8 ms·

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 eith

• google234123 3y ago
  It was impossible to get a spot so not a huge deal imo
  • Noughmad 3y ago
    Ah yes, it was too crowded so nobody went there anymore.
    • fullshark 3y ago
      Daycares don’t scale like other perks. It’s possibly hugely impactful but for very few employees.
      • clutchdude 3y ago
        Yogism strikes again!
  • elaus 3y ago
    There was too much demand, so it's no problem that it's closed now? Can't really follow that logic to be honest.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      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.
    • google234123 3y ago
      It probably annoyed the huge majority that got rejected - probably created a lot of resentment
    • rmk 3y ago
      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.
  • jakderrida 3y ago
    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.
    • jldugger 3y ago
      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.
      • gretch 3y ago
        > Caretaker ratios are fixed by law genuine question as a bay area resident: which laws are you referring to? do you have a link to something?
        • liveoneggs 3y ago
          every state has these: (weird url but it was first result) https://casetext.com/statute/california-codes/california-education-code/title-1-general-education-code-provisions/division-1-general-education-code-provisions/part-6-education-programs-state-master-plans/chapter-2-early-education-act/article-3-administration/section-8241-staffing-ratios-for-center-based-programs https://casetext.com/statute/california-codes/california-edu...
• CommieBobDole 3y ago
  > 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?
  • hot_gril 3y ago
    The senior employees they want to retain are leaders.
    • grepfru_it 3y ago
      And they will pay them leadership salaries which enables them to afford privatized daycare
      • ChainOfFools 3y ago
        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.
        • grepfru_it 3y ago
          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
          • hot_gril 3y ago
            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?
            • ChainOfFools 3y ago
• givemeethekeys 3y ago
  Why would they close it if they're running it for breakeven / profit?
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    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.
  • eddd-ddde 3y ago
    Cost of opportunity? The same money used elsewhere was probably calculated to render more profit.
    • 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      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/cash-on-hand https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/cas...
  • willcipriano 3y ago
    Signal to investors they are making the "tough calls" to boost the stock.
  • CydeWeys 3y ago
    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.
• caturopath 3y ago
  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?
• JamesBarney 3y ago
  Given low fertility rates, companies that provide daycare should get large tax breaks.
  • mupuff1234 3y ago
    Or you could just give the tax break to the parents instead of creating another corporate tax loophole that will most likely be abused.
    • JamesBarney 3y ago
      You could, either works.
      • hot_gril 3y ago
        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.
        • deleted 3y ago
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        • deleted 3y ago
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    • ytdytvhxgydvhh 3y ago
      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.
      • throwaway6734 3y ago
        give the parents the money and let them decide what to do with it
• hot_gril 3y ago
  The biggest perk is working from home. Enabled me to get of the Bay Area before I start a family very soon.
  • d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
    You still need daycare when working from home. Trust me.
    • Almondsetat 3y ago
      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
      • hot_gril 3y ago
        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.
        • passwordoops 3y ago
          >it sounds ridiculous to rely on one particular employer for daycare About as ridiculous as relying on one particular employer for health care coverage
          • d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
            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. In an action that was a blow to union control of health plans and a stimulus to employer-controlled programs, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned union control of welfare funds based on employer contributions. On the positive side, an attempt to explicitly exclude employee benefits from the requirement for collective bargaining failed, and the law retained the vague language of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that required management to bargain on "wages and conditions of employment." The law also established regulations for joint employer-union control of plans involving multiple employers. [1] [1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/
• hasty_pudding 3y ago
  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.
  • webdood90 3y ago
    People want to WFH? Well this is what happens. A lot easier and cheaper to hire in South America right now.
    • JeffSnazz 3y ago
      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.
    • wyclif 3y ago
      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.
      • pompino 3y ago
        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.
      • nox101 3y ago
        Is it possible managers were afraid of offshoring but forced WFH via COVID opened them up to it more?
      • webdood90 3y ago
        It's quite literally what is happening across the industry. > 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 Your words, not mine. It's easier to plug in remote employees than it was pre-pandemic, this cannot be denied.
• irrational 3y ago
  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.
  • clutchdude 3y ago
    > 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. 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.
• somekyle2 3y ago
  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.
• makeitdouble 3y ago
  ＞ 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.
• scottlamb 3y ago
  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...]
  • napierzaza 3y ago
    [dead]
  • kajecounterhack 3y ago
    FWIW from a current GCC parent: > You can't actually get in. There was a waitlist and your position on it actually got worse over time 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. > From what I heard recently from a daycare provider (I can't directly verify), it wasn't very good if you did get in 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. > It was supposedly subsidized but still strangely expensive. 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.
• saurik 3y ago
  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.
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  > 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.”
• pyuser583 3y ago
  I wonder if employers deliberately enact family-hostile policies. Some would prefer early 20-something’s with no life outside work.