This debate has been going on since before the pandemic. Parents have always taken sick days to care for kids, or show up late to attend parent teacher conferences, or knave early to go to soccer games or school plays.
I can understand the backlash. Perhaps the companies should allow people who need more time to handle things time off with benefits but no pay or reduced hours (work a 30 hour week) with a pay cut and full benefits for the duration of the pandemic. This way nobody loses.
> The backlash here is justified. The companies should allow people who need more time to handle things time off with benefits but no pay or reduced hours (work a 30 hour week) with a pay cut and full benefits for the duration of the pandemic. This way nobody loses.
I can agree with this.
> That being said, these companies brought these problems onto themselves, by allowing internal message gripe boards and the policy that "all voices and opinions are valid."
So... In essence, your policy is that only people _you_ (or someone in the company) select have valid opinions? What if you're not in this category? Would you advocate it then? What if someone told you "Your opinion is invalid, nobody cares what you have to say?"
Exactly. There is a narrow focus on what is fair at the corporate level and less focus on what is actually good for society as a whole like in other countries.
I'll take the bait. I feel bad about maternity leave.
You can choose to have a baby or not, and I don't see why you should get special treatment at work because of that decision.
I understand meritocracy is an illusion at best, but it's an important illusion to maintain. If someone is pulling less weight, they should receive less compensation. They certainly shouldn't be rewarded for taking weeks or months off to work on on side projects, which is essentially what a baby is.
But maybe I'm just being harsh by thinking of children as side projects, and I should be more sensitive. Fine, let's say that having a baby is a medical condition. For any other medical condition, your options are burn all your PTO or go on short-term disability. Why should having a baby be any different?
> maybe because the society literally can't go forward without babies?
Technically true, but practically nonsense. We're at no danger of under-population. And if we were, it would be the government's job to subsidize having children, not Facebook's.
People who work in tech and choose to have babies are doing it as a luxury, not to push society forward.
You don't think wealthy professionals choosing to have 1 or 2 kids is a luxury? Saying FB employees need to have babies to keep society going makes as much sense as saying the family shih tzu is necessary as a guard dog.
Sure, maybe technically in some way, but absolutely not in any meaningful sense.
Most of these companies offer unlimited PTO so what, exactly, is the problem?
"I'm taking PTO and I don't need to justify it or tell anyone why" should be the process.
As your co-worker or manager, I don't need to know that you or your kid or your dog or your parent is sick, or if you're really just sick of working and need some time to zone out.
If someone is taking so much PTO that their work suffers, address it in private with HR.
> We’ve added more support for all of our employees and encourage everyone to have open discussions about the challenges they’re facing
Please don't.
I don't need to hear my co-workers sob stories, and I don't want to burden them with mine. And I certainly don't want to feel compelled to overshare.
Offer private counseling through HR or the health plan.
I would hope those who report to me feel comfortable, within certain bounds, to make me aware of personal difficulties so I can manage up, downwards and across—likely in the way of managing expectations rather than saddling folks with more work.
Being kind goes a long way in not just being empathetic, but also in keeping employees retained. Everyone, at some point, will face issues that will drag on their performance. I hope I’m extended the same grace eventually.
This. As a people manager I want to know if someone is struggling as long as they are comfortable sharing. I want to make sure we can make reasonable accommodations and provide support so the person can deal with the issues and come back with a healthy mindset when the problems have been dealt with. We are in unprecedented times and empathy goes a long way.
> As your co-worker or manager, I don't need to know
That came off harsh, particularly when I said "as a manager", but the key word there is need.
I mean that we shouldn't feel compelled to justify why we need to take advantage of our already unlimited PTO - particularly laterally, to teammates - and that not revealing those details should be the default.
Confiding in a manager, mentor, close work friend, and definitely to HR is fine.
But encouraging and thereby creating an expectation of oversharing across all levels just seems like a recipe for disaster.
A likely end result being employees resenting one another for taking time off for reasons they don't think are "serious" enough, or feeling like their need or desire to take time off is unjustified because their personal situation isn't bad compared to their co-workers'. And people who don't want to share now feel antisocial for trying to keep their personal and work lives separate.
If we want to normalize the act of taking time off, imo we'd be better served if everyone just took their PTO without explanation and let HR handle coordinating extended time off for life events.
Fascinating discussion and rather ironic. There are people at tech companies that object to people that don’t have kids being forced to effectively subsidize other people who “aren’t pulling their weight.”
And yet the majority of people at those companies vote for leftist economic policies that do that very same thing.
It's not really related, and I'm sure that the majority do. However I do wonder sometimes, everyone is keen to loudly declare their love and support for the 'correct' party when around others in a hyper liberal workplace - but in the privacy of the voting booth it might not be the same, and that is the place it matters most.
(I'm stating this based off of my experience in the UK only)
The difference is that on the country level, subsidizing families to have children is arguably in the interest of the state. That's not the case on the company level.
And the difference is that if you don’t like a policy at a company, you don’t have to work there. A bit harder to escape a country. But most often in these cases, people want benefits but they want someone else to pay for them.
> And yet the majority of people at those companies vote for leftist economic policies that do that very same thing.
And you’ve decided that the people complaining about the new corporate policies are the same that vote for leftist economic policies, rather than the minority who you claim don’t support them?
> reflecting a sentiment voiced at several companies, complained that the policy seemed to put parents’ needs ahead of theirs.
So much for caring about others. As someone who doesn't have children, this still sounds really selfish of them to complain. Instead, the childless should petition HR for a complementary benefit (additional PTO) when the pandemic is over or a bonus (cash) now for picking up the slack. Complaining without solutions will fall on deaf ears
Additional PTO at many companies is a joke because there's no mandate to actually use it, and definitely no compensation for leftover. Usually the opposite, in fact - the culture strongly encourages people to use as little PTO as possible. Monetary rewards are really the only way people are going to be ok with different treatment.
Have you not worked in California? This is sidestepped by offering "unlimited PTO" at every company I've worked at in the last 10 years. I can only think of one friend here who actually got paid out for unused PTO.
This is just very reflective of hip start-ups. A large amount of tech companies (i.e., more established ones) have standard 15-21 day PTO accrual policies.
I've gotten paid out twice for my PTO and one of them actually happened to be a "hip start-up" who didn't believe in "unlimited PTO".
I choose to see your personal anecdote with my own, if you’ll appreciate it as far as pleasant exchange will allow; the “unlimited vacation” model (or “Flexible PTO” whatever we want to call it) seems to be becoming less of a ‘hip start-up’ thing, as experienced in my last two jobs-and widely becoming a recruiting hook in even established enterprises: one was a boring as hell telecom provider introduced it a year before I departed, the other was an equally boring as hell real estate software vendor introduced it years before my arrival.
$currentEmployer is announcing with rolling it out next year, they themselves are a rather boring healthcare systems provider.
Maybe the difference lies in how the two of us define ‘hip start-up’, though.
I also work at a big tech company who is equalizing their performance-related bonuses this year. Before the pandemic, I went remote to a place which is not impacted by the pandemic as much as Silicon Valley, so I have been able to continue to make use of most of normal childcare facilities. During these past 7 months or so my output has increased as I put in extra hours to pick up the slack of my colleagues who have had to deal with their life situations in hard-hit areas, child related and non-child-related, while I am in an area where life has continued relatively normally. Now I find out my annual bonus this year will be capped to what everybody else gets. So this doesn't just impact the childfree - it impacts SV expats as well.
'Lockdown' in the developed European country I'm living in (Finland) consisted of closing the border to non-residents, and bars, restaurants, theatres and cinemas for a couple of months. All of those are now open - apart from the border, with some restrictions but honestly I wouldn't know what they are because for my usage of them it all seems pretty normal...
> apart from the border
In germany it's a mandatory corona-test and quarantine until the results come back if you entered the country from a high-risk region (to avoid the spread through travelling). No restrictions as far as I know if the region is not considered a high-risk one.
Question, in what manner is your work level impacted by your coworkers' work level? This is different from where I work where if somebody goes on vacation, we adjust our sprint capacity accordingly during our planning.
Having an oncall rotation with fewer people available means the available people are oncall more often. Committments that are hard to slip for internal political reasons means that those who are available to work pick up the slack. Fewer people to spread the constant level of customer support load over. Knowledge silos where you had an "expert" on subsystems and they are not available but that subsystem needs a fix so someone new has to go in and learn the system in order to fix it. I'm happy for you that your team does not suffer any of these inefficiencies, but these are not uncommon in work of certain shapes (SRE, for example)
One way to solve this is to extend these types of benefits as a way for any employee to help care for children. If you’re an aunt or uncle and want to take time off to help care for your nieces and nephews, you should be able to. That being said, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for employees complaining about these specific policies. The entire world is in uncharted waters here and these companies, as well as individual employees, are doing the best they can with responding. As the article points out, these benefits aren’t meant to be used for vacation, they were introduced as a way to help employees respond to a sudden loss of childcare and the collapse of an education system. And to anyone who thinks this is a vacation, I recommend spending a week in a household with children who are unable to go to school while still trying to get work done.
Alternative point of view: a better way to handle this is to reward the employees shouldering additional burden via money when parents take time off. Coworker takes a few months off for maternity leave? Fantastic - give the remaining team members a temporary raise until the person comes back. The whole "everyone has the same opportunity" argument never really made sense to me because not everyone shares the same goals or desired outcomes that align with those opportunities.
