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

You're right we need a next generation for society to continue. But right now we're trending in the opposite direction. Just like your first concern about a fast-growing invasive species is whether it becomes extinct if it doesn't reproduce enough.

I'll take Things That Will Never Happen for 500, Alex.

> In your “tax rebate” example you should be upset with whoever decided to issue rebates in that way, not the people who received the rebate.

Or you could point out that it's unjust to favor some people in that regard, which everyone would do, and the receivers of the tax break would report feeling a growing resentment over their privileged treatment. Because at the end of the day, the taxes have to be paid. If some are cutting their taxes, others must step up.

I get it, double incomes are great, paying for child care sucks, and reducing hours sucks too (because less income), so if coworkers could just pick up the slack without compensation, that'd be great. But that's essentially just asking the colleagues to finance the chosen lifestyle.

When the company continues to produce the same output, their salaries are the same, they get their equity bonus, and undoubtedly they expect their promotions not to be affected, what are they losing?

Employers should pay for the amount that humans are capable of putting out on average in the long run, which is probably not the same as a neat number like 40hrs a week. Pretending that we can ignore human limits and ask for more is not only a recipe for burnout, but probably not even in the businesses interest due to mistakes and retention concerns.

No, nobody saw a pandemic coming, that wasn’t even my point. My point is that not expecting people to slow down during this is genuinely stupid, and any company (that can work remotely) that can’t handle that change in velocity isn’t well led. It doesn’t take a once in a century pandemic for a team’s availability to change; all it takes is a key developer leaving, someone having a child, or even a car wreck to suddenly pull employees out of the regular rotation. All plans should have error bars on them to compensate for these uncertainties as best as possible; the answer is not to expect the remaining teammates to pick up the slack to avoid missing a deadline that very well might be arbitrary, especially if it’ll cause resentment or burnout among your other employees.

At the end this comes down to - some people are providing more value and want to be compensated appropriately; or more specifically some people are now providing less value and don't want their compensation to reflect that.

Besides, I am talking about a drop in output for a given employee, so the comparison to other employees is pointless. If my productivity dropped by 25%, I'd hear about it pretty quickly, and I doubt my explanation would matter much in my performance review.

I don't think this has to be explicitly stated.

Never seemed okay for non-smokers to take these breaks in the Army

In fact, I found GP's situation to be quite relatable, and was relaying what I've been doing (or am planning to do) in lieu of going out.

Perhaps I should have added something to this effect: there is meaning in personal enrichment. Now is a terrible time for meeting new people, but it's also an opportunity for self-improvement and for exploring new hobbies.

Quite fair. I live on the East Coast and that never crossed my mind.

As for the rest, I'll copy my above reply:

I don't have children (never want children) and wasn't trying to trivialize being bored.

In fact, I found GP's situation to be quite relatable, and was relaying what I've been doing (or am planning to do) in lieu of going out.

Perhaps I should have added something to this effect: there is meaning in personal enrichment. Now is a terrible time for meeting new people, but it's also an opportunity for self-improvement and for exploring new hobbies.

Where are these anecdotes from? Of the divorced men I know in California - they're on the hook for a lot of money. Their wives chose to not work (first few years to do childcare - remaining years because they didn't want to). The women didn't want to be in the relationship anymore and got a divorce. The men end up owing their spouses alimony for decades plus child support (regardless of where the kids spend the most time).

As a straight man, I've decided to not marry based on their horror stories alone. I see marrying someone who wants to be a SAHM as a huge financial liability not in just temporary loss of earning potential but in near permanent levels of loss due to potential divorce.

You're mixing up cause and effect. A married women trying to resume her career (which also happens for many other reasons in addition to divorce)is going to have the same problems as a women who is trying to resume her career due to a divorce.

Or historical/current practices and attitudes to relationships and child rearing is what created the liability, specifically the societal pressure for women to leave/not pursue a career and thus lose highly valuable work experience relative to men. Divorce just highlights this.

