Ask HN: Is your company (job) family friendly?
The other day I talked with a friend who is searching for a new job. His expenses got higher when he got a second child. He went to some interviews and he got an impression that he wouldn't handle new job, because he doesn't have free time like he used to for studying new frameworks and languages and work hours were from 9 to 6 (or 7). And he would love to spend some time with his family.
Is your company family friendly? If it is, please help me build a list of companies who offer family friendly jobs.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WcwFlqppHmLZ1kIqinqPedYjQpsfcGjCXTDF_4tuQEE/edit?usp=sharing
82 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadThe company that I did go with had some great childcare attached with the position; Anyhow, upon declining i mentioned that we were planning on having a kid in the future and this childcare was a nice bonus.
The response from the company that I declined? 'If we had known you were going to have a child then we would not have made an offer'.
Bullet dodged.
I imagine you won't name the company, but can you comment on its size?
Also, it's not like I would be the one doing all the hard work, that would be up to my wife.
I give my team time to learn new stuff on the job. Obviously I strive to hire smart people so that doesn't take forever.
I am not sure exactly what you are asking for. Companies OK with working 35 hour weeks?
There were sacrifices but a lot of the worries I see expressed about work life balance don't really worry me. With the strong connection to the kids, I can feel how they are doing: I have that mother's sense of can I work late tonight or do I need to focus on the people. I feel the parenting skills also have made me more effective at work, both in cutting out useless activities because my time is sacred and in seeing the non-verbal emotional sides of people. The idea of how people can have trouble saying certain important things and how to respond to that happening is essential when dealing with kids and useful when dealing with engineers. So I highly recommend staying at home for men that have the capacity for it. (It is hard and you have to be almost totally self driven; no one will thank or notice what you do).
My father was a two time veteran and purple heart winner who never changed the diapers of any of his own kids, but stayed home to care for his first born grandchild when my brother got divorced and got custody.
My family of origin is really, really big on the idea that kids need a full time caregiver. Not so much on the "it needs to be the mother," which is humorous because my parents' marriage was so very old fashioned for so long that no one would have predicted that grandpa would stay home while grandma kept working.
#yougoguy #fistbump
Not for me cause I would never do it.
But men who do are beta cucks who let their wives steamroll them on everything then end up getting divorced and lose everything while she cheats on him. But it's his fault cause reasons.
Traditional gender roles have been the back-bone of civilization for thousands of years, when you try to change the natural order into some progressive bullshit you get the horrid state of society we have today and unhappy families.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I also can't even imagine working 9 hours a day 5 days a week for the best 30 years of my life, for someone who doesn't give a shit about me. It's not just about kids.
It seems reasonable to me to target 35 considering it seems reasonable to you to expect overtime.
I know of Treehouse which has a 4-day workweek[0], but I can't think of any others.
I can think of a few reasons why companies wouldn't do this ("leaving money on the table", force of habit, investors, scheduling with partner companies, ...) but it's still surprising there aren't more founders taking a Basecamp-like "think different" approach towards working hours.
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/treehouse-ceos-32-hour-workwe...
You're on HN, the startup community. The premise of startups is that young engineers give their life to create products in exchange for free food and a bit of experience, while the executives and the VC will take all the returns, if any. It's really not family friendly.
Now, doing a burst of work from home on a weekend or at night can be really productive. But staying up too late makes the next day at work kind of hard.
While my company doesn't strictly fit several of those things, I do think it's generally pretty good for people with families. Most people in my department are raising families (including the management), and there is some flexibility. But really we're just one office in part of a much larger company too.
It's 8-5, where it's rare that people work overtime (unless they're architects or higher, they tend to work about 45-50 hours), if you need to take a couple hours off here and there it's not usually a problem if you let them know ahead of time. There is a remote work program but it's not a remote culture company, yet. There are a few employees that work remotely, though, including the CTO.
Oh, the healthcare benefits aren't very good though (used to be, until we got swallowed up by the larger company and were forced to switch to their plans). Several people have left because of it. Yeah, nevermind. I'll leave it off this list.
I'm single, but at my company (at least on my team) the start and end hours are pretty flexible as long as you're getting work done. For instance, I generally get in about 10-15 minutes before 9AM, and then I can usually leave either around 4:25PM or 5PM (depending on which train I'm taking back home) and I'll take a 30-60 minute lunch break.
I know not all companies are so flexible, but I'm sure there are still quite a few that are.
If it comes to that, for my team we can WFH if needed without advance notice and if anything comes up during work hours we're able to leave for the errand or need, even for an hour or two, without being required to "make up" the time per se. As long as we are getting work done, etc.
Stated differently, paraphrasing the CEO that just had their first kid: "holy crap, this is a lot of work!!!!" You have not truly experienced sleep deprivation until you have had sustained, parental sleep deprivation.
Also, in my limited experience (two kids), the sleep deprivation part isn't really all that bad, unless you're mom. She usually gets the brunt of it. And in any case the newborn phase is done in less than a year for most kids and you settle into an easier rhythm of just mild sleep deprivation :)
"If you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed...Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies don't just happen. They happen because of really hard work."
(Its also important to have personal time to yourself even if you don't have a family as well)
Lots of people get forced into having kids.
That was almost 6 years ago and I've never regretted it. If you value time with your family, nobody is a better boss than you. It's not unusual for me to shoot an IM over to my business partner that goes something like "Really nice weather today. We're headed to the park for an hour or two."
You are entirely wrong. Homeschooled kids typically have stronger relationships and better social skills.
At face value, it seems more difficult to socialize children than at traditional school with hundreds of daily social interactions from a wide variety of backgrounds, personalities, and teamwork opportunities.