Yeah sure, all for rewarding employees who end up doing more work as a result but we need to separate the two issues. The parent flexibility was introduced almost overnight as a way to respond to systemic changes to childcare and schooling. There hasn’t been a lot of time to get things right but the need for this flexibility was clear immediately. So yes, let’s keep figuring out how to take care of all employees during this time but let’s stop framing it as a parent vs. non-parent issue. This is just one class of employees, parents, who needed immediate relief and some companies stepping up and providing that relief. Instead of complaining about a new benefit for parents, work with management to find a way to help all employees in a way that feels equitable to all. We’re all still just trying to figure out how to keep moving forward in a world that changed suddenly.
I don’t know how to respond to the opportunity comment, I’m not sure I understand your point.
I feel like your comment is another sidestep. Here's an example of what an equitable solution looks like that doesn't specifically favor one group: "Team, we realize how difficult the pandemic has made home life for many people, so we're implementing a new policy until care situations return to somewhat normal. Weekly hours have been reduced to 35 across the board and everyone gets every other Friday off on an A/B schedule."
To the opportunity comment, I thought it was evident, but maybe a thought experiment will be helpful. Let's pretend your company announces a new policy tomorrow - everyone who eats meat at the cafeteria next week gets Friday off. There are cheers around the office at this announcement because hey, Friday off! Except that you're vegan and don't want anything to do with meat for a variety of reasons. Your coworkers look at you and say, "Hey why aren't you happy about this?" You try to explain to them that you're vegan and so you won't get Friday off and this seems like kind of an unfair policy, but your coworkers just brush off your comments and say, "Well look, it's not like you can't eat meat. You've got the same opportunity as everyone else here - eat the meat and get Friday off, so what's the big deal? Just be a team player and support the rest of us."
Just because an opportunity exists that is technically available to everyone doesn't mean it's actually a fair opportunity or that the outcome of it is equal for everyone.
Thanks for creating the thought experiment. Let’s keep using that as an example. This is not a case where companies decided to create a benefit arbitrarily or to make employment at the company more attractive to workers. This was the world responding to an unexpected disruption to almost every area of life. As part of that, parents had an immediate need that could not wait to be met- caring for their children. This, in my mental model, is closer to someone taking leave to deal with a physical or mental health issue vs. someone taking time off voluntarily. If your colleague were to take time off to deal with a severe physical or mental health issue, would you have the same complaints about not getting an immediate increase in compensation for picking up some extra work or also not being able to take time off? I suspect that over time you might have a conversation with your manager about the increased workload but would not look at your colleague as deriving additional benefit. It can still be argued that it’s not equitable that someone who lost a limb gets to take so much paid time away from the office but I think we can all agree that this isn’t the point of the benefit. I have the same view of this time off extended to parents right now.
> If your colleague were to take time off to deal with a severe physical or mental health issue, would you have the same complaints about not getting an immediate increase in compensation for picking up some extra work or also not being able to take time off?
I don't know how it works in the US, but where I live the extended sick leave would be paid by the government, which would leave the company with funds to find a temporary replacement or increase compensation for people who pick up the slack.
Indeed, I think it would be a terrible and absurd system if the company had to continue paying the person on extended sick leave.
>Indeed, I think it would be a terrible and absurd system if the company had to continue paying the person on extended sick leave.
Yet that's typically the case in the US. Large companies typically have short-term disability and long-term disability as part of their benefits plans.
Added: From the government side, there is Social Security disability.
I’ve said this in a couple of comments but reiterating here, we’re talking about a new event that caused a failure of systems. There are no government systems or subsidies to help working parents who suddenly have no public or private school and who need to balance work with the very sudden needs of providing around the clock childcare. Longer term, yes, it will be great if there is more support similar to medical care leave but an immediate solution was needed and companies did the right thing by offering flexibility to their employees. The medical leave model was put forth because it captures the essence of a required reduction of work (which is what parents are experiencing) compared to a discretionary decision like giving vegans Fridays off. It’s not time yet to take a long view of how equitable this is, we have no idea how long parents will need this flexibility for. If this lasts a year, I don’t think we should look to the government to step in. If this lasts several years, yes, we need to come up with a model that works long term and that will likely require some sort of government action.
Your thinking falls apart when you consider that children are a choice. And often a selfish one at that. You are not afflicted with children, you make an active decision to have them and everything that comes along with that. I would of course not begrudge a coworker for taking time off to deal with cancer, for example, but when you decide you want kids? That's a different story.
The other part of this discussion that gets left out is state vs. company responsibility. In the US, the state has generally failed when it comes to supporting parents, so people have turned to companies to fill the gap. However, it's not clear to me why companies should be the ones to do that. The state needs children and eventually benefits from them. Companies do not.
I disagree that my thinking falls apart. Maybe my message is not coming across clearly so I’ll try and restart it:
We are not talking about a benefit that is systemic and a typical part of our workforce. We are talking about a reaction by companies to help their employees during an unprecedented failure of normal institutions during a moment of global crisis. To extrapolate that into an argument of choices around kids, equity of benefits, or the the role of government vs. private responsibility. We’re taking about something that started 6 months ago and has still not returned to normal, if it ever will. This will require a fundamental rethink of how we work, yes, but in the interim, parents needed help, companies stepped up and complaining about any of that seems selfish and missing the point.
I understand your message, but you keep framing it as a temporary issue and response when that doesn't matter - it's a preferential response, which is the whole issue. Rather than providing actually-equal time flexibility and time off to all employees in response to WFH challenges, companies provided those to only one class of employees.
It may be a choice but without a younger generation growing up behind you, the whole house of cards - your life included - all comes down pretty quick. We all benefit from children.
(This is part of why we all pay for public education)
I respect that opinion, but personally disagree with it pretty strongly. 1) The earth does not need more humans on it, it needs fewer. 2) It should be the responsibility of the state to cater to the needs of parents, not the responsibility of private corporations. I am perfectly happy to pay tax dollars toward public education, childcare, maternity-related disability, etc. I am not ok with picking up the slack at work without additional compensation for people who choose to have kids. You might argue that these are equivalent in net result, but I would say that paying into a pool for the public good is quite a bit different than directly being asked to shoulder more burden for free.
> Your thinking falls apart when you consider that children are a choice. And often a selfish one at that.
You seem pretty hostile to people having children, why is that?
> I would of course not begrudge a coworker for taking time off to deal with cancer, for example, but when you decide you want kids? That's a different story.
And to be clear, most people, when deciding to have children, assume various things - for example, they assume that there is an education system in place to help shoulder some of the childcare burdens. This is part of what people's taxes are going towards - and many parents also privately spend money on additional/alternative day care.
No one could predict such an unprecedented and global catastrophe that makes all of that unavailable.
This wasn't a new event that affected only parents. Bit the companies rushed to provide benefits to parents because that helps them in their talent branding and being politically correct Decision makers are also most likely parents and have a blind spots to think about not parents.
I'm not saying that parents should not be given benefits but they should be applied to all employees. Singles are going through depression and would benefit from taking time off to visit their family.
I'm not sure who you are arguing with regarding the whole "opportunity" thing, did anyone even mention that as something that affects this situation? That everyone technically has the opportunity to have kids?
Your metaphor is not at all similar to the real situation parents find themselves in. It's not "oh here, some people who eat meat gets Friday off". It's closer to "because of a situation outside of the company, anybody who ate meat in the last year has to do 2x as many work hours, and no longer has any time off, so in recognition of this, we're going to try and balance this out by giving them certain benefits".
That is the situation parents find themselves in, at least parents of young children.
You seem to be looking at this as a pure benefit to parents. It's not - it's a global catastrophe that has caused a massive problem for parents, and companies that are trying to at least somewhat mitigate that massive problem.
> It's not - it's a global catastrophe that has caused a massive problem for parents, and companies that are trying to at least somewhat mitigate that massive problem.
... at the cost of employees that are not parents who have to work more.
If project timelines aren't adjusted for the available resources and the tight timelines are putting pressure on those who are available, that is not the fault of the parents taking time off, it's the fault of bad project management.
If you give people who's last name starts with A a tax rebate, everybody else has to pay more taxes to fund the same things. If you cut the expenses appropriately, you can make sure they don't have to pay more, but they'll get less for what they pay. Either way, it's unfair.
Don't adjust the schedule. Increase the pay for anyone who works more.
I tend to agree. The it's all about me attitude has become so ingrained in western society that the greater-good is utterly discounted.
The most prominent covid related example of this is mask wearing. An unreasonably high number of people have decided that wearing a mask as a societal benefit isn't as important as their slight inconvenience.
This "it's all about me attitude" is definitely present in western society but I disagree that it is "so ingrained ... That the greater good is utterly discounted"
It seems, based on observing reality, that the greater good is far more ingrained. That's why things like public schools, post offices, animal rescues, ambulances, and fire departments are so common and tend to function relatively well.
I see some validity to the argument that "it's all about me" is perhaps gaining ground on "greater-good" but it seems clear that "greater-good" is still the majority.
They aren't resentful of someone else for having it better. They're resentful that people who consider children the most meaningful thing in their own lives evidently "selfishly ignored* the impact of the pandemic on the lives of people who had no choice but to put meaning in things other than children. Most of which was stripped away months ago and may not be back for a long time, by the way.
We're all in this together. Failure to sympathize with childfree people is a problem. Resentment for that failing is not.
I'm a working parent but I understand the frustration. People see from their own point of view. What non parents see is that I am no longer pulling the same weight I pulled last year. Someone has to pick up the slack or the schedule has to slip. Both of these are frustrating to the hard driving employee who is bound to notice that I'm not doing as much as I used to.
I don't have a great solution. This is hard on everyone but in completely different ways. I'd be happy to compensate for my lower output with a pay cut to be given to those who are pulling the load for me. It would take away some guilt at not putting out what I'm used to. But I would need that pay cut to come with an understanding that it's an exchange for less responsibility.
