The senior employees they want to retain are leaders.
It's not a matter of affording daycare is my point.
Kinda creepy how they're like company towns, though.
However I was a senior leader that was paid the salary to lead high stakes projects. YMMV
Sure losing daycare benefit is a fault. Deciding to put your child in a lesser program because it won’t impact your commute has nothing to do with your job and entirely everything to do with you being a parent..
In my case I will pay to ensure the best upbringing for my children. And this means financially (paying for the best education) and temporally (waiting in traffic to pick them up from said learning institute).
All the people I know, whose circumstances I don't share except by second-order family relations, and who are indeed well paid senior engineers, actually do have live-in nannies or au pairs. Which is why I mentioned that possibility.
You got my viewpoint and I can clarify if you would like. My goal was to ensure the best upraising of my child. This includes social interaction, so a nanny was a nonstarter. So the 20 minute commute was considered an acceptable trade off (just as others may consider the lack of social interaction in selecting a nanny). When we purchased a new home we factored in the additional 50 minute loss in time and once again put our childrens consideration over our own.
When you are in a leadership position and have to consider the real fact of working over 40 hours a week, those benefits or lack thereof become a factor you (and thus the company) must consider.
I hope this helps you understand, especially one day in the future when you are in this position!
On that note, per the other comment, the family I'm referring to all live in midtown manhattan where nannies and au pairs are the norm, and socialization amongst such families comes with the ecosystem. I assume people who have nannies in other built-up regions operate the same way, but maybe your mileage does vary.
In our story, we were not able to get into the "elite" daycare that all the who's who of my city went to. That daycare cost $1500 - $1100 respectively. We ended up going to our daycare out of necessity which just turned out to be a really really good daycare, so we got lucky. But the point is the extra $2200/mo, as you noted, was part of my salary
Foster City Odyssey Preschool for toddlers is $2100 for school day, plus $500 extended day until 6pm.
https://www.odysseypreschool.com/foster-city-admissions
Pennisula Jewish is $3125 for toddlers until 5:30pm
https://pjcc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/PJCC-Preschool-R...