For those who supported the government, it was much more expensive.

For those who were persecuted by the government, it was a living nightmare.

Because on the job market you compete against your neighbors. You can't do it now, because you can't get the neighbors from the 50s.

When most of your reference class have one income per family, the labor market will adapt so that you can feed the family from one income, because your neighbors will refuse to work for less. Then also you can get an income sufficient to feed your family.

When most of your reference class have two incomes per family, the labor market adapts so that now you need two incomes to feed your family. Your neighbors are willing to work for half the cost, and to remain competitive so do you.

(Here, "feed your family" is an euphemism for... basically the total cost of living on the same standard as your neighbors. That includes literally food, but also the cost of housing, schools for kids, health care, etc. A part of it you can save by living more cheaply than your neighbors, for example always cooking at home and never going to restaurants. But you can't do much with the housing costs, and that is a large part of the family budget.)

> Why not just let mothers be mothers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma -- if all mothers stay at home, they can. If half of them chooses career, the other half has to.

With regards to productivity and pay, I share with you many illustrative charts. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Plus, this solution isn't highly scalable; only so many people can do it.

It's not only not that simple, it's not even clear to me it's the right answer. The right answer is probably something involving employers understanding that this is a hard time right now and you need to be flexible.

We don’t all need to have children to be relevant. But that doesn’t mean that the people primarily responsible for raising a new generation aren’t doing a difficult job deserving of support, either.

I hope as I age and my children become independent, I can help people with their own children even more. It makes a tremendous difference.

For that matter, adoption is also an option so we can't look simply at fertility.

There is nothing in our legal system that compels you to care about future generations -- at least not in the way you're proclaiming.

These childless workers are 100% entitled to their opinions about equitable compensation -- and they're entitled to lobby for these changes as well.

The equation isn't so simple. Life is also much more pleasant today because we are enjoying benefits today at the expense of the future generations' environment. Just like governments can excessively borrow from future taxpayers and then drown them if the growth doesn't pan out, so can consumption of resources if mitigation or reversal of environmental change not favorable to humans doesn't pan out.

Also, by definition, "over"population and "over"consumption are a problem, otherwise they wouldn't be "over". All life is constrained by the parameters of the system in which it exists, including humans.

No, we wouldn't. We would have a massive increase in immigration to offset the difference.

> 2. Your lifestyle is made possible by people that choose to have kids. Especially women, who sacrifice a lot for kids. At least be respectful to them.

What does this have to do with anything? I guarantee part of your lifestyle is also made possible by people who can't or don't want to have children. This has nothing to do with any argument either way.

This is assuming that people are only having children out of a sense of duty. Do you think that 50% of parents are having children out of some sense of duty to society?

> 2. Your lifestyle is made possible by people that choose to have kids. Especially women, who sacrifice a lot for kids. At least be respectful to them.

I reread my comment a couple times and I don't see where I was disrespectful.

This is anecdotal, but I have never had a friend confide in me that they had a child for the social good of procreation. All of my friends have had children because they wanted to have children. My wife and I are planning on having a child because we want to have a child. If you told me that society didn't require me to have a child, I wouldn't care one bit.

So my question to you is "if there was no social need for a child, would you still have one?" If the answer is "yes," I don't see how you can claim that you are performing some heroic deed to mankind. And calling that out is not disrespectful.

Modern technology means that we need much less labor than we previously did, while doing much more. That rate is increasing. Jobs are disappearing.

Why do we need to add so many people? We are at almost 8 billion and growing very rapidly.

> If all of a sudden, say, 50% of the people having children now, in developed countries, would decide to not have children, we'd probably have societal collapse

Maybe. Maybe not. Because the effects won't be felt for a while. It's possible that society would collapse, but it is also possible (and very likely) that it would adapt.

If it turns out that we can't adapt to this, then it means that humanity's days are numbered anyway. Because we can't keep growing indefinitely. One day this cycle has to end, one way or another.