However, it still demonstrates an unsurprising failure to properly empathize with childfree people.
Implicit in this solution is the assumption that childfree people need to justify their value for equal access to personal time off to people with entirely different (and more orthodox) personal values.
The best solution would be to give everyone the option to take extra time off with partial pay redistributed to active team members.
Childfree people aren't a hegemony with the same values and problem as people with children. They have more diverse values, or lack of values, and more diverse problems intensified by a pandemic which shouldn't need to be justified to coworkers with different personal priorities.
Have you considered, for example, the daily impact of a pandemic on people who derived meaning in life from time with friends and activities they can no longer see and enjoy? You might not think these are important as children (and if those people had children they might agree). But the fact is that they don't have children and these are the most meaningful things in their life. For them, their children may as well have died in the pandemic.
You won't hear them express this because it's terribly unorthodox. But it's true. Equal access to equal benefits matters.
Some of the people in the article do strike me as just resentful whiners, but some of them have quite reasonable points that the company isn't working as hard to take care of their needs. Being at home taking care of your kids in virtual school isn't a vacation - but neither is being at home alone, unable to go hang out with a single friend or family member.
Why do you have to give up your social life because someone on your team has kids? Can't the business adjust its productivity expectations to account for a once in a century pandemic? And kids are optional for any given individual, but in the aggregate if no one has children society will collapse.
So the problem is the boss and/or the company, because they are the ones assigning the extra work, right? Just want to make sure we assign the blame appropriately.
It’s too bad society couldn’t be more realistic, and sacrifice some productivity instead of just pushing the work around. Central banks printed trillions of dollars in a matter of weeks (incinerating some currency value) to keep the economy alive, this is no different. We’re still collectively optimizing for the wrong metrics.
Isn't it more selfish to expect preferential treatment, privileges and time off just for having kids?
> Kids are the ones who will be working when these people retire (whether by then they have children of not).
Yes and won't the retired child-free people be paying for the work these kids provide? Or are you saying these kids should work for free to provide for the retired child-free people?
> Society depends on new generations and so I don’t see a problem if parents get a small advantage.
Well then you are free to give most of your paycheck to them. But why insist or force others to sacrifice?
So you don't have a car. Should you pay for other people's car maintenance? Should you pay for other people's gasoline and the gas tax? You do know that the gas tax pays for the roads right? If you don't have a car or drive, you don't pay to build or maintain the roads. Car owners pay for it via the gas tax.
I don't have a kid, but I have to pay for your kid? Is that the logic? How about people pay for their own kids, cars, homes, etc? Fair?
> I'm not old. Get rid of social security.
People pay for their own social security. You don't pay for my social security, I don't pay for yours.
I am not fat, so fuck anyone that needs health help or insulin for diabetes.
I don't smoke, so fuck anyone that needs lung cancer treatment.
I don't drink so fuck anyone that comes to ER with alcohol poisoning.
I work out, so fuck anyone with back/wrist/whatever problem from being sedentary.
I have friends and go out, so fuck anyone with depression/anxiety.
I have a car, so fuck anyone that takes a bus/metro.
I have two working legs, so fuck any ramp for wheelchair users.
I have enough money so fuck all the old people (and younger ones getting there) on social security.
Fuck, I am strong and crazy enough, so fuck anyone that thinks they should be able to walk at night and not be beaten up/robbed. Fuck them right? How much do you even lift bro?
Being selfish is the number one problem in the world today, the lack of empathy, understanding of others situations, is bringing this world to a dark dark place, and unless we (or most of HN readers) understand that and be in a privilege position to try and change that, we will see everyone going even more into a dark path,
It's certainly selfish of them to be resentful but humans are selfish to some degree by nature. I do see why childless people are resentful. [note: I'm the parent of a small kid]
This same problem exists with every preferential policy (group policies, welfare, etc.) -- if society doesn't agree on the difficulties encountered by X group (or worse, sees people cheating the system in some way [1]), resentment triggers AND work productivity drops. See also problems with communism.
> would not be scoring employees on job performance for the first half of 2020 because there was “so much change in our lives and our work.”
This gets.. a bit problematic, as it is reducing the incentive for the people who did put a lot in. While the article notes everyone gets a higher bonus, it's unclear if this can result in promotions not happening for people who worked more hours during H1 -- that would trigger lots of resentment if it's the case. A more middle-ground approach might be setting a floor to ensure no one gets fired over weak productivity during covid, but still nonetheless rewarding those who put in more work time.
There's also a deeper question of whether it is the state's responsibility to cover parental leave or individual companies. Most other parents with this predicament had to rely on the state (take unpaid leave - and collect UI)
[1] Anecdotally, I have known people taking long paternity leave to use the time as much for childcare as to figure out their next start-up.
Because not all people who have children have a harder situation.
What about people taking care of parents with Alzheimer's? Do they not deserve the leave? I assure you that a parent with Alzheimer's is WAY harder than a child. In addition, the child will eventually get easier; Alzheimer's just gets worse.
The problem is "too little leave for everybody" not "extra leave for parents".
The solution is to set the leave amounts at a fixed amount that accommodates almost everybody. If parents have to burn that to take care of children, so be it. They made that choice.
A friend works for Microsoft in the Netherlands and apparently the way it works there is everybody can dial their working hours up or down as they see fit. When he had a newborn he worked 70%, then 80%, then 90%. Averaging a half day once a week is enough for all the sick days and other child-related emergencies.
It would be interesting, if it could even be measured, to see how productivity varies over the variation in work hours. I'd guess for many it would go up as you went down to about 80%. As in 80-95%+ attendance would produce more output than 100% attendance.
I think this backlash is a microcosm for why our welfare programs are always under attack and identity politics plays so well in our society.
The Balkanization of benefits is _always_ a way to drive a stake through a cohort of people. Any type of increased leave benefit should be available to all. If that means the pace of developing new things for the business slows down, that’s what that means. We’re in an unprecedented time where anxiety and uncertainty is reining. The notion that we have to produce the same amount as before the pandemic is ludicrous and callous.
No one should be taking pay cuts, whether they take more vacation or not, if the underlying health of the business remains strong (in Facebook’s case, for example, it is). Arguably, no one’s marginal value of labor should be changing either, it’s just that their working hours may change, and that should be okay.
We’re just approaching distributed work, right now, all wrong. Commons hours matters less than good, written communication. If folks need to adjust their schedules significantly (more than two hours, here and there), then so be it. It won’t matter in the long run. Especially if leveraging that flexibility means that they don’t have to take PTO days for other reasons.
What portion of those "subscriptions" are just first payments of a trial users forgot to cancel, and what percentage of employee time is devoted to tweaking the funnel to get more of the same (conversion rate)?
This may be cynical, but both are significant for many mobile app businesses.
That “almighty revenue” isn’t just a variable in a spreadsheet. That’s the source of your paychecks. It’s the money in the bank that keeps the company afloat during down quarters. It’s the number that needs to go up by a sufficient margin before your team can hire another person to help out.
It would be an interesting experiment to offer half-time positions with half-pay (ignoring fixed costs that make the half-pay/half-time job more expensive). I doubt many people would take that deal.
I’m absolutely aware that’s where my paycheck comes from.
I’m simultaneously and acutely aware that the exact rationalization above is also used to excuse poor decision making In some companies that has real human consequences that happen to exist parallel with ‘getting a paycheck’ and those consequences and the behavior behind them are no less worthy of critique just because ‘paycheck’.
These are my ethics. You don’t have to share them, I’m not here demanding that you do. I’d just rather dispense with the obviousness of “but that’s how you get paid”. Of course it is.
Recurring revenue should be the source of compensation.
Obsession with revenue growth is what drives poor staffing decisions: "We can't hire because net new revenue is down", but doing more requires more people.
> Any type of increased leave benefit should be available to all. If that means the pace of developing new things for the business slows down, that’s what that means.
I’ve worked at two companies that tried genuinely unlimited vacation policies. The theory was that happy and well-rested employees who lived very fulfilling lives outside of the office would be naturally more motivated to do work for the company that granted them this benefit.
For the people who needed flexible schedules (young children at home, caring for aging parents, personal health issues, irregular sleep patterns) this was a success. People who fit this description were overjoyed to find a company willing to accommodate them, and they returned the favor with great, efficient work.
On the other hand, there was a subset of people who approached the system like a game: Just how little work could they do without getting fired? How could they claim the easiest tasks for themselves?
This becomes a major problem when the workload is shared across a team, where one person’s reduced output becomes an increased burden on someone else. The people gaming the system weren’t doing so at the company’s expense. They were doing so at their team member’s expense.
In theory we’d all get the same allowances regardless of the reason. In practice, people are infinitely happier to cover for a hard working coworker who needs an unplanned day off to tend to a sick child than they are to cover for an otherwise unencumbered coworker who simply decided they didn’t feel like working today.
You could argue that the business should be allowed to slow down, but when your competitors are not slowing down and your profit margins aren’t infinite, that’s not a sustainable option. Eventually you need to start cutting headcount to compensate for the reduced productivity, which begins to defeat the purpose of catering to the employees. There is no free lunch.
I debated calling it something else to avoid getting pulled into debates about semantics.
I’ll put it this way: The company tried the “As long as you get work done, it doesn’t matter how many hours you work” approach.
The problematic part of this equation is that “your work” isn’t a fixed quantity. When we allocate tasks and set weekly goals according to how much people can reasonably accomplish in a week, the “your work” variable becomes a proxy for how much that person is willing to work that week.
