The problems SparkFun has letting people bring dogs into work
sparkfun.com
sparkfun.com
EDIT: Just to clarify, I am not allergic to dogs and yes, I don't like pets, but I also don't mind having dog or a cat around when sitting in friends house. But, I just don't feel safe in a presence of dogs, and there's no way I would be able to do anything useful the whole day except watching over my shoulders to make sure the beast is not somewhere near me. Whoever wants to impose that kind of feelings to me is making me bad, regardless of his intentions.
Also, let the inter-species pet wars begin ... right in the darn office. I'll get the popcorn.
Some people have rats as pets and carry them around. I fail to see the problem with that.
Plus animals aren't like humans, they don't use the restroom when they have to relieve themselves. They beg for food, stare at you when you are eating, make noises and smell.
Presumably at the interview it's pretty obvious what's going on, and people ought to be fairly self-filtering about this. Diversity is good, right? You ought to be matching the company to your needs anyhow.
Who is the company taking care of? Dogs or Humans? From all my unfortunate experience having to put up with my immediate neighbor's dogs, dogs in my neighborhood, and dogs at work, I've noticed a certain percentage of dog owners are the dog equivalent of a "crazy cat lady". They think "dogs are people", should have access to every place humans do, should bark all they want, and usually value a dog's happiness over the happiness of real human beings.
I understand that in certain companies (with sky-high margins or money to burn) the line between work and play gets blurred more and more, but that's in stark contrast to the rest of the economy. I can understand that certain people outside of tech (who are struggling) are starting to get a bit restless.
I think that the blurring of the line between work and play is a Good Thing in some sectors, namely engineering/tech/creative jobs. Creativity comes out of playtime, not worktime.
If your only concern was profitability, there are a huge number of engineering companies who achieved success despite, or perhaps because of, encouraging long hours and driving their employees to the ground. That's why profitability is not my only concern.
Good point.
> That's why profitability is not my only concern.
It isn't mine either; I wanted to point out that even in the most selfish, profit-focused world imaginable, there'd still be an argument for blurring work and play for at least some types of jobs.
I can enjoy playing with a dog periodically, but I would definitely prefer to not spend a lot of time (much less work 40++ hours/week) in that environment.
That said, it's a company choice they've made. Reversing it it now or even severely restricting it would probably mean attrition of a large portion of their staff.
We allowed dogs at our office (until we moved to a new building that forbade them). It was fun when there were a handful, but when there got to be about a dozen it was terribly distracting and only fun for the owners. I think most people are relieved we don't have them anymore.
What are the insurance ramifications of all these dogs? I'm astonished that the fact that dogs have already attacked people at SparkFun didn't cause them to rescind the policy of allowing dogs. Just how serious does a bite have to be, anyway?
If it was an aggression bite it would've been more serious but this doesn't look like the case.
But apparently SparkFun is mature enough to realize that and hasn't gone into an exaggerated reaction. Banning them should be ok.
Props for them!
Edit: for an example....if you got say a pretty good dog bite that required you to seek medical help and say you had to get 5 or 6 stitches. And the medical bill came to say $600 (probably depends on location). If you were to take the cast to court to seek "pain and suffering" damages, and it was found that you were having lots of pain and suffering, you'll probably receive between $1200 - $2400. Far from oblivion. Despite the some sensational headlines that make the media, you'd find that most settlements and awards are a lot more reasonable.
But you might luck out and get a dog that wasn't vaccinated for rabies, in which case I'm sure you'd get more.
You can be fined up to £5,000 and/or sent to prison for up to 6 months if your dog is out of control. You may also not be allowed to own a dog in the future.
If you let your dog injure someone, you can be sent to prison for up to 2 years and/or fined
When there are medical bills involved.
They could allow occasional work from home. No instead they create The Dog Policy, the Dog Agreement and The Dog Tribunal Management. If someone has allergy or wants to bring his baby, they introduce another 10 agreements.
In my previous job colleague was bringing dog sometimes, I just asked him to keep it away from me (have serious allergy) and problem was solved.
1 - They're a hardware company. You can't take most of the equipment home
2 - EDA software is usually very expensive (and sometimes hardware demanding), so you can't just install it in a laptop
I worked for hardware manufacturer which produced 50+ pound UPS units. They do Arduino boards.
When trying to do any interactive PCB layout, there was substantial lag in redrawing the traces as I moved them, making it borderline unusable. I put up with it as I only had a small amount of work to do, but I certainly wouldn't expect anyone to use it in a serious business environment.
And I had a gigabit ethernet link with the 'remote' computer a yard away. I dread to think what the performance would be like over a slower link.