Yes, and? Understand that a housing market "collapsing" means the price of housing becomes substantially more affordable. Same with education. This is a huge part of why Europe is able to subsidize its education so heavily on a per-student basis. The share of the population that is enrolled in university in Germany is about half the share of the US enrolled in university in the US (at least, pre-COVID).

Reduction in demand results in diminished GDP which freaks out economists, but it doesn't result in a decline in GDP per capita. There are fewer people producing, but there are also fewer mouths to feed.

I don’t think many people understand the abuse and contempt childless women face for their choices. This thread and the comments demanding medals of honor for the breeders is very triggering to me.

Parents can also be nasty selfish and self absorbed. Many parents raise children so badly that they are a burden to society. Who is counting those?

My point was more around the parent comment that "society generally needs X, therefore anyone doing X should be applauded"

We have a huge number of needs in society - and yes, that includes enough children to keep the future viable. However, I disagree that on an individual level, having children is fulfilling some duty.

But then their noble sacrifice isn't as important for society anymore, is it? If we simply need more children, then it's not relevant whether they're born to the family of the tech worker or someone worse off.

Just to be clear, I was just adding to the conversation. I agree with you that the transition won't tank your productivity and make you a nervous wreck.

This is over 15 years ago, and there was no pandemic going on. It was worthwhile even then and helped me be better prepared for moving out of my parents house.

FWIW, my brother and sister who were both younger than me when we started preparing food are significantly better and healthier cooks than me today. So starting to cook earlier, as long as it is safe, has only helped.

Tbh my wife and I have gotten a lot closer through all of this and our relationship has never been better. But obviously YMMV on that and it helps that our jobs have been stable and both our companies are doing well during this.

That other stuff is about coming up with outputs, often from a dry well. HN feeds the well for a great many people.

(Just a general observation, not really intended to be argumentative per se.)

Or at least that's how I read it, a polite reminder to be a little sensitive when it comes to such things...

Imagine you're blind.

Now Imagine a sighted person tells you that they've just seen something so ugly they wish they were blind. You might be a bit upset at that notion no?

The government gives you money each month for each child you have, and forces your employer to allow you to work part-time.

> the edict issued by teachers’ union

This is greatly misinformed. Schools in the US are underfunded and have scarce resources to deal with the healthcare nightmare that is COVID. The unions simply are the medium through which some school organizations had to be convinced of this rather obvious problem.

For example, there is no lower age a child can be left alone in my state, and no requirements for leaving with someone else — except that the child or person can reasonably recognize danger and avoid it.

Even assigning one child care professional per household with children is impractical. That would amount to one care giver per one or two income earners in those families, while still introducing vectors for the virus to spread. It is a disproportionate amount of the workforce and would be incredibly expensive. Good child care professionals aren't working for minimum wage.

Yesterday I heard on the radio the local chief of police saying they would be present and ready to write fines to people who didn't follow the new restrictions on public night life. Like they were actually eager to do so!

The same is true for people not wearing face-diapers on public transport.

I'm not saying ignore corona entirely, but on the other hand I'm shocked at how carelessly people act when their rights are violated and their governments oppress them.

Puts missing some crammed for test into perspective.

Perhaps this is the real issue that needs addressing?

In a family with 2 working parents, I've always been shocked that "all day" pre-k and schooling means "until 2p". After care is quite expensive and in our experience has a hard stop at 6p.

It's hard enough with office-drone professionals, but when I think back to my service industry days and how those schedules were created - at the whim of a petty manager with no week-to-week consistency and only a couple days notice ont he next week - I just don't understand how those parents get to feel that school is childcare. I means they can only work 8-2, assuming little commute.

Your argument could easily be used to argue against anything in our service based society. From schooling to dentists.