The loophole is to minimize the number of tasks assigned to yourself while maximizing the perception of how long it took. The honest team members didn’t play this game and naturally ended up around 40 hours, mostly 9-5ish. It was the people gaming the system who played this game the most, obviously, and they tended to claim off hours and weekends as extra time spent working alone, assuming we couldn’t disprove it.
> I debated calling it something else to avoid getting pulled into debates about semantics.
Sure, but the larger point would be that the companies call it that way, which would still be dumb even if we didn't get into that discussion right now.
(BTW, was "unlimited" the term that was actually used where you worked?)
> The problematic part of this equation is that “your work” isn’t a fixed quantity. When we allocate tasks and set weekly goals according to how much people can reasonably accomplish in a week, the “your work” variable becomes a proxy for how much that person is willing to work that week.
Yes, of course. What is puzzling to me is - how is this not completely obvious right from the start to everyone involved?
> It was the people gaming the system who played this game the most, obviously, and they tended to claim off hours and weekends as extra time spent working alone, assuming we couldn’t disprove it.
This part sounds more related to "work whenever you want policy" than "work as much as you want". It was obviously the case that people were expected to work 40-ish hours/week and take roughly the same amount of vacation as was the norm before unlimited/unspecified vacation policy.
How do you define high output. I remember I was in high school and there were 10 homework problems. I goofed off all day and everyone else worked on the home work. They got 9 of them done. I got interested and solved the 10th. Had I worked on the 9 problems with them I might not of even had the desire/energy to look at the 10th.
It’s always up to individuals how how work they are willing to take on and the business to decide if that’s worth their continued employment. Wally is an archetype that’s going to exist whatever the office hours are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wally_(Dilbert)
The expectation that everything should be "fair" in terms of salary and perks is nonsense, and how you end up with tiered salary and perks tied to job titles instead of being able to drive your own deal when you're accepting a job. Things probably should be in the same ballpark for two people doing the same job but if one person gets a bit more thats OK.
Paid time off for whatever reason is a benefit you and the company negotiate for. If the company decides to grant parents time off that non-parents don't get that's fine. That's just the company's opening position when they're negotiating with people who are parents, in much the same way that people who drive to the office might negotiate for a parking space or people who have a long commute might negotiate more hours working from home.
What you get in return for your hours is basically nothing to do with other people, and what they get is nothing to do with you.
For most of us a job is not a hobby. Also we don’t get a wide gamut of job opportunities to make the selection based on the benefits. There is no negotiation, there are only one-two job opportunities (best case scenario) with the traditional take it as-is or leave option. This is why in the States fresh graduates end up with almost no Personal Time Off.
With no legislation and no competition for talent (which is the case for most job roles), the business owners will ALWAYS F their employees.
It sounds great in theory until you realize it leads to paying women and minorities less for the same work. Meanwhile it means those in positions of power can arrange for myriad benefits (I’ll need a private helicopter between meetings and summers in the Hamptons) while Americans are guaranteed literally 0 days of vacation leave.
Here in Germany we have a minimum of 4 weeks (=20 days for full time workers) of paid time off, a livable minimum wage, 6 weeks paid paternity leave (well, paid by the government), up to 14 months (less well) paid paternal leave, etc.
Still, most of what GP said is still true. People negotiate for their salary and benefits, and paid or unpaid time off is a big part of that (6 weeks paid time off is common in IT).
That of course means better negotiators tend to get better deals. If you don't like that there are places with collective labor agreements, with wages set entirely though negotiations between company and union.
In the US there is no mandated time off, paid or otherwise, for any reason and employers can fire employees at any time without any reason or penalty.
There's also no minimum paid hours, only a minimum hourly wage; which is below the poverty line even for someone fortunate enough to work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks in a year without end.
If employers had more to lose from commiting to an offer of employment, like they do in Germany, then employees might have room to negotiate. The reality is that only a few very exceptional people have that luxury.
MacsHeadroom responded well so I don't have a lot to add but I will clarify that its not that I'm against any negotiation as obviously some people have special needs / desires and don't want things other people want. There are also people who are truly exceptional who likely could have many competing offers so naturally they are going to end up with a better deal.
The point is when you leave literally everything up to the market as the GP appears to be in favor of then you end up with a bunch of $5 wage slaves who've never heard of a vacation and a well financed class of financiers with boats who help arrange to finance the whole thing. Once you have social programs and policies that insulate from those kinds of things, then sure let people negotiate for additional perks they want.
They were favoring people with less of a homestead, which tend to be the young. And really I think that only applies to the laundry. From my time at Google, I'd honestly say the demographics present for free meals didn't tend toward any age. Plenty of people starting a family room advantage of the cost savings free meals provided.
Why on earth wouldn’t a parent be able to eat the free lunch? Or drop off the dry cleaning in a box at the office instead of a dedicated storefront along the way? Or get their hair cut between meetings?
For us dinner was provided as a courtesy in case we worked late. Some younger people stayed for it every day; it’s true that only a few parents did that (ones with bad commutes waiting for traffic to die down). But there would also be random other parents who happened to work late that day, maybe half the time.
> It wasn’t long before employees without children started to ask: What about us?
This entire article is hard to read and honestly a little cringe. I know the millennial gen catches a lot of flack for supposedly acting entitled, but this sort of thing does not help.
I grew up as a latchkey kid from the time I was old enough to go to school.
I honestly don't see the point in bothering with childcare if they're old enough to be in school. They've either got homework, they can engage in some free play around the neighbourhood, or they can just play on their own. Paying someone hourly to watch over them as if they were made out of glass is just going to infantalize them further.
it's not that easy. kids are not used to the situation. they are not allowed to go outside either. and online learning requires self-discipline that not all kids have.
the kids also do not understand that parents being at home doesn't mean that they don't have to work.
It took me some time to fully understand that yes, sometime other people need things that might appear as "preferential treatment" to other people. And we should just STFU about that.
A while ago I was talking with some aquaintances about maternity leave and since we were already talking about work it struck me: if I was forced to take 1-2 years off work completely now that I'm not even 30, all of a sudden, it would be pretty much catastrophic for my career. My skills would get mostly outdated given how fast the industry evolves (thank you kubernetes) and I would probably fall a bit out of touch with dealing with coworkers and stuff.
I then thought about some of my female colleagues and other female workers I know and how much could they struggle in the future or have struggled in the past.
A lot of things started to make sense. I though back to when I was on call an was frequently called in the middle of the night, and how newborn children are probably[0] way heavier on parents.
And it kinda dawned on me how important is, often, to "pick up the slack" for other people.
So yeah... After these kind of realization my opinion changed a bit. I agreed already with most work-life balance policies but I hadn't had such a strong realization. I now think that it's a good thing that companies allow parents to take time off and deal with both work and personal/family time. Actually, companies should be encouraged/forced to do so on a regular basis. I also think that if you don't agree with me you're piece of shit and you should really go fuck yourself with a cactus.
I don't have children of my own now, but I might have in the future. It should really be our background priority to work for better working conditions across all the industry and across other industries too. If you don't want to have children then it's fine (it's your life, do whatever you want) but you're an asshole if you think that everybody should march at your own pace just because you took that decision.
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[0] i'm writing "probably" just because i haven't had kids of my own yet, so i don't really know what i'm talking about. I can imagine, but I don't really know.
> My skills would get mostly outdated given how fast the industry evolves
Except ... it doesn't. There's plenty of stories about people who took substantial time off before coming back to software development who say there wasn't much real change.
There's substantial churn, absolutely. How many popular web frameworks have there been? But substantial change that would be catastrophic for a career? No.
As one reference point, the list of topics to study as background before going to a tech interview hasn't really changed much in a long time. That knowledge doesn't disappear after a year or two.
As another reference point, Sweden has 480 days of parental leave where 90 days is exclusively for each of the parents. Many people in software development take over a year off, without it being catastrophic to their career.
> There's substantial churn, absolutely. How many popular web frameworks have there been? But substantial change that would be catastrophic for a career? No.
Finally! In my whole career so far, I could maybe name you about 2 frameworks that I'm both a) actively aware of and b) know when would be a good idea to use. I have not struggled to find work.
What I consider to be _real_ skills, such as knowing how to work to a deadline, prioritise, work with difficult people, research, communicate, knowlege of good coding standards some good solid fundamental CS understanding, only seem to improve with time.
I'm not saying to stop being curious about whatever floats your boat, but it's not like you're going to miss out on 'the next big thing' by sitting out a year (or, in the case of some of the best engineers / managers I know, moving careers for a decade).
Even the childless are benefited by the continuation of society that children manifest. Parents pay far more costs than the childless in capital, time, attention, freedom, happiness, et cetera. Having children is increasingly a choice but replacement reproduction is also a requirement (although I could imagine a world that would invalidate this, that is not our current state). However, because it is a choice the argument that parents should take responsibility for the consequences can seem sensible. At some point and scale it gets entangled in everyone's well-being. Everyone able to make these arguments has benefited from the sensible and self-interested arrangements having been a child themselves. While I understand and have had the objections myself, they represent a rejection of the deal we were all forced into: that society will support us to grow in value and we in turn pull up the following generations who will soon shoulder the load in their own middle lives when we become more dependent on them for our care.
I realize that expectation for elderly care varies across cultures, but even in industrialized Western countries, there's some expectation of adult children taking care of their elderly parents. So the argument that we should all pay for the next generation because we rely on them to take care of us rings a bit hollow.
