As someone allergic to dogs I was wondering exactly the same thing. I assume this simply makes it impossible to work there if you have a dog allergy since (even with an isolated office) any contact with coworkers who are around dogs all day would be enough to get my eyes itching and my nose running pretty badly.
Edit: Note that I don't think this is necessarily bad - not having people allergic to dogs be able to join up is a price they are probably willing to pay because the perk is a huge factor for keeping dog owner employees happy.
I'm also allergic to dogs (and cats), and so policies like these would just make me go somewhere else. I don't particularly understand what advantage there is in bringing a dog to work anyway... yes, you probably love your pets but the same goes for children, that doesn't mean they should be with you when you work.
Would you like to be left alone without a toilet for like 10-11 hours a day, 5-days-a-week? Then you know why some people insist on taking their dog to the office ;)
Yes, but I realize this is horribly politically incorrect because everyone has a right to reproduce, even if its at everyone elses cost. It seems especially if its at everyone elses cost.
In another post I bring up the excellent point that the proper solution to the 11 hours in the office problem isn't making the 11 hours more bearable by Fing off for several hours per day, but perhaps only spending 8 hours in the office per day. Or less.
My wife did half days at home for almost a decade while the kids were little. They trusted her to work at home during an emergency at 3am, so leaving work in the afternoon to pick up the kids at school then working at home from 3pm till 6 or whatever was no big stretch of the imagination, even for "big corp" "dilbertian" management. This is obviously only applicable to cubie/desk jobs not manual labor.
> yes, you probably love your pets but the same goes for children, that doesn't mean they should be with you when you work.
Well, it's actually not that uncommon to have an office kindergarten (at least in the part of Europe I live in, no idea how it is in the US), for some people, it's a big perk, as it allow people that would otherwise have to choose between an office life and a family life to have both.
I (fortunately) never met anybody allergic to dogs, so I have no idea how sever it is — would you get allergic reaction by just meeting me without the dog? If yes, then the dog rules don't really matter, as you will be allergic to me anyway.
Still, in coworking spaces I would just leave my dog at home and try to agree on some 4h-4h working schedule so my dog isn't alone longer than 6-7 hours.
It would probably be enough to make people allergic to dogs say "oh, ok, sparkfun isn't the place for me" - as a hayfever suffer I know I will never risk working somewhere next to farm fields (and therefor probably SF's new location as a good example possibly), it's just one of those things you (sadly) factor in. I do wonder if there is legislation in any country that would over rule this bit of company culture though...
I believe that type of stuff is covered under Workplace Safety Regulations. If company allows dogs on premises, allergic reaction would be treated as work related injury. Probably too expensive for most companies.
Also I would be careful before putting "Must love dogs" as a job requirement. Unless you run pet saloon its in the same category as "Must love girls" requirement.
It's not just allergies. I'm partially sighted & have very little peripheral vision. Some people have brought their dogs into our office & there have been times where I have accidentally "kicked" the dog simply because I have not seen it on the floor (and was not expecting a dog there anyway).
I like dogs & don't mind having them in the office but I certainly think it needs to be made very clear where the line lies when it comes to "me or the dog" issues.
>there have been times where I have accidentally "kicked" the dog simply because I have not seen it on the floor (and was not expecting a dog there anyway).
I think every dog owner in existence has pulled this one. I always feel a combination of "I'm a monster" and "Maybe this will teach you not to be underfoot".
This is totally unacceptable behavour by an employer.
To you. To someone else, it is laudable behavior. Not everyone has the same views you or I do, and that's okay. We just take our business elsewhere and life goes on. No need to get too worked up about a business (owner) who runs the business the way they see fit (within the law).
I was wondering if this would be legal (I'm in the UK). Obviously they don't have an issue but we have pretty strict equality rules and I'm not sure culture would be a valid excuse to allow such exclusion.
IANAL, and I'm not sure about US law, but this could be a problem for any laws against disability discrimination, if a dog allergy is counted as a disability (it could be, the UK legal definition is pretty broad).
On the one hand, I don't think the law should be heavy-handed about this. Nothing wrong with variety, and smaller companies should be able to try things.
On the other, its not people's choice to be allergic to something, and maybe that shouldn't prevent them from taking employment where they are otherwise a good fit. And what about if an employee develops a dog allergy? Do they have to quit, or does the company ban all dogs?
A tribunal to sort out these issues seems like a really good idea, and hopefully will find a way through these issues that preserves the culture. Kudos to Sparkfun for trying!
Probably the same way an office full of smokers deals with it. If everyone agrees it's not a problem than it's not a problem. If even one person disagrees then you follow the rules.
I believe it is also the same for food allergies at school. If one child has a peanut allergy, birthday cakes are out.
