Comment by scottlamb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottlamb | Hacker News Reader

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> It's a miserable situation

Agreed.

> and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it.

Depends on who you mean by "others". When I was working and struggling, I was grateful to Google, my coworkers, and my managers for their patience with me at work. I was also angry with our society: voters and politicians who prioritized reopening @#!$@#ing bars over schools, even though my understanding was science was saying (still is saying, AFAIK) spread through the schools is relatively little and the difference to kids' learning is huge. And on parents, which is important but not as important as the impact on kids.

Our society as a whole doesn't care about young families, and it's never been so clear. There is someone to blame.

btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)

Yes, politicians and teachers' unions share most of the blame. It's unconscionable how long they insisted on keeping schools closed, despite the massive impact on families and students and the minimal danger posed to kids. I feel sympathy for parents who are trying their best to survive while teachers have taken this as an excuse to work even less.

> btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)

Yes, if you can objectively prove that a parent isn't working then they wouldn't be protected. This is very obvious and easily quantifiable in an in-office environment, but with remote knowledge work it's much harder to prove—especially since the result would look like you're suddenly targeting parents for "not working hard enough." Most companies are risk-averse and simply prefer to tolerate underperformance.

> Yes, politicians and teachers' unions share most of the blame. It's unconscionable how long they insisted on keeping schools closed, despite the massive impact on families and students and the minimal danger posed to kids. I feel sympathy for parents who are trying their best to survive while teachers have taken this as an excuse to work even less.

I don't know what to make of the teachers' unions. My personal experience with individual teachers is that they work plenty, and what I saw during remote school was no exception. (Being a kindergarten teacher over Zoom is hard!) And I never heard a particular teacher in my area advocate for closed or remote schools.

But school administrators blamed the teachers' unions a fair bit for being slow to reopen. In general I suspect school administrators were looking to blame someone else for their own leadership failings, but there still might be some truth in it. I could see how the unions might have adopted the position of the most risk-adverse (and/or laziest) of the teachers.

> My personal experience with individual teachers is that they work plenty, and what I saw during remote school was no exception.

Yes, there are definitely some individual teachers who care about student learning and work hard to go back to in-person.

Unfortunately, the unions adopt the most risk-averse/lazy possible regarding remote learning. Even in 2022 there are unions pushing hard for effectively indefinite remote learning.[0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/us/teachers-unions-covid-...

Teachers’ unions often have skewed incentives that don’t match the desires of working teachers, because the primary goal of the union is to perpetuate itself, over and above any benefits to teachers themselves.

I have negotiated teacher union contracts, from the non-teacher side - the easiest way to get the union to agree to layoffs was to offer a slight bump in pay to the most senior teachers - i.e. the ones most connected with the union - worked every time. The senior/older teachers were always more than happy to lay off the younger/newer staff, as long as they got even a slight bump in their own pay - i.e. I don't care if class sizes go up, and we have to layoff 10 of the most recent hires - as long as I get a 4% raise instead of 3%.

There is nothing about teachers unions priorities that align in anyway with students & parents priorities.

Teachers don't owe you pandemic childcare.

Then we don't owe them a salary. If they refuse to do their job, they shouldn't get paid.

Who's saying otherwise? I'm assuming childcare workers moved on or stuck it out since you can't remotely take care of a kid. But teachers can still do their jobs remotely (as painful as it is to wrange a few dozen kids on a screen where the internet is 2 clicks away).

We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.

> But teachers can still do their jobs remotely

Citation needed. There's a ton of evidence that learning has dropped dramatically with remote school. Especially for elementary students, I suspect it is near-zero.

> We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Whether teachers like it or not, a significant part of their job is childcare. Society would not fund schools at anywhere near their current rate if they didn't also provide childcare.

> Teachers don't owe you pandemic childcare.

Schools owe students an education. As you can see from this thread, it's controversial whether adults in tech can work productively remotely. Elementary school kids by and large don't learn well remotely. Unless that changes, it's a moot point whether childcare is just a bonus or something that is owed.

As for the "pandemic" part: I agreed with the closures of schools, preschools, and day cares at the very beginning of the pandemic. It seemed reasonable at first to believe kids spread COVID-19 as much as they seem to spread colds and flus. But it was't long before there was evidence that spread through schools is modest [1], especially with reasonable precautions (e.g. masks). And it was painfully obvious education was suffering. Schools should have reopened a full year sooner than they actually did in my area (and many other areas are worse). Society has a risk budget, and this should have been the priority for spending it, not bars or travel or indulging mask/vaccine denial.

[1] I remember a fair bit of this in the news; a quick search found https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/7/618 from June 2020. I believe it's been consistent since, e.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103420118 from October 2021.

Which group do you think did receive a favorable treatment?

Almost every societal group suffered in one way or another, from school kids, single adults, the elder, small business owners and the list goes on.

There wasn't anything specifically targeted at young families. These last years sucked hard for a lot of people.

I think lots of knowledge workers—particularly ones without kids—have gotten a very good deal the last few years. Teachers have also had dramatically lowered expectations and still refuse to go back to the classroom.

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