Is my neighbor's kids going to look after me when I get Alzheimers? I imagine not. I'll have to live with whatever service I can afford with my retirement account. For the childless, it's a choice they make to prioritize present comfort over future security. Parents are making the opposite tradeoff, but expect the childless to subsidize their present loss in time/money/leisure. How does that seem fair?
> I'll have to live with whatever service I can afford with my retirement account.
Exactly the point. If the supply of labor is sufficiently reduced due to a reduced population of able bodied people, your retirement capital will not go far.
To clarify my comment, I wasn't discussing the intergenerational support between related peoples but the intergenerational support provided via any source but conventionally by the marketplace through care homes.
I wonder how often in "normal" companies (not FAANG), workloads shift to non-parents due to typical inability of management to alter timelines along with the realities of a situation?
For example, if parents are given a bit of slack or simply have more sick days due to real life responsibilities, but project plans are not altered accordingly, are those without children feeling the pressure to compensate?
I have a suspicion this is a problem in companies where investors have expectations of quarterly growth, returns or exit plans, and not much of an outlook to create a healthy long term business.
> “A question that we might ask the employees who are feeling some frustration about their co-workers being on leave is what do you think is going to happen if that person quits?” she said. “You’re going to actually be stretched further.”
This is the actual calculus; it’s not the companies role to ensure or subsidize child care. It’s a societal problem that both parents are expected, indeed required in a lot of cases, to work. Everyone should vote appropriate to their belief in November!
Explicitly, the choice for working parents is for one parent to quit. Single people or couples with no school age children don’t face this choice.
“At Twitter, a fight erupted on an internal message board after a worker who didn’t have children at home accused another employee, who was taking a leave to care for a child, of not pulling his weight.”
Well that’s pretty beyond the pale. What’s going on with your coworkers is not your business (other than whatever personal/professional relationship you're maintaining). If 1 worker taking leave is putting undo strain on you, that’s a business problem. Go tell your manager that he needs headcount and then go do your job.
This is a root-level issue that cyclically results from & continues the uneven benefits. When workers spend time slap-fighting with each other, it makes it even easier for management to means-test benefits like this
There seems to be two schools of thought in opposition here:
1) For parents that have excessive obligations to their children outside of work it makes sense for the company to provide them additional time at this time to ease that burden. The time off is not a vacation.
2) For employees that do not have children (possibly by conscious choice) they feel that it's offensive to be forced to effectively do more work so that their parent colleagues can take time off (regardless that the time is not a pleasant vacation)
I don't have a good opinion, I see validity in both sides. I don't see an easy solution because any benefit differentially applied to the childless would raise similar concerns from parents.
Maybe at some employers but what I've seen is deadlines moved forward because of Covid and the need to adapt. So not only is there less staffing but more work to do overall in a shorter period of time.
Mind you, I'm not arguing against the status quo here but just looking at both sides.
This is insane. It's one thing to push for further recognition of folks who have pulled more than their weight in support of their teammates — which is deserved and I think the parents would not protest, but it's another thing entirely to choose to express anger over teammates who are parents.
I've seen my brother tried to "work" with his kids at home. It's stressful. It's a mess. It's HARD. Many of these people seem to think the parents are getting extra "time off." 24/7 child care is not a freaking vacation. Kids are great, but kids are kids. You can't just ignore them or turn them off. There's not much you can do when a baby is throwing a tantrum and demands attention.
Think you are working hard because you're working 20 hours a day? Imagine spending 20 hours a day working but getting very little done because you are a parent and getting constantly pulled out of your focus zone and context switching from "worker" mode to "parent" mode.
If this is the thinking that our society is teaching the new work force, I fear for the future of our nation. Japan has already experienced the "not raising a family because it jeopardizes my work life" and they are NOT having a good time.
Here’s what I don’t understand (childless person); How did parents get by for thousands of years always having children by their sides?
What is it about the modern world that makes children act like starving cats all the time? Is it the sugary diets? Is it the overstimulation from media? What the heck changed in the last hundred years or so?
In many respects, it's "modern" parenting behavior.
Example, if you let a baby cry at night it will usually stop crying after a few weeks.
Once kids hit ~7 years old it used to be normal to let them wander around the house and neighborhood unsupervised. In most unwesternized countries it still is.
That's how the average family has 6+ kids in some countries. They're only actively caring for a few at a time.
Taking such a relaxed view to parenting in the west would get your kids taken away
letting babies sleep alone is a modern parenting behavior. kids mostly used to sleep together with their parents before.
aside from that, older kids took care of younger kids, neighborhood groups took care of children together, older relatives who could no longer do hard work supervised the children...
manual labor like field work, house work, baking, tailoring, keeping a shop, etc are things you can do while watching kids. you take the kids to work, and let them play alongside you. when they are old enough they can help, or pretend to help.
if your work requires focus like writing or programming, then kids are a disruption and you can't do it.
also once factory work was developed, schools for everyone were built too, those developments happened at around the same time.
Not a historian, but I'm guessing the primary reason is because for much of human history, two-parent families had one parent dedicated to raising children.
Also some other reasons:
1. Probably there was more general family help with children - grandparents/town/etc was more involved.
2. For kids that were a bit older, they were effectively part of the workforce - apprenticeships, farmhands, etc.
3. Probably, it was more safe to let kids wander around in many cases - cities are particularly complicated, what with streets full of cars and just generally unsafe areas for kids. In a small town, or a family farm, you could let toddlers run around a lot more.
Another modern effect is that a lot of people don't live around extended family anymore which ends up affecting childcare options, especially with daycares in the state they are.
Cool, except people choose to be parents, and when you do that you accept the additional work involved in that.
It is unfair to offer arbitrary benefits to people with children, and then compensate them the same amount as people who are doing more work.
That’s a “I chose to to do something I knew would take up a lot of time, I want work to give me time off to do that, but I also want work to continue to pay me as much as anyone else, including those people who are doing more work”.
P/maternity leave is one thing, arbitrary benefits from that point on is clearly unfair.
If I choose to sign up for 40 hours a week of volunteer work on top of my normal work hours I don’t get to ask for additional time off benefits from my employer, even though my volunteer work is likely to benefit far more people than just my immediate family.
> Cool, except people choose to be parents, and when you do that you accept the additional work involved in that.
Yes. That's why parents will get before and afterschool child care, daycare, find a relative, or hire a babysitter to take care of the child(ren), etc. so that they can work. When most if not all of that is taken away, then what do you expect?
Also, keep in mind that other than a relative or public school, you usually have to pay quite a bit of money for these services, but I don't see parents arguing that they should be paid more to compensate for those additional expenses so that their income after expenses is comparable to those who don't have children.
I fully agree with and respect everything you said. But for every life difficulty, time management issue, or resource problem that you have as a result of having a child, I can give you an equivalent and equally important and difficult issue in my own life, even though I don't have children (yet).
I'm sorry to hear that. I'm assuming this is a specific situation that you are in - most people without kids are not in the same boat. I hope that you are able to also receive benefits from your employer / government to help with whatever situation you are in.
I think you misunderstood me as having special needs, however that's defined. I'm talking about normal difficulties that life throws at you. Things like needing exercise, adequate sleep, good nutrition, friends, or having the time and resources to meet my future life partner, all of which is difficult to juggle with an extremely demanding job working at Facebook or Netflix for example. In the same way parents struggle taking care of kids while working in those careers, people without kids struggle similarly, just with different, though no less important, aspects of their lives.
I'm sure this is unpopular opinion. My kids are grown up now and I can relate to both sides. But what's wrong is that companies focus on benefits that only help in their talent branding and being politically correct. Me having kids was a choice and it's a commitment same as starting a business. So not providing fair and equal benefits to all is an issue. As a parent to teenagers I still get the same paid time off as parents with newborns or toddlers which is unfair.
All that is true. I have someone on my team who is at 25% of normal due to their children.
However, what about the person who is caring for someone (perhaps an unwed partner friend) with mental illness worsened by the pandemic? Taking care of someone with severe mental illness (e.g. suicidality) can also be extremely draining and time consuming, yet there are almost always 0 official leave benefits for those sorts of situations. And even caring for an elderly parent or sick non-immediate family member tends to receive less support compared to many parental leave policies.
As a childless person, I believe that parents deserve all the time off, flexibility, and additional benefits for raising children. Good on them.
However, I deserve all the same benefits even though I don't have children.
My goal is to eventually have children. In that sense, even just the time and resources I spend dating, making myself more desirable to a life partner, and seeking a life partner is exactly as important as the time and resources you spend caring for your child, because in order to have a child like you I need time to prepare myself to have child.
Life is complicated. I have many family issues, as well as mental and physical health issues that require just as much time and resources to take care of as you need to take care of your children. My needs are not less important, less complicated, or less time consuming than your child-rearing related needs.
When I see parents implying that as a childless person I'm spending all of my non-work time relaxing at the pool, I can only say that I wish that were true. Not that there's anything wrong with spending all of my free time relaxing at the pool. If I could, I would. Even then, I would deserve all the same benefits as someone who didn't choose to or can't do that.
We should not discriminate against people with children. But we also should not discriminate against people without children.
This. I don’t want to take away these benefits from parents, I just want to ensure the employee who is caring for a relative/significant other/mental illness/worsened living space/etc to also be supported.
I work for a great company with top-tier parental leave benefits like these. But if my non-married partner fell back into major depression and required constant suicide watch as they have in the past, while I’m sure my management would be supportive I’m aware of 0 official leave policies that would support me.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadI can agree with this.
> That being said, these companies brought these problems onto themselves, by allowing internal message gripe boards and the policy that "all voices and opinions are valid."
So... In essence, your policy is that only people _you_ (or someone in the company) select have valid opinions? What if you're not in this category? Would you advocate it then? What if someone told you "Your opinion is invalid, nobody cares what you have to say?"