I think what this shows is that you really need to work at what culture you want at your company and take steps to improve something if it's not working and deemed important. It would have been much easier to just ban dogs and move on - instead management come up with a process that could maintain the dog presence and keep people happy.
I suspect there are still a bunch of people unhappy with the dogs around, even with the tribunal.
We allowed dogs at our office (until we moved to a new building that forbade them). It was fun when there were a handful, but when there got to be about a dozen it was terribly distracting and only fun for the owners. I think most people are relieved we don't have them anymore.
At my current job I bring my dog to the office every day and there are no issues whatsoever, but I have some personal rules when it comes to bring my dog to work:
- no dog if there are allergic people around,
- no barking,
- no wandering around,
- DEFINITELY no pee and poo in the building,
- CLEANING outside the company building,
- I am responsible for the dog's actions.
Disclaimer: my dog is trained by me and really knows how to behave in the office and outside the office.
Unfortunately in some past jobs I stumbled upon people that treated their dog permit like a kindergarten — just dropping the dog in the office and not taking care of it. Some fabulous examples was dog pooping in the middle of a group of people during the SCRUM meeting ;) Or a dude bringing his 3-month puppy peeing on the floor every 15 minutes. Some people are not mature enough to bring their dog to the office :)
I'm involved in rabbit rescue and have 7 at home. Once in a while if I'm taking them to the vet I'll bring them to work with me in carriers. Coworkers come from all around to fuss over them, and the rabbits love it. They're closely supervised and used to being handled.
One day during an important meeting the CIO picked Earl out of his carrier, a tiny 2-pound grey netherland dwarf who knows he's cute and rides it for all it's worth. She spent the whole meeting with him in her lap -- Earl probably thought we were all there for him.
I really love dogs, but this is just nuts. Pets belong at home, not at work. A dog tribunal? Talk about a waste of company time.
I understand that in certain companies (with sky-high margins or money to burn) the line between work and play gets blurred more and more, but that's in stark contrast to the rest of the economy. I can understand that certain people outside of tech (who are struggling) are starting to get a bit restless.
> I understand that in certain companies (with sky-high margins or money to burn) the line between work and play gets blurred more and more, but that's in stark contrast to the rest of the economy.
I think that the blurring of the line between work and play is a Good Thing in some sectors, namely engineering/tech/creative jobs. Creativity comes out of playtime, not worktime.
I think the blurring of the line is good for all sectors. Let's not assume that people who aren't in tech somehow don't deserve to have the same perks.
Maybe, but I'm not thinking about deserving and making workers feel good; though I'm all for it in every industry, in some this is a requirement rather than perk. You can treat people like slaves (and many do) in grocery stores or internet bookshops with little negative impact on productivity or profitability, but I wouldn't want to see or use code written by people in similar conditions.
I don't want to be operated on by a stressed-out doctor who's at the end of a 36-hour shift either.
If your only concern was profitability, there are a huge number of engineering companies who achieved success despite, or perhaps because of, encouraging long hours and driving their employees to the ground. That's why profitability is not my only concern.
> I don't want to be operated on by a stressed-out doctor who's at the end of a 36-hour shift either.
Good point.
> That's why profitability is not my only concern.
It isn't mine either; I wanted to point out that even in the most selfish, profit-focused world imaginable, there'd still be an argument for blurring work and play for at least some types of jobs.
Except in the medical field. I draw the line at seeing a dog, except for aid, walking around a clinic. People are disgusting enough as it is, complicating it with canine/feline borne vectors doesn't help.
Wouldn't work where I work; I'm not sure whether having a dog running around in the sequencing lab would be worse for the dog (in a facility some of whose areas are rated BSL-3) or the lab (where contaminants are generally regarded as a Bad Thing), but I can't see it being a good thing for either. Kind of a shame, I think; it'd be nice to have pups around, at least in the office areas. But I just don't see it working. (I try not to be biased by the fact that, the first and so far only time someone brought a dog into an office where I worked, it promptly waddled over and pissed on my shoes.)
Just nuts is right. 3:1 ratio of people to dogs? That's a dog park.
I can enjoy playing with a dog periodically, but I would definitely prefer to not spend a lot of time (much less work 40++ hours/week) in that environment.
That said, it's a company choice they've made. Reversing it it now or even severely restricting it would probably mean attrition of a large portion of their staff.
In all fairness it used to be more of a waste of time (as mentioned in the post it got progressively worse and widely viewed as a waste of time) until the tribunal came along. Under that setup it's 30 minutes of 5 peoples' time once a month, which is pretty easy to swing.
If this is not spoof, it illustrates well how startup turns into corporation.
