Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#31

Post by ars »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #29
runako wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of legit reasons. Some I have seen: - kids do remote school for whatever reason. This works when parent is at home, but not if parent is at the office. - kids are age when it's okay for them to walk home from school. - Have to be at work at 9, school drop-off starts at 8:35. School is 45 minutes from the office. There are a lot of ways people organize their lives. The cool thing about sales teams is you don't ha…

These are all legitimate but I found my self a bit bewildered that the concept of a school bus is absent entirely from the apparent thought process, given I rode the bus for the vast majority of my primary and secondary schooling

At least by me you have to be more than 1.5miles from the school to get a bus - that's a half hour walk! Doable certainly, but not fun, especially in the winter - or worse, when it's hot!

And teens need to live even farther from their school to qualify for a bus, but teens don't walk any faster than non teens. Most kids don't really want to spend the better part of an hour each way going to/from school.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#32

Post by [deleted] »

milesskorpen wrote: post #4

It's not clear to me how you can be a full-time employee and be doing full-time child care. I understand the need for schedule flexibility, but if going back to the office means you need to find child care it seems to suggest some of these people weren't really working full time on those days.

[deleted]

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#33

Post by xinayder »

> Johnny C. Taylor Jr., the president of the Society for Human Resource Management, told BI that as more organizations have called workers back to the office, it's become clear that many employees didn't heed warnings that remote work was not here to stay.

It's not the employees fault if they trusted the company wouldn't screw up home office, all these companies made employees believe they could have better working conditions, until they forced everyone to go back to the office.

I don't blame the employees but the employer for making broken promises and manipulating their employees into thinking the company is better than the competitors.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#34

Post by garciasn »

burnte wrote: post #22
ryandrake wrote: post #9

> "To harness this energy and grow skills, we believe our sales teams need to be together in the office," the memo added. "Additionally, our data shows that sales teams are more productive when onsite." I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo. Otherwise, this should be considered a magical myth that the company's leadership simply believes.

> I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo. Otherwise, this should be considered a magical myth that the company's leadership simply believes. They never share the data. The data is "management wants it that way." I manage a completely remote team, I couldn't care less if they were in person, they work fantastically this way.

Of course they don’t; because, none of this has anything to do with any measurable KPI(s) other than “we said so.”

E: forgot a quotation mark. Please forgive my indiscretions.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#35

Post by CalRobert »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #29
runako wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of legit reasons. Some I have seen: - kids do remote school for whatever reason. This works when parent is at home, but not if parent is at the office. - kids are age when it's okay for them to walk home from school. - Have to be at work at 9, school drop-off starts at 8:35. School is 45 minutes from the office. There are a lot of ways people organize their lives. The cool thing about sales teams is you don't ha…

These are all legitimate but I found my self a bit bewildered that the concept of a school bus is absent entirely from the apparent thought process, given I rode the bus for the vast majority of my primary and secondary schooling

School buses are increasingly rare - https://www.vox.com/life/373743/school-bus-transportation-ki...

My kids start school at 8:40 and the train to work leaves at 8:54, meaning that if everything goes perfectly (no disasters at dropoff, train on time, I get the folding bike unfolded quickly and ride like hell, though I like that part) I get to the office at 9:27. I don't think it would be physically possible for me to do a 9:00 AM start time.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#36

Post by CalRobert »

creativenolo wrote: post #24
milesskorpen wrote: post #4

It's not clear to me how you can be a full-time employee and be doing full-time child care. I understand the need for schedule flexibility, but if going back to the office means you need to find child care it seems to suggest some of these people weren't really working full time on those days.

I couldn’t find any mention of employees doing full-time childcare in the article. But I suspect you don’t really understand the issues. If you need an extra hour childcare because of your commute you are unlikely to find childcare that covers that one hour only and works around you. You most likely need to find afternoon/early evening cover. Good luck. Also, you can work from home distraction free whilst ensuring th…

Something like that might include a casual arrangement like a neighbour watching them after school before you get home, a grandparent dropping by, etc.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#37

Post by plantwallshoe »

milesskorpen wrote: post #4

It's not clear to me how you can be a full-time employee and be doing full-time child care. I understand the need for schedule flexibility, but if going back to the office means you need to find child care it seems to suggest some of these people weren't really working full time on those days.

Elementary schools close at 3pm. No longer can you just take a break mid-day to pick them up because you’re stuck at the office until 5.

Lots of daycares close by 6pm. Good luck leaving the office, commuting, picking up the kid on time.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#39

Post by burningChrome »

ryandrake wrote: post #9

> "To harness this energy and grow skills, we believe our sales teams need to be together in the office," the memo added. "Additionally, our data shows that sales teams are more productive when onsite." I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo. Otherwise, this should be considered a magical myth that the company's leadership simply believes.

Before I got into information systems, I spent about a decade in sales. As someone who's been on both sides of the ball, sales teams absolutely do not need to be in the office. Maybe for quarterly or managerial meetings, but the highest performing sales people and teams I knew where given free reign to do their thing as long as they were hitting their quotas. If you weren't hitting your numbers, then yeah, managers would lean on you to be in the office and on the phone building your pipeline and demonstrating you weren't out on the golf course doing nothing.

Its a total myth that sales people need to be in the office.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#40

Post by dboreham »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #29
runako wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of legit reasons. Some I have seen: - kids do remote school for whatever reason. This works when parent is at home, but not if parent is at the office. - kids are age when it's okay for them to walk home from school. - Have to be at work at 9, school drop-off starts at 8:35. School is 45 minutes from the office. There are a lot of ways people organize their lives. The cool thing about sales teams is you don't ha…

These are all legitimate but I found my self a bit bewildered that the concept of a school bus is absent entirely from the apparent thought process, given I rode the bus for the vast majority of my primary and secondary schooling

Also a bus/train rider in my youth (from 6 years old no less) but today it's a bit different. I live in a very safe rural part of the US but even here the school busses aren't entirely safe for kids (bullying, theft) so we ended up driving our kids after a few months of trying the bus. In addition the busses only run to school hours so if the kids attend any kind of after school activity, which turns out to be the case most days...no bus.
Post reply on HN