Closing the day care is a big deal. I don't know how they justified that; most company daycares cost as much, if not more than regular daycares and are run either at break-even, or at a very small profit.
And it's a huge, huge perk. Taking your kids with you to work allows you to not make a second trip every morning and every evening to go to their daycare (which is never exactly on the way) it's good for morale, it's GREAT for work/life balance, it's good for the environment, and the kids spend more time with their parents.
PG&E closed their daycare at 77 beale (Downtown SF) when they moved their headquarters to the ghost-town building in Oakland and very explicitly announced they had no plans to re-open a daycare. If you're reading this and in a position where you can affect change, definitely consider a daycare on site, it's a very effective way to dramatically increase retention of senior employees.
You mean the self-propelled code production units that cost more than the other self-propelled code production units? Why would we want to retain those?
Generally speaking, I would think senior employees would have less need for daycare.
Why is that?
Because they're older and on average so are their children
"senior" in our field has lost any of the original age related meaning. You'll see senior engineers aged 24 in many companies.
The very concept of this is so absurd as to be entirely ridiculous. Title inflation at it's finest.
To think a person can have enough real-world experience to become "senior" in any field within 3-4 years is absolute insanity.
I do suspect if I ran into a 24 year old that called themself a "senior engineer" with a straight face, I'd likely burst out laughing...
I do suspect that if I saw you do that, that I’d think that you were being an asshole, regardless of how much I agree with your views about title inflation. Taking out your displeasure on one a cog in the machine with little agency reeks of the exact lack of life experience that you otherwise appear to be speaking out against. Though maybe in your organisations an utter lack of interpersonal skill can be overlooked if someone is REALLY good at C or something.
Laughing is not taking out one's displeasure on someone.
When you openly laugh at someone, who isn't being intentionally funny, it is widely regarded as a sign that you don't respect them. Those sorts of things are commonly apprehended as something called an "insult" in modern society.
That would still not be taking out one's displeasure on someone.
You can take out your displeasure at someone without physically doing so
Sorry - I can't tell what you mean. Define physically?
With your fists for example
Well, yes in that case of course. But that doesn't mean laughing is one of those times.
You have made this statement before, but not taken the time to explain why you believe that. Perhaps if you explain your position others will be more sympathetic to it.
All it means is the individual has any amount of experience. It's OK if you didn't know that, but go ahead and absorb it now. It is not weird or unique to software. People on other engineering career paths, like mechanical engineers, will also be called "senior engineer" after a few years on the job, to distinguish them from inexperienced ones.
A person with at-most 3-4 years experience, but much more likely a lot less is not senior or experienced. I entirely disagree with your assessment.
Someone has to have actual experience to be considered senior. Being a couple years out of college is not experienced.
By this logic - what would we call someone with 15 years of experience? What about 25 years? Super Supreme Senior Engineer, Level 9000?
The field needs to stop inflating titles. It's bad enough having people willy-nilly call themselves "engineers", let alone tack-on qualifiers like "senior".
Words are meant to communicate things through shared meaning and this is what seniority means to ~everybody else except you, so although nobody will stop you from adopting your private definition that nobody else uses, I think persistence in doing so will make you look a little silly.
How is this something that no one else thinks?
"Words are meant to communicate things through shared meaning and this is what seniority means to ~everybody else except you"
Apparently you need one more counterexample? I certainly do not think one can be considered senior after 3-4 years as well.
But I would also be curious, how you would then call someone with 15 years, or oh my, 25 years of experience?
The thing you're glossing over is Senior at Company A != Senior at Company B.
If your company wants to grossly inflate titles, fair enough - but your next job will then look like a demotion.
Counting someone as senior purely by a clock is also absurd. It's about knowledge, depth and breadth. A person with 3ish years of experience does not have either... we used to just call that "engineer".
But... go ahead, keep assigning recent graduates absurd titles. Inflating people's egos helps keep salaries low.
The main issue is how hard it is to stick other qualifiers to titles.