They could allow occasional work from home. No instead they create The Dog Policy, the Dog Agreement and The Dog Tribunal Management. If someone has allergy or wants to bring his baby, they introduce another 10 agreements.
In my previous job colleague was bringing dog sometimes, I just asked him to keep it away from me (have serious allergy) and problem was solved.
The other week I tried running EDA software (Altium) over Remote Desktop.
When trying to do any interactive PCB layout, there was substantial lag in redrawing the traces as I moved them, making it borderline unusable. I put up with it as I only had a small amount of work to do, but I certainly wouldn't expect anyone to use it in a serious business environment.
And I had a gigabit ethernet link with the 'remote' computer a yard away. I dread to think what the performance would be like over a slower link.
"I worked for hardware manufacturer which produced 50+ pound UPS units. They do Arduino boards.
"
What does the weight of the UPS has to do with the circuit complexity? Nothing. Arduino is probably more complex.
If you used it though a VPN great, but it doesn't mean it will work with more modern systems (which could be hardware accelerated) and displaying lots of traces)
They do, the post was written by somebody working from home.
And their business is manufacture and retail of microcontrollers boards and breakout boards. Most of the job is either R&D creating electronics (require expensive, usually shared, physical equipment) and handling the production and sale of their manufactured equipment which requires being on-site.
> No instead they create The Dog Policy, the Dog Agreement and The Dog Tribunal Management.
That makes sense. When you've got 5 people and 2 dogs you can handle it informally, when you have 150 people and 45 dogs you need a bit more structure to it. Reading the timeline, the alternatives were basically implementing a solid framework or banning dogs altogether.
> In my previous job colleague was bringing dog sometimes
It was one colleague doing it sometimes. Not a third of your colleagues doing it regularly.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy here, as we do have occasional work from home which varies between positions and departments. That perk is a separate concern from the dog perk. I know of some employees who do choose to favor the former to opt out of the latter (working from home to be with their dog) because they don't want to bring their dog to work for whatever reason.
I occasionally have to visit offices where a single dog is brought in - they always smell strongly of dog, and often the dog will come and "greet" me. I'm not particularly keen on either of these aspects and as such it really puts me off visiting. I would certainly put that high on the list when considering taking a job in such an environment.
I had other reasons to quit the job where they started bringing their dog in, but wouldn't have needed any.
The idea of having these huge animals that can't communicate what they want and try to assess relative position in their idea of a social hierarchy with me by getting aggressive just makes me ill, so adding another species that unlike those higher primates has nothing to contribute to my projects, can't communicate at all or solve their own nutrition or excretion, and use physical instead of verbal aggression for social survey is way out.
Some very large companies let people bring dogs to work - Mars being the one that comes to mind. If you wouldn't like it then I guess it means it's not a place for you to work.
I presume this is a spoof. Nobody would want to work in a place with animals wandering around.
Are you serious? I once worked for a company where a cat was living on the premises (belonged to the lady who was cooking lunches). That's still one of my best workplace-related memories - both the cat, and the fact that lunches were pretty much "home made" food.
Aside from zoo keepers. I imagine they're happy working in a place with animals wandering round.
Ridiculous example yes, but your acceptable working environment and someone else's working environment can be very, very different. Clearly having animals wandering around works well for SparkFun, as they seem to be on the ball with their business.
I work with a mostly blind woman and her seeing-eye German Shepard service dog. Amazing dog. All the puritan whining about dogs assumes its a standard issue frat boy bringing in his basset hound, but the puritanism melts away like ice from a blowtorch when its the blind lady instead of some frat boy antics.
All the stories about poop everywhere and people getting bitten and fighting amongst the rabble remind me of when my kids were toddlers. I wonder if I could bring in my kids, as long as the poop ended up in a bag and they don't bite too many people.
It seems more than a little ridiculous. Instead of "working" for 12 hours a day but spending half of it Fing around with your dog, why not work 8 hours and go home and play with your dog at home? Or if you're only "working" for eight hours but spending half of it playing with dogs, why not honestly work part time? Or why not just work at home, or flex time it to the max, or whatever? It just seems the most complicated possible solution to a simple problem.
>All the puritan whining about dogs assumes its a standard issue frat boy bringing in his basset hound, but the puritanism melts away like ice from a blowtorch when its the blind lady instead of some frat boy antics.
Well yeah, for obvious reasons:
1) It's not a luxury for the blind person to bring her dog into work, it's a necessity.
2) It's not her pet, it's a service animal, and she will presumably treat it like a service animal (i.e. no cutesy excusing any bad behaviour, no doggy-talking all day long etc).