So how do you feel about maternity leave for pregnant women?
You can choose to have a baby or not, and I don't see why you should get special treatment at work because of that decision.
I understand meritocracy is an illusion at best, but it's an important illusion to maintain. If someone is pulling less weight, they should receive less compensation. They certainly shouldn't be rewarded for taking weeks or months off to work on on side projects, which is essentially what a baby is.
But maybe I'm just being harsh by thinking of children as side projects, and I should be more sensitive. Fine, let's say that having a baby is a medical condition. For any other medical condition, your options are burn all your PTO or go on short-term disability. Why should having a baby be any different?
yup, you definitely are. a lot, too.
> Why should having a baby be any different?
maybe because the society literally can't go forward without babies?
Technically true, but practically nonsense. We're at no danger of under-population. And if we were, it would be the government's job to subsidize having children, not Facebook's.
People who work in tech and choose to have babies are doing it as a luxury, not to push society forward.
So now having babies is a luxury. Jesus christ this is so wrong on so many levels.
Sure, maybe technically in some way, but absolutely not in any meaningful sense.
I'm not saying that FB employees need to have babies to keep society going, I said that everybody needs to have babies to keep society going.
"I'm taking PTO and I don't need to justify it or tell anyone why" should be the process.
As your co-worker or manager, I don't need to know that you or your kid or your dog or your parent is sick, or if you're really just sick of working and need some time to zone out.
If someone is taking so much PTO that their work suffers, address it in private with HR.
> We’ve added more support for all of our employees and encourage everyone to have open discussions about the challenges they’re facing
Please don't.
I don't need to hear my co-workers sob stories, and I don't want to burden them with mine. And I certainly don't want to feel compelled to overshare.
Offer private counseling through HR or the health plan.
Being kind goes a long way in not just being empathetic, but also in keeping employees retained. Everyone, at some point, will face issues that will drag on their performance. I hope I’m extended the same grace eventually.
> As your co-worker or manager, I don't need to know
That came off harsh, particularly when I said "as a manager", but the key word there is need.
I mean that we shouldn't feel compelled to justify why we need to take advantage of our already unlimited PTO - particularly laterally, to teammates - and that not revealing those details should be the default.
Confiding in a manager, mentor, close work friend, and definitely to HR is fine.
But encouraging and thereby creating an expectation of oversharing across all levels just seems like a recipe for disaster.
A likely end result being employees resenting one another for taking time off for reasons they don't think are "serious" enough, or feeling like their need or desire to take time off is unjustified because their personal situation isn't bad compared to their co-workers'. And people who don't want to share now feel antisocial for trying to keep their personal and work lives separate.
If we want to normalize the act of taking time off, imo we'd be better served if everyone just took their PTO without explanation and let HR handle coordinating extended time off for life events.
And yet the majority of people at those companies vote for leftist economic policies that do that very same thing.
(I'm stating this based off of my experience in the UK only)
And you’ve decided that the people complaining about the new corporate policies are the same that vote for leftist economic policies, rather than the minority who you claim don’t support them?
So much for caring about others. As someone who doesn't have children, this still sounds really selfish of them to complain. Instead, the childless should petition HR for a complementary benefit (additional PTO) when the pandemic is over or a bonus (cash) now for picking up the slack. Complaining without solutions will fall on deaf ears
I've gotten paid out twice for my PTO and one of them actually happened to be a "hip start-up" who didn't believe in "unlimited PTO".
$currentEmployer is announcing with rolling it out next year, they themselves are a rather boring healthcare systems provider.
Maybe the difference lies in how the two of us define ‘hip start-up’, though.
I guess it's similar in Finland.
I don’t know how to respond to the opportunity comment, I’m not sure I understand your point.
EDIT: added a comma
To the opportunity comment, I thought it was evident, but maybe a thought experiment will be helpful. Let's pretend your company announces a new policy tomorrow - everyone who eats meat at the cafeteria next week gets Friday off. There are cheers around the office at this announcement because hey, Friday off! Except that you're vegan and don't want anything to do with meat for a variety of reasons. Your coworkers look at you and say, "Hey why aren't you happy about this?" You try to explain to them that you're vegan and so you won't get Friday off and this seems like kind of an unfair policy, but your coworkers just brush off your comments and say, "Well look, it's not like you can't eat meat. You've got the same opportunity as everyone else here - eat the meat and get Friday off, so what's the big deal? Just be a team player and support the rest of us."
Just because an opportunity exists that is technically available to everyone doesn't mean it's actually a fair opportunity or that the outcome of it is equal for everyone.
I don't know how it works in the US, but where I live the extended sick leave would be paid by the government, which would leave the company with funds to find a temporary replacement or increase compensation for people who pick up the slack.
Indeed, I think it would be a terrible and absurd system if the company had to continue paying the person on extended sick leave.
Yet that's typically the case in the US. Large companies typically have short-term disability and long-term disability as part of their benefits plans.
Added: From the government side, there is Social Security disability.
The other part of this discussion that gets left out is state vs. company responsibility. In the US, the state has generally failed when it comes to supporting parents, so people have turned to companies to fill the gap. However, it's not clear to me why companies should be the ones to do that. The state needs children and eventually benefits from them. Companies do not.
(This is part of why we all pay for public education)
Overrule companies vacation policy and give all parents extra PTO?
You seem pretty hostile to people having children, why is that?
> I would of course not begrudge a coworker for taking time off to deal with cancer, for example, but when you decide you want kids? That's a different story.
And to be clear, most people, when deciding to have children, assume various things - for example, they assume that there is an education system in place to help shoulder some of the childcare burdens. This is part of what people's taxes are going towards - and many parents also privately spend money on additional/alternative day care.
No one could predict such an unprecedented and global catastrophe that makes all of that unavailable.
I'm not saying that parents should not be given benefits but they should be applied to all employees. Singles are going through depression and would benefit from taking time off to visit their family.
Your metaphor is not at all similar to the real situation parents find themselves in. It's not "oh here, some people who eat meat gets Friday off". It's closer to "because of a situation outside of the company, anybody who ate meat in the last year has to do 2x as many work hours, and no longer has any time off, so in recognition of this, we're going to try and balance this out by giving them certain benefits".
That is the situation parents find themselves in, at least parents of young children.
You seem to be looking at this as a pure benefit to parents. It's not - it's a global catastrophe that has caused a massive problem for parents, and companies that are trying to at least somewhat mitigate that massive problem.
... at the cost of employees that are not parents who have to work more.
Don't adjust the schedule. Increase the pay for anyone who works more.
It’s selfish of them to be resentful. Kids are the ones who will be working when these people retire (whether by then they have children of not).
Society depends on new generations and so I don’t see a problem if parents get a small advantage.
I tend to agree. The it's all about me attitude has become so ingrained in western society that the greater-good is utterly discounted.
The most prominent covid related example of this is mask wearing. An unreasonably high number of people have decided that wearing a mask as a societal benefit isn't as important as their slight inconvenience.
It seems, based on observing reality, that the greater good is far more ingrained. That's why things like public schools, post offices, animal rescues, ambulances, and fire departments are so common and tend to function relatively well.
I see some validity to the argument that "it's all about me" is perhaps gaining ground on "greater-good" but it seems clear that "greater-good" is still the majority.
We're all in this together. Failure to sympathize with childfree people is a problem. Resentment for that failing is not.
I don't have a great solution. This is hard on everyone but in completely different ways. I'd be happy to compensate for my lower output with a pay cut to be given to those who are pulling the load for me. It would take away some guilt at not putting out what I'm used to. But I would need that pay cut to come with an understanding that it's an exchange for less responsibility.
However, it still demonstrates an unsurprising failure to properly empathize with childfree people.
Implicit in this solution is the assumption that childfree people need to justify their value for equal access to personal time off to people with entirely different (and more orthodox) personal values.
The best solution would be to give everyone the option to take extra time off with partial pay redistributed to active team members.
Childfree people aren't a hegemony with the same values and problem as people with children. They have more diverse values, or lack of values, and more diverse problems intensified by a pandemic which shouldn't need to be justified to coworkers with different personal priorities.
Have you considered, for example, the daily impact of a pandemic on people who derived meaning in life from time with friends and activities they can no longer see and enjoy? You might not think these are important as children (and if those people had children they might agree). But the fact is that they don't have children and these are the most meaningful things in their life. For them, their children may as well have died in the pandemic.
You won't hear them express this because it's terribly unorthodox. But it's true. Equal access to equal benefits matters.
Why should I give up my social life and free time for someone else that has kids?
Why should I do more work so they can take time off to care for their kids?
The way I see it, having kids is optional in life. They knew or should have known the added responsibilities for when they had kids.
https://www.workplacefairness.org/marital-status-state-law
https://www.abetterbalance.org/resources/family-status-and-c...
It is your decision.
Isn't it more selfish to expect preferential treatment, privileges and time off just for having kids?
> Kids are the ones who will be working when these people retire (whether by then they have children of not).
Yes and won't the retired child-free people be paying for the work these kids provide? Or are you saying these kids should work for free to provide for the retired child-free people?
> Society depends on new generations and so I don’t see a problem if parents get a small advantage.
Well then you are free to give most of your paycheck to them. But why insist or force others to sacrifice?
I don't have a car. Get rid of the roads.
I'm not old. Get rid of social security.
I live in a neighborhood with a security force. Get rid of the police department.
So you don't have a car. Should you pay for other people's car maintenance? Should you pay for other people's gasoline and the gas tax? You do know that the gas tax pays for the roads right? If you don't have a car or drive, you don't pay to build or maintain the roads. Car owners pay for it via the gas tax.