When I have my kids full-time, time with them is a balancing act between being actively engaged and trying to enrich their lives and just trying to keep them alive while I knock out other stuff that has to be done. My youngest is still a toddler, and much of his experience of being at home is me chasing him around the apartment taking (almost) everything away from him. He loves going to day care where he's in an environment that's designed around him and where he's allowed to mess with just about anything he wants to. I'm skeptical that I'm worse in that regard than a "median" parent.

In practice, very few stay-at-home parents dedicate all of their children's waking hours to their kids.

When childcare closed across Europe due to the pandemic, I've seen a lot of my friends with kids turning from oh so "concerned" parents to people in survival mode who suddenly don't mind their kids having sugary food in the evening or watching yet another TV show if that is what makes them happy:

It's one thing to hand the nanny a list of things to do or to avoid, it's another thing to prepare gluten-free, vegan food 3 times a day while also making sure the little one does the preschool-level introductory course to quantum physics.

Two of my siblings are primary school teachers (that is, for kids who come right out of kindergarten; not sure how this is called in the US/elsewhere), and from the stories I've heard from them, they'd argue heavily against your points.

I think you're underestimating how many families are completely dysfunctional, or where the parents are overwhelmed with taking care of their children, even under normal situations, let alone during the current pandemic. For example; where I live, it's unfortunately still often the case that schools do not take care of lunch for the kids (they are supposed to go home during lunch breaks) and the amount of times where teachers have to wonder whether the kids had anything to eat at all for lunch (sometimes because nobody is at home and they didn't feel hungry at the time or had only junk available) is astounding.

Childcare workers are trained and certified for their job (that's at least the case in my country); and yes, while they have many kids around and thus might not have as much interest in an individual kid as a parent might have, they at least have to uphold a certain level of competence in order to keep their jobs (essentially, like the rest of us - be good enough at your job or search something else), while a parent stays a parent, no matter how bad they are at it.

> Parents have an animalistic, senseless love for the children, which confuses themselves with the child all the time, the educator has respect, and this is much more valuable for education, even if there is no love present at all. I repeat: valuable for education, because even though I call parental love animalistic and senseless, that does not value it lowly, it is just as much a unknowable mystery as the artful, creative love of the educator, only in the context of education however it cannot be valued low enough.

500 bucks/month seem quite expensive.

A full time job minimum salary is 1.521,22 euros per month in France, and at this salary, you have no revenue taxes and extra child support, namely a one shot birth allocation of roughly 1000 euros, and 185,54 € per month of child support.

So, no, "500/month" is not in my opinion "insanely expensive and unaffordable" considering a bigger picture.

- Half of gross income is taxation

- Half of the net income is rent

- Half of the net-net income is other cost of living

- The remainder is disposable income (~10 % of gross income)

No, that's paying it forward for the children of those that choose not to think as conscientiously as yourself on the matter of taking care of the environment. That's not the world I want to live in.

If you care about the short term, then yes.

If you care about humanity leaving the solar system before the heat death (or asteroid, whatever), then no.

It would offend many (including me) if the law prohibited people from working as hard/long as they wanted.

If you want legal protection to prevent being you fired specifically because you don’t want to work more than 40 hours a week, I’d 100% support that. If you want legal protection to prevent me from working harder than that, I’m 100% opposed.

> a person who chose to have children ends up being able to be excused from work to take care of children, ... a person [with] no children is not as easily excused to do what they want to do

On this point, taking care of your children is not always something you want to do. It's a never ending, unrewarding responsibility that is often met with fighting the party you're trying to help in order to make sure they don't die. "Eat this so you don't starve", "Don't eat this so you won't get poisoned", "Don't crawl into the oven to hide".

Which leads into...

> We need to be prioritizing peoples' personal time and respecting however they choose to use it. Regardless whether someone chooses to spend their personal time raising kids or raising orphans in an orphanage or rescuing animals or reading books or hiking the wilderness or community service or being social and sleeping and watching movies, all of these things are good for their own mental health, and we need to not discriminate between these choices in giving people their personal time.

