On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As Google matures and they start cutting even more of these perks, the two groups will start growing even further apart. It's a serious organizational issue and Google will need to tackle it quickly.
Google's atmosphere is similar to America's regulated airline era, where fares were set by a government body. Being unable to compete on price, they competed in other dimensions -- who had the newest planes, the best food, the friendliest flying atmosphere, the most trusted brand and the best service to their customers.
The best engineers are not more motivated by a somewhat higher salary, since they are passionate about their work, right? Indeed, all the perks in the world can't keep some of their employees from heading for the exits in the, er, face of more exciting opportunities. So why offer lavish perks at all?
The always-implied reasons are for its signaling effect and ability to increase the all-important worker productivity. But I would contend that the best reason for them to do so at this point is to reduce effects of the company's relative wealth disparity, which, should they rear their heads, clearly have the potential to be very corrosive. Highly democratic perks are a tonic for a de-facto aristocracy.
But the two risks of establishing a millionaire atmosphere are clear from this example. Firstly, of course, they're way expensive to the company, and that's hard to sustain. Secondly, workers, who may not have even cared about these things before arriving, have been conditioned to expect them.
So that sets up a bind, since the company needs to maintain the illusion that these benefits create. If you try to shunt some of the expense onto your workers, say to the 20% of employees that use 80% of some benefit, you run the risk of breaking the spell. Because the antediluvian class will take it in stride while the post-IPO gleaners will scream. So, Google: buck up and pay up.
This is an issue faced by all "unequal" social structures, including countries, tribes, corporations, governments, and others, and every human structure throughout history has required mechanisms for managing it. Google is not exempt.
I'm assuming the other person works too, which is why they need child care. Thus, their actual combined income is over $110K, which is an enviable position for any household, even in the Bay Area.
People get too used to what they have. Try leaving and seeing how much better plan B is.
The haircut, dentist, car-wash, etc perks aren't so much about being free as they are about being convenient due to being located on-site.
Perhaps a more equitable and user-responsive way to provide day care would be to let local offices or workgroups organize their own childcare groups, with some degree of corporate subsidy and other support.
I believe that the original source of that quote was Rousseau, referring to an unnamed princess, some 20 years before Marie Antoinette was even born.
There is some speculation that he may have been referring to Maria Theresa of Spain, but even that is doubtful.
"Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year — which nobody had noticed up until then — compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle."
It seems that Google was quite generous over the years and finally realized that given the difficult economic times that they as a company must do something to bring their internal spending in line to a more realistic range. I don't see why Google should be penalized for such a move.
Unfortunately for Google, the fact that this is a move that affects children and families such a story becomes even more sensitive. Google is a business like any other business out there. Why are they being treated as though they are something other than a business?
That said no one is forcing the parents to use Google child care and they could presumably band together and go to the company that ran the original lower cost care service and have them open a cost effective center near by, or something to that effect.
Instead, they seem to be making the subsidy -- which includes the unique benefit of having children nearby onsite -- conditional on a high level of copayment. Only if you can already afford gold-plated child-care, then you get the additional Google subsidy and proximity. If the copayment is too dear, you wind up getting no subsidy, and your children wind up farther away.
It's like welfare for the already-well-off, which excludes the most needy.
We've done our best to think about the future, but it's unknowable.
Obviously, you don't have to answer him in detail, but you could do more than simply scold the guy for asking. I know plenty of couples who never thought deeply about finances before they launched into parenthood.
I don't mind talking about my own job situation, but don't really feel comfortable talking about my wife's.
To keep it brief, my wife and I could live in any number of countries and both of us could find jobs in most of them. With choice comes a lot of thinking and a great weight of responsibility. Live in Italy, make less money, and have the grandparents nearby to help out? Live in the US, make more money at better jobs and pay someone? Stay in Austria with a nice social welfare system, and reasonable jobs? All of those have further variables and derivatives and basically end up being very much impossible to calculate a priori (and there are elements that are private and I don't wish to share publicly).