I don't have a kid, but I have to pay for your kid? Is that the logic? How about people pay for their own kids, cars, homes, etc? Fair?
> I'm not old. Get rid of social security.
People pay for their own social security. You don't pay for my social security, I don't pay for yours.
I don't smoke, so fuck anyone that needs lung cancer treatment.
I don't drink so fuck anyone that comes to ER with alcohol poisoning.
I work out, so fuck anyone with back/wrist/whatever problem from being sedentary.
I have friends and go out, so fuck anyone with depression/anxiety.
I have a car, so fuck anyone that takes a bus/metro.
I have two working legs, so fuck any ramp for wheelchair users.
I have enough money so fuck all the old people (and younger ones getting there) on social security.
Fuck, I am strong and crazy enough, so fuck anyone that thinks they should be able to walk at night and not be beaten up/robbed. Fuck them right? How much do you even lift bro?
Being selfish is the number one problem in the world today, the lack of empathy, understanding of others situations, is bringing this world to a dark dark place, and unless we (or most of HN readers) understand that and be in a privilege position to try and change that, we will see everyone going even more into a dark path,
This same problem exists with every preferential policy (group policies, welfare, etc.) -- if society doesn't agree on the difficulties encountered by X group (or worse, sees people cheating the system in some way [1]), resentment triggers AND work productivity drops. See also problems with communism.
> would not be scoring employees on job performance for the first half of 2020 because there was “so much change in our lives and our work.”
This gets.. a bit problematic, as it is reducing the incentive for the people who did put a lot in. While the article notes everyone gets a higher bonus, it's unclear if this can result in promotions not happening for people who worked more hours during H1 -- that would trigger lots of resentment if it's the case. A more middle-ground approach might be setting a floor to ensure no one gets fired over weak productivity during covid, but still nonetheless rewarding those who put in more work time.
There's also a deeper question of whether it is the state's responsibility to cover parental leave or individual companies. Most other parents with this predicament had to rely on the state (take unpaid leave - and collect UI)
[1] Anecdotally, I have known people taking long paternity leave to use the time as much for childcare as to figure out their next start-up.
What about people taking care of parents with Alzheimer's? Do they not deserve the leave? I assure you that a parent with Alzheimer's is WAY harder than a child. In addition, the child will eventually get easier; Alzheimer's just gets worse.
The problem is "too little leave for everybody" not "extra leave for parents".
The solution is to set the leave amounts at a fixed amount that accommodates almost everybody. If parents have to burn that to take care of children, so be it. They made that choice.
That's a great angle. Absolutely agreed, caring for young children is basically a second job.
Anyone seen stats or have input on that?
The Balkanization of benefits is _always_ a way to drive a stake through a cohort of people. Any type of increased leave benefit should be available to all. If that means the pace of developing new things for the business slows down, that’s what that means. We’re in an unprecedented time where anxiety and uncertainty is reining. The notion that we have to produce the same amount as before the pandemic is ludicrous and callous.
No one should be taking pay cuts, whether they take more vacation or not, if the underlying health of the business remains strong (in Facebook’s case, for example, it is). Arguably, no one’s marginal value of labor should be changing either, it’s just that their working hours may change, and that should be okay.
We’re just approaching distributed work, right now, all wrong. Commons hours matters less than good, written communication. If folks need to adjust their schedules significantly (more than two hours, here and there), then so be it. It won’t matter in the long run. Especially if leveraging that flexibility means that they don’t have to take PTO days for other reasons.
This right here is what stops most companies from doing most things that benefit the employee more than it does the almighty “revenue”.
This may be cynical, but both are significant for many mobile app businesses.
It would be an interesting experiment to offer half-time positions with half-pay (ignoring fixed costs that make the half-pay/half-time job more expensive). I doubt many people would take that deal.
I’m simultaneously and acutely aware that the exact rationalization above is also used to excuse poor decision making In some companies that has real human consequences that happen to exist parallel with ‘getting a paycheck’ and those consequences and the behavior behind them are no less worthy of critique just because ‘paycheck’.
These are my ethics. You don’t have to share them, I’m not here demanding that you do. I’d just rather dispense with the obviousness of “but that’s how you get paid”. Of course it is.
Obsession with revenue growth is what drives poor staffing decisions: "We can't hire because net new revenue is down", but doing more requires more people.
I’ve worked at two companies that tried genuinely unlimited vacation policies. The theory was that happy and well-rested employees who lived very fulfilling lives outside of the office would be naturally more motivated to do work for the company that granted them this benefit.
For the people who needed flexible schedules (young children at home, caring for aging parents, personal health issues, irregular sleep patterns) this was a success. People who fit this description were overjoyed to find a company willing to accommodate them, and they returned the favor with great, efficient work.
On the other hand, there was a subset of people who approached the system like a game: Just how little work could they do without getting fired? How could they claim the easiest tasks for themselves?
This becomes a major problem when the workload is shared across a team, where one person’s reduced output becomes an increased burden on someone else. The people gaming the system weren’t doing so at the company’s expense. They were doing so at their team member’s expense.
In theory we’d all get the same allowances regardless of the reason. In practice, people are infinitely happier to cover for a hard working coworker who needs an unplanned day off to tend to a sick child than they are to cover for an otherwise unencumbered coworker who simply decided they didn’t feel like working today.
You could argue that the business should be allowed to slow down, but when your competitors are not slowing down and your profit margins aren’t infinite, that’s not a sustainable option. Eventually you need to start cutting headcount to compensate for the reduced productivity, which begins to defeat the purpose of catering to the employees. There is no free lunch.
I wish companies would stop using the word "unlimited" for this. It's unspecified vacation policy, not unlimited.
I’ll put it this way: The company tried the “As long as you get work done, it doesn’t matter how many hours you work” approach.
The problematic part of this equation is that “your work” isn’t a fixed quantity. When we allocate tasks and set weekly goals according to how much people can reasonably accomplish in a week, the “your work” variable becomes a proxy for how much that person is willing to work that week.
The loophole is to minimize the number of tasks assigned to yourself while maximizing the perception of how long it took. The honest team members didn’t play this game and naturally ended up around 40 hours, mostly 9-5ish. It was the people gaming the system who played this game the most, obviously, and they tended to claim off hours and weekends as extra time spent working alone, assuming we couldn’t disprove it.
Whether that rubs up against some idealized mythological puritan work ethic doesn't change the fact of the matter.
Sure, but the larger point would be that the companies call it that way, which would still be dumb even if we didn't get into that discussion right now.
(BTW, was "unlimited" the term that was actually used where you worked?)
> The problematic part of this equation is that “your work” isn’t a fixed quantity. When we allocate tasks and set weekly goals according to how much people can reasonably accomplish in a week, the “your work” variable becomes a proxy for how much that person is willing to work that week.
Yes, of course. What is puzzling to me is - how is this not completely obvious right from the start to everyone involved?
> It was the people gaming the system who played this game the most, obviously, and they tended to claim off hours and weekends as extra time spent working alone, assuming we couldn’t disprove it.
This part sounds more related to "work whenever you want policy" than "work as much as you want". It was obviously the case that people were expected to work 40-ish hours/week and take roughly the same amount of vacation as was the norm before unlimited/unspecified vacation policy.
Deal with the discrepancy by rewarding high output.
Paid time off for whatever reason is a benefit you and the company negotiate for. If the company decides to grant parents time off that non-parents don't get that's fine. That's just the company's opening position when they're negotiating with people who are parents, in much the same way that people who drive to the office might negotiate for a parking space or people who have a long commute might negotiate more hours working from home.
What you get in return for your hours is basically nothing to do with other people, and what they get is nothing to do with you.
Would that mean you will f* your employees too? What a mean person you must be.
Still, most of what GP said is still true. People negotiate for their salary and benefits, and paid or unpaid time off is a big part of that (6 weeks paid time off is common in IT).
That of course means better negotiators tend to get better deals. If you don't like that there are places with collective labor agreements, with wages set entirely though negotiations between company and union.
There's also no minimum paid hours, only a minimum hourly wage; which is below the poverty line even for someone fortunate enough to work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks in a year without end.
If employers had more to lose from commiting to an offer of employment, like they do in Germany, then employees might have room to negotiate. The reality is that only a few very exceptional people have that luxury.
The point is when you leave literally everything up to the market as the GP appears to be in favor of then you end up with a bunch of $5 wage slaves who've never heard of a vacation and a well financed class of financiers with boats who help arrange to finance the whole thing. Once you have social programs and policies that insulate from those kinds of things, then sure let people negotiate for additional perks they want.
For people who had family, at least for some of them, it wasn’t practical to make use of it.
Now that pandemic has reversed the table...
For us dinner was provided as a courtesy in case we worked late. Some younger people stayed for it every day; it’s true that only a few parents did that (ones with bad commutes waiting for traffic to die down). But there would also be random other parents who happened to work late that day, maybe half the time.
This entire article is hard to read and honestly a little cringe. I know the millennial gen catches a lot of flack for supposedly acting entitled, but this sort of thing does not help.
Most millenials are now old enough to have both kids and a job.
Actually, millennials are probably in the age range where kids are not old enough yet to take care of themselves.
I don't think this is a millennial-only thing. And by the way the article does not mention the word "millennial" even once.
I honestly don't see the point in bothering with childcare if they're old enough to be in school. They've either got homework, they can engage in some free play around the neighbourhood, or they can just play on their own. Paying someone hourly to watch over them as if they were made out of glass is just going to infantalize them further.
