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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

#901

Post by kelnos »

gandutraveler wrote: post #896
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…

How many parents think about having kids because its an essential service ensure continuance of society? I would say none? It's a personal and selfish choice for their own family. I'm not saying that it doesn't benefit the society. But there are govt schemes like child tax credits etc. which are meant to control the population. Yes parents should be given the time off. But do all parents need the time off? What if yo…

> Also why limit this for parents only, why can't the same benefit apply to singles who can use the extra time off to find their potential partner and hence help in societies growth.

You're mistaking an acute problem for a chronic one. Society won't be harmed if you have to put your dating life on hold for 6 months because of a pandemic. But putting child care on hold for 6 months will result in a lot of dead, injured, or developmentally messed-up kids.

> I feel it's tone deaf to just talk about parents problems during these crisis.

I don't think that's the case at all. As an example, my employer also talks about general mental health during this pandemic, and encourages everyone -- parents and non-parents alike -- to take the time they need to care for themselves.

But as a non-parent I recognize that I haven't been affected much by the pandemic. Yes, I miss seeing my friends, and doing normal things out of my home, but I'm dealing with it reasonably well. If I had kids, what I'd be dealing with would be orders of magnitude more difficult. So I expect and accept that orders of magnitude more time will be spent talking about the problems parents are having right now.

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

#902

Post by gandutraveler »

It's so sad many commenters don't seem to objectively acknowledge non-parents argument here. Calling them as selfish and non empathetic.

What If there is no pay cut and every employee gets the same 6 weeks time off whether you have kids or not. If employees are willing to work for those 6 weeks they will be paid extra. This should be a win-win solution.

I as a non parent, I'm struggling with being locked down for longer duration. With almost none social and dating life. I used to eat company catered meals before covid and now I have to spend extra hours doing it all by myself and no one to share the work load with. I wish I could take time off from work, visit my family back home or work on finding my future partner. But our manager looks up to us non-parents to meet our OKR's. So yeah, being a non-parent in this pandemic is hard. So please don't disregard our struggles just because you were non-parents before and you think all we do is chill and play xbox.

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

#903

Post by IMTDb »

kelnos wrote: post #890
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…

> Even side hustles have been adversely affected by the pandemic. Were you working on your side hustle during normal work hours before the pandemic? No? So is the pandemic stopping you from working on your side hustle after work hours now? No? I didn't think so. > Parents deserve all the concessions that can be afforded, but people without kids should also be afforded the same. I think you're looking at this in the w…

Picture this : My side hustle requires me to be available to perform it at 6PM on wednesdays. So outside of my normal work hours.

This was always OK before the pandemic. Everyone stopped working at 5, and I got to get ready for my hobby at 6. All good.

Now, parents need to be available for their children at 5. So they have to leave at 4. Someone has to stay until 6 to "make it up". It's a priority that we allow them to be available for their children. So I will have to let go of my hobby, so they can be with their children.

They might even justify it by saying "I will come early on thursdays to compensate, and you can start later". The thing is that I don't care about starting later on thrusdays. I want to be free at 6 on wednesdays.

And because my calendar does not include the magic "children" word, I automatically get the lowest priority when discussing schedules. Holidays during thanksgiving ? No sir, you don't have children, you would probably be sad and alone anyway! Those nice summer days ? Well, Henry wants to take his gasp children hiking during summer break, you can have a week in november, while his son is at school! And so on...

The children word is systematically used as an argument to justify some kind of priority for parents when defining schedules over those who don't have any children. And COVID made that really visible because people with children suddenly had even more constraint than those without - and you can guess who had to be even more flexible. And because non-parents are systematically being shown that they matter less, this creates resentment.

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

#904

Post by luckylion »

codeyperson wrote: post #854
mike_d wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is called life. There is no vacation when you have a sick spouse, or bought a new house, or are in a car accident. Your job shouldn't be your break, regardless of your situation. My wife is at a FAANG company currently covering for 4 people who all get double digit weeks off because they chose to have children. Does she get any time off for literally working 18 hour days 7 days a week? No of course not.

Now consider that 18 hours of work for Waterluvian right now would be an 18 hour holiday. It's all relative. It's a hard thing to grok without having experienced it. And yeah I realise how patronising that probably sounds.

> Now consider that 18 hours of work for Waterluvian right now would be an 18 hour holiday. It's all relative.

It really wouldn't though, or they'd happily work 18 hours a day, just to enjoy the holiday, and then retire in a year or two, to enjoy their permanent holiday. They don't, obviously, because it's just a thing to say that sounds cool.

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

#905

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#906

Post by kelnos »

nicbou wrote: post #403
tylerhou wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parents chose to have children with the assumption that childcare, schooling, etc. would exist. Almost no everyday citizen could have predicted that there would be a pandemic that would bring those services down for 1+ years. Life during COVID is not what parents expected (or reasonably could have expected) when they chose to have children.

I agree with you. I was thinking about remote work in the long, but this was hidden in the last paragraph. > However, if this arrangement is to last, then childless employees should also get time for their personal obligations, whatever they might be.

I think if this arrangement were to continue for multiple years, the likely new deal would be for parents to shift to part-time work where possible, with accompanying cultural changes such that their new situation won't turn that into a complete career dead-end. It will mean lower pay, fewer raises, and longer stretches between promotions, but it won't mean being treated less seriously from a professional development perspective. Parents who would usually pay for child care will have extra money to help offset the wage cut. Parents who would usually rely on public services for child care will require additional effort to accommodate.

Meanwhile, non-parents will just work normal full-time jobs and get raises and promotions at their usual cadence, and it'll be more or less status quo.

The issue now is that we're not expecting this to go on for multiple years, and are hoping that things will go back to some semblance of normal sometime early- to mid-next year (whether that comes to pass or not is irrelevant; the expectation is what matters). With that thinking, you can expect solutions to problems to be blunt and short-term, not well-thought-out policy changes and cultural shifts that in the best of times can take years to work out and transition to. And because they're blunt and short-term, they are going to have rough edges, as we're seeing here.

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

#907

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#908

Post by kelnos »

anonymoushn wrote: post #761
Cd00d wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly curious, what are these "personal obligations" that are similar to educating and entertaining children during their waking hours in dual-career homes after childcare and in-person school went poof? What I'm seeing overall is a shocking lack of empathy for that situation and seeing home-parenting obligations during a pandemic as not being too dissimilar from taking time to binge Tiger King or take a road trip…

If someone's spouse is having a mental health crisis, dealing with that during work hours is not generally permitted, because a spouse is not a child.

That type of thing is generally acute, not chronic. If someone needs to duck out of work on short notice for the rest of the day to help a spouse in crisis, that absolutely should be generally permitted, and I think most tech employers would be ok with that.

If this crisis required the employee to take several weeks off, it would require scrambling and maybe require some unpaid leave, but it would get done.

But that has nothing to do with what's going on now. We have a chronic situation where parents need to take care of their kids all day, every day, for every week and month that this pandemic shuts down schools and other child care services. You can't address this with an afternoon off or temporary leave of absence. This requires a complete change in expectations. You can't pause child care for 8 hours while mom and dad work. You can't even pause it for 30 minutes.

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

#910

Post by renewiltord »

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…

Just FMLA using a sympathetic doctor. You can find one. It's like a medical marijuana diagnosis.
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