In any case, I think most parents would respond with some indignation if their commitment to their children were questioned. It's just something that's probably not very polite to do outside of a small circle of friends and family.
For what it's worth, I don't think he was questioning your commitment to your children, so much as the forethought you put into the process. He just didn't do it in a diplomatic way.
The fact is, finding a perfect solution for taking care of small children in an industrial society is probably an insoluble problem. And if so it's not one you can solve before having kids, or after them.
Looking at it again, I hope that he wrote quickly without really thinking about what his words meant.
You said you were facing a certain problem "now", 2 months after the child was born.
You could have made your decision about how to handle it prior to the child being born. If you'd done that, you would not be facing the problem now, it would be decided. But you didn't.
He asked about why you didn't decide in advance. You got offended by the implication that you hadn't decided in advance. That was something you said yourself, so it's unreasonable to be offended by it, or to blame him for noticing you said it.
And, BTW, if you and other parents can't read it rationally, why should I believe you handle parenting matters rationally? Parenting matters are more difficult and more emotional than reading a simple forum post.
I thought the waterfall development link basically answered the question about advanced planning. I'm mostly interested in the emotional fragility of parents and wanted to see what would happen if I pointed out that logic does not back up his reaction.
= trolling
Can I have my DH rating now? :)
So you didn't really care what people had to say, you were just trying to bait them? i.e. you were being a troll on purpose?
I wanted to learn something. Why did you post?
It's not like the career question is unforeseeable. Many people put off having kids due to that exact issue. You can be offended all you like, but if you really didn't have a solid answer to that question before you had your child, I do think you were being irresponsible.
Hopefully he just dashed off a quick response without really thinking about it.
Of course, there are extenuating circumstances which can waylay any planning; I never intended to imply that there weren't. Go back and read my post, and you'll see that my criticism was conditional. If you did have a plan in place, and then extenuating circumstances derailed those plans, then fine.
Twice now you've taken statements that were pointed at a specific issue and acted as if they were broad indictments of your parenting skills that amounted to nothing more than ad hominem attacks. False umbrage hardly contributes to a strong and friendly community.
My umbrage was anything but false: the idea that we had taken the arrival of a child so lightly as to not consider and plan for the future most certainly implies negative things about me and my wife, especially considering that people here really don't have that much knowledge of our situation.
pg's response was quite astute: we thought and planned beforehand, but things change rapidly, and in ways that are unpredictable. One small, simple example is that I thought at this stage, since our daughter is basically in the eating/pooping/sleeping phase, it would be easy to get back to work, and leave most of it to my wife, since she has to feed her in any case. However, it's quite difficult to concentrate on work, and I really enjoy helping out and spending time with the baby, even if she doesn't do much. There are plenty of other things that aren't like we'd imagined them either.
Basically, unless you have experience with kids yourself, I think that it's not so easy to understand what it's like.
If you and your partner didn't make plans for your careers before having a child, then suck it up and accept that you were irresponsible. If you did make those plans, then put your reading comprehension hat on and stop with the broken-heart act. Christ.
There are a lot of difficulties when raising kids, and both parents are well educated, and can have potential good careers. I don't have kids, but my sister has, and she decided to stay for half a year home, then they got a nanny. She had to find a job that had flexible hours, so she could be home early enough, and she works hard. She has a masters in finance, and an MBA, and she decided to get a job that pays less, but that has better hours, and a lot of her salary goes to the nanny.
Before having kids, their planning was different, that they were going to send the kids in day-care, but the local options were not that good at all, and my niece was getting sick very frequently, so they had to change the plans, and for a month or so they were in a dilema on what to do.
Your comment had a very arrogant tone, and it came out preachy and self righteous. Maybe you didn't mean it, but that's how it came.
You. The way you made her. The Famous 20% time?
Who else is in a better position to take responsibility and care, than you (& partner)?
How else could you do it if not with love?
