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Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

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Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#101

Post by j45 »

the_gipsy wrote: post #46
lynx23 wrote: post #33

If the pandemic has demonstrated one thing, it is that I don't want to work in an environment where almost everyone is remote. It has become very clear that WFH workers take extra time off at random intervals during a day, and are typically hard to reach if you need to talk to them. Also, the smaller the children, the more likely it is they are subtly unavailable during work time. This is not acceptable, even though…

First off, there is a huge difference in being 100% available and not outputting work. They are not exclusive. I WFH with people with babies and kids and they absolutely exceed expectations. Second, people in office can be just as unavailable or unproductive as from home. There are a million ways to slack off or be intermittently absent. Third, it's a matter of gender equality too. If the childcare is split 50% then…

Offices allowed a form of pushibg work into other people. Email can do that too.

Daycare is a possibility instead of having one parent takes care of kids. If that’s not an option there are other creative child care options emerging that can work.

As for not working like someone without kids.. maybe I could learn to be twice as effective with half the time at work like having to be as a parent. Sometimes we can’t reframe work to work harder than we feel we should have to.

The bottom lines is off the life we want is uncommon it might take an uncommon approach and balance.

Many childless people are very inefficient with their time too as contrast.

Managing interruptions and organizing projects into very small steps to better be able to use tiny pockets of time after proving to be critical and a super power.

Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#102

Post by defrost »

j45 wrote: post #96
humanrebar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most are carried out by women, ... Is that true? I can rattle off a list of male-dominated jobs that are absolutely not remote, like basically all the "trades" and a list of jobs popular with women that are at least somewhat remote friendly. Does someone have evidence?

Instead of trying to discredit the experience of others or women could it not be a “yes, and trades” instead of a “yes, but”?

The comment above doesn't read as a "yes, but" questioning the experiences of workers, it reads as questioning the assertion that hands on work that cannot be performed telecommuting from home is "mostly carried out by women".

It's a fair question; while I recognise the role of women as care givers, etc it's also true that in many countries trades (mechanics, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, buildrs, tilers, etc) are male heavy jobs, point of sale, bartending, etc. have a large number of men, etc.

FWiW I question any demarcation over gender and remote work as here (Australia) women are as capable of doing either (telecommute | hands on) and do so - and whatever splits there are today on numbers may change five years down the track.

Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#103

Post by the_gipsy »

lynx23 wrote: post #63
the_gipsy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, there is a huge difference in being 100% available and not outputting work. They are not exclusive. I WFH with people with babies and kids and they absolutely exceed expectations. Second, people in office can be just as unavailable or unproductive as from home. There are a million ways to slack off or be intermittently absent. Third, it's a matter of gender equality too. If the childcare is split 50% then…

I expected just as much. So, gender "equality" of the spouse of my coworker is reason enough for my coworker to slack off, and me being coerced into keeping my mouth shut? No. People can demand things like that, but I am not playing that sort of game for them. Your first two points are both ireelevant to me, because "can be" doesn't help in my daily work. All that counts, in this subjective report of mine, is my expe…

> So, gender "equality" of the spouse of my coworker is reason enough for my coworker to slack off

Put it the other way around: gender inequality of someone having a stay-at-home-wife is not reason enough for everyone else to be working the same. Having a stay-at-home-wife can't be the only way to equalize to childless workers.

> All that counts, in this subjective report of mine, is my experience.

My personal experience is the opposite. Office-goers perform worse, are the lesser talent left behind by those that can afford to leave for full WFH jobs, and try to compensate by putting in more office-chair-time and office politics, which just compounds to more problems for those that actually work.

There you go.

Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#104

Post by tyoma »

rco8786 wrote: post #88
tyoma wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve also been working from home and very glad to have been there for my kids when they are young, but highly productive are not two words I’d use to describe the experience. I guess my time management and prioritization skill have improved by necessity, but the lack of uninterrupted quiet time is real.

> but the lack of uninterrupted quiet time is real. Do you have dedicated office space in your home? This is crucial. Additionally, once the kids go to school the house gets very, very quiet for most of the day.

I do. But not like its sound proof. And sometimes your partner just needs help. And other times your kids stop by and ask for something. You can say you’re “at work” as much as you want, but you’re still at home.

And yes, I am sure once everyone is at school for a big chunk of the day it all gets much easier.

Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#105

Post by dumpster_fire »

During the 2 years of COVID WFH, I got to see my baby grow up and be there for all the milestones. For the next baby, it's full RTO and I've been feeling guilty this whole time that I'm not able to give the same amount of attention to him. His sister learnt extremely fast because I would be there every other hour just playing and asking questions for just a few minutes.