I'm not sure what you mean by raising orphans in an orphanage, but if you mean volunteering to feed and do day care for children at an orphanage, then that again is a choice not comparable with the obligation of being a parent. There's a certain social pressure that you can not just give your baby to somebody else when you get tired of it as you would a pet. Parenting is definitely not something people do for fun for their mental health. And it's not something everybody signs up for. Yes, the actions that created that child may have had known outcomes, but it's also very hard (and very easy) to get pregnant.

> It's when people are working till 11pm and someone says "I need to leave at 6 to make food for my kids" that the resentment happens. If everyone got off at 6, there wouldn't be any resentment.

The ire should be directed at those you feel pressured by to stay until 11, such as managers. Not those who have to take care of another life. Just as "people choose to have children", people also choose to have whatever job says they must work till 11. It's just that there is much, much less pressure to leave a job than to leave your children. The 2 are really not comparable.

When do parents get this self care? Between work, kids, sleep, what free moments are you imagining?

If you can't fit in a workout when you're now without a commute, then I'm confused. And, if you equate a workout with the relentless task of educating and entertaining a toddler, well, you must be _very_ serious about your gym time. Little kids are 7a to 9p, _maybe_ a nap on a good day of an hour, and oh, if you slack too long they just don't get to learn math.

Stop working late. Take care of yourself. Stop blaming people with other responsibilities if you're not doing that. Above all, develop empathy - this is hard for everyone, so stop playing the "those people are getting benefits I'm not" game.

But from what you’re saying, it sounds like you need better communication with your management. Otherwise, I can’t imagine it having been a healthy environment pre-COVID.

I'm a little confused by this argument, because (if you don't have children) the time you had to exercise pre-COVID is still available to you. If you used to get up at 7am, go out for a run for an hour, come back, shower, and start your work day, you... can still do that.

If somehow you are unable to continue this routine during COVID, perhaps because your employer is expecting you (as someone who is childless) to work until 11pm, which makes you too tired to get up to exercise, then shouldn't your ire be directed at your employer for imposing unreasonable work expectations? It seems pretty pointless to get pissed off at parents because of that.

I also do not have kids. I put in 8-10 hours a day, just as I did pre-COVID, and have the same amount of free time as I used to. It's very different free time, and there are mental health implications to that, but none of that in any way has anything to do with my employer showing empathy toward parents and making allowances for them to take care of their kids during the work day.

The big difference between parents and non-parents is that child care is not optional during work hours. If your school or pre-school or day care or whatever has shut down because of COVID, you can't simply opt out of caring for your child because you have to work. COVID has not given non-parents any new non-work responsibilities during work hours. But it has certainly done so for parents.

The choice to have kids isn't like the choice to work out or get good at Starcraft. It's a choice which benefits all of society.

If you're 30, the toddlers of today will be voting and coming into the workforce and voting when you're 50; and will be basically running your country when you're 70. If the next generation isn't raised to take your place, your retirement is going to really stink. And the character and attitude of the toddlers now are going to have a massive impact on your life.

When the harassed parent on your Zoom call apologizes and puts you on mute to spend 30 seconds interacting with their toddler, that's an investment in your own future. Be grateful for them for doing that work.

"Sister for sale! One sister for sale! One crying and spying young sister for sale!"

Sub-cultures with anti-natalist norms will find themselves subsumed by those that produce a lot of children. Simple math tells us that the typical American circa 2100 is a lot more likely to be descended from Utah Mormons than Bay Area rationalists.

This comes up just enough I wonder - are there really people that wish to revoke citizen privileges because you don't earn enough money?

“ While Democrats lose support as income increases, there seems to be a tipping point where the ultra-wealthy begin leaning Democratic. The most famous example would be the entertainment industry, where star-studded events have become a significant part of Democratic culture.