What does the weight of the UPS has to do with the circuit complexity? Nothing. Arduino is probably more complex.
If you used it though a VPN great, but it doesn't mean it will work with more modern systems (which could be hardware accelerated) and displaying lots of traces)
They do, the post was written by somebody working from home.
And their business is manufacture and retail of microcontrollers boards and breakout boards. Most of the job is either R&D creating electronics (require expensive, usually shared, physical equipment) and handling the production and sale of their manufactured equipment which requires being on-site.
> No instead they create The Dog Policy, the Dog Agreement and The Dog Tribunal Management.
That makes sense. When you've got 5 people and 2 dogs you can handle it informally, when you have 150 people and 45 dogs you need a bit more structure to it. Reading the timeline, the alternatives were basically implementing a solid framework or banning dogs altogether.
> In my previous job colleague was bringing dog sometimes
It was one colleague doing it sometimes. Not a third of your colleagues doing it regularly.
Reading all those problems I think dog ban would be better alternative, especially if they allow work from home.
But if it suits them, I guess they can attract lot of talent from dog fanatics.
The idea of having these huge animals that can't communicate what they want and try to assess relative position in their idea of a social hierarchy with me by getting aggressive just makes me ill, so adding another species that unlike those higher primates has nothing to contribute to my projects, can't communicate at all or solve their own nutrition or excretion, and use physical instead of verbal aggression for social survey is way out.
</humor attempt>
We have probably between one and two dozen dogs that come in regularly. There is a "doggy committee" made up of volunteers that meets about once a month. No software to manage them yet, but a little bit of occasional drama about them. I can imagine it being more intense if we had three dozen dogs each day.
I get along with cats easier than dogs, but I love having either around. They and their owners are one of my favourite parts of the place I work. I sit beside someone with a dog who greets me every day, and it might be the best part of my whole day.
Anyway, I just want to throw some non-hate into the top level of this post. I get that some people do not like dogs or are unfortunately allergic. There are clearly reasons to not have dogs around, and it simply would not work in many environments. But there are also a lot of dog owners and people who are just cool with the companionship, and for them dog-presence is a serious plus.
Either way, it's great to have insight into how other organisations dealt with this stuff.
Disclaimer: my dog is trained by me and really knows how to behave in the office and outside the office.
Unfortunately in some past jobs I stumbled upon people that treated their dog permit like a kindergarten — just dropping the dog in the office and not taking care of it. Some fabulous examples was dog pooping in the middle of a group of people during the SCRUM meeting ;) Or a dude bringing his 3-month puppy peeing on the floor every 15 minutes. Some people are not mature enough to bring their dog to the office :)
One day during an important meeting the CIO picked Earl out of his carrier, a tiny 2-pound grey netherland dwarf who knows he's cute and rides it for all it's worth. She spent the whole meeting with him in her lap -- Earl probably thought we were all there for him.
Then one day I brought my Bullmastiff in because not many people were going to be in the office that day, and she's content with just sitting under my desk for hours on end. Girls in the front office would bring in their dogs who were pretty well behaved. It was nice meeting other peoples dogs.
Then another developer brought in his Beagle. A dog howling every 10 minutes is very, very distracting, especially in an open-layout office. Someone in customer service brought in their 1 year old Labrador, who I'm convinced was fed a diet consisting of canine Red Bull.
At some point, people in graphics started bringing their cats in. I came in one morning to find a cat on my chair. I did not bring my dog that day or things would have probably gotten very interesting.
If I took anything away from that, I'd say pets are okay on Fridays, or holidays when not everyone is in the building. But for every day, pets are just too dang distracting. Eating out of trashcans, snooping around the office, scaring visitors, and just people in general wasting time playing with pets all day. The biggest benefit is taking your pooch for a walk at lunch time is a great break.
This is serious. Whatever love you might have for your pet, but if its get around to directly harming some one, that's simply just not acceptable. Animals are animals, you need to take responsibility for their actions if you own one.
I have extreme fear of dogs since a dog chased me till fell and bruised whole of my left arm, my friend's brother had a dog bite after a chase and suffered from serious health issues post that. Of the things that I fear the most is dogs in a pack. In a pack dogs exhibit hunting behavior.
Plus asking for a workplace where pets can be bought in is just going to far, What has this industry come down? In other professions there are people with kids who would do anything to get day care at work.
Edit: Note that I don't think this is necessarily bad - not having people allergic to dogs be able to join up is a price they are probably willing to pay because the perk is a huge factor for keeping dog owner employees happy.
Edit: Hopefully, "at home" would then mean "at the daycare", otherwise it's a bit irresponsible...
