5 ms·

There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot: > ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the re

There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot: > ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal. Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career' depends on a lot of things, one of them is the support you get. I know enough stories from child-raisers I've worked with myself - including some men - to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google. Calling onsite daycare 'no big deal' doesn't seem to me like the thing that would be said by anyone using the service.

alephnerd 3y ago
Their onsite daycare was out of the way and oversubscribed. It was basically created for the Wojcicki sisters' children.
- swozey 3y ago
  I'd never heard of Wojcicki. Nor this story from her Wiki. I was curious how a CEO of youtube was worth $800 million. > Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over twenty years.[3][4] She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and later led the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023. And man, youtube for $1.6 billion. I just did a quick google and articles are saying $180 billion today. They did $29b in revenue in 2022..
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    That's Susan Wojcicki (former Youtube CEO). Her sister Anne Wojcicki is the IB turned co-founder and CEO of 23andme and Sergey Brin's ex-wife
nigelk 3y ago
The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge. It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.
- apwell23 3y ago
  is it available to all employees and do they all get on a single waitlist or do executives get a preference.
  - nigelk 3y ago
    It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.
    - apwell23 3y ago
      > to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google. oh got it. Top comment made it sound like it was cheap/free of cost
      - nigelk 3y ago
        as did the Google recruiters and HR people I spoke to before accepting the job :)
      - swozey 3y ago
        Another comment in here says it could be up to 4-5k/mo. Idk about googler parents but thats pretty much an entire 2 week net-income paycheck to me.. IIRC my friends with kids pay something like 2-3k/mo I think for their daycare but I'm in CO not CA.
nostrademons 3y ago
Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists and exorbitantly high prices (sometimes as much as $4-5K/month). I remember when I first joined in 2009 there was a bunch of friction because new arrivals - those who had joined post-IPO and whose stock was then underwater - could not afford it, and so it was felt like it was a perk that went exclusively to pre-IPO Googlers. Sometime in the early 2010s, it also ceased to actually be on-site. I lived near the Bernardo/El Camino neighborhood in the late 2010s and the daycare on the corner there is actually one of the Google daycares shuttered in the recent announcement. It's more like 3 miles from campus. Most of the folks I know who actually optimize for commute time have their kids at private daycares in the Middlefield area.
- swozey 3y ago
  You had to pay.. 4-5k/mo for daycare, at work? I don't know if they ever built it because I left prior but Rackspace was going/did add a daycare at their hq (castle) and as far as I know it would be/was free.. At least there was never any mention of cost before I left. Big difference in number of employees but also massive difference in quarterly profits. A lot of the younger child-free people were angry about it and wanted a bar or something added for them. I've never worked anywhere with a daycare except a Golds Gym in high school so I'm not familiar with how they usually go.
  - swexbe 3y ago
    That’s crazy. Couldn’t you basically hire a day-time nanny for that price?
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      Going rate for a nanny is about $25/hour or about $4000-5000/month in the Bay Area, so yes, it was roughly the same price. I know many, many Googler families with daytime nannies, night nannies, multiple nannies, etc. The two main things you got with the in-house daycare was a.) consistency and b.) convenience. I have a teammate whose kid went through the Google daycare; she said that at the time (over a decade ago now), it really was quite high quality, and because the caretakers were in-house employees of Google, they had passed the same high bar as the rest of Google employees. (I've also heard that this - like many other things about Google - has gone downhill in recent years, and that people whose kids went through post-COVID dealt with high staff turnover and inadequate care.) Meanwhile, almost everybody I know who uses nannies for full-time care has had horror stories about finding a reliable nanny. Some are flakes who don't show up to work; some seem to have perpetual car trouble; some are neglectful; some always have their boyfriend come over and spend more time with him than the kids; some get fired for putting the kids in danger. Nannies are not licensed, unlike daycares. It's very much parent-beware, and a lot of people don't have time to search for a good nanny, hire them, and monitor them to make sure their kids will be safe. There's also just a convenience benefit from having your kid on-site. You can share commutes; you can use the carpool lane; your schedules are identical; you can pick up your kid in a blink if they get sick; you know they're always close; you don't need to coordinate logistics with a nanny; your time schedules will overlay; and so on.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DiggyJohnson 3y ago
Is “child raiser” rather than “parent” a stylistic choice or is there some meaning that I’m missing.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Stylistic choice, no deeper meaning. I know people who are the sole child-raiser after separating from the child's other parent, and people who are parents but they work full-time and their partner looks after the child.
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    Cool cool, appreciate the explanation.
lumost 3y ago
I suspect that as people push off having kids until they are in their late thirties, choose not to have children, or have single-income arrangements due to divorce/family dynamics... the support for families in corporations will decline. There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Probably a terrible thing for society at large.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  > There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Arguably, many already do. As "main child-raiser" (as opposed to "parent", again a place where this matters) is not equally distributed across the sexes in our society, I would say though that (1.) this does leave you at risk of legal challenges over structural discrimination and (2.) it leaves a bad taste when a corporation one the one hand does this, and on the other hand bemoans how few women in "tech" (or any other sector) they're getting. Pushing off kids until the late 30s also has a different risk profile if it's your womb those kids might be coming out of.

