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Comment by nigelk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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is it available to all employees and do they all get on a single waitlist or do executives get a preference.

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.

> 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

as did the Google recruiters and HR people I spoke to before accepting the job :)

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.

we pay 2k/month here in chicago, so that number kind of makes sense to me.

I'll bet many people were willing to pay that if executives and managers had there kids there. Daycare can provide unique kinds of networking and job-security/promotion options.

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