You can't have a "makes decent estimations engineer", or "wasn't quit by the team lead engineer", or "gets paid twice as much data scientist". Some company go with "ninja" or "rockstar", or stick level numbers straight in the title but meh...so we settle for "senior" for most of these demarcations.
At Google:
L3 is a new graduate
L4 is mid level (an engineer who you can generally trust to complete the tasks they're assigned)
L5 is Senior (who owns/shapes the direction of the team)
L6 is Staff (who has to see upcoming problems and shape efforts across the organization)
L7 shapes a product
L8 shapes a division
L9 shapes an industry
It's very possible that a 24 year old could become an L5 with a typical path: college 18-21, straight to Google for 3 years on the same team and becoming one of the main contributors on the team.
Considering that Google grew its headcount by over 50% between 2020 and 2022, there could be plenty of mid level engineers joining the 24 year old's team who they are able to lead now since they have an extra 3 years worth of experience + context in the specific area.
Life doesn't start at age 21.
I think it partially reflects the accessibility of the field.
You can start hacking on things as a kid with little more than a computer and an internet connection. You can literally have junior engineer knowledge when graduating high school. Add in a bit of formal education and a few years of experience, you can be a legitimate senior engineer at 24.
In fact, one of the best engineers I ever worked with was 21 and working at staff level. Things just clicked with him, so it didn't take long in the professional world for him to round out his knowledge.
By contrast, most other fields require expensive equipment or advanced techniques to gain actual, real experience. A high schooler might be able to weld a track car together, but it's a lot harder for them to do FEA (finite element analysis) or load testing without serious equipment.
Even if they are in their mid-30s that strikes me as a common age to have children which require child care.
The senior employees they want to retain are leaders.
And they will pay them leadership salaries which enables them to afford privatized daycare
either you've never had kids, or you had the incrediblly good fortune to have found them a daycare that required little or no departure from your normal work commute. Or you had a stay-at-home nanny or similar arrangement, which I would put up there in the incredibly good fortune category.
My daycare was 20 minutes off-route which increased to 45 minutes off-route when we moved.
However I was a senior leader that was paid the salary to lead high stakes projects. YMMV
So you spent a total of 90 minutes extra each day going to/from daycare. It sounds like the daycare should've been closer. At your pay rate, how much money was that time worth monthly?
I didn't understand the point of OP's own goal either. seems pretty unlikely that someone who lived that experience as described would not notice the obviously bad tradeoff they are making, and that this would hardly be something to be (apparently) proud of. But he got a chance to portray himself as a Senior Somebody making Important Decisions, so there's that.
All the people I know, whose circumstances I don't share except by second-order family relations, and who are indeed well paid senior engineers, actually do have live-in nannies or au pairs. Which is why I mentioned that possibility.
You got my viewpoint and I can clarify if you would like. My goal was to ensure the best upraising of my child. This includes social interaction, so a nanny was a nonstarter. So the 20 minute commute was considered an acceptable trade off (just as others may consider the lack of social interaction in selecting a nanny). When we purchased a new home we factored in the additional 50 minute loss in time and once again put our childrens consideration over our own.
When you are in a leadership position and have to consider the real fact of working over 40 hours a week, those benefits or lack thereof become a factor you (and thus the company) must consider.
I hope this helps you understand, especially one day in the future when you are in this position!
I don't share their circumstances because they're in finance whereas I'm the owner of a consulting business specializing in the facilitation of remote work for other companies (including some of theirs). So although my calendar is marked busy for months out I'm pretty free to determine what 'busy' means, and can spend time with my kids under terms I thus see fit. Still, daycare is indeed important for social development, commuting is not, and dead time in the car is a waste of both time and money.
On that note, per the other comment, the family I'm referring to all live in midtown manhattan where nannies and au pairs are the norm, and socialization amongst such families comes with the ecosystem. I assume people who have nannies in other built-up regions operate the same way, but maybe your mileage does vary.
Sounds like I should have been closer, but sometimes you don’t find a learning program that is close by. Turns out the high school we should put our daughter in will be an hour long commute. This decision is not purely monetary and does not involve the company I work(ed) for. There will be a time in everyone’s career when they must make a decision that will remove them from their personal time and is not the fault of the company.