3) Seeing-eye dogs go through a tremendous amount of training to make them basically not act like dogs, so that they won't be hyper, and won't randomly bark, and won't randomly crap on the floor. Pets go through bare minimum training (if that) to make sure they don't savage a human.
Surely you can see why the analogy between a service animal and a pet isn't apt? It's like calling a Democrat hypocritical for disliking domestic firearms usage, yet allowing military firearms usage; sure the object in question is nominally the same, but the context and effects are entirely different, and it's really the context and effects that the speaker is objecting to.
"Some serious incidents took place during this time, like bites. Most of the bites were workers from other companies onsite to do their normal rounds, like delivery drivers. Fortunately no serious injuries ever materialized [...]"
What are the insurance ramifications of all these dogs? I'm astonished that the fact that dogs have already attacked people at SparkFun didn't cause them to rescind the policy of allowing dogs. Just how serious does a bite have to be, anyway?
If I went onsite say as a consultant to a company and was bitten by a dog that had been approved by management, I would be looking to sue them into oblivion.
Ha...sue to oblivion? I guess it'd depend on what a "bite" is but unless the dog took you down, ate out your organs, your left arm, and you lost an eye, etc, you might be pretty disappointed what oblivion would be.
Edit: for an example....if you got say a pretty good dog bite that required you to seek medical help and say you had to get 5 or 6 stitches. And the medical bill came to say $600 (probably depends on location). If you were to take the cast to court to seek "pain and suffering" damages, and it was found that you were having lots of pain and suffering, you'll probably receive between $1200 - $2400. Far from oblivion. Despite the some sensational headlines that make the media, you'd find that most settlements and awards are a lot more reasonable.
But you might luck out and get a dog that wasn't vaccinated for rabies, in which case I'm sure you'd get more.
Yes I have checked out the relevant law here now (Dangerous Dogs Act 1991) and it says
You can be fined up to £5,000 and/or sent to prison for up to 6 months if your dog is out of control. You may also not be allowed to own a dog in the future.
If you let your dog injure someone, you can be sent to prison for up to 2 years and/or fined
If someone tried to bring dog to my office, next thing I will do would be to ask permission to work from home. If that doesn't work, I'd look up for another job. If that doesn't work, I'd buy rats and cocroaches, and bring them to work with me as "pets". But, there's no way I'm going to sit in the office full of "nice dogs" and pretend that doesn't affect me.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I am not allergic to dogs and yes, I don't like pets, but I also don't mind having dog or a cat around when sitting in friends house. But, I just don't feel safe in a presence of dogs, and there's no way I would be able to do anything useful the whole day except watching over my shoulders to make sure the beast is not somewhere near me. Whoever wants to impose that kind of feelings to me is making me bad, regardless of his intentions.
Yay! for workplace pet equality. Just like everything else work-related, dog lovers (I'm one) should not be disproportianately favored over gecko/spider/snake loving peeps.
Also, let the inter-species pet wars begin ... right in the darn office. I'll get the popcorn.
Yeah, because passive aggressive people who do things out of spite are great in a workplace. Instead of bringing roaches as your pets or rage-quitting maybe you can take it up with HR first, or god forbid your coworkers, especially if the reason is allergies (you didn't specify)?
Do you dislike dogs? Are you allergic? I get that you are saying you don't want to work in an office with dogs and would find it unacceptable, but explaining why would be helpful!
Many people have a fear of dogs. I myself have an extreme fear of dogs. Most people have had experiences with dogs which amplifies that fear. Being chased till person falls and bruises themselves badly, or getting bit.
Plus animals aren't like humans, they don't use the restroom when they have to relieve themselves. They beg for food, stare at you when you are eating, make noises and smell.
I think there's an important difference between starting from scratch this way, and trying to transition an existing, say, hundred person company from scratch to this policy.
Presumably at the interview it's pretty obvious what's going on, and people ought to be fairly self-filtering about this. Diversity is good, right? You ought to be matching the company to your needs anyhow.
I'm with you. Dogs are NOT people, and when dog owners think they are, they place their dogs happiness above actual people. We had someone that brought in 1 dog, it was a Border Collie and it was peaceful and still a distraction. I'd immediately put in my 2 week notice if I had to put up with more than 1, no joke. I go to work to work not babysit, smell, or listen to barking dogs. Even if they were quiet just having something roaming around from desk to desk with those jingly dog collars that sound like eternal Christmas is annoying. Some people have no respect for silence anymore. It's bad enough many offices have an "open space" setting which disrupts thinking, pisses off and stresses employees, and lowers productivity, the last thing I need a bunch of dogs walking around, making noises, watching me eat my lunch, begging for food, needing to be let out, farting, smelling like dog pop after coming back in, smelling like wet dog after a rain, etc. Combine that with my distraction of cute things and I won't be able to get any work done.
