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

cnet.com

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

#621

Post by jimmaswell »

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 feel like companies could easily afford to just give everyone the same time off even if that's the amount of time off these parents allegedly get. Shouldn't be an issue if not for our toxic culture of overworking. They get by fine with far more vacation on average in Europe etc.

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

#622

Post by nemo44x »

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…

If your company doesn’t give you time off to volunteer to help homeless non-profits then you might consider asking for it. Your premise is sound in my opinion. That’s a valuable and local thing.

People don’t have kids directly to service humanity. But the bet effect is kids do benefit humanity. It’s worth supporting. In fact it’s quite sad how low the birth rate has become among those that can afford to have kids.

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

#623

Post by sulam »

alisonkisk wrote: post #426
sulam wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just keep in mind, those people working two full time jobs might be barely making ends meeting in Silicon Valley. Maybe one is a tech writer earning 5-figures and the other is a nurse with a schedule they don't control and that doesn't give them real benefits (this is all too common). They can't afford to quit and now they have to juggle kids, too. Everything worked fine when the kids were in school and they could pa…

They never seemed to worry about paying for those of us who don't live in year round 70degree weather to be comfortable. It seems bizarre to say that CA is so expensive due to the poor choices of people who live there, and the solution is for everyone else to pay their exorbitant luxury bills for them.

I think your argument lost the thread somewhere in there. I didn’t say the bizarre thing you are setting up as a straw man.

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

#624

Post by wonderwonder »

ActorNightly wrote: post #607
wonderwonder wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would posit that no one should be working until 11 and everyone should be comfortable saying its 6pm, I'm going home. It's not the parents fault there is resentment its everyone else's for allowing themselves to be abused into working until 11. We turn on each other when we should really be focused on those making us work the late hours.

Being made to work till 11 without any reward is one thing. Having the ability to work till 11 for overtime pay or get ahead is another. Having a law that mandates that I cannot work when I want to because other people need the time sounds terrible

Sure, but op said that people were resentful when they were working until 11 and the parents left at 6. Sounds like the working until 11 is not being seen as something being done to get ahead of for extra pay but as something that is expected but that parents are able to avoid.

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

#625

Post by alextheparrot »

triceratops wrote: post #559
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…

> Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless? A lot of companies will happily let you do that. Microsoft and Google even donate in $ for every hour you volunteer, up to a certain limit.

Irrespective of the reasonableness of the comment you’re responding to, I don’t think this comment is addressing the presented point. My experience with these policies is that these volunteer hours cannot be performed during work hours unless they are coordinated as by a manager in your organization as a team event.

It seems that situation, wherein you cannot reduce or substitute your working hours as an individual to instead volunteer, is what they are commenting on. Parents are being allowed to do this with their parental duties, which seems to be the perceived unfairness.

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

#626

Post by LudwigNagasena »

nemo44x wrote: post #613
nicbou wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't fully agree with you. Back when I worked in retail or fast food, smokers could step out for a 5 minute smoke break every once in a while. As a non-smoker, I wasn't allowed to just sit there for 5 minutes. At the end of the day, we got paid the same, but smokers got 30 minutes off, courtesy of the non-smokers who picked up the slack. Likewise, parents are excused from work because they have children. I fully a…

We should prioritize people with children. The entire biological point of your life is to reproduce and we should value this. If you can’t reproduce (for a variety of reasons) but you take care of a child then this should be valued just the same. Society should prioritize people with children to raise instead of having a nihilistic philosophy of “ain’t my problem”. The social benefit of well raised children benefits…

> The entire biological point of your life is to reproduce

There is no biological point of anyone’s life. This is nonsensical, it is also extremely offensive both to childless by choice and, especially, to infertile people.

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

#628

Post by bsder »

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…

People would be a lot more sympathetic to parents if parents were being a lot more sympathetic about things like elder care, for example.

People taking care of parents with Alzheimer's in this mess are way worse off than parents.

You can see your children. You can take care of your children. Your children can see you. Your children can see other family members within reason. Your children probably won't die of Covid.

Seeing your elderly family member with Alzheimer's might kill them. Getting them medical care is a long dance with various doctors in order to try to not give them Covid. Maybe you have to make a choice to pull them out of a memory care facility and bring them home so they don't die. And, if they wind up hospitalized, they may wind up dying completely alone and isolated.

The problem is that parents often act like they uniquely deserve special treatment. Yeah, that pisses people off.

Everybody should have enough leave to deal with things. Period. Not just one "special" group.

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

#629

Post by RHSeeger »

room500 wrote: post #359
CydeWeys wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parents are making sacrifices which benefit society as a whole. 100%. We need people to have kids (and for it to be financially possible to do so) because kids are literally the future generations of human society, and if no one is having kids then we'll see a very rapid collapse. This is, incidentally, why it pisses me off when people complain that their pets don't get the same kind of accommodations that children…

I don't understand this sentiment. Farming is critical for society. However, we don't require everyone to pull on their overalls and work the land. Security is critical for society. However, we don't expect every person to pick up their machine gun and jump in a trench. Society is nowhere near a population level that is dangerously low. In fact, we are more concerned with overpopulation and overconsumption. If you ha…

Both the examples you mentioned are cases where everyone in society pays to help those that do perform those roles. They seem like poor choices for counterpoints to helping people who are raising children.

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

#630

Post by snickell »

A 50 year transition to 50% of the current population would be difficult to manage, but if you could skip ahead another 50 years, I believe everyone would have a higher quality of life: cheaper housing, less crowded nature and more of it, less competition for natural resources, more land available per person, more opportunities for recognition in winner-take-all markets, etc.

At our current population density levels and birthrate, I believe society should (moderately) discourage having kids, and one of the best ways to do that is to say "those who want it the most should do it", which means those for whom its the most beneficial and meaningful. A good starting point for that is not to discourage having kids, but not particularly support it either. If its hard, that's ok, the people who are ok with the difficulty will do it, and those that aren't won't, and we'll have fewer new people to the benefit of ourselves and future generations.

I didn't think this until several years ago, when I got the opportunity to work at an NGO focused on carbon neutral energy systems research. This gave me a lot of work time to explore what the US looks like today, and how that has changed over the past 50 years. One of my key random personal takeaways from several years exploring carbon chains, land use, etc, a takeaway shared with several of my colleagues who already had children, was that we had previously underestimated the degree to which quality of life in post-2000 (completely aside from quality of life for other species, which is a separate topic) is negatively impacted by the increased density of people.

For example, and there's lots of stories you can tell like this, many people like having access to alone time in nature, and it's a lot harder in 2020 than it was in 1970, simply because more people in the country => less natural / fallow land. "The woods behind the neighborhood" is less and less a thing.

As an aside, my wife and I were considering having kids until I got exposed to these viewpoints, and they changed my mind. I think its better that my brother has kids, because he REALLY REALLY wanted to have them. And that's great. But, for example, he now doesn't have the free time I have to do open source.... and neither will I if I work longer hours to cover for him ;-)

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