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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

Returning to the workforce does not mean returning to the office anymore. I can imagine mother-friendly remote work as a replacement/supplement to maternal/paternal leave

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I cannot imagine that, babies and toddlers require attention frequently and randomly. Unless you have zero meetings, loose deadlines, and very asynchronous contact with the rest of the business, it would be a very difficult balance.

Might work for first 6 months when all they do is sleep, eat, and lay around, but as soon as they are moving or aware that they can get things they want, predictability goes out the window. Although, I would not even bet on the first 6 months being easy due to sleep deprivation.

Have you not attended meetings with parents taking care of babies? I sure have. People do difficult things all the time.

It's especially manageable if both parents are WFH.

I have not, and it may be my lack of understanding, but I don’t think taking care of babies during a meeting is a good thing.

Unless you and I have very different types of meetings, the ones I have are usually short and focused and I would be very annoyed if someone was constantly interrupted or distracted (just like I would be if someone is constantly checking their phone).

You are very lucky and privileged to have such useful focused meetings.

The vast majority of meetings are useless and unproductive, and if half the people on the call are muted the entire time nobody would ever notice.

I guess the question is would you rather have this employee that is sometimes distracted or no one at all.

That’s a very good question actually, I didn’t think about it like that, and it changes my mind on the subject a bit. Thanks for that.

I have attended meetings with people who had to remain muted the entire time due to their kid screaming at the top of their lungs constantly. Its not great

Well of course it's not ideal. Employees are people and people come with imperfections.

I've worked with employees distracted by kids. Distracted by substance abuse. Distracted by mental illness. Distracted by video games, TV, something on their phone, or even just a basic disinterest in the job.

When we talk about the job market as a whole -- such as in the article above -- it doesn't help to focus on a hyper-selective section of capable, skilled software engineers. The vast majority of workers are in a much messier, less efficient and effective environment.

It's sad that we have to consider children a disability to get companies to realize that parents should be treated with at least as much respect as we would give to someone who falls under the ADA.

Nobody would even think to say "I hate when our meetings get interrupted because Suzy has insert medical condition here and has to go off-camera for a few minutes".

You are right, we shouldn’t focus on whether or not someone is a parent. We should focus on whether they can effectively do their work.

I would react similarly if somebody was playing a video game during a meeting.

There is some AI now that can filter this type of background noise.

Ah, the beautiful future we were promised.

well, if it helps, the person with teh screaming kid in their room was suffering 10x more than you heh.

Yes, and it is not ideal.

Eh, I took a 1:1 with my manager and he was holding his newborn right there. Its a slightly different world of work now, I was just glad I wasn't in his position.

A newborn that has been fed and slept and lays around is easy, but it is not long before the kid wants to play with keyboard and mouse and headphones and unplug things, etc. I setup my brother MFC printer on the ground so they can mess with the display and open and shut the flatbed scanner and whatnot. The device can apparently take quite a beating.

Kids adore doing whatever their parents are doing, so giving them some "office equipment" can be a great way to get them "working away" for quite some time.

Maybe I should dig up some old IBM PCs, those things were tank-like, but likely the kids would start trying to beat each other with the keyboard.

> Kids adore doing whatever their parents are doing

Sometimes I worry that many parents focus in "teaching" or "instilling" a desired behavior at the expense of "role-modeling" it through personal lived demonstration. The latter can be far more powerful because of how kids are hardwired to mimic adults... at least up until a certain age where they go the opposite way. :P

> Maybe I should dig up some old IBM PCs

It's be great if there were more "child's version of adult thing" toys that focused on a realistic appearance rather than multicolored plastic. (Unless there's some research showing that actually helps?)

I was playing with my baby's fisher-price rotary phone (the rolling one with the googly eyes) and realized that in the past they would have had much more fun playing with it, since they saw mommy and daddy doing the same thing. It's unfortunate that much of the tools we use today exist virtually, making our kids interests totally virtual as well.

Yeah, there are some interactive My First Digital Device things out there (or baby-software to run on a real tablet one) but IMO that is a double-edged sword with respect to physical activity and screen-time addiction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjsSr3z5nVk

As a parent of, IMHO the first six months are when they need the most attention, not when they're the easiest. Infants desire constant affection, feeding, cleaning, and some never stop crying.

Once they can crawl it's off to the races. Basically anything can hold their attention for half an hour while you take a short meeting.

I've worked from home with two infants, then toddlers, and now kids. Infants were the hardest.

In my experience, once they start crawling, they are putting things in their mouth, or falling, or getting a finger stuck, or making a mess, or wanting to feed…and confining them to a kid safe zone just makes them want to be out of the zone.

The trick I've used is make a kid safe zone inside another kid safe zone, and they'll spend inordinate amounts of time trying to get out of the first into the second.

Note that "kid safe" and "kid unchangeable" are not the same, be sure to leave things that they can safely mess up (boxes of Duplo are great for this). It helps even more if you've told them not to touch the Duplo, heh.

And if they have visual line-of-sight to you, they'll often stay calmer, but if you move out of line of sight then the howling starts.

Ah, I liken it to rising flood waters. I removed everything in every space of the house that was remotely dangerous and could conceivably be reached by young children. So they had the run of the house, and it was totally safe.

once they start walking you have about two weeks then they can run. That's when the chasing really starts!

When both parents are WFH you just try to schedule meetings so that they aren't both in a meeting at the same time. This isn't always trivial to do, but it hasn't been a big problem for us in practice.

Asynchronous is the new norm. If I were a parent, I would absolutely push back on less important meetings and ask them to email me instead with a summary.

Asynchronous in the sense that your phone call with a colleague could be interrupted at anytime due to a baby waking up. I am writing from experience (as the parent). Or not even be able to schedule meetings.

I have not seen or heard of many businesses that are completely asynchronous.

Remote work while doing childcare is something I would not wish on anyone.

Definitely not an upgrade in my experience

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