Who is the company taking care of? Dogs or Humans? From all my unfortunate experience having to put up with my immediate neighbor's dogs, dogs in my neighborhood, and dogs at work, I've noticed a certain percentage of dog owners are the dog equivalent of a "crazy cat lady". They think "dogs are people", should have access to every place humans do, should bark all they want, and usually value a dog's happiness over the happiness of real human beings.
Why not just contract with a nearby dog day care center and provide subsidized rates for employees? This way the dogs are cared for during the day and distractions in the office are kept to a minimum.
I gave a talk once at an agency in Brooklyn. It was rife with dogs. A little shih tzu proudly trotted across the presentation area right before I started speaking.
We had an un-official 'dogs allowed' policy at my last job. It all began with the owners wife bringing their dog in when she'd come to visit.
Then one day I brought my Bullmastiff in because not many people were going to be in the office that day, and she's content with just sitting under my desk for hours on end. Girls in the front office would bring in their dogs who were pretty well behaved. It was nice meeting other peoples dogs.
Then another developer brought in his Beagle. A dog howling every 10 minutes is very, very distracting, especially in an open-layout office. Someone in customer service brought in their 1 year old Labrador, who I'm convinced was fed a diet consisting of canine Red Bull.
At some point, people in graphics started bringing their cats in. I came in one morning to find a cat on my chair. I did not bring my dog that day or things would have probably gotten very interesting.
If I took anything away from that, I'd say pets are okay on Fridays, or holidays when not everyone is in the building. But for every day, pets are just too dang distracting. Eating out of trashcans, snooping around the office, scaring visitors, and just people in general wasting time playing with pets all day. The biggest benefit is taking your pooch for a walk at lunch time is a great break.
As someone who works at a company about the same size as Sparkfun, that also allows dogs, I am surprised by two things: the number of dogs they have coming in and the vitriolic responses to it here.
We have probably between one and two dozen dogs that come in regularly. There is a "doggy committee" made up of volunteers that meets about once a month. No software to manage them yet, but a little bit of occasional drama about them. I can imagine it being more intense if we had three dozen dogs each day.
I get along with cats easier than dogs, but I love having either around. They and their owners are one of my favourite parts of the place I work. I sit beside someone with a dog who greets me every day, and it might be the best part of my whole day.
Anyway, I just want to throw some non-hate into the top level of this post. I get that some people do not like dogs or are unfortunately allergic. There are clearly reasons to not have dogs around, and it simply would not work in many environments. But there are also a lot of dog owners and people who are just cool with the companionship, and for them dog-presence is a serious plus.
Either way, it's great to have insight into how other organisations dealt with this stuff.
The problem with banning dogs now is that it has become an actual benefit to working at this company. Like rescinding work-at-home privileges. You will get very unhappy employees who feel they were misled and picked the wrong job offer.
I worked at a company that did away with all the free snacks in the break room and put an end to the Friday beer cart. People were pissed. But we all got over it. It is possible to make those changes.
Omg, enough with the dog madness. I already have issues with domisticated animals whose sole purpose is to entertain a human. You have this aninal who does nothing all day, except wait for you, this is cruel. My advice, get some human friends, it will probably cost you less money also.
I had heard about offices with dog, and I never understood how this could be tolerated by employees without dogs. I can only imagine trying to work, but all I hear is random people talking to dogs with their dog talking voice.
>>Some serious incidents took place during this time, like bites.
This is serious. Whatever love you might have for your pet, but if its get around to directly harming some one, that's simply just not acceptable. Animals are animals, you need to take responsibility for their actions if you own one.
I have extreme fear of dogs since a dog chased me till fell and bruised whole of my left arm, my friend's brother had a dog bite after a chase and suffered from serious health issues post that. Of the things that I fear the most is dogs in a pack. In a pack dogs exhibit hunting behavior.
Plus asking for a workplace where pets can be bought in is just going to far, What has this industry come down? In other professions there are people with kids who would do anything to get day care at work.
The thing that baffles me in this thread is the nonchalance that posters have when saying: "people need to be self-filtering at the interview stage", "just work somewhere else".
Apparently for something that will actively discriminate on a large portion of your potential employees it needs to be some sort of protected category.
If I open an office space where you need to climb a ladder to get in, I'll probably get sued because I'm actively discriminating against handicapped workers. Why can't it be the same with a dog allergy (or just plain fear)?
The other thing that bugs me is that engineers usually have a good range of choices as to where they work, but I highly doubt that the delivery person from UPS has any choice but to deliver to SparkFun or get fired. As it turns out some of them were actually bitten.