But this phenomenon is not limited to Hollywood. A review of the 20 richest Americans, as listed by Forbes Magazine, found that 60 percent affiliate with the Democratic Party, including the top three individuals: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison. Among the riches families, the Democratic advantage rises even higher, to 75 percent.”

why exactly? generally, it is rational to subsidize things that society does not have enough of and tax things that we have too much of. are we currently not producing enough children? this is not necessarily implied by birthrates being below the replacement rate.

> Raising a child is spending 20-40 hrs a week for 18 years [...] to create another person [...] who will spend ~40 years generating GDP and paying taxes

Let's not forget that this person will eventually retire and require increasingly expensive care.

That makes me curious. If the current economy can only function with a growing population, then it takes > 1 person to subsidise your upbringing/retirement. Does that mean that 1 human life costs more than the output of a human's entire life?

Those people making $62K are getting paid for their work, not donating it.

You chose one particularly inexpensive subsidy, and ignored everything else. 200 days/year of free childcare is not free. Maternity/paternity leave is coming out of someone's pocket. Many social programs are heavily skewed towards children (SNAP participants are around 1/2 children, despite them only being 1/4 of the population, for example).

I'm not saying we shouldn't do these things - modern society makes having children expensive, and it's obviously best for all of us if we ensure some base level of care for them. But we don't have to pretend it isn't happening.

We must control population to conserve non renewable resources. So we can comfortably perpetuate our species without burning the house down and killing everyone.

Non-parents get many benefits from children, but the parents get far more. To be clear, I think many of the arguments for subsidizing the rearing of children are coherent, such as arguments in favor of public schooling and healthcare (on the basis that the children are the primary beneficiaries), but I think those arguments do not apply to the parents' workplace.

This was in response to the parent post:

> an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist

If this was the reason why parents get a free pass, people who provide essential services would also get to do it on their employer's dime, at the expense of their colleagues.

My point across this entire comments section is that this privilege is arbitrary. A lot of people do hard work for all sorts of important reasons, but when they miss work, it gets mentioned in their performance review.

Parents actually have to have kids to be in a position of caring for a dependent.

This couldn't be further from the truth. I don't know anything about you but I can confidently say for every person like you, there are 5 that have a lot of kids purely out of inability or unwillingness to try not to. We are so far from not having enough children that your service to humanity is nothing but a stroke of your own ego. If you really, truly believed what you're saying, would you give up your right to have children under a guaranteed contract that someone else would in your place? Probably not.

I want to emphasize that a sustainable average number of children per family is not zero [0] but around 1-1.5 for a sustainable population size in 100 years, according to the linked article. So given that you presumably live in a developed country (well educated, and don't need children for labour), and have a human's normal biological urges to reproduce, it's not immoral to produce children, but it's certainly not morally commendable.

[0] https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/yes-overpopulation-problem/

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.

Taxes are perpetual and mandatory. It goes towards subsidizing other people’s genes and then the childless have to be thankful for that.

Let’s not forget the children who grow up to be thugs and criminals. Not every fruit of the loin is a productive member of the society. I find it appalling that after 12 years of subsidied education, they still want free education, housing is a human right and most haven’t even paid off the cost of society paying for them ..never mind paying it forward for the next generation.

Similarly, people choose to have kids for lots of reasons (family pressure, want to pass on genes, etc.) but society's continued existence depends on people having kids, so it's on all of us to support the people who do have kids whether or not any given individual's motivation is noble.

The only way it is beneficial is because some jokers decided that running country on ever increasing debt (esp. retirement) is acceptable, and another decided that growth rates have to be high.

We owe the coming generations one last push to glory.

In Tech? With 3-10 times the average family income? How will they buy food if they work part time for a month or two, or one of them quits?

Probably the way as before, with their massive pay check.

You can tell that no one prepares for the pandemic, and that's true. But the point is that this applies to everyone, not just those with kids. What if I have an ailing parent or a sibling? What if I run an orphanage on the side? Just give the same benefits to everyone instead of cherry picking people who make life decisions that are of no consequence to their day job. If you think that's too much to provide to everyone, then I will argue that it's too much to provide for just parents.