Your partner + you: 20% off is 1+1 days a week. Make grandparents happy, that makes +1+1 days. Each of you can take 2 days off a month. And this is even without parental leave for three years.
After that, daycare is your answer: socializing is an essential need for humans.
Here in Slovakia, the most common way to solve it is that mother will stay at home for two or three years (it is also called "mother's vacation"), and then resume her career. I think that in most cases, this is the most sane option. Some mothers would stay at home for 6 years - but even in this scenario, it doesn't mean the abandonment of the career, does it? Can't she return to work after a few years and resume where she left?
I believe the first years of a child are most magical for the parents to watch...and those moments will not return: if your wife will miss them by being in the workplace, they just will be missed forever. So take care and enjoy being with your kid as often as you can afford!
Austria, where we are now, is similar, and we've both taken several months "off" (or as much 'off' as I can force myself to do:-) to spend time getting used to the new situation, and enjoying her. It's difficult to say that it should be entirely the woman's responsibility though, especially as my wife is also quite talented in her field, and taking something like three years off might put her permanently behind the curve.
Without a doubt, though, we both firmly believe in spending as much time as possible with her!
In reality, the men are not keen on staying at home, and for good reason - you lose your marketability, and poetic ideas of parenthood aside, it's not all that magical to take care of a screaming, pooping kid who is too young to engage in activities that adults find interesting.
If am probably coming across a little harsh but having grown up female in the Eastern Block, I am predictably annoyed that the men from my part of the world are quick to preach to women what they don't want to practice themselves. If you think staying at home is so great, why do you immediately say David's wife should do it?
Then when it was her turn to work, her husband arranged to work part time from home. The kids were self sufficient enough that he could focus on his programming for short stints during the day and for longer periods at night when his wife got home. He was able to do enough work to "stay in the game." In fact, he liked it so much he decided to do it for another 2 years.
At that point the girls were in pre-school, so had about 3 hours each day to get work done while they were gone, could then play with them the rest of the day, and finish his work at night when his wife was there.
The girls are now 6 and in school for most of the day. He's looking at going back to work full time, but given how much he enjoys working from home, he may just keep doing that for a while.
It surprises me how rarely this gets said. It seems kind of obvious to me. In Canada a few years ago one party announced billions of funding for government-run daycare centers, while the other party (who won in the end) wanted to give the money as tax credits to parents. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, but I recall quite a controversy about how the latter proposal was "anti child care".
Perhaps the discourse is this way partly because of economics. Postwar economic growth was closely linked to women entering the workforce. A mass exodus of parents back into the home could have negative macroeconomic effects (that's the perception at any rate). From a conventional point of view, the "answer" is to prevent that from happening and commercialize child care itself.
The controversy was that the latter proposal was anti public child care. The rival proposals were pushing in different directions the economics of the decision of staying home with children vs. working and putting them in daycare.
Children being alone at home vs. being with lots of other children in daycare has many benefits.
First, over the years I've seen a lot of kids that stayed at home with mom that were not socialized well at all. Being in a group is how we evolved. It's natural and normal. Being at home with one parent all day is not normal at all.
Aside from socialization, being in the "home bubble" doesn't do a child's immune system any good. They need to be exposed to lots of stuff early in childhood to develop a strong immune system.
Also, the kids being raised by strangers have behavior problems, not because they aren't socialized, but because there is a fundamental breakdown in the family structure.
We could debate this all day, but it probably isn't relevant for most here and no one way works for everyone.
Our kids are among the best "socialized" (as if that were the ultimate goal of life!) I've run across.
Yes, having a single child would be tough on that child in terms of learning to deal with others and their needs.
We educate them at home, or, rather, give them the tools & guidance to educate themselves, which is the only way it's ever going to happen.
It's been good that I've been working from home for 18+ years, running a "lifestyle" small software business (5 people distributed around the country).
The problem now is, there's no village. The older children are segregated in separate schools, and most of the adults are at work. Daycare is, in effect, the closest substitute we've been able to invent for a village on this axis. It may not be the final answer. Which is why lisper's comment is so funny; it's not a problem society has even solved, let alone individuals.