It all boils down to this 'at will employment' nonsense IMHO…
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadEdit: Note that I don't think this is necessarily bad - not having people allergic to dogs be able to join up is a price they are probably willing to pay because the perk is a huge factor for keeping dog owner employees happy.
Edit: Hopefully, "at home" would then mean "at the daycare", otherwise it's a bit irresponsible...
In another post I bring up the excellent point that the proper solution to the 11 hours in the office problem isn't making the 11 hours more bearable by Fing off for several hours per day, but perhaps only spending 8 hours in the office per day. Or less.
My wife did half days at home for almost a decade while the kids were little. They trusted her to work at home during an emergency at 3am, so leaving work in the afternoon to pick up the kids at school then working at home from 3pm till 6 or whatever was no big stretch of the imagination, even for "big corp" "dilbertian" management. This is obviously only applicable to cubie/desk jobs not manual labor.
Well, it's actually not that uncommon to have an office kindergarten (at least in the part of Europe I live in, no idea how it is in the US), for some people, it's a big perk, as it allow people that would otherwise have to choose between an office life and a family life to have both.
Still, in coworking spaces I would just leave my dog at home and try to agree on some 4h-4h working schedule so my dog isn't alone longer than 6-7 hours.
I believe that type of stuff is covered under Workplace Safety Regulations. If company allows dogs on premises, allergic reaction would be treated as work related injury. Probably too expensive for most companies.
Also I would be careful before putting "Must love dogs" as a job requirement. Unless you run pet saloon its in the same category as "Must love girls" requirement.
I like dogs & don't mind having them in the office but I certainly think it needs to be made very clear where the line lies when it comes to "me or the dog" issues.
I think every dog owner in existence has pulled this one. I always feel a combination of "I'm a monster" and "Maybe this will teach you not to be underfoot".
If this is true I'd want nothing further to do with that company.
Good for you! And good for the company too, now they can hire someone else in your place who is fine with dogs.
To you. To someone else, it is laudable behavior. Not everyone has the same views you or I do, and that's okay. We just take our business elsewhere and life goes on. No need to get too worked up about a business (owner) who runs the business the way they see fit (within the law).
On the one hand, I don't think the law should be heavy-handed about this. Nothing wrong with variety, and smaller companies should be able to try things.
On the other, its not people's choice to be allergic to something, and maybe that shouldn't prevent them from taking employment where they are otherwise a good fit. And what about if an employee develops a dog allergy? Do they have to quit, or does the company ban all dogs?
A tribunal to sort out these issues seems like a really good idea, and hopefully will find a way through these issues that preserves the culture. Kudos to Sparkfun for trying!
I believe it is also the same for food allergies at school. If one child has a peanut allergy, birthday cakes are out.
We allowed dogs at our office (until we moved to a new building that forbade them). It was fun when there were a handful, but when there got to be about a dozen it was terribly distracting and only fun for the owners. I think most people are relieved we don't have them anymore.
Disclaimer: my dog is trained by me and really knows how to behave in the office and outside the office.
Unfortunately in some past jobs I stumbled upon people that treated their dog permit like a kindergarten — just dropping the dog in the office and not taking care of it. Some fabulous examples was dog pooping in the middle of a group of people during the SCRUM meeting ;) Or a dude bringing his 3-month puppy peeing on the floor every 15 minutes. Some people are not mature enough to bring their dog to the office :)
One day during an important meeting the CIO picked Earl out of his carrier, a tiny 2-pound grey netherland dwarf who knows he's cute and rides it for all it's worth. She spent the whole meeting with him in her lap -- Earl probably thought we were all there for him.
I understand that in certain companies (with sky-high margins or money to burn) the line between work and play gets blurred more and more, but that's in stark contrast to the rest of the economy. I can understand that certain people outside of tech (who are struggling) are starting to get a bit restless.
I think that the blurring of the line between work and play is a Good Thing in some sectors, namely engineering/tech/creative jobs. Creativity comes out of playtime, not worktime.
If your only concern was profitability, there are a huge number of engineering companies who achieved success despite, or perhaps because of, encouraging long hours and driving their employees to the ground. That's why profitability is not my only concern.
Good point.
> That's why profitability is not my only concern.
It isn't mine either; I wanted to point out that even in the most selfish, profit-focused world imaginable, there'd still be an argument for blurring work and play for at least some types of jobs.
I can enjoy playing with a dog periodically, but I would definitely prefer to not spend a lot of time (much less work 40++ hours/week) in that environment.
That said, it's a company choice they've made. Reversing it it now or even severely restricting it would probably mean attrition of a large portion of their staff.
