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Comment by MattRogish | Hacker News Reader

I was talking with a friend about this, that works at a big SV company that is known for high comp. Why don't they have a child care facility? Surely they can afford it!

His response was - paraphrasing - "What happens if someone quits, or is fired? In SV/SF, waits for child care facilities can easily take 6-12 months. If someone is terminated from our company, the last thing we want for them to do is have a crisis about where their children are going to go."

I believe they have a stipend, but I'm not sure about that.

Of course, I can't say if this is Apple's rationale, but it wouldn't surprise me if that had something to do with it.

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Seems like a bullshit excuse that's using the illusion of empathy (which is some extra infuriating bullshit). I'd much rather the option of on-site daycare and dealing with the fallout of leaving a job myself.

I'd rather not have my kids under the control of my company.

Then don't. Corporate childcare isn't mandatory... just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't incredibly valuable to other working parents.

I've considered employers I wouldn't have otherwise considered because the thought of on-site child care is incredibly appealing.

Child care is a competitive business that can almost always be provided better and cheaper elsewhere. So it's much better to use stipends to subsidize employee child care.

Having child care is also an expensive distraction and liability for management. Do you want to deal with employee complaints over childcare hours, personnel, facilities, etc, or do you want to spend your time thinking about how to better sell product and keep employee's employed? What happens when an employee accuses a child-care worker of hurting their child?

This is all a bunch of weird handwringing...

>Child care is a competitive business that can almost always be provided better and cheaper elsewhere. So it's much better to use stipends to subsidize employee child care.

Child care facilities aim for profit like any other business, and a corporate add-on doesn't need to seek profitability (and even if they did, assuming it's on-site the operational overhead is ultimately lower). So how exactly would outside facilities compete with that?

>Having child care is also an expensive distraction and liability for management

Having children is an expensive distraction whether or not your company is involved. If something happens at a remote daycare, your employee will leave the building to manage that. If there's a child-care gap that doesn't align with work schedules, your employee will take time off to deal with that.

>What happens when an employee accuses a child-care worker of hurting their child?

What happens when an employee accuses another employee of hurting them?

>or do you want to spend your time thinking about how to better sell product and keep employee's employed

I want to spend my time making a good product and making my employees lives easier so they can do their best work.

Making something non-profit doesn't make it efficient. If your business is child-care, it's your job to know the cheapest/best way to comply with regs, build child-care locations to meet market demands, hire child-care staff, enforce appropriate rules and procedures, etc, etc, etc.

Running a software company doesn't give you any of those skills. Someone specializing in the business of child-care should be able to wipe the floor with anything your software company puts up in it's spare time.

Children are a distraction, I know. But having the management of the company involved in making decisions about how your kids are being cared for is a distraction from their core duties. By definition they are going to be slightly worse at sales, marketing, development, etc because they have to spend time on childcare.

Having childcare only benefits a few employees for a few years of their lives. There is nothing wrong with having company childcare, I'm playing the devils advocate a bit here, but there is also nothing wrong with saying the outside world will be better at serving this need and just offering a stipend to help parents with the cost.

>Making something non-profit doesn't make it efficient. If your business is child-care, it's your job to know the cheapest/best way to comply with regs, build child-care locations to meet market demands, hire child-care staff, enforce appropriate rules and procedures, etc, etc, etc.

You hire someone for this

>Running a software company doesn't give you any of those skills. Someone specializing in the business of child-care should be able to wipe the floor with anything your software company puts up in it's spare time.

Same hire as above

>Children are a distraction, I know. But having the management of the company involved in making decisions about how your kids are being cared for is a distraction from their core duties. By definition they are going to be slightly worse at sales, marketing, development, etc because they have to spend time on childcare.

Seriously, hire like one person.

>Having childcare only benefits a few employees for a few years of their lives. There is nothing wrong with having company childcare, I'm playing the devils advocate a bit here, but there is also nothing wrong with saying the outside world will be better at serving this need and just offering a stipend to help parents with the cost.

I'm talking about companies with hundreds of employees in the same building... like Apple, who has built a massively enormous HQ without childcare. An issue that likely impacts dozens, if not hundreds, of their employees at this location.

I think you greatly over-estimate the ease of hiring someone to run child-care for your company.

Are they skilled at it? You don't know, their resume looked good to you, but your expertise is elsewhere.

Are their policies correct? Again, you don't know.

Are your liabilities reasonably covered? Who knows?

And you still have to manage that person on a day to day basis. You have to be able to fire them if they screw up, you have to know whats going on in their department.

You can educate yourself, but again you won't become an expert and that's time you could spend building your business.

Even for Apple, and Tim Cook, it's easier to rely on the competitive market to provide child-care. The best of all worlds would be to rent space to a child-care provider, and bid out the service to get the best child-care possible. There are still issues, such as you don't want the low bidder, and you have to do research to pick the best bidder. But at least you aren't running it day to day.

These are all problems involved with hiring anyone for any position... or even using any daycare. These aren't uniquely difficult problems for any reasonably large company, not to mention one of the most profitable companies in existence.

You're making a mountain out of a mole hill. Steve Jobs wanted to make this building "breathable" and paid to come up with a custom solution and your bemoaning the logistics of hiring competent child care providers.

This is a classic HN conversation, a bunch of people trying to reason about something off the top of their head from their own personal experience.

Childcare in businesses is a solved problem. Thousands of businesses do it, as do many government agencies. Here in DC there are in-business childcare centers at places like the Smithsonian, Holocaust Museum, FDA, World Bank, HHS, etc. Heck the public middle school in my neighborhood has an attached childcare center for the teachers' kids.

Patagonia, one of the most-admired businesses in the world, has a huge childcare center on campus, and encourages other businesses to do the same thing.

Whether or not to offer on-premise childcare is a choice every business can make for itself, but let's not pretend it's some risky idea that is hard to work out.

I agree entirely. It's really weird to pinpoint this as some complex logistical problem. Apple creates intentional supply chains that are large enough to impact international economies — as a 'problem' this is like a fart in the wind.

Of course it's completely up to a company to do this. my point, and likely OP's point is that it seems like a glaring omission from an otherwise feature-rich campus.

Same reason companies shouldn't provide healthcare. Macroeconomics is complicated.

Why can't there be onsite third-party childcare? The problem here is the concept of a surburban "company town" office, instead of having an office building integrated into the wider community.

If all companies had childcare that wouldn't be an issue...

In the case of firing, are they unable to take care of the child themselves at home?

I understand that on-site childcare wouldn't work for everyone, but it could work for some, and be a benefit to them.

Other companies DO provide it.

There's a on-site cafeteria, correct? Do they worry how people will get lunch if they quit/fired? Reservations in SV/SF can easily take 6-12 months. /s

> In the case of firing, are they unable to take care of the child themselves at home?

Yes, they are unable because that would hinder them from getting another job.

> I understand that on-site childcare wouldn't work for everyone, but it could work for some, and be a benefit to them. > Other companies DO provide it.

Whats the difference between a daycare at your work or at a separate daycare building?

> Whats the difference between a daycare at your work or at a separate daycare building?

Lower cost and fewer logistical issues I would imagine.

You've just removed a 10~45 minute round trip commute to that separate building. That's twice a day every day, and if the kid gets sick or injured.

That's a good point I didn't think of actually. Forgot about the extra commute time to/from the daycare.

> Yes, they are unable because that would hinder them from getting another job.

They, ultimately, have the responsibility to take care of their children, rather than always handing them off to a someone else - correct?

If these jobs are so incompatible with raising children, what's the point of trying to raise children? Does it now seem wise why they companies of these jobs could provide childcare for the benefit of these employees?

SV sounds like Hell on Earth.

If your child is not yet attending school, and you don't have a spouse/partner/grandparents to watch them during the day, then YES, that situation is quite literally incompatible with holding a job. That is in no way unique to Silicon Valley.

It sounds like really you're critiquing parents in general for sending kids to daycare.

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