My knowledge of this is rooted in having been involved in the online gifted homeschoolers community. I was briefly Director of Community Life for The Tag Project. http://www.tagfam.org/ So, you can take my word for it as a SME or you can contact Tokenadult and see if he can hook you up.
I do think your assumptions are in error. Good socialization is not about a wide variety of superficial relationships. It is about having positive interactions that teach one what one needs to know. I do know that studies show that kids who go off to boarding school do best if they figure out how to artificially replace the natural family unit with a close group of caring friends. But I don't have links to anything. That is just remembered off the top of my head.
Best.
My wife and I like kids and believe children are a blessing from God. They are a joy to be around and I learn from them and from teaching them.
Plus somebody's gotta take care of my sorry self when I'm old.
I value this over salary.
In general, call me lazy, but I don't want to do unpaid work outside of work. Sorry, but I spend 40 hours a week coding, that's plenty enough. I want to spend my free time doing other things. I don't know the details of what my coworkers do in their spare time but, honestly, I can't think of a single one who I could see going home and spending any significant amount of time free time writing code. Our office talk is usually stuff about video games, vacations, TV shows, family, local businesses, the weather, and weekend actives, not frameworks.
That's not to say they/we aren't smart or good at our job. I am good at my job, I like my job, I like writing code, I get good performance reviews, I have pride in my work, and I do care about the success of our product and our company. I am just not one dimensional. I like doing other things, I like spending time with friends and family, I like traveling, and there's just not unlimited time in my life. Nor do I have unlimited attention span.
I sometimes look at job boards to see if there's an interesting position open. I'm not really actively looking for a new job but if I find a better deal I'll take it.
I haven't.
I am interested in remote work because I live in a fairly small-ish quiet-ish town and I'd like to keep using Java as my primary language. We have industry, large employers, and jobs here in my town but not as much as a big city, and I'd like to expand my options. Remote work I see seems to lean sorta-kind startup-ish. Sometimes their job application/about us makes it clear I'm expected to make work the only thing in my life and I don't apply. Sometimes I get to the application and they are like "give us links to your LinkedIn and Github." I leave these blank, as I don't have a LinkedIn or Github, and I never get a call back. One didn't even get asked for a resume or what my work experience was, just a Github link.
Oh well, I don't want to work somewhere that expects me to do work after work. I'd rather take a non-software job with a massive paycut than spend 90% of my waking hours writing code.
I wonder if they know what they are losing out on by excluding an entire demographic? I mean, my coworkers are, for the most part, bright and good at their jobs. Certainly your life doesn't have to be your job to be good at your job or to be productive?
I'm sure you'd be great at it. But if you want to work remotely, showing you can collaborate on an online interface would probably help!
Generally I would expect this to translate to a meaningful commitment to work/life balance, flexible hours, adequate paternity/maternity leave, the ability to occasionally (or primarily) work-from-home, and some benefits and incentives that make sense for people with families (such as employer contributions to life insurance and disability insurance).
the way you phrased your question "Does he want to work fewer hours but get paid more money" includes a lot of implicit hostility, by the way. I'm not sure if you meant it that way but that's how it reads.
Staggeringly, the United States still lacks a national unpaid leave policy. Plus companies in other countries on your spreadsheet might offer additional leave than what is required.
More importantly I have seen many colleagues and managers take the 4 pm BART home to deal with kids issues. We also have a much more diverse age set of engineers - half of the engineers in my seating area are over 50. If you've experience Silicon Valley ageism please check us out because we definitely like to hire experienced engineers.
I linger around hacker news and it's weird hearing about toxic company cultures around this area as I've started to take for granted my perks. While I'm somewhat young (30) and without a family, I'm used to (and appreciate) working with folks who started coding before PCs even existed. I like that I can easily take the day off when I have a friend visiting and my colleagues can do the same for a school activity. I appreciate that my free time isn't monopolized through forced company social events and I can have a clear separation between work and play.
I can't imagine ever working at a place where every one looked exactly like me, drank the cool aid, and embraced "work hard play hard" (which usually means just work hard).
We're very remote friendly, which is a big plus. They pay for my whole family's healthcare (even though it's just my wife and I right now). We have a "family week" every year where they pay for our S.O. to come with us to an in-office week (and we're welcome to bring kiddos) for a week in town where they keep them entertained during the work day and do some special events for the whole fam at night. The best thing though is that during the summer we get every Friday off. Paid. So that's a whole day a week for the entire course of the summer to spend with your family (and that's what it's meant for).
There are other companies that offer different benefits that we don't (due to size or whatever), but I feel like we offer an incredible set of benefits for someone with a family.
PS, I'm Kin's cousin!
First one was 7 people when I first started and grew to ~150 while I was still there. Normal 9-5 work hours, but flexible if I needed to take off early or head in late because of traffic. I ended up working the last 3 years at the company remotely because HQ moved to a different city. At that time, I had a baby, took ~ 3 months maternity leave, come back at 3 days a week remotely, then full time remotely, and as long as I got my job done and was there during 'core hours,' had a pretty flexible day. Yes, it helps that the CEO also had young children at the time, but I think it also helps that he was a decent person and we had decent people as managers who understand work-life balance.
My startup job after that was for a smaller team, still a startup, but still pretty flexible in terms of taking off early to beat traffic, pick up kids, coming in late b/c of drop-offs, etc.
My current company is more traditional, but I still leave at a decent time, WFH a few days a week, and is generally very family friendly.
In general, I think being able to stick up for myself in terms of carving out personal time and setting boundaries or expectations of when I'm working is what's been successful for me. Also, making it clear that if they don't respect that I want to be home to have dinner with my family, I'm not gonna be a happy camper. It also helps that I'm good at my job and IMO a valuable player on the team.