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> They looked up to me for leadership and that also meant defining what was and what was not allowed. Of course, this is easy when somebody makes a remark that

• julian_t 11y ago
  Quite so. My youngest is now 24, but I remember those days. I remember thinking that "I thought the idea was that we work together to get this stuff done," and that if the company decided that its interests were more important that the health of my family, then we were going to part company before long. Now we have "work-life balance", which is a red flag to me, just like hotels putting "quality" in their name, in case you don't notice...
• sintaxi 11y ago
  Agreed. I don't even consider coming in late and leaving early inappropriate at all. The office is there to help you get your work done and communicate with others on the team. If you are able to accomplish that without being in the office 9-5 then that shouldn't be a problem to anyone.
• dangero 11y ago
  This is a tangent but, as a father I've always felt the sick child/spouse excuses were dumb in the same way that smokers were allowed to take extra 15 minute breaks at one of my jobs. Shouldn't the presence or absence of a family be irrelevant to your employment rules?
  • user_0001 11y ago
    Can depend on where you live. If you have moved to a new area for a job and have no friends or relatives within 6 hours. Your wife is struck down with a nasty illness and is barely able to get out of bed in order to get to the toilet and you have a chlid who needs taken care of / taken to nursery / school etc
  • shanemhansen 11y ago
    Life doesn't actually stop when you clock in. I think it's reasonable from a business perspective to realize your resources don't work 100% for you 100% of the time. However, if the company really want to disallow people missing time here and there to deal with family, I really hope they'd never ever ever consider asking them to work before 9, after 5, or on the weekends no matter how high priority the business tasks are. I hope they're the kind of employer that turns off email at 5. For me, the time I take to deal with my personal responsibilities at work is more than balanced by the time I take to help my employers out outside the hours of 9 to 5.
    • sokoloff 11y ago
      > I think it's reasonable from a business perspective to realize your resources don't work 100% for you 100% of the time. I also recommend barring the use of the word "resource" when you specifically mean "person". Capex, opex, machines, buildings, presses, are all resources. Allowing your leaders to talk about people as being "resources" biases them to think in a certain way (or at least risks that). It is unfortunate that in the phrase "human resources", "human" is an adjective... ;)
      • perfTerm 11y ago
        Hmm, I don't really think its off by much, especially in Westernized nations where practically every thing is governed by contracts, regulations and legalese. And especially at a management level. You allocate resources to accomplish tasks. If you have a C++ developer, that's a resource. Resource X costs Y and produces Z could be applied to JetBrains licenses or people. Maintence for licenses is quite simple requiring updated payment information, maintence for people is a lot less clear cut and requires communication, and lots of ambiguous judgement calls. It's stale but I'm not sure there's a better word to fit in its place.
        • sokoloff 11y ago
          Denotation of people on salary as a "resource" is correct, and I'm even OK with including people in a collective set of varied types of resources. "We just don't have the resources to pursue all possible ideas" and the like is fine. I'm recommending a terminology change to always call people "people" as it biases your leaders to think of them as special and different from licenses, machines, money, and black boxes. (It's not my idea originally, but I've seen it play out at my company and believe it to be helpful.)
  • rhino369 11y ago
    The dumb thing that I see is that employers sometimes don't give childless employees the same leeway. Like I had an employer who let mom's leave for their kids, but gave me a hard time when I left to go to a hospital after my brother was in a terrible car accident. But just plain forbidding dealing with sick children is a horrific policy. Unless you want all your family employees to leave or hate you.
    • sokoloff 11y ago
      I wonder how much of these anecdotes are a natural outcome of human discomfort with a situation? Maybe your boss was just uncomfortable and feeling bad/empathetic with your brother's condition and didn't know how to handle you, so handled you awkwardly and stiffly, which you internalize as "a hard time". If someone gave you an actual hard time over something like that, I don't want to get all internet badass here, but "you have my address; please send my last check there" might be the most appropriate response... (I'm not in any way discounting the certainty that there are asshole employers out there, and the possibility that you worked for one.) (Hope your brother is now OK.)
      • rhino369 11y ago
        I had already left and just sent an email back saying "Well I already left and I'll be in Duluth for a while. I'll talk to you when I get back." I think the boss realized he was being a dick because it was never mentioned again. I think you might be right, discomfort plus not knowing how to handle the situation. He survived the crash but is quadriplegic now. He was very lucky though, his two best friends died.
