[flagged]
You work to live not the other way.
Family is more important than a job. So yeah, giving only 20-30% of your life to your job and keeping the rest for your family makes more sense than the other way around.
There is no point in a child's life that requires 100% attention during the day.
Even once they reach preschool/primary they don't.
You are of the opinion that it is more important that an employee be available 100% of the time from 9 to 5, I am of the opinion that it is most important that an employee get their job done.
I would 100% prefer a competent employee where I have to block out some brief segment during the day, than someone less capable where I can schedule a meeting whenever I like from 9 to 5.
I would also 100% prefer an employee I can trust to do their job regardless of supervision than someone who needs hand holding for everything.
Handholding is for interns and new employees learning how to work in industry (vs. academia or opensource).
I expect FTEs to be able to do their job without persistent oversight, and I expect them to do their jobs without persistent oversight.
Above 6-7 yo they are obligated to go to school, unless you homeschool, which is also incompatible with fulltime, good faith employment.
The same goes for middle managers though.
Just because you are unable to get your job done while having children around doesn't mean that's true of others.
It tells me that your only measure of getting a job done is "are you 'doing your job' from 9 to 5 with no break" rather than "are you getting the work your job requires done". Which is the standard trope of all these "we must be in the office, because without being in the office we lack the emotional maturity and competence to do our job" asshats.
I am done listening to all this "you must be in the office to do a job that has no functional requirement to be in an office" BS from people who are apparently not capable of doing their own jobs without being hand held.
Just because you can't do your own job without being in an office doesn't mean other people can't, so stop projecting your own issues on others and accept that maybe other people have different weakness. I can recognize that "Getting my job done without an office" discipline isn't universal, why are you folk incapable of recognizing that your own weaknesses are not also universal?
No, it really is. There's probably some age threshold where you can say "I don't care what you're doing, don't bother me for the next X hours" (that's not taking care of your child though). Below that threshold... what do you expect to happen when your kid wants to play and has a meltdown next to you?
Some days they demand ~100% of your time and there's no way around it - you would not be able to do your job while trying to look after the kid.
I mean… Do you always make so many random assumptions about the thoughts and lives of people you don’t know and know absolutely nothing about?
Let’s play this game.. Maybe your job is just not very demanding and you get paid for doing basically nothing all day?
I'm not sure why you're accusing me of this, when I was replying to the person saying that if you're a single parent your only option is unemployment
> Let’s play this game.. Maybe your job is just not very demanding and you get paid for doing basically nothing all day?
Feel free to, maybe it is, I don't think so, but that's kind of moot as I don't have kids. What I do know is that I have plenty of coworkers who are parents who seem able to do their job while their kids are around, and my experience working with them was very periodically rescheduling meetings rather, and not once them being incapable of doing their job.
Let's try this again: I am not saying that looking after kids is easy. I am not saying that looking after kids takes time.
What I am saying is very simple: people who have kids, of any age, are able to do their jobs. Requiring them to return to office means immediately and instantaneously that at least one must quit. Not because they're not doing their job, but rather because their employer has required that they be in the office from 9 to 5, they're now (let's be optimistic) away from home from 8 to 6. At that point the message is extremely clear: if you have children you cannot work here. An absurd hypothetical of children need only one minute of you being there during the day means you can no longer be in the office, and therefore are no longer permitted to work for your employer. Again not because you're not doing your job, but because you're not in the office.
It's also super fun that childcare penalization disproportionately impacts women. In the US at least, you only get 12 weeks of guaranteed maternity leave, but it's generally recommended that you breastfeed for 6 months. So the mandatory RTO policies say "are you a new mother? time to stop being employed in tech because mothers don't belong here".
Here's the thing: if you're a decent human being and someone is in a meeting and their kid wakes up unexpectedly you can reschedule the meeting or delay it a couple of minutes. If someone is not in a meeting then who gives a damn if they spend an hour or two in the middle of the day playing with their kid?
It's super easy.
Any business has a choice. You can reward working exactly a 9 to 5, or you can reward getting the work done and doing incredible work.
You are making it absolutely crystal clear that you would rather a person who is doing a 9 to 5 and not remotely interested in doing anything else is more valuable than any amount of skill or work that isn't 100% available for BS meetings from 9-5.
It's also not lost on me that these policies universally favor people who don't have children, or who are not expected to look after children. While the deployment of child rearing would ideally be a 50/50 split, it is still split such that women are expected to do that, so a policy that says "you can have a job or you can have kids" is inherently biased against women.
It is incredibly hard to deal with kids while working — for either the kind of job where you have to sit and mindlessly make widgets for 8 hours a day or the kind where you need to think and focus. Kids are not awake 100% of the time but a) when they are they demand up to and often 100% of your time, b) you don't get to decide when they are awake. As for your idea of "oh just reschedule the meeting or delay it": sure, once or twice that's fine, but if you had kids you'd know that this happens _all the time_ and feeling like a total flake who can't concentrate sucks for the parent and the employer.
(Yes, they can find a new job blah blah. I'm more concerned with your lack of empathy though.)
It seems like the only thing you're interested in is insisting that your work arrangement is the best and every other one is wrong, even when you aren't doing them or don't understand their challenges.
Nope, just for the majority of that time. You might be able to squeeze in a couple of hours of work, but not anything remotely close to what you could do in a full work day.
Here's the thing: if you're a decent human being and someone is in a meeting and their kid wakes up unexpectedly you can reschedule the meeting or delay it a couple of minutes. If someone is not in a meeting then who gives a damn if they spend an hour or two in the middle of the day playing with their kid?
It's not an hour or two.
It's also not lost on me that these policies universally favor people who don't have children, or who are not expected to look after children. While the deployment of child rearing would ideally be a 50/50 split, it is still split such that women are expected to do that, so a policy that says "you can have a job or you can have kids" is inherently biased against women.
Whether or not you have kids is your choice, and it's on you to make the required arrangements for childcare. It's not on the employer - some of them are struggling as much as you are - to deal with your choices. In most developed countries, maternity leave (and paternity leave for those who have it) is paid for by taxes via social security, not the employer.