Sorry second kid, you'll have the same attention that I was given when growing up.

On the other hand, people who claim to be more productive with kids running and screaming around them, I think your brains are special. There's no way in hell I can figure out why a dependent service 3 levels deep is OOMing while my kid is tugging at my pants screaming "read to me!!!!!!" And it showed in my performance reviews. I gave presentations with a crying baby in hand, causing me to just totally blank out.

Win some lose some.

Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#106

Post by ragebol »

ideamotor wrote: post #100
ragebol wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advice we got was from ~8 months, when they can sit up on their own. For the 2nd kid, that's been only a few weeks, but it's so nice to be much more nimble than with a stroller and less bulky than a car to go places with 2 kids. Can't wait for the weather to warm up a bit and go on bigger trips with the two kids in front.

Your cargo bike has them in front? That’s what I’m leaning towards because I’ve had a few close calls from behind. I’m already petitioning my city to fix a few missing bike lanes haha, I also wonder about wearing reflective decals and using flashing lights. Only so much you can do. Once I’m past 15 minutes of roads we can basically access all of the best parks of the city through an awesome trail.

We have a https://www.babboe.nl/babboe-city-e. And as you can tell from there, we're Dutch, in the Netherlands, so bike paths is all superb over here.

We tried a few variants, also with 2 wheels in front so it can't fall over in standstill. But that's less stable in curves than a normal bike with 1 front wheel.

Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#107

Post by dickersnoodle »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #64
rob74 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all good, as long as you are free to choose the way of working that is best for you and your team. What I am talking about is companies mandating e.g. 3 office days per week for everyone , even if for some it makes no sense at all (neither business-wise nor personally).

I personally do not see an issue with 3 office day mandate. Your job probably isn't so solitary that you don't need other people at all and at the office you get a lot of micro interactions that you wouldn't get otherwise. Just think when was the last time you randomly ran into a guy from the next department while getting coffee and you were just chit-chatting and one of you brought up a topic that helped the other?…

[flagged]

Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#108

Post by VBprogrammer »

brabel wrote: post #68
VBprogrammer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been remote since our youngest turned 1 year old due to the pandemic. I honestly can't imagine what life would have been like otherwise. The year I spent before that I was lucky to see her at all during a day. She wasn't awake before I left (except for the inevitable screaming during the night) and we kept her up late so I could feed her a bottle before she went to bed. I think it's a huge win for equality and f…

> I think it's a huge win for equality and family life Hm, where I live, both parents take roughly the same amount of parent leave (around 240 working days each in total - minimum 90 days for each) from work regardless of whether they work at home or anything else. That's what I would call equality.

Sure. That would be a win for both men and woman by eliminating discrimination on the basis of potential for taking parental leave in the future. But even that is less than a year.

By contrast WFH changes the rest of a child's experience for their whole life.

Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#109

Post by ljf »

dumpster_fire wrote: post #105

During the 2 years of COVID WFH, I got to see my baby grow up and be there for all the milestones. For the next baby, it's full RTO and I've been feeling guilty this whole time that I'm not able to give the same amount of attention to him. His sister learnt extremely fast because I would be there every other hour just playing and asking questions for just a few minutes. Sorry second kid, you'll have the same attentio…

Same here - I feel so lucky to have a 'shed/office' in the garden - means I can be around with 10 seconds notice if I've needed, but generally I am 'somewhere else' and everyone know I'm working and busy.

My old manager could confidently and happily conduct snr level meetings with her kids not only in the room but climbing on her - I just don't have that mental power to work like that.

Re: Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

#110

Post by Thlom »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #61
omnibrain wrote: post #37

I switched our whole company switched to remote back in march 2020; I became a father in 2022 and have no intention to ever switch back to the daily commute. I was there for everything so far. But it's not only what I would have missed out on, but also there are so many situations with a baby where it is useful to have a second set of hands. I don't want to imagine what my wife would have had to endure, if I left her…

>but also there are so many situations with a baby where it is useful to have a second set of hands. I don't want to imagine what my wife would have had to endure, if I left her alone the whole day. The idea of even just two adults raising a baby/toddler all by themselves is a very modern phenomena, in only certain parts of the world. The norm was probably a village like setting where many families are raising many k…

We have paid parental leave split between mother and father, in total about one year. Add in some vacation time and unpaid leave and you can stretch it a a few months. After that most kids attend day care from around year 1 or 2 and both parents go back to work. Many families let one of the parents work reduced hours so the kids can be picked up earlier or stay home one day of the week or whatever. I feel this is close to perfect for both kids and parents.
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