In another post I bring up the excellent point that the proper solution to the 11 hours in the office problem isn't making the 11 hours more bearable by Fing off for several hours per day, but perhaps only spending 8 hours in the office per day. Or less.
My wife did half days at home for almost a decade while the kids were little. They trusted her to work at home during an emergency at 3am, so leaving work in the afternoon to pick up the kids at school then working at home from 3pm till 6 or whatever was no big stretch of the imagination, even for "big corp" "dilbertian" management. This is obviously only applicable to cubie/desk jobs not manual labor.
Well, it's actually not that uncommon to have an office kindergarten (at least in the part of Europe I live in, no idea how it is in the US), for some people, it's a big perk, as it allow people that would otherwise have to choose between an office life and a family life to have both.
Still, in coworking spaces I would just leave my dog at home and try to agree on some 4h-4h working schedule so my dog isn't alone longer than 6-7 hours.
I like dogs & don't mind having them in the office but I certainly think it needs to be made very clear where the line lies when it comes to "me or the dog" issues.
I think every dog owner in existence has pulled this one. I always feel a combination of "I'm a monster" and "Maybe this will teach you not to be underfoot".
If this is true I'd want nothing further to do with that company.
Good for you! And good for the company too, now they can hire someone else in your place who is fine with dogs.
To you. To someone else, it is laudable behavior. Not everyone has the same views you or I do, and that's okay. We just take our business elsewhere and life goes on. No need to get too worked up about a business (owner) who runs the business the way they see fit (within the law).
On the one hand, I don't think the law should be heavy-handed about this. Nothing wrong with variety, and smaller companies should be able to try things.
On the other, its not people's choice to be allergic to something, and maybe that shouldn't prevent them from taking employment where they are otherwise a good fit. And what about if an employee develops a dog allergy? Do they have to quit, or does the company ban all dogs?
A tribunal to sort out these issues seems like a really good idea, and hopefully will find a way through these issues that preserves the culture. Kudos to Sparkfun for trying!
I believe it is also the same for food allergies at school. If one child has a peanut allergy, birthday cakes are out.
Are you serious? I once worked for a company where a cat was living on the premises (belonged to the lady who was cooking lunches). That's still one of my best workplace-related memories - both the cat, and the fact that lunches were pretty much "home made" food.
Ridiculous example yes, but your acceptable working environment and someone else's working environment can be very, very different. Clearly having animals wandering around works well for SparkFun, as they seem to be on the ball with their business.
All the stories about poop everywhere and people getting bitten and fighting amongst the rabble remind me of when my kids were toddlers. I wonder if I could bring in my kids, as long as the poop ended up in a bag and they don't bite too many people.
It seems more than a little ridiculous. Instead of "working" for 12 hours a day but spending half of it Fing around with your dog, why not work 8 hours and go home and play with your dog at home? Or if you're only "working" for eight hours but spending half of it playing with dogs, why not honestly work part time? Or why not just work at home, or flex time it to the max, or whatever? It just seems the most complicated possible solution to a simple problem.
Well yeah, for obvious reasons:
1) It's not a luxury for the blind person to bring her dog into work, it's a necessity.
2) It's not her pet, it's a service animal, and she will presumably treat it like a service animal (i.e. no cutesy excusing any bad behaviour, no doggy-talking all day long etc).
3) Seeing-eye dogs go through a tremendous amount of training to make them basically not act like dogs, so that they won't be hyper, and won't randomly bark, and won't randomly crap on the floor. Pets go through bare minimum training (if that) to make sure they don't savage a human.
Surely you can see why the analogy between a service animal and a pet isn't apt? It's like calling a Democrat hypocritical for disliking domestic firearms usage, yet allowing military firearms usage; sure the object in question is nominally the same, but the context and effects are entirely different, and it's really the context and effects that the speaker is objecting to.
So not exactly an easy solution as suggested.
I had heard about offices with dog, and I never understood how this could be tolerated by employees without dogs. I can only imagine trying to work, but all I hear is random people talking to dogs with their dog talking voice.
Apparently for something that will actively discriminate on a large portion of your potential employees it needs to be some sort of protected category.
If I open an office space where you need to climb a ladder to get in, I'll probably get sued because I'm actively discriminating against handicapped workers. Why can't it be the same with a dog allergy (or just plain fear)?
The other thing that bugs me is that engineers usually have a good range of choices as to where they work, but I highly doubt that the delivery person from UPS has any choice but to deliver to SparkFun or get fired. As it turns out some of them were actually bitten.
It all boils down to this 'at will employment' nonsense IMHO…