Sure losing daycare benefit is a fault. Deciding to put your child in a lesser program because it won’t impact your commute has nothing to do with your job and entirely everything to do with you being a parent..
In my case I will pay to ensure the best upbringing for my children. And this means financially (paying for the best education) and temporally (waiting in traffic to pick them up from said learning institute).
Daycare is literally the monthly cost of a two bedroom apartment.
My daycare cost $1300 at 6 months and $800 at 4 years. A two bedroom apartment around here starts at $2200 (less if you live in different parts of town, but the daycare costs go down accordingly).
In our story, we were not able to get into the "elite" daycare that all the who's who of my city went to. That daycare cost $1500 - $1100 respectively. We ended up going to our daycare out of necessity which just turned out to be a really really good daycare, so we got lucky. But the point is the extra $2200/mo, as you noted, was part of my salary
currently on penninsula it is significantly more expensive than that.
Foster City Odyssey Preschool for toddlers is $2100 for school day, plus $500 extended day until 6pm.
https://www.odysseypreschool.com/foster-city-admissions
Pennisula Jewish is $3125 for toddlers until 5:30pm
https://pjcc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/PJCC-Preschool-R...
You know this saying that all money in the world is worth less than your own time? On-prem daycare gives you more of your time back(and ultimately - more time with your kids). Being paid even some crazy salary does not make up for the fact that with almost any other childcare option you have to walk/drive the kids there before work and then pick them up later.
It's not a matter of affording daycare is my point.
It's a bigger issue in the South Bay because these tech offices are in huge office-only zones that take a long time to get in or out of. Back when I worked there, I was so glad lunch was on-prem for the same reason, and would've been glad even if I had to pay for it.
Kinda creepy how they're like company towns, though.
Generally the code production units that cost more are valued more.
You should tell big blue that, see how that goes over.
Who is big blue?
They're probably referring to IBM. It's an old term, but it checks out.
I believe that Bill Joy famously once refered to it as the Big Blue Dinosaur (ala Barney). I think the more general term "Big Blue" came before "Dinosaur" was appended.
The term did come back a bit in 2014 with the great television series "Halt and Catch Fire."
The metonymy of "Big Blue" was regularly used in the series (especially in the pilot) to describe IBM as a huge entity that a forcefully-made new division of a smaller company was competing against, to develop a personal computer in the 1980s.
This scene in the pilot about a salesman trying to convince another company's executives to choose his products over IBM's describes the feeling behind the term very well: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc&t=65
IBM
THINK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(slogan)
My first employer. Now get off my lawn.
I was hoping for flying cars, but as far as signs I am living in the future go, this will have to do
Before I laugh out loud can you please specify who values them more?
The best ones are the first to propel themselves away when it gets bad: they have options
All things being equal, yes. But all things are not equal. Mid 20s single with no kids is not the same as mid 40s married with kids.
Google's daycare wasn't like that in so many ways, though.
* You don't just take your kids in to work with you. The Google daycares were not any closer to whatever office you happen to work in than some third-party daycare. [edit: they weren't particularly close a long time ago when Google was concentrated in North Bayshore, and then became even less so as Google's offices were spread out more and people bounced around more often, and then became even less so with wfh...]
* You can't actually get in. There was a waitlist and your position on it actually got worse over time (because sibling priority), then later a lottery system where you pay money to play but never win.
* From what I heard recently from a daycare provider (I can't directly verify), it wasn't very good if you did get in. The typical tenure for a teacher was like a month, which is shockingly bad. Like how do you screw up pay/work environment so badly that's possible? And their understanding of children's needs wasn't great either. For example, they organized the kids into rooms by age (which is common but not universal) and...had no transition period at all or hint to the kids that these transitions were coming. They were just in one room one day with one set of teachers, then unexpectedly in another room with another set of teachers the next, which was super confusing and alarming to them.