    • dangero 11y ago
      This is why I brought this up. I had the same situation where the only person on the team who had a "valid excuse" was the one who had to take kids to school in the morning. Other people on the team felt they were required to do more work because they had chosen not to have kids. Any method of defining what constitutes a valid excuse is likely to step on someone's toes.
  • el_benhameen 11y ago
    I suppose you could argue that, and a workplace with that mindset could certainly work for some people. As someone who values my family, though, that's not somewhere that I would choose to work. I think you'd also find that most people will not be flexible for their employers when the employers don't expend the same courtesy. In the end, we're all humans, most of us don't operate in a social vacuum, and I wouldn't want to work for someone who fails to understand or respect that.
  • sokoloff 11y ago
    They're not dumb in the sense that you have a distraction that you (or your SO) simply must deal with. It's not like it's optional to go pickup your kid from daycare or school if they're sending him home. If you're doing repetitive assembly-line type work, maybe you worry about an excessive smoke break pattern. If you're doing creative and novel work (as most programming is), don't sweat the smoke breaks. Sweat the overall output and contribution maybe, but I don't find time-at-keyboard to be nearly linear with output. (Context: I'm a non-smoking father of two, aged 4 and 6.)
    • XorNot 11y ago
      Also you can pretty much either accomodate or run the risk they'll just leave to somewhere more understanding. Do you want to be rehiring the same position every 2-3 years and in the meantime making people unimaginably hostile to you ('no I want you to ignore your children for an extra hour I probably got for free elsewhere anyway').
    • gizmo686 11y ago
      It is possible that smoke breaks boost productivity for knowledge workers like programmers. Not so much the smoking part (which may have some effect itself), but simply taking a break could be benificial to total productivity.
      • bkor 11y ago
        As long as it is also socially acceptable that non-smokers take various 15min breaks during the day and talk about nothing. I once worked at a place where smokers took various breaks but it was not acceptable to just idle around. IMO nowadays I just see it as weak management, not being able to determine and/or say to a person that they're taking way too many breaks.
  • Gibbon1 11y ago
    Back in the bad old days... when men went to the office and women stayed home, you could expect that a working mans family issues stayed at home. Now with more two worker families and single parent families, it's just not the case. What is important for morale is that your single workers not feel like they are the ones covering for Mr and Mrs Familyman without some quid pro quo.
    • dangero 11y ago
      I think that's what I was getting at. The whole concept of a "valid excuse" seems arbitrary to me. I worked at a place that had regular office hours and one of the people on the team was regularly late because he had to drop his daughter off at school. He was the only person on the team who had what was considered a "valid excuse" to be late. The single people strongly resented that because they felt they were being forced to work harder for the same pay since they made different life choices.
      • dasil003 11y ago
        There's just something so hilarious about the idea of a single person resenting a married-with-children person on the basis of the amount of work they have to do.
        • irishcoffee 11y ago
          As a single parent, gosh I hope childless people reflect on what you said.
          • handojin 11y ago
            Is not possible. No context.
        • eropple 11y ago
          I am all in favor of accomodating people, but this is some kind of bull, man. You agreed to do a job. The childless person did, too. Your kids aren't work, and they don't factor in, and I know you know that. Having additional work pushed on the childless person (and I've seen it happen, though never to me) because they don't have kids and "can handle it" is straight-up unfair, unless they're being properly compensated.
  • handojin 11y ago
    Take a 15 minute break yourself. There's objective evidence that getting up and going walkabout every for fifteen minutes every hour or two is good for you. I mean, it's not like you stop working right? The break and the distance can really help. If you happen to smoke (or are gregarious, or can pretend to be) you'll also meet everyone (for values implying a random distribution of all people working at your company from AP to exec) outside. You might be surprised what you can learn.
• dkokelley 11y ago
  Unfortunately there exists a messy side of company culture in which perception (by peers and management) impacts morale and performance. In a utopian company, all employees are judged purely on their productivity and have unilateral say in their working conditions. Unfortunately our world is filled with people and their pesky emotions. People get upset when they perceive unfair treatment, and things like "good reason" and "productivity" can be so subjective. This is a matter of nurturing a good team culture. Culture is hard.