They could allow occasional work from home. No instead they create The Dog Policy, the Dog Agreement and The Dog Tribunal Management. If someone has allergy or wants to bring his baby, they introduce another 10 agreements.
In my previous job colleague was bringing dog sometimes, I just asked him to keep it away from me (have serious allergy) and problem was solved.
1 - They're a hardware company. You can't take most of the equipment home
2 - EDA software is usually very expensive (and sometimes hardware demanding), so you can't just install it in a laptop
I worked for hardware manufacturer which produced 50+ pound UPS units. They do Arduino boards.
When trying to do any interactive PCB layout, there was substantial lag in redrawing the traces as I moved them, making it borderline unusable. I put up with it as I only had a small amount of work to do, but I certainly wouldn't expect anyone to use it in a serious business environment.
And I had a gigabit ethernet link with the 'remote' computer a yard away. I dread to think what the performance would be like over a slower link.
What does the weight of the UPS has to do with the circuit complexity? Nothing. Arduino is probably more complex.
If you used it though a VPN great, but it doesn't mean it will work with more modern systems (which could be hardware accelerated) and displaying lots of traces)
They do, the post was written by somebody working from home.
And their business is manufacture and retail of microcontrollers boards and breakout boards. Most of the job is either R&D creating electronics (require expensive, usually shared, physical equipment) and handling the production and sale of their manufactured equipment which requires being on-site.
> No instead they create The Dog Policy, the Dog Agreement and The Dog Tribunal Management.
That makes sense. When you've got 5 people and 2 dogs you can handle it informally, when you have 150 people and 45 dogs you need a bit more structure to it. Reading the timeline, the alternatives were basically implementing a solid framework or banning dogs altogether.
> In my previous job colleague was bringing dog sometimes
It was one colleague doing it sometimes. Not a third of your colleagues doing it regularly.
Reading all those problems I think dog ban would be better alternative, especially if they allow work from home.
But if it suits them, I guess they can attract lot of talent from dog fanatics.
The idea of having these huge animals that can't communicate what they want and try to assess relative position in their idea of a social hierarchy with me by getting aggressive just makes me ill, so adding another species that unlike those higher primates has nothing to contribute to my projects, can't communicate at all or solve their own nutrition or excretion, and use physical instead of verbal aggression for social survey is way out.
</humor attempt>
Are you serious? I once worked for a company where a cat was living on the premises (belonged to the lady who was cooking lunches). That's still one of my best workplace-related memories - both the cat, and the fact that lunches were pretty much "home made" food.
Ridiculous example yes, but your acceptable working environment and someone else's working environment can be very, very different. Clearly having animals wandering around works well for SparkFun, as they seem to be on the ball with their business.
All the stories about poop everywhere and people getting bitten and fighting amongst the rabble remind me of when my kids were toddlers. I wonder if I could bring in my kids, as long as the poop ended up in a bag and they don't bite too many people.
It seems more than a little ridiculous. Instead of "working" for 12 hours a day but spending half of it Fing around with your dog, why not work 8 hours and go home and play with your dog at home? Or if you're only "working" for eight hours but spending half of it playing with dogs, why not honestly work part time? Or why not just work at home, or flex time it to the max, or whatever? It just seems the most complicated possible solution to a simple problem.
Well yeah, for obvious reasons:
1) It's not a luxury for the blind person to bring her dog into work, it's a necessity.
2) It's not her pet, it's a service animal, and she will presumably treat it like a service animal (i.e. no cutesy excusing any bad behaviour, no doggy-talking all day long etc).
3) Seeing-eye dogs go through a tremendous amount of training to make them basically not act like dogs, so that they won't be hyper, and won't randomly bark, and won't randomly crap on the floor. Pets go through bare minimum training (if that) to make sure they don't savage a human.
Surely you can see why the analogy between a service animal and a pet isn't apt? It's like calling a Democrat hypocritical for disliking domestic firearms usage, yet allowing military firearms usage; sure the object in question is nominally the same, but the context and effects are entirely different, and it's really the context and effects that the speaker is objecting to.
What are the insurance ramifications of all these dogs? I'm astonished that the fact that dogs have already attacked people at SparkFun didn't cause them to rescind the policy of allowing dogs. Just how serious does a bite have to be, anyway?
If it was an aggression bite it would've been more serious but this doesn't look like the case.
But apparently SparkFun is mature enough to realize that and hasn't gone into an exaggerated reaction. Banning them should be ok.
Props for them!
Edit: for an example....if you got say a pretty good dog bite that required you to seek medical help and say you had to get 5 or 6 stitches. And the medical bill came to say $600 (probably depends on location). If you were to take the cast to court to seek "pain and suffering" damages, and it was found that you were having lots of pain and suffering, you'll probably receive between $1200 - $2400. Far from oblivion. Despite the some sensational headlines that make the media, you'd find that most settlements and awards are a lot more reasonable.
