do tech companies need handouts to do this. No one is having kids in lieu of their obligation to society, people have kids because they want to. The governments where majority of people are actively choosing not to have kids are trying to incentivize the population to do so; it's not clear to me why private employers should be doing it. Further, these incentives should be declared with significant notice to make sure people can make life choices accordingly.

You can tell that no one prepares for the pandemic, and that's true. But the point is that this applies to everyone, not just those with kids. What if I have an ailing parent or a sibling? What if I run an orphanage on the side? Just give the same benefits to everyone instead of cherry picking people who make life decisions that are of no consequence to their day job. If you think that's too much to provide to everyone, then I will argue that it's too much to provide for just parents.

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

#753

Post by dcolkitt »

baddox wrote: post #540
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…

That makes it sound like raising children isn't already an extremely strong biological urge and something that tends to provide immense satisfaction to parents. If parents didn't receive special benefits at work to help them raise children, or if all adults were given comparable benefits regardless of whether they have children, I don't think that would shatter the incentive structure and result in having too few hum…

> I don't think that would shatter the incentive structure

The best available evidence is that fertility rates are highly sensitive to external incentives. For example Russia managed to raise its fertility rate from the lowest in Europe to one of the highest in just a decade. They did that through a combination of cash incentives, extended maternity leave, and various social status and privileges for mothers.

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

#754

Post by was_boring »

shard wrote: post #619
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…

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 transmi…

Most likely depends on what you consider professional. Turns out the qualifications for watching other people’s children are almost enterally age base. Even then there’s wiggle room for a competence factor that is deemed by the guardian and confirmed by the court.

For example, there is no lower age a child can be left alone in my state, and no requirements for leaving with someone else — except that the child or person can reasonably recognize danger and avoid it.

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

#755

Post by zeroonetwothree »

jwilber wrote: post #570
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 with your larger point, but your cancer comparison is absolutely ridiculous. Especially in a paragraph claiming others lack empathy. The vast majority of white-collar parents not only chose to have children, they actively planned to. Nobody plans to have cancer. Of course there is a purported difference in feelings toward the two, and the responsibilities they entail.

I don’t think the cancer analogy is good either but to be fair no one planned to have children in a world that removed all their expected child care options.

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

#756

Post by zeroonetwothree »

baddox wrote: post #552
gus_massa wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a 24 hours electricity outage last week. (Some problem with an electric wire in the whole block after a heavy rain). Should I buy an electricity generator just in case? I expect to be able to send the kids to school, perhaps at least a few hours per day. It is impossible now. An in case the school is not working, I can send them with one of the grandmas or the other. But we are currently in the peak of the pan…

What do parents do during the summer or before public schooling starts? I've always heard controversy about parental leave, but why haven't I heard as much controversy about parents spending less time at work when their children are very young or during the summer?

They pay for child care (daycare, summer camps, nannies) or use free child care (family, friends).

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

#757

Post by anonymoushn »

dcolkitt wrote: post #591
nicbou wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits. The US and most other Western countries run huge budget deficits at essentially zero interest costs. This is only possible because creditors have full faith in the ability of future tax payers to meet debt obligations. In light of that, I’d say the overall balance is that those with children are massively subsidizing the childless.

You mean the children are subsidizing the parents?

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

#759

Post by linuxhansl »

Not _at all_ true where I work.

I work with folks who have kids and folks that don't. There is absolutely no sign of this. I interact with a fairly large group of people; everybody is understanding and supportive.

Now. Perhaps I'm in a lucky bubble here, and it's different in other places. Perhaps the article is click-bait. Hard to know.

In the end it seems rather pointless to build up resentment this way anyway. There is so much evidence that a good work-live balance has a greater impact on productivity than skill - engineers who work less often get done more.

Managers who do not understand that should, frankly, do something else.

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

#760

Post by zeroonetwothree »

jartelt wrote: post #252
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…

It is not necessarily just hostility to parents. I see it more as hostility to the HR policies in place at some of the companies. A new parent at facebook gets 4 months leave after the birth and then can take another 10 weeks of family leave. Alternatively, non parent employees at facebook can take 3 days off to cope with stress or else need to take sick days. Otherwise they can take sick days, which probably would b…

I know lots of FB employees that have taken mental health leave this year far in excess of any leave parents have taken. It’s simply not true that there’s no option for non-parents.
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