My wife ran a daycare centre, and she's staying home to raise our kids. The best solution is to find the social activities in other places. Daycare is far from the end of the world, but I dont see it as the preferable option, just an easy and not the worst option.
He talks a good amount of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa where all the kids used to just go out Saturday morning to a nearby field, meet new kids, and spend the entire day there before coming back home to dinner. Right now it seems the kids are too focused on their tvs and computers to go out and actually partake in the backyard baseball games.
Based on my own observations, I think that what the kids spend their time doing is largely a function of the parent's need to have them do something.
I fondly recall spending escapist afternoons digging into the dirt underneath a bush with my Star Wars action figures and creating my own world.
I don't think it's as much parents are trying to just get the kids to do something so the kids won't be around as the parents trying to improve their kids education and life.
There are numerous articles describing how even pre schools are becoming more and more competitive. In such a world what can you do as a parent?
I agree with you when it is an entire family of mother/father, grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. raising children. But I can see how a mother (or father) alone at home all day with children may not be able to provide the same environment as a day care with several adults and many other children.
Implying that only insane (read: ignorant and uncaring) parents would choose to work and leave their kids to play with other kids during the day is just typical conservative scaremongering. I am sure there are bad daycare centers out there, but then there are bad stay-at-home mothers out there also. One is not good and the other is not evil, both are choices made by equally intelligent and caring people.
Smart people I know who don't have children are often a source of great observations about child rearing in general and even specific parenting situations. That's the positive side of your point, and I've used it many times to get a read on what I might be missing.
The mistake they make is not in their observations, which as I said are often very rational, but in assuming that they themselves would do better. What makes parenting hard is that your emotions are involved in a way that is far deeper and more complicated than anything you've experienced before. It's easy to be a "good" parent when that condition is absent, for the same reason it's easy not to get hypothermia in Florida.
"$1,425" was the subsidized price? If someone told me day care cost that much, I'd fall on the floor, but that's the good price. A woman where I work pays 30 dollars a day, and that's far, far too much. Unbelievable waste. Absolutely unbelievable. $1,425 is more than my total monthly expenses. I could theoretically make my living by watching one child. Clearly, this is an industry just waiting for its Sam Walton.
Clearly, you haven't seen my latest web-app...
An insurance liability, for one thing.
That said, many people here in MN do in-home daycare which is usually much less expensive. Usually it's a parent who has decided to stay home with her baby and gets the training and insurance to care for other children as well to cover the cost of her leaving her job. However, as you get to the preschool years, the quality varies radically. They may give good childcare, but the learning experiences can be slim to none. My son entered Kindergarten extremely well prepared and immediately outdistanced most of the other kids. Odds are that in-home daycare would not have prepared him for school as well.
http://www.pausd.org/community/employment/teachers/teacher_s...
It seems child nurses earn a LOT more than the average IT person?
Cleaners: It's only a room, it only needs to be cleaned once a day. Shouldn't be that expensive either.
Contractors to maintain the infrastructure: again, it's only a room, maintenance really shouldn't be that difficult.
It's obvious that there's a lot of money flowing into childcare, and it's not obvious where it's all going. It's certainly not going to the people who are doing the caring -- they make almost no money at all. Is it all going to into insurance and compliance with various regulations?
You would horrify many parents in Italy with that statement:-) Truth be told, I don't think I can blame them, even if they do get a bit fixated at times. Their kids are healthier and don't have obesity problems because they start off eating right.
It's a bummer that there's no commonly accepted definition for organic, but it's probably because at least for now, the fight is against current practices (which explains the many alternatives that have sprung up), instead of being for a particular practice, which could be named more accurately and concisely.
For example, the Marines describe a unit as "organic" if it can operate without assistance from the other services (e.g. this is why the Marines have their own aviation and don't rely on the Air Force the way the Army do)
Not only have Google basically doubled the cost of their childcare, but they're also charging people for the priveledge to be on the waiting list for that childcare?
