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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

#771

Post by ashtonkem »

abpavel wrote: post #601
ashtonkem wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any manager that’s laying out timelines assuming that everyone will work at 100% capacity permanently is being unbelievably naive. People will take vacations, get sick, or need mental breaks. We’re humans, not robots. If a team can’t handle someone losing velocity due to the challenges of parenting during a once in a century pandemic, then it needs new leadership, period.

100% pay for 100% work and 16/5 availability. 50% pay for 75% work and 10/3 availability. Are you going to be ok with this on the receiving end? The second part of comment is asinine trolling. No one is ready for once-in-a-century thing by definition. If once in a century flood leaves the team stranded and water still does not drain away after 6 months it has nothing to do with management. There are no continuity pla…

Don’t call me a troll. It’s unhelpful, and turns this from a well meaning discussion into something much more personal and rude. You can disagree without stooping to insults.

Employers should pay for the amount that humans are capable of putting out on average in the long run, which is probably not the same as a neat number like 40hrs a week. Pretending that we can ignore human limits and ask for more is not only a recipe for burnout, but probably not even in the businesses interest due to mistakes and retention concerns.

No, nobody saw a pandemic coming, that wasn’t even my point. My point is that not expecting people to slow down during this is genuinely stupid, and any company (that can work remotely) that can’t handle that change in velocity isn’t well led. It doesn’t take a once in a century pandemic for a team’s availability to change; all it takes is a key developer leaving, someone having a child, or even a car wreck to suddenly pull employees out of the regular rotation. All plans should have error bars on them to compensate for these uncertainties as best as possible; the answer is not to expect the remaining teammates to pick up the slack to avoid missing a deadline that very well might be arbitrary, especially if it’ll cause resentment or burnout among your other employees.

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

#773

Post by Cd00d »

kortilla wrote: post #727
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…

>A BIG chunk of all that drama is due to the US social safety net not including childcare. Of course it does. That’s 90% of what grade school is and that’s why sending kids back to school is such a high priority for so many people.

Sorta.

In a family with 2 working parents, I've always been shocked that "all day" pre-k and schooling means "until 2p". After care is quite expensive and in our experience has a hard stop at 6p.

It's hard enough with office-drone professionals, but when I think back to my service industry days and how those schedules were created - at the whim of a petty manager with no week-to-week consistency and only a couple days notice ont he next week - I just don't understand how those parents get to feel that school is childcare. I means they can only work 8-2, assuming little commute.

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

#774

Post by ulmas »

ultramundane8 wrote: post #743

This thread is absolutely bananas. I actually read most of it at 759 comments. The short version is that people with kids are insanely defensive about it. In many cases, they have literally rewritten their brains to see reproduction as exclusively good and necessary. If you suggest anything else, you will be swiftly brigaded and condemned. Those without children are all over the place. Their opinions vary from comple…

"rewritten their brains"... conceiving, carrying, birthing, raising a child is not like picking a favorite beverage or ice cream flavour, and changing the choice as you evolve. It's not something you set your mind about, and change it a couple weeks later as a result of a mood swing, or because of an influential article or a comment on the web.

"reproduction ... good and necessary"... people don't get kids because it's "good", and certainly not because it's "necessary"... They're a little more to it.

and no, you either read all of the 759 comments, or you didn't. Also, skim through ≠ read.

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

#775

Post by phreeza »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #392
burlesona wrote: post #55

This 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…

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.

At faang size companies?

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

#776

Post by ironman1478 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #682
wmsiler wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

They are not being "rewarded." They need leniency to deal with the raw hand they've been dealt. Its called empathy. Companies are choosing to help their employees out in a rough spot and that's the correct thing to do. My mother was sick a few years ago and I "worked" remotely for 1-2 months to take care of her. The company could have easily said "nah." I am eternally grateful that the company did that and I stayed for 2 years longer than I would have and worked very hard. By treating your employees well not only are you acting like a normal person, but you get the side benefit of building goodwill with your employees.

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

#777

Post by jdm2212 »

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…

Among most groups in America, the fertility rate is well below replacement -- same ballpark as Japan, IIRC. The only reason our population grows is immigration: immigrants themselves, and they have more kids than native-born Americans.

So the biological urge apparently isn't doing the trick.

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

#778

Post by jb775 »

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…

The ppl complaining about parent employees are the same ppl complaining about how schools MUST be closed due to covid.

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

#779

Post by Cd00d »

dheera wrote: post #703
betterunix2 wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." So, a few problems here: 1. Parenting is not a choice when you have children in your home. 2. Most parents do not want to be woken u…

So while I agree with your facts here, I would also like to point out that there are other things besides parenting that are also non-negotiable but are neglected. 1. Yes, children need self-care. But so do adults. Just as it is wrong to tell someone they can't take care of their child, I'd say it's equally wrong to tell an adult that they can't, for example, get their exercise time, because I would consider that als…

I'm unsure if you're having an empathy problem or need to find a new employer, to be honest.

When do parents get this self care? Between work, kids, sleep, what free moments are you imagining?

If you can't fit in a workout when you're now without a commute, then I'm confused. And, if you equate a workout with the relentless task of educating and entertaining a toddler, well, you must be _very_ serious about your gym time. Little kids are 7a to 9p, _maybe_ a nap on a good day of an hour, and oh, if you slack too long they just don't get to learn math.

Stop working late. Take care of yourself. Stop blaming people with other responsibilities if you're not doing that. Above all, develop empathy - this is hard for everyone, so stop playing the "those people are getting benefits I'm not" game.

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

#780

Post by ironman1478 »

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?" Yes and my last job encouraged us to take days off for local volunteering work. What most of us do isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. If you can make somebody's day better or easier, why not. The software everybody is making isn't really going to come out that much faster because you took some time out of a single day your week to do anything else but work.
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