"As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home - we balance the needs of the employee and the company."
sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her's not.
Contrary to popular belief, kids are not some tamagotchi pet that needs constant attention and helicoptering after they're babies. You can perfectly be a good parent and raise independent well minded kids without needing two parents always present every moment of every weekend.
And this is a good enough reason to expect people to work on the weekend? Kids are not some tamagotchi pet that exists as it is for a long time... kids are constantly growing and if you blink, you miss it. Some people would rather spend their weekends with their kids for purposes other than just keeping them alive.
I'm not advocating we work full weekends, but I'm not sure why I would not have a few hours for myself and do things that don't involve my kids. Some weekend's it would be work but other weekend's it might be something else, but it surely doesn't have to be 24/2 just kids kids?
Of course if you blink you miss them, it's not like you're in a cave across the world, you're probably literally in the next room staring at a screen for a couple hours after a heavy lunch while the kids play on their ps5. How's that weird.
It definitely does not! And clearly we are different people! I would love nothing more than to grab a drink with you sometime and learn from each other though!
No, but until they're mid-teens, they do need one parent most of the time. If one of them is working weekends a lot, then that assumes the other one is available to parent.
Sounds exorbitant tbh. After they're seven or eight it's not clear why they need constant direct supervision (as opposed to being in another room minding ones business). What are we afraid of?
Also why doesn't balance mean "now you've earned an extra hour or two mid-day for yoga, 0 judgement"? I call it the "retail-worker mentality" when I point it out in friends. It isn't meant to deride retail workers, but to draw attention to the inhumane people and conditions they live under. The conditions aren't justified at low pay nor high pay, and people need an impolite analogy to have this simple but life-changing epiphany. Just look at the deathbed surveys of happiness and regrets.
If I do good work for a rich, high-margin company, I'm going to act like it (towards the employer) and reap the rewards. Because if I don't, someone is, and they're up the chain, so let's pull those rewards back down a bit and reclaim our humanity, ok? This isn't entitlement, this is taking the rewards I've had a hand in building rather than leaving them on the table and saying "thank you for letting me leave these extra 20% of rewards to you".
Separate from this, I might vehemently advocate politically for reversing the upwards redistribution of wealth to the tech elites (me), and that's not hypocritical. Hoping for Richard Stallman-level principaledness among the professional working public isn't the answer to political and social problems such as this, so let's not armchair and claim that working half your Saturdays moves the needle towards wealth fairness better than saying no and going home and taking the paycheck. Inconsistencies can coexist without resolution, and most of life is exactly that. If you can't live with it, then the answer is to quit, not routinely work Saturdays.
The company's budget has room for more staff if it's truly needed (it's not); my life budget of personal hours does not have room for more work, nor should it if my employer is among the wealthiest in human history.
Germany's auto-workers union negotiated a 28-hour workweek. Like them, we shouldn't be ashamed to rebalance our lives towards leisure, personal hobbies, personal relationships, etc, now that technology is so productive. In general, why is it wrong to favor broader participation in the fruits of human effort? I'll do my part by going home and taking the paycheck. Now I have more time and financial security to spread my politics if I want.
Elon Musk is right that companies and communities are fully and precisely the human-machine cyborgs of fiction, just at a different scale. Can that apparatus rebalance towards leisure etc? I think yes, so I'm taking my paycheck and going home early. It's not entitlement, it's living my valid and reasonable politics.
If this post seems off topic, then maybe you haven't thought all the way through what "sure, I can give you more hours of my life" means when you offer it to an employer. We might disagree on some or many points, but all of this post is directly relevant to that negotiation of hours.
> Also why doesn't balance mean "now you've earned an extra hour or two mid-day for yoga, 0 judgement"? I call it the "retail-worker mentality" when I point it out in friends.
A 28 hour workweek is fine if consistently applied. The daily 11am absence however, is likely treated with disdain because:
- doing mid-day yoga while I'm attending daily release engineering meetings to accommodate someone else's schedule slip is grating
- for some reason mid-day workouts are okay but leaving the office at 4pm isn't
Both of which is why it strikes many as slacking off.
That implies then that there will indeed be weekends where your boss expects you to work, your spouse is working, you cannot, and therefore you “fail”.
sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her's not.
Here, fixed for you.