They dont think this is a strange move at all?
Of course they are missing a bigger opportunity in improving education here. Like universities, google should be experimenting with different kinds of education. They could make a big difference.
Not quite true; Google is legally obligated to act in the best interests of its shareholders, and only that. That's true for any public company, and the board can go to jail if they aren't seen to be doing that. With great riches comes great responsibility...
We need to update education, and a tech company is the right place to start. A simple example: build a natural language query system to allow a child to get any question answered immediately. May as well call it 411-GOOG 2.0
These issues are very much related to how google makes money today.
I believe as time goes on, this is going to become more and more common as there are more women in the workforce who are uninterested in waiting until their late 30s to have children and telecommuting gets to be more common.
It's constant hard work for her, but she would never trade her time with our daughter for the extra money from being full-time, even if that extra pay covered the child-care (which it wouldn't).
6/13 http://valleywag.com/5016355/google-daycare-now-a-luxury-for...
6/16 http://valleywag.com/5016952/googles-daycare-debacle-the-kin...
A broken clock's at least right twice a day, eh?
Edit: I went and looked at them. They're very similar to the NYT piece, only shorter. Perhaps HN should ban the NYT? :)
1. The exorbitant cost of the Bay Area (and other places like NYC, Boston, D.C., etc.) - there's a reason the Bay Area has the lowest ratio of children to overall population in the country. It's just not an affordable place to raise a family. It's essentially a giant suburbs without the traditional cost advantage of a suburb. You can live in Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc. for the price of living in a world class city like Chicago. You make that choice. Good for you.
2. Where are the grandparents? As someone from a more traditional culture, I don't quite understand the desire for couples to go it alone. Why not live near your parents or have them move to live near you? Grandparent-grandchild interaction is extremely valuable. It helps transmit your family values to your children while allowing your parents to stay mentally active and it also keeps them happy. It also significantly reduces childcare costs.
I'm not married yet and probably won't have kids for a few years but I really think this is the correct AND affordable approach:
*Evaluate where you are in life. There's no point waiting for the perfect time. Adversity is good for kids - it prevents them from growing up to be spoiled brats. I grew up in a Third World country and the only things my parents weren't cheap on were my health/nutrition, safety, and education. That's all that really matters. Have kids before you're too old.
A) If you have a lot of capital or high salary, stay where you are, and have one spouse work part time (can alternate), and suck it up till the kids are in school. Mix in a few days of daycare per week to allow for part-time.
B) If you don't have a lot of capital or a high salary, move somewhere cheap. Your spouse and you can both work full-time and afford daycare a few days a week.
In both situations, have the grandparents around! If you're an only child, it's easy - your parents will be there in a heartbeat. If you and your spouse are one of 2 kids, then your parents can alternate. If you and your spouse are one of 3 or more kids, live near your siblings. Raise your kids around your family.
If only this were true in more companies nowadays.
The problem would be alleviated somewhat if more and more people owned their own businesses, instead of the situation we currently have, of numerous workers employed by a wealthy class. At some point, these workers should simply refuse to work for anyone substantially more wealthy than they are. The value to an employer of having a large pool of interchangeable labor is calculable. Who created that value? Not the employer: the people. And it is the people who should and who must demand that value they created for themselves.
These msm companies online (forbes, NYT, et. al) really have not figured it out yet.
I wouldn't take this too seriously and I'm surprised that the Times:
1. Thought Google's daycare policy was worthy of the front page
2. Couldn't find a credible source who actual understands how and why the decision was made.
<i>Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft.</i>
Wait a second... Facebook is "hotter"? That seems unreal. It's not that Facebook is a bad company, per se, but I'd much rather work at Google. I can't imagine top-talent wanting to have Mark Zuckerberg, an arrogant 24-year-old, as a boss. I can't speak for tip-top talent, but even still I'd rather gargle a fistful of nuts and bolts.