Older kids can do online classes on their own somewhat; younger kids? nope.
the kids also do not understand that parents being at home doesn't mean that they don't have to work.
A while ago I was talking with some aquaintances about maternity leave and since we were already talking about work it struck me: if I was forced to take 1-2 years off work completely now that I'm not even 30, all of a sudden, it would be pretty much catastrophic for my career. My skills would get mostly outdated given how fast the industry evolves (thank you kubernetes) and I would probably fall a bit out of touch with dealing with coworkers and stuff.
I then thought about some of my female colleagues and other female workers I know and how much could they struggle in the future or have struggled in the past.
A lot of things started to make sense. I though back to when I was on call an was frequently called in the middle of the night, and how newborn children are probably[0] way heavier on parents.
And it kinda dawned on me how important is, often, to "pick up the slack" for other people.
So yeah... After these kind of realization my opinion changed a bit. I agreed already with most work-life balance policies but I hadn't had such a strong realization. I now think that it's a good thing that companies allow parents to take time off and deal with both work and personal/family time. Actually, companies should be encouraged/forced to do so on a regular basis. I also think that if you don't agree with me you're piece of shit and you should really go fuck yourself with a cactus.
I don't have children of my own now, but I might have in the future. It should really be our background priority to work for better working conditions across all the industry and across other industries too. If you don't want to have children then it's fine (it's your life, do whatever you want) but you're an asshole if you think that everybody should march at your own pace just because you took that decision.
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[0] i'm writing "probably" just because i haven't had kids of my own yet, so i don't really know what i'm talking about. I can imagine, but I don't really know.
Except ... it doesn't. There's plenty of stories about people who took substantial time off before coming back to software development who say there wasn't much real change.
There's substantial churn, absolutely. How many popular web frameworks have there been? But substantial change that would be catastrophic for a career? No.
As one reference point, the list of topics to study as background before going to a tech interview hasn't really changed much in a long time. That knowledge doesn't disappear after a year or two.
As another reference point, Sweden has 480 days of parental leave where 90 days is exclusively for each of the parents. Many people in software development take over a year off, without it being catastrophic to their career.
Finally! In my whole career so far, I could maybe name you about 2 frameworks that I'm both a) actively aware of and b) know when would be a good idea to use. I have not struggled to find work.
What I consider to be _real_ skills, such as knowing how to work to a deadline, prioritise, work with difficult people, research, communicate, knowlege of good coding standards some good solid fundamental CS understanding, only seem to improve with time.
I'm not saying to stop being curious about whatever floats your boat, but it's not like you're going to miss out on 'the next big thing' by sitting out a year (or, in the case of some of the best engineers / managers I know, moving careers for a decade).
Is my neighbor's kids going to look after me when I get Alzheimers? I imagine not. I'll have to live with whatever service I can afford with my retirement account. For the childless, it's a choice they make to prioritize present comfort over future security. Parents are making the opposite tradeoff, but expect the childless to subsidize their present loss in time/money/leisure. How does that seem fair?
Exactly the point. If the supply of labor is sufficiently reduced due to a reduced population of able bodied people, your retirement capital will not go far.
To clarify my comment, I wasn't discussing the intergenerational support between related peoples but the intergenerational support provided via any source but conventionally by the marketplace through care homes.
For example, if parents are given a bit of slack or simply have more sick days due to real life responsibilities, but project plans are not altered accordingly, are those without children feeling the pressure to compensate?
I have a suspicion this is a problem in companies where investors have expectations of quarterly growth, returns or exit plans, and not much of an outlook to create a healthy long term business.
Disclosure: Am manager, not parent.
This is the actual calculus; it’s not the companies role to ensure or subsidize child care. It’s a societal problem that both parents are expected, indeed required in a lot of cases, to work. Everyone should vote appropriate to their belief in November!
Explicitly, the choice for working parents is for one parent to quit. Single people or couples with no school age children don’t face this choice.
School closed, extra scholar activities canceled, not allowed to meet friends, working parents.
And then some childfree employees complain that the company allow parents to take care of their own children because no one else will?
Pretty selfish take...
Well that’s pretty beyond the pale. What’s going on with your coworkers is not your business (other than whatever personal/professional relationship you're maintaining). If 1 worker taking leave is putting undo strain on you, that’s a business problem. Go tell your manager that he needs headcount and then go do your job.
This is a root-level issue that cyclically results from & continues the uneven benefits. When workers spend time slap-fighting with each other, it makes it even easier for management to means-test benefits like this
1) For parents that have excessive obligations to their children outside of work it makes sense for the company to provide them additional time at this time to ease that burden. The time off is not a vacation.
2) For employees that do not have children (possibly by conscious choice) they feel that it's offensive to be forced to effectively do more work so that their parent colleagues can take time off (regardless that the time is not a pleasant vacation)
I don't have a good opinion, I see validity in both sides. I don't see an easy solution because any benefit differentially applied to the childless would raise similar concerns from parents.
Mind you, I'm not arguing against the status quo here but just looking at both sides.
I've seen my brother tried to "work" with his kids at home. It's stressful. It's a mess. It's HARD. Many of these people seem to think the parents are getting extra "time off." 24/7 child care is not a freaking vacation. Kids are great, but kids are kids. You can't just ignore them or turn them off. There's not much you can do when a baby is throwing a tantrum and demands attention.
Think you are working hard because you're working 20 hours a day? Imagine spending 20 hours a day working but getting very little done because you are a parent and getting constantly pulled out of your focus zone and context switching from "worker" mode to "parent" mode.
If this is the thinking that our society is teaching the new work force, I fear for the future of our nation. Japan has already experienced the "not raising a family because it jeopardizes my work life" and they are NOT having a good time.
I recognise my younger self in that. How stupid I was!
Bringing up kids is the most important job in the world, and employers have zero loyalty.
Do your eight hours, or however much you need to support your outgoings, and then focus on the important stuff.
Edit: This applies whether or not you have kids. Your employer being understaffed or having unrealistic goals is not your problem.
What is it about the modern world that makes children act like starving cats all the time? Is it the sugary diets? Is it the overstimulation from media? What the heck changed in the last hundred years or so?
Example, if you let a baby cry at night it will usually stop crying after a few weeks.
Once kids hit ~7 years old it used to be normal to let them wander around the house and neighborhood unsupervised. In most unwesternized countries it still is.
That's how the average family has 6+ kids in some countries. They're only actively caring for a few at a time.
Taking such a relaxed view to parenting in the west would get your kids taken away
aside from that, older kids took care of younger kids, neighborhood groups took care of children together, older relatives who could no longer do hard work supervised the children...
if your work requires focus like writing or programming, then kids are a disruption and you can't do it.
also once factory work was developed, schools for everyone were built too, those developments happened at around the same time.
Also some other reasons:
1. Probably there was more general family help with children - grandparents/town/etc was more involved.
2. For kids that were a bit older, they were effectively part of the workforce - apprenticeships, farmhands, etc.
3. Probably, it was more safe to let kids wander around in many cases - cities are particularly complicated, what with streets full of cars and just generally unsafe areas for kids. In a small town, or a family farm, you could let toddlers run around a lot more.
It is unfair to offer arbitrary benefits to people with children, and then compensate them the same amount as people who are doing more work.
That’s a “I chose to to do something I knew would take up a lot of time, I want work to give me time off to do that, but I also want work to continue to pay me as much as anyone else, including those people who are doing more work”.
P/maternity leave is one thing, arbitrary benefits from that point on is clearly unfair.
If I choose to sign up for 40 hours a week of volunteer work on top of my normal work hours I don’t get to ask for additional time off benefits from my employer, even though my volunteer work is likely to benefit far more people than just my immediate family.
Yes. That's why parents will get before and afterschool child care, daycare, find a relative, or hire a babysitter to take care of the child(ren), etc. so that they can work. When most if not all of that is taken away, then what do you expect?
Also, keep in mind that other than a relative or public school, you usually have to pay quite a bit of money for these services, but I don't see parents arguing that they should be paid more to compensate for those additional expenses so that their income after expenses is comparable to those who don't have children.
However, what about the person who is caring for someone (perhaps an unwed partner friend) with mental illness worsened by the pandemic? Taking care of someone with severe mental illness (e.g. suicidality) can also be extremely draining and time consuming, yet there are almost always 0 official leave benefits for those sorts of situations. And even caring for an elderly parent or sick non-immediate family member tends to receive less support compared to many parental leave policies.
Parents with more time off will (could) have better educated children and thus make life better for everyone.
Taking care of kids isn't a luxury it is something everyone should see as a fundamental human goal.
However, I deserve all the same benefits even though I don't have children.
My goal is to eventually have children. In that sense, even just the time and resources I spend dating, making myself more desirable to a life partner, and seeking a life partner is exactly as important as the time and resources you spend caring for your child, because in order to have a child like you I need time to prepare myself to have child.
Life is complicated. I have many family issues, as well as mental and physical health issues that require just as much time and resources to take care of as you need to take care of your children. My needs are not less important, less complicated, or less time consuming than your child-rearing related needs.
When I see parents implying that as a childless person I'm spending all of my non-work time relaxing at the pool, I can only say that I wish that were true. Not that there's anything wrong with spending all of my free time relaxing at the pool. If I could, I would. Even then, I would deserve all the same benefits as someone who didn't choose to or can't do that.
We should not discriminate against people with children. But we also should not discriminate against people without children.
I work for a great company with top-tier parental leave benefits like these. But if my non-married partner fell back into major depression and required constant suicide watch as they have in the past, while I’m sure my management would be supportive I’m aware of 0 official leave policies that would support me.