But you might luck out and get a dog that wasn't vaccinated for rabies, in which case I'm sure you'd get more.
You can be fined up to £5,000 and/or sent to prison for up to 6 months if your dog is out of control. You may also not be allowed to own a dog in the future.
If you let your dog injure someone, you can be sent to prison for up to 2 years and/or fined
When there are medical bills involved.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I am not allergic to dogs and yes, I don't like pets, but I also don't mind having dog or a cat around when sitting in friends house. But, I just don't feel safe in a presence of dogs, and there's no way I would be able to do anything useful the whole day except watching over my shoulders to make sure the beast is not somewhere near me. Whoever wants to impose that kind of feelings to me is making me bad, regardless of his intentions.
Also, let the inter-species pet wars begin ... right in the darn office. I'll get the popcorn.
Some people have rats as pets and carry them around. I fail to see the problem with that.
Plus animals aren't like humans, they don't use the restroom when they have to relieve themselves. They beg for food, stare at you when you are eating, make noises and smell.
Presumably at the interview it's pretty obvious what's going on, and people ought to be fairly self-filtering about this. Diversity is good, right? You ought to be matching the company to your needs anyhow.
Who is the company taking care of? Dogs or Humans? From all my unfortunate experience having to put up with my immediate neighbor's dogs, dogs in my neighborhood, and dogs at work, I've noticed a certain percentage of dog owners are the dog equivalent of a "crazy cat lady". They think "dogs are people", should have access to every place humans do, should bark all they want, and usually value a dog's happiness over the happiness of real human beings.
Then one day I brought my Bullmastiff in because not many people were going to be in the office that day, and she's content with just sitting under my desk for hours on end. Girls in the front office would bring in their dogs who were pretty well behaved. It was nice meeting other peoples dogs.
Then another developer brought in his Beagle. A dog howling every 10 minutes is very, very distracting, especially in an open-layout office. Someone in customer service brought in their 1 year old Labrador, who I'm convinced was fed a diet consisting of canine Red Bull.
At some point, people in graphics started bringing their cats in. I came in one morning to find a cat on my chair. I did not bring my dog that day or things would have probably gotten very interesting.
If I took anything away from that, I'd say pets are okay on Fridays, or holidays when not everyone is in the building. But for every day, pets are just too dang distracting. Eating out of trashcans, snooping around the office, scaring visitors, and just people in general wasting time playing with pets all day. The biggest benefit is taking your pooch for a walk at lunch time is a great break.
We have probably between one and two dozen dogs that come in regularly. There is a "doggy committee" made up of volunteers that meets about once a month. No software to manage them yet, but a little bit of occasional drama about them. I can imagine it being more intense if we had three dozen dogs each day.
I get along with cats easier than dogs, but I love having either around. They and their owners are one of my favourite parts of the place I work. I sit beside someone with a dog who greets me every day, and it might be the best part of my whole day.
Anyway, I just want to throw some non-hate into the top level of this post. I get that some people do not like dogs or are unfortunately allergic. There are clearly reasons to not have dogs around, and it simply would not work in many environments. But there are also a lot of dog owners and people who are just cool with the companionship, and for them dog-presence is a serious plus.
Either way, it's great to have insight into how other organisations dealt with this stuff.
So not exactly an easy solution as suggested.
I had heard about offices with dog, and I never understood how this could be tolerated by employees without dogs. I can only imagine trying to work, but all I hear is random people talking to dogs with their dog talking voice.
This is serious. Whatever love you might have for your pet, but if its get around to directly harming some one, that's simply just not acceptable. Animals are animals, you need to take responsibility for their actions if you own one.
I have extreme fear of dogs since a dog chased me till fell and bruised whole of my left arm, my friend's brother had a dog bite after a chase and suffered from serious health issues post that. Of the things that I fear the most is dogs in a pack. In a pack dogs exhibit hunting behavior.
Plus asking for a workplace where pets can be bought in is just going to far, What has this industry come down? In other professions there are people with kids who would do anything to get day care at work.
Apparently for something that will actively discriminate on a large portion of your potential employees it needs to be some sort of protected category.
If I open an office space where you need to climb a ladder to get in, I'll probably get sued because I'm actively discriminating against handicapped workers. Why can't it be the same with a dog allergy (or just plain fear)?
The other thing that bugs me is that engineers usually have a good range of choices as to where they work, but I highly doubt that the delivery person from UPS has any choice but to deliver to SparkFun or get fired. As it turns out some of them were actually bitten.
It all boils down to this 'at will employment' nonsense IMHO…