They tracked down the CEO mom:
The ad, posted by a CEO and mother of 10-year-old twins in Menlo Park, California,
Slate tracked her down yesterday with a little investigative Googling, and she agreed to talk as long as she could remain anonymous.
Yeah, no one will ever figure out who that is.
Female CEO with twins isn’t going to be very common.
Also single.
I mean I’m like 90% of the way to IDing her without even trying.
They wanted all that, for $35 to $40 an hour.
I have no idea who it is.
There is some amazing stuff in that interview. She values the ‘pool cottage’ living arrangement offer at $3000 per month. She says things like Most families go on ski vacations with the husband and the wife. She says things like I would say most people around here have that with their nanny. She says people attacked the post because women attack women, because women are sexist. She says I think that people related to the post.
More like she decided to talk because of damage control.
I dunno, i think it’s funny she actually admitted she needed a wife. She just seems like a CEO Type-A OCD sort of person that wants basically someone who will understand what she wants perfectly without having to ask her about every minute decision - like in her example that “obviously” you should know you shouldn’t leave the kids alone with coaches. Which is either a partner or a clone, tbh. At least she said the list wasn’t meant to be posted online but was provided to an agency, which simply posted the list rather than compiled it into something sensible. But i don’t get the sense she’s some spoiled 1%er. I think the list she gave to the agency was just a little too personal. 40$ an hour isn’t rolling in cash but it’s not exactly starvation wages either.
What would it take to give you that sense?
Okay. There were several things in the ad as well as the interview that says she definitely is. Let’s review.
Travel:
And we travel to Hawaii, Central America. And when that person would be traveling, that person would only be working eight to nine hours a day.
So, in the world caretakers, nannies, etc. It does not matter if they travel with the family or they are at home. Work is work. This is traveling for work, and there is no real indication there would be time off. So this person would travel but not really get to enjoy their experience, but hey it’s only a full days work so it should be fine.
Fitness:
I’ve said “must be able to run a mile,” the person shows up and there’s no way they could run even an eighth of a mile.
And that’s only a fraction of her requirement either.
There are a number of people who can do a lot of things, physically, that might not fit some sort of ideal model body, but all they have to do is show up, and she’s decided no.
Family:
We’re not talking working at Oracle, or at Salesforce. We’re talking working in my home, in my family. I always include our nanny or our au pair in the family portrait.
She wants someone who is going to love her and her children. That’s fine, that’s wonderful but the fact she compares it to not working at Oracle and Salesforce tells you something. So does the fact she didn’t get the job filled yet. Her expectations are very likely to high. The kind of person she is looking for someone in her own industry.
There are a lot of women who are good at sports, right?
Yes, there are a lot of women who fit your ideal, but they’re not typically working as nannies. One them probably hopes to replace you someday.
Oh, she’s clearly a 1%er. But splitting the hair between a 1%er and a spoiled 1%er is not a hill i want to die on. I just think the issue is that many of her requests looks more like shopping for partner than an au-pair++.
Whether she is spoiled beyond the other 1%ers… eeh, I don’t actually know. I suspect trying to get the next CEO of some tech company as your nanny is a a little unusual, but hey maybe they all demand that. heh.
Hah, I was willing to bet 100$ this story was going to turn into: “I can’t possibly be a rich jerk, I’m a woman!”
As in: "I need a wife that does things exactly as her tell her to in the house, which an actual wife might or might not do entirely at her own discretion, and that I can fire at the drop of a hat with minimal financial compensation and that will have no competing claim whatsoever on my kids.
In other words, I’m not looking for a wife at all.
…underpay, undervalue them and be able to fire them at any point without reason.
A lot of this is the hyper-helicopter parent on steroids phenomenon going on right now. It started with STEM, then morphed into STEAM, then because this crazy best/worst of all words thing where the kids are doing calculus and geometry and art and sports and study groups and play groups and on and on, where every single interaction is some kind of deliberate choice and effect and the kids are shuffled from one activity to the next with hardly any downtime and their parents live in a state of panicked desperation.
It’s great that people are sensitive to small things but right now it feels like these upper crust parents are terrified of the tyranny of small things and want to micromanage every single possible interaction to prevent them. It’s also this perhaps malign development in social media society that everything has a diagnosis and everything has a cause and everything therefore has a solution.
What these parents want is not complex work per se, but they want someone just as social media connected as they, so that their potential nanny / au pair already knows and follows the “important” trends of the day w/re to child development and care. It feels like a whole generation is going to unintentionally make their kids hypochondriac overstimulated narcissists.
It just all comes out when the “hot” thing for well off families now is getting an au pair / nanny, and all their schizophrenic lifestyles and micromanaging worries for their children get put out for display in their demands.
What’s a little weird though is… you can simply request someone know how to make meals without beef, or adhere to a specific diet, or know how to use duck eggs. Why is it important to indoctrinate a belief system? Who cares if the person who cooks your delicious meals believes beef is harmful so long as they can make something you like without beef.
The second listing did the same thing above. Okay so they want someone who can cook vegetarian meals without gluten in it. End of story. Why does it matter if that person thinks it weird so long as they can do it? They’re not there to become… the poster.
Yeah, people are posting these positions as statements of self rather than actual candidate profiles. Having spoken with a female CEO in the Fortune 500, she never would have made it where she did if she’d waited before jumping and had every aspect nailed that a given job was looking for; she learned on the go and expected others to do the same. People posting how they’ll turn away anyone who isn’t “perfect” (aka “the me I want everyone else to see and believe in”) are setting themselves up for a major disappointment or two.
Also, I have to say $20/hour strikes me as a little toward the cheap side (at least the Silicon Valley position promised a good wage, if still underpaid for the massive amount of work and time it would require).