A Brief Note:
Dear Creep:
You are one of the top five people at your studio. Your stay at home wife has a nanny come in twice a week so she (your wife) can do the shopping without schlepping your children. You yourself leave early at least twice a week so you can see your kids play soccer or dance, and sometimes you leave early just so you can pick them up from school as a surprise.
That’s lovely.
And if you ever again say your studio is a family friendly place to work, I am going to get in my car, drive through wind and rain and toll highways, and punch you right in the junk. I’m serious. You have employees who have quit because they didn’t make enough to pay for day care. You have other employees driving two hours, one way, so they can afford day care and a place to live. You offer no paternity leave, no flex time, and while you have telecommuting, anyone who takes you up on it winds up with nothing but scut work.
You haven’t granted vacation days in months. Anyone who isn’t a lead gets spoken to by their lead for their lack of dedication if they leave on time to fetch their kid from day care, let alone early for a special event. Your leads never have to be spoken to, because they don’t GET to be leads if they ever left early for a special event.
Hiring a clown for the company picnic is a wasted gesture. There’s already a clown sitting at your desk.
*
If you work for a family friendly company, post here with the things that make it friendly. But please note, if the benefits aren’t available for the rank and file, it doesn’t count.
What is it they say about sled dog teams? The only one with a view is the lead dog; the rest of the team gets to see assholes all day long.
Point is, perspective changes with position.
I’ve worked for Mom & Pop; I’ve worked for MegaCorp. Each can be just as bad as the other, for different reasons. You’re either the victim of nepotism or your accomplishments are marginalized. To Mom & Pop, “family friendly” is secret code that means “profits stay in the family”. To MegaCorp, “family friendly” means “stay with your family, you’re going no where here.”
To that end, I don’t believe I’ve worked for a “family friendly” company that falls within the idealized meaning.
I work for a top software company. We place in the top 100 best places to work year after year. We have zero-copay medical (even prescriptions) that’s completely free for single employees and quite reasonable for families. It varies from team to team, but telecommuting one day a week is not uncommon. We have the best implementation of flex-time I’ve seen … where some of us work 6am-3pm, some work from 11am-8pm and some work really weird hours like 8am-5pm. And you can choose daily based on your needs. I regularly work from home to wait for an expensive package. Everyone gets at least two weeks of vacation time to start (and the vast majority start at three) and this is the first company I’ve worked for where I’ve seen an employee basically forced to take a vacation because they were up to their use-it-or-lose-it limit. Take six weeks, buh-bye. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Sure, it’s a challenging work environment … but the benefits are truly hard to beat.
Earen, stop teasing and drop a name!
…and are they hiring?
Similar to Earen’s report, Google’s Benefits are very nice for families. Among other things for families:
- Maternity Benefits: Up to 18 weeks off at approximately 100% pay
- Parental Leave (for non-primary caregivers): Up to 7 weeks off at approximately 100% pay
- Take-Out Benefit: To help make things easier, new moms and dads are able to expense up to $500 for take-out meals during the first 3 months that they are home with their new baby.
As well as incredibly flexible working hours and vacation policies.
Earen is describing Microsoft.
I work for a small startup that feels very much like a dot-com (down to working in a downtown loft and most of the principals toting around Mac Powerbooks). Before I arrived, there were 7 people here. