On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble (NYTimes, registration blah blah)
Their subsidies were ridiculous, but the solution is stupid.
Jesus, does day care cost THAT much? So with 2 working parents, basically the one parents salary is negated?
Yes, “Jesus?!?!” was my initial response as well.
Even at $33.000 a year that would be 5 times more than I pay for two kids.
Pretty much. Working does pay off in the long run as the woman isn’t out of the labor market and is gaining skills but in the early days it’s a wash.
Edit: Stay at home parent! In my marraige it’s the woman but I do know people where the father is the stay at home parent.
So , uh, why not just find a cheaper alternative for day care or something ?
Where I live it’s nothing like that much. You could get a full-time nanny (paying all the proper taxes, even) for a lot less than $33,000 a year.
I just thought Google’s response was insane. What’s the benefit of having daycare only millionaires will use?
The executives are happy? Surely, their children shouldn’t mingle with the Google plebs.
Edit: Hey, NYT website has a neat feature for its articles. Double clicking a word will pop up a new window with a search based on the word (or a suggested phrase) on answers.com. From there, you can use the drop down menu next to the text box to search articles on the site.
I pay a little over $900/month for a 4 year old. It gets more expensive the younger the child, so if you have two kids under 2 in (nice) day care here, it would be in the neighborhood of $25,000/year. And Austin is a LOOOOT less expensive than Google town.
“…that’s what Google is fast becoming: just another company.”
Well, isn’t it?
I’ve never bought into the idea of Google being anything more than just another company that is growing far too quickly for its own good. A the hype settles, they are going to have to shed their “special” image. Obviously the people at Google don’t understand this either.
It’s probably mean of me to mention this when everyone’s still reeling over this kind of shocking news, but: in one of its most common state on Earth’s surface, water is usually liquid and wet. Sometimes, it’s solid, and in that state it’s pretty chilly.
If you worked there, you wouldn’t ask this question. Seriously. Because it really is unlike any company I’ve ever worked for, for both good and ill.
Anyhow, articles like this one really suck - it’s just sloppy, lazy journalism. Take one part inevitable Google backlash (pretty much anyone who wants to write about Google these days has to write something negative, because all the various positive slants have already been written up over the last several years), one part “out-of-context-quote from an ex-googler’s blog”, and one part anonymous complaints from whiny employees, wrap it all up with some convoluted, can’t-win logic (First, the article complains that Google advertised child care but some employees couldn’t get it due to the waiting list - now Google no longer advertises child care, and the article criticizes them for that, too) and poof, you’ve filled 6 column inches.
And there are a ton of whiny employees - for many of them, Google is the only job they’ve ever held, and they have no perspective on how good they have it. Case in point: employees get an annual bonus that is scaled up based on how well the company has done in the previous year - past bonus multipliers have been quite large, because the company growth rate has been astounding. Last year’s was still large, but smaller than previous years because the growth rate was lower - at our weekly company meeting, a young employee stood up and complained to the CEOs that new employees were being “punished” because they didn’t get to enjoy the larger bonuses of previous years. Sergey replied that if the employee felt that receiving a sizable bonus was a punishment, then he was going to have a hard life. Some Googlers are whiny bitches, and you should take complaints (particularly anonymous, unattributed quotes) with a huge grain of salt.
Anyhow, Google had a perk (subsidized day care) which was only available in the Mountain View office (btw, the majority of Google employees work outside of the main office, and so didn’t have access to this perk). Furthermore, there was a waiting list for the day care, which meant that primarily old-timers got to put their kids in day care (since they were there first) which meant that the subsidy was primarily benefiting people who needed it least (pre-IPO googlers).
They were faced with a few choices:
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Have two competing day-care systems on campus, with varying degrees of subsidy and quality (again, primarily benefiting old-time employees in mountain view only who got on the waiting list early).
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Vastly expand the day care system to support 1000+ kids, with the commensurate cost increases.
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Lower the subsidy to around $5K/child, and have people pay more of the actual costs of the day care, and let the market sort things out.
I’m hard-pressed to see 3) as particularly evil. The problem is that you have a set of Googlers who want top-of-the-line daycare and are willing to pay for it, and you have a set of Googlers who are willing to settle for merely decent day care if it saves them enough money. You can make the argument that Google should cater to the second group (and perhaps they will over time) but targeting world-class day care if only for a small set of employees doesn’t seem like a bad thing.
If you have two parents working in Silicon valley, you can bet that your household is making on the order of $250K/year. Spending 10% of your salary on infant day care is not unheard of.
Thats a pretty broad and false assumption. It depends on what kind of jobs they have. If you’ve got one person in tech and the other teaching K-12 education, for example, you aren’t making near that much.
Sure. In that case, I’d say they have some hard decisions to make regarding whether it’s feasible for them to have both parents working, especially since the K-12 teacher is probably taking home less money than it’d cost to pay for child care. Shrug. My wife and I recently had to make a similar decision when she left a high-paid position - we decided it just didn’t make financial sense for her to work for the next few years, until our kid is old enough to go to school.
In a country where there’s still significant debate over whether we should pay for universal healthcare, I think it’s a little too early for people to treat child care as an entitlement. Companies like Google are still feeling their way around how company-provided day care should work, and I don’t think we should criticize them too heavily while they work out the kinks.
This seems to be endemic across much of the IT field. I had a friend in the upper ranks of Amazon complaining that his cafe served the same gourmet food over & over. Apparently they cycle through dishes every 2 weeks. (And they revamp their menu completely once every 6 months.) Don’t even get me started on his take-home pay.
I’ve heard similar stories at Microsoft. While I don’t think we should worship our corporate overlords, I do wish people would get some perspective.
Neat? Neat!? More like PAIN IN MY FUCKING ASS. As a compulsive double-clicker while reading articles, NYT is the bane of my existence.
That article pissed me off.
“Today she is the company’s vice president for product measurement, though as I discovered in talking to unhappy Google parents this week, not many Googlers seem to know what her exact duties entail. Everybody, however, knows that she’s Mr. Brin’s sister-in-law.”
I have no idea what she does either, but that smacked of misogynistic gossip to me.
Anyway, I agree that some of the decisions sound a bit crazy, but mostly I’m boggling at what kind of daycare facilities cost that much. What do they do in there? I pay $1200 month for infant daycare here in LA (at a registered home daycare, not a center which charge more).
Nothing to add. This pretty much sums up my experience perfectly . . .
Ditto. Can’t stand that feature since I tend to click/highlight as I read.
Arise, thread!
Is there anything more evil than autoplay videos on the Internet? I didn’t think so. Although at least they’re muted, and not yet rolled out to everyone.
Dang, that might be enough to get me to switch to Bing.com or DuckDuckGo.com. We’ll have to see how annoying it is. If they turn on sound, I’m definitely switching.