alephnerd 3y ago

Their onsite daycare was out of the way and oversubscribed. It was basically created for the Wojcicki sisters' children.

swozey 3y ago
I'd never heard of Wojcicki. Nor this story from her Wiki. I was curious how a CEO of youtube was worth $800 million. > Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over twenty years.[3][4] She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and later led the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023. And man, youtube for $1.6 billion. I just did a quick google and articles are saying $180 billion today. They did $29b in revenue in 2022..
- alephnerd 3y ago
  That's Susan Wojcicki (former Youtube CEO). Her sister Anne Wojcicki is the IB turned co-founder and CEO of 23andme and Sergey Brin's ex-wife

nigelk 3y ago

The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge. It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.

apwell23 3y ago
is it available to all employees and do they all get on a single waitlist or do executives get a preference.
- nigelk 3y ago
  It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.
  - apwell23 3y ago
    > to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google. oh got it. Top comment made it sound like it was cheap/free of cost
    - nigelk 3y ago
      as did the Google recruiters and HR people I spoke to before accepting the job :)
    - swozey 3y ago
      Another comment in here says it could be up to 4-5k/mo. Idk about googler parents but thats pretty much an entire 2 week net-income paycheck to me.. IIRC my friends with kids pay something like 2-3k/mo I think for their daycare but I'm in CO not CA.

nostrademons 3y ago

Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists and exorbitantly high prices (sometimes as much as $4-5K/month). I remember when I first joined in 2009 there was a bunch of friction because new arrivals - those who had joined post-IPO and whose stock was then underwater - could not afford it, and so it was felt like it was a perk that went exclusively to pre-IPO Googlers. Sometime in the early 2010s, it also ceased to actually be on-site. I lived near the Bernardo/El Camino neighborhood in the late 2010s and the daycare on the corner there is actually one of the Google daycares shuttered in the recent announcement. It's more like 3 miles from campus. Most of the folks I know who actually optimize for commute time have their kids at private daycares in the Middlefield area.

swozey 3y ago
You had to pay.. 4-5k/mo for daycare, at work? I don't know if they ever built it because I left prior but Rackspace was going/did add a daycare at their hq (castle) and as far as I know it would be/was free.. At least there was never any mention of cost before I left. Big difference in number of employees but also massive difference in quarterly profits. A lot of the younger child-free people were angry about it and wanted a bar or something added for them. I've never worked anywhere with a daycare except a Golds Gym in high school so I'm not familiar with how they usually go.
- swexbe 3y ago
  That’s crazy. Couldn’t you basically hire a day-time nanny for that price?
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Going rate for a nanny is about $25/hour or about $4000-5000/month in the Bay Area, so yes, it was roughly the same price. I know many, many Googler families with daytime nannies, night nannies, multiple nannies, etc. The two main things you got with the in-house daycare was a.) consistency and b.) convenience. I have a teammate whose kid went through the Google daycare; she said that at the time (over a decade ago now), it really was quite high quality, and because the caretakers were in-house employees of Google, they had passed the same high bar as the rest of Google employees. (I've also heard that this - like many other things about Google - has gone downhill in recent years, and that people whose kids went through post-COVID dealt with high staff turnover and inadequate care.) Meanwhile, almost everybody I know who uses nannies for full-time care has had horror stories about finding a reliable nanny. Some are flakes who don't show up to work; some seem to have perpetual car trouble; some are neglectful; some always have their boyfriend come over and spend more time with him than the kids; some get fired for putting the kids in danger. Nannies are not licensed, unlike daycares. It's very much parent-beware, and a lot of people don't have time to search for a good nanny, hire them, and monitor them to make sure their kids will be safe. There's also just a convenience benefit from having your kid on-site. You can share commutes; you can use the carpool lane; your schedules are identical; you can pick up your kid in a blink if they get sick; you know they're always close; you don't need to coordinate logistics with a nanny; your time schedules will overlay; and so on.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

DiggyJohnson 3y ago

Is “child raiser” rather than “parent” a stylistic choice or is there some meaning that I’m missing.

red_admiral 3y ago
Stylistic choice, no deeper meaning. I know people who are the sole child-raiser after separating from the child's other parent, and people who are parents but they work full-time and their partner looks after the child.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  Cool cool, appreciate the explanation.

lumost 3y ago

I suspect that as people push off having kids until they are in their late thirties, choose not to have children, or have single-income arrangements due to divorce/family dynamics... the support for families in corporations will decline. There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Probably a terrible thing for society at large.

red_admiral 3y ago
> There is nothing that says that a corporation can't optimize their culture to only have workers without children/dependents. Arguably, many already do. As "main child-raiser" (as opposed to "parent", again a place where this matters) is not equally distributed across the sexes in our society, I would say though that (1.) this does leave you at risk of legal challenges over structural discrimination and (2.) it leaves a bad taste when a corporation one the one hand does this, and on the other hand bemoans how few women in "tech" (or any other sector) they're getting. Pushing off kids until the late 30s also has a different risk profile if it's your womb those kids might be coming out of.