* It was supposedly subsidized but still strangely expensive. [edit to add: when I first heard about it, this was explained to me as a consequence of it having very high-quality staff who are paid well, but this doesn't match up with the bullet above. Maybe what I heard from the daycare provider was wrong. Maybe quality has gone downhill. Maybe it was never good. I think there are a variety of factors that would have allowed it to continue existing until now without ever having been good. An absolutely tiny proportion of interested people actually were able to try it. Those who did probably felt very lucky to get in and disinclined to complain/give up their exclusive spot, and folks on the waitlist disinclined to listen to their complaints... additionally, many of the parents who went there had never had kids in another daycare to compare against...]
FWIW from a current GCC parent:
This changed after covid. My understanding is that they struggled to fill classrooms due to people moving away from MTV / Palo Alto. We tried to convince friends to enroll their kids for fear of something like this happening. The closure was way worse than we expected (we thought they'd at least do a phased closure) and we kinda regret the advice we gave to friends since they're scrambling to find replacement care now.
Daycare turnover has been bad industry wide, and our classroom had bad turnover in 2021 but it stablized since then. We've super loved our experience. Really great sanitary procedures, high quality learning objectives and measurement, healthy food, etc.
Yes it's still shockingly expensive. Maybe this was self inflicted at first: I heard that when one of the Wojicki sisters had her kids there they changed out all classroom furniture every year, looked for way overqualified people to do the childcare (like Ph.Ds) and all that. It's not that over the top anymore today, but today they still pay the childcare workers very well by that industry's standards (they also get all the same days off as other alphabet workers) and the facilities are way bigger than others that you'd find on the peninsula, with a playground / yard for every N classrooms.
My personal feeling is: I understand why they'd cut this benefit. I _don't_ understand why they had to cut it in this fashion. Having another daycare company buy it out and handing over operations, or raising prices so it's not subsidized, or phasing out classrooms over N years to give parents plenty of time to find alternative care -- there are just better ways they could have ended this longstanding benefit.
Can you speak to how expensive? I'm trying to gauge childcare costs in the area and there's not a lot of transparency out there...
I've heard from colleagues that it's about as expensive as rent in the Bay area.
This is correct. Our rent is about the same as childcare
This feels like a good average globally, right? You have multiple staff per room (hopefully!) + admin staff + cook who need to pay their own rent+spending, then add the costs+mintenance of the daycare itself. Unless government-subsidised, I'd expect the daycare costs to be in the same ballpark as the local rent.
In this world where rent is your dominant monthly cost, totally agree. The teacher student ratio for infants here is 1:3, honestly it should maybe be more.
Would be nice if rents were a smaller total of our living expenses though. Everyone would have more breathing room.
Wow. Might as well rent a place for the grandparents and have them take care of the kid. And if you have two kids, it would be a huge savings. Something seems broken about the economics here.
Assuming grandparents are local or unemployed and willing to move. And willing to do the work (maybe including food?)
Labor aside, a 2 bedroom in Mountain View is quite expensive and doesn't come with learning materials, toys, classmates, etc.
I mean, learning materials can toys can’t cost that much, and classmates would just make the savings even better…
~$2900
Close to 4k for under 2 yrs old. Bottom barrel places are 2800 for infants
Childcare is universally the cost of a medium quality 1 bedroom apartment in a safe neighborhood, just about everywhere in the US
Thanks for the updated perspective!
Ahh, that explains how my across-the-street neighbor has a kid there.
From what this provider told me, the Google daycares' turnover was bad even by industry standards.
Anyway, glad to hear you had a good experience there, and my sympathy as you try to find a replacement!
FWIW not Google but have my child at a Kiddie Academy, and turnover is abysmal..monthly sounds right. And yeah they do class transfers by age and abrubtly so. And they’re in one room all day, though when it’s over 50 degrees they’ll go outside (I’m in Maryland and ya know..winter).
Edit: oh and $2500/mo for 0-2 yr olds..curious how that stacks up compared to Google day care!
Kiddie Academy struck me as ~3rd/4th tier when I was looking at daycares - it was way down my list.
My kids went to a small local chain where some of the teachers have been with it since it was founded in the 90s, almost 30 years ago. Average tenure was like 10-15 years. Unfortunately they got bought by Bright Horizons last year, and have lost 4 teachers since the school year began (although luckily it's that 4 teachers have rotated into the 2 spots vacated, not that they lost 4 veteran teachers).
Was it The Wonder Years? I saw really mixed reviews on Yelp for that place and am curious if you have some insight into that.
My kids were at a Kiddie Academy for a while that was coincidentally down the street from a Google daycare. It was a pretty good experience at the time. Each room had at least one long time teacher (years). They eased them into the next room. But then management changed, they pushed those teachers out, we reported a couple ratio violations to the state, and we left. We tried to get the owners more involved (Kiddie Academy is a franchise), then we met the owners and thought maybe less involvement would be better...they got a decent director in the end but the damage was already done from our perspective.
Then my kids went to a Montessori style preschool. Small, run by the owner of 20+ years and a couple of long time staff members. That was great for us. The owner has since retired though and the school changed hands. Nothing lasts forever, I guess...
Thanks Scott <3
Sounds a lot like the abrupt product cancellations they're known for.
yeah they really sold whatever soul they had when they completely ditched the "don't be evil" slogan completely
They didn't ditch it
https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
I looked into it pre-covid and was basically told that it's for the upper level executives. We went with an au pair for our 2 kids, and it cost less than having one kid in GCC.
Given low fertility rates, companies that provide daycare should get large tax breaks.
Or you could just give the tax break to the parents instead of creating another corporate tax loophole that will most likely be abused.
Individual parents aren’t generally in a position to open a daycare and make a meaningful difference in the supply of childcare. Employers may be able to do so.
give the parents the money and let them decide what to do with it
All day cares will suddenly increase in price to the tune of the tax break.
BLS data[0] indicate over 30% of married couples with children have a stay-at-home parent, and census data[1] indicate over 20% of childcare is provided by a non-parent relative. So family providing care is quite normal and close to the majority of the supply of childcare.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.t04.htm
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/11/child-care.ht...
A tax break only helps people who are paying enough in taxes for it to matter and when it’s well calibrated to match what daycare costs. It would generally be better for the government to provide daycare because they have much better scale and consistency on funding, employment – daycare employees are notoriously underpaid because it’s such a high overhead business – and especially real estate. Using state buildings and getting the workers on healthcare plans which have better economies of scale would be a lot more sustainable economically than having a bunch of small businesses with far less leverage trying to do it on a smaller scale.
No, tax deductions help higher rate taxpayers more, but "tax breaks" is a more broad/relaxed term that includes tax credits. Tax credits benefit everyone who files taxes and meets the criteria for the credit.
Eh, that is kind of a wholly different argument. In some ways the credit is obviously better (maybe it frees up one partner who wants to to stay-at-home parent), and it can be used more flexibly than a government-provided care program, even if you assume arguendo that the government program would be good and/or good value.
If you’re going to be that pedantic, be sure to specify that you mean refundable tax credits – and then perhaps acknowledge the second half of the compound statement you’re replying to.
You could, either works.
Neither way really impacts fertility rate if that's the goal. Many countries, esp in west and north Europe, have already found out that you can't pay people to have kids.
Or throw away the entire bullshit that is the US tax code and start over.
Why does fertility rate matter? Subsidizing daycare seems beneficial in any circumstance.
I don't want to post spoilers here, but the inverted population pyramid is going to result in some interesting times.
Only for people scared of degrowth. It's not that scary if you actually have some kind of consensus mechanism or conflict resolution, which is the thing we actually lack as a country that's scary as shit.
Anyway, politicians could always loosen immigration. More people = bigger economy, higher wages for the rest of us, and generally immigrants have higher fertility rates. Somehow neither party wants to acknowledge this.
(yes, the above would come with inflation too—this can be reclaimed pretty easily from the top of the wealth pyramid with taxes.)
Not by much, it's only higher in the origin country afaik.
Growing the economy isn't inflationary.
Rich people don't contribute to inflation as much because they have lower marginal propensity to consume. You need to combat demand-side inflation by taking money away from everyone else, and supply-side inflation by increasing production.
It is if you provide a route to citizenship for ~16M americans, many of which are not making minimum wage.
The goal is to use the inflation to drive a reduction in wealth inequality. If the rich person finds it unfair, I'm sure they can find something to mop their tears with.
Hmmm, I think it more counters a deflationary trend of older local people retiring. It is true that people earning more is likely inflationary (but that's better than all alternatives).
Causation would go the other way round. Wealth taxes are inflationary, insofar as taxes are paid in USD and so you have to sell your assets to get the USD, causing extra transactions. That's a problem since most other kinds of tax are deflationary.
Idiocracy, the best accidental documentary of our generation, strikes again
So would a permanent, non-inverted pyramid. Gotta bite the bullet at some point.
Consensus viewpoint is that population stability or (modest) growth is probably ideal from a long-term economics perspective. If fertility rates were sky high, you wouldn't need to incentivize parenting as much to achieve that outcome.
Funnily enough, the CHIPS Act has provisions that require recipients of grants of a certain amount to provide childcare to employees. That might be the way of the future if we explicitly subsidize more and more industries directly...
It was impossible to get a spot so not a huge deal imo
Not to sound like I know better, but wouldn't that imply it to be hugely successful? When the demand exceeds supply, my first assumption is that an increase in supply, if possible, would reap high marginal benefits. Again, I know nothing of Google's inner workings.
No inside knowledge but: day care everywhere in the Bay Area is in high demand but is so very expensive and needs to be _more_ expensive. Caretaker ratios are fixed by law, so your main expense is labor, of a relatively low skill variety. And that is where workers have seen impressive gains in wages lately, putting a real squeeze on daycare businesses. It's a real "losing money but making up for it in volume" squeeze.
genuine question as a bay area resident: which laws are you referring to? do you have a link to something?
every state has these: (weird url but it was first result) https://casetext.com/statute/california-codes/california-edu...
There was too much demand, so it's no problem that it's closed now? Can't really follow that logic to be honest.
What's hard to grok? Its capacity was 300 children, so fewer than 300 families at a location where there could have been thousands of families that could have benefited. It served an insignificant fraction of the employees at Google who could have used it.
It probably annoyed the huge majority that got rejected - probably created a lot of resentment
The logic seems pretty easy: it was so limited in availability that it benefited very few workers.
So very few people will miss it.
It would be a totally different situation if this were a perk where there had been plenty of supply, so that it actually met employee demand.
Ah yes, it was too crowded so nobody went there anymore.
Daycares don’t scale like other perks. It’s possibly hugely impactful but for very few employees.
Yogism strikes again!
The biggest perk is working from home. Enabled me to get of the Bay Area before I start a family very soon.
You still need daycare when working from home. Trust me.
Working remotely with such salaries one can afford to search for places where a house near a daycare is a viable solution and move to another place once daycare is no longer needed
Yes, it sounds ridiculous to rely on one particular employer for daycare. But it's not just that. Even if your spouse is totally staying home to take care of the kids, Bay Area (be it SF, East, or South) ain't a good place for families.
About as ridiculous as relying on one particular employer for health care coverage
Agreed. The employer managed Healthcare concept is so weird to me. It's just the government outsourcing administrative work to companies as a "ticket to ride" the economy. Public servants have been high fiving each other since 1935.
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/The employer healthcare doesn't make any sense to me either. At least it's a normal expected thing, though.
Why is it not a good place for families? Anything other than the expense I mean
Not if you have a SAHM or SAHF.
that seems like a pretty bad sign that American tech engineers are losing their value. part of the reason that exists is for valuable employee retention.
People want to WFH? Well this is what happens.
A lot easier and cheaper to hire in South America right now.
No, it is not "what happens." As somebody who has been doing WFH since well before COVID, I'm getting tired of the trope that says avoiding old management frameworks like having asses in seats in an office in the US is driving offshoring. It's just not true—it was always cheaper to hire in other parts of the world.
It's quite literally what is happening across the industry.
Your words, not mine.
It's easier to plug in remote employees than it was pre-pandemic, this cannot be denied.
There will never be a single factor that drives outsourcing. That being said, I kinda agree that if everybody is remote, adding one more remote employee is a lot easier since your company is already setup as a remote-first org.
Is it possible managers were afraid of offshoring but forced WFH via COVID opened them up to it more?
That was true before WFH became popular with the lockdown; I'm not convinced these are related phenomena. For one thing, an employee in the office generally isn't any more valuable than one working from home.
Why would they close it if they're running it for breakeven / profit?
Cost of opportunity? The same money used elsewhere was probably calculated to render more profit.
Random site[0] claims that Alphabet has ~$120 billion cash in hand. Methinks the incremental extra cash of a daycare closure is not going to make a new business opportunity materialize.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/cas...
Signal to investors they are making the "tough calls" to boost the stock.
Google makes so much money that the attention on it is probably more expensive than what it makes. They could have sold it. But maybe it is worth more for the stripped assets.
Google Domains was canceled even though it too was profitable. At some point if a line of business isn't making literally billions of dollars it might be on the chopping block to yield a leaner overall company.
And sometimes your numbers can look better if your profit margin goes up even if your absolute profit goes down. A daycare is never going to have the marginal profit margin of, say, selling more ads.
Yes, my company had two large childcare centers with plans to build a third. Then the pandemic happened and during the pandemic they decided that not only were they not going to build the third center, but they would close down the other two centers. Now the other two centers are just used for storage, but there are still all these children toys just laying around forlornly in the outside fenced play areas where the last kids left them years ago. Very sad.
I think the image of this, as small as it is to the actual scenario of failing to provide care, paints a bleak picture.
We don't even care enough to cleanup the reminders of the pandemic.
Daycare was an anti-perk for Google, practically speaking. It was a huge waiting list to have a chance, and a small fraction got to use it, so most parents just got to be somewhat frustrated by it.
Lots of perks aren't widely used, but mostly by choice; a perk I could potentially use is still a perk, and it feels good to have that option.
Pushing toward remote work or asking someone to work on a different campus also makes the on-prem daycare a bit weird.
But yeah, a company day care that has enough spots to serve most interested parents would be a pretty nice perk. But, I think for most parents, a daycare near home is much better, especially those not working from office every day.
I mean, when was the last time you saw Google bother to continue running a service that was merely "profitable" and failed to achieve even a paltry billion users? This daycare was doomed to be shut down before it even got started.
I wonder if employers deliberately enact family-hostile policies.
Some would prefer early 20-something’s with no life outside work.
＞ Taking your kids with you to work allows you to not make a second trip every morning and every evening to go to their daycare (which is never exactly on the way) it's good for morale, it's GREAT for work/life balance, it's good for the environment, and the kids spend more time with their parents.
Caveat: only if you absolutely need to go to work in the first place, or you couldn't remote for critical reasons (granted, someone being unremediably miserable at home would be one)
Otherwise dealing with kids is one of the primary factor in choosing remote work, and it's life changing.
A local, close to your home daycare means you have options on who brings the kids and who takes them. It's a few minutes away, so yes you get more time with your kids, it fits into a standard work break, you're there quick enough when puke hits the fan, you get access to your local doctors and hospitals who have your kids' records, etc. All of these "perks" persist if you change job, your kids go to school, etc.
Google's daycare wasn't particularly on-site. When I was there I had lots of coworkers with small kids and I can't recall any of them using the company daycare rather than normal daycare. I think TFA says there were like 300 kids in it? For a company with....what is it, over >100k? workers in the area?
> retention of senior employees
I’m not convinced that any modern tech company is actually interested in keeping people around for too long.
I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong, but my own experience has me a bit cynical.
Childcare is good for folks in their mid-to-late twenties, and early thirties. Not even that “senior.” People older than that, often don’t need childcare as much.
So it seems as if they want to have a workforce of extremely young, unmarried people, or maybe a few older, “empty nesters.”