Love him or hate him Louis C.K. has a great quote here
“The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them.”
Times are tough, don't blame the parents for what they have to do, blame your management if they haven't adjusted team goals/metrics to take into account the new normal.
But how far do you take this? Is not getting a promotion penalization if your coworkers are more likely to be able to participate in work that garners praise?
It starts at the top. I work at a (non-tech) Fortune 50 and the message from the CEO on down has been the same: take vacation, take care of your family, some priorities/projects for this year will not be met and that is fine.
This isn't always possible, especially given the target businesses that hang out here. This is just evading a tough question.
If you aren't open to less working ours and less output, you will never get management's boot off your neck.
Bad managers just say "You bet!" when given an unreasonable timeline (more work than can be done) and then push their workers too hard and blame them when upper management asks why the project is late. It is an all too common management pattern.
When engineers talk about "How hard is management really? You just tell everyone else what to do and yell at them to get it done." they miss that one of the things you do as a manager is tell your boss, "Nope, can't do that without either additional people or additional time." Sometimes it is always time because not all projects can be broken up into parallel efforts. That conversation can be hard unless you've built up the level of trust and understanding with your manager so that they respect your time estimates and requests.
Often times your first few encounters along this line you have to keep "parallel books" where you note what you thought it would take and you look at what it actually took, and what was asked. Bringing that information together in a 1:1 setting can help educate your manager that a) you know what you are doing and b) they should trust your judgement.
A pretty dang important thing. For my 5 sons, I did the vast bulk of changing diapers, feeding, cleaning & the rest of it.
>Women will stop producing because of childbirth, so let’s screw everybody over
Women don't stop producing. Day to day, they're more likely to out-produce the men in their lives. Anyone who's in their shadow and somehow feeling screwed-over is in deep need of a perspective adjustment.
Smaller companies dont have this luxury, because execution is everything.
The issue overall shouldnt be with extra workload, but with rewards. People without kids shouldnt be angry at having to pick up the slack, thats normal part of any business, but they def have the right to be angry at the management if they dont get rewarded for it
Is it possible that what's changed is the price of good leadership?
The clear question is should the expectations be reduced for parents for similar promotion or not? And if your answer is yes, then by how much?
I am 45 and childless for what it's worth.
Decent managers already know who their over- and under-performers are. Using "time at work" as a proxy for performance generally doesn't work well in general.
Didn't consider the case where individual conversations might run afoul of the law.
But, states and localities often add protected classes beyond federal requirements. As has the executive branch of the US government for federal jobs.
The job of the manager is precisely to get them to swallow the pill. Classic excuse "We didn't get enough promotion slots this year, we will get more next year".
More importantly the initial assumption is wrong, not everybody care about promotion. Some employees expect to be promoted or want to climb up the corporate ladders, some don't. If you can figure those with little aspiration and those with long teeth, that's a good way to direct promotions and maintain a team for longer.
Second thing is to figure out who's likely to leave looking for a promotion elsewhere (both willing and capable to get a job at the next level). A promotion with a 5-10% raise is the best way to make them feel valued and forget about looking elsewhere (even though they could get 30-50% by switching companies).
Last but not least, who's strategic for the team and yourself as the manager? Some people may have rare skills hard to replace, some people may have knowledge of the legacy systems and company internals, some people are just dead weight, some are on really important projects that you need done, others are not. Any combination thereof. Estimate whom to keep in priority.
That's the point: which two are promoted? The ones that did more work or the ones that did less work?
> More importantly the initial assumption is wrong, not everybody care about promotion.
"Let me take your hypothetical situation and inject a bunch of fantasy to solve it". That's basically "I just cast a magic spell at the trolley so I don't need to decide. Check Mate
I don't know you but I will take a guess that you're young and on the initial ramp up in your career? HN is certainly filled with high competent high achievers.
That's not the case for everybody though. Many employees are happy to chug along and get a regular paycheck, doing work but preferably not too much work.
Either way, careers will slow down significantly after a decade (if you go up aggressively enough), you're senior and paid relatively well, there is no easy path up anymore. You don't mind much whether you will get this year's award and 5% raise that comes with it, that's no factor in deciding what to do of your life and where to work.
Even single people have to do with issues or projects or you name it outside of work. A workplace should only evaluate on the job performance. If it doesn't, then you can't do any actual fair evaluations. Maybe you spend too much time with your kids, maybe the single person spends too much time getting ready to ski in the Olympics or is tired all the time from being out late and partying?
If you take this to it's somewhat logical conclusion, you could have have 10 kids and say you don't have time to do a lot of work and then get a paycheck.
This seems pretty straightforward to me.
A parent brings different things to the table than a non-parent. Especially for managers, being a parent is like being thrown in the deep end of an intensive empathy building program and that experience makes good managers.
Parents may just need to adjust their own expectations/career trajectories and consider 2020 a "lost year" of sorts. There's always 2021 and beyond to make up for lost time once things are back to normal. Competing against those without families feels like an unwinnable war.
You can't measure the amount that the 2 "slackers" are influencing decisions by talking to the 2 putting in more hours at a keyboard. A side conversation nobody bothered to document with could save weeks worth of work. Sometimes the ones who put in more hours contributed less. You may not be able to measure that.
I'll come right out and say it: Fixed number of seats promotion budgets and performance reviews based on individual achievement are usually bullshit. The entire game is false. Unfortunately it's religion for many people.
As the parent article was specifically about Tech firms, I find the likelyhood of a position with rigidly fixed hours low.
Anecdotal, I know, but I work in the tech field, and am a parent of two small children. Luckily, I've been given the ability to flex schedule, and often work two or three hours "after-hours" if I needed to go afk to parent during normal "office hours". I'm rather confident that my productivity has not dropped by any measurable margin since my flex scheduling has started, and has probably increased, since I more often take on late-night deployments or maintenance tasks since it allows me to trade hours for day-time parenting.
Now I'm sure there are people who are taking advantage of the system, or perhaps are unable to flex or work after hours and may be unable to shoulder their full workload, but I think that group is being blown out of proportions.
For bonus? Sure, hand out some extra money to the hard workers.
So then pay me 40% more and tell the parents not to look at my bowl.
That's hypothetical because I have a small kid myself. But that quote is sucker talk. Demand that you are compensated for the value you provide because none of these mega corps give a shit about you. They will fire you the moment that it becomes profitable for them to do so.
And even that level of "caring" is not going to last.
It's kind of fucked up to say a struggling person doesn't deserve your sympathy just because their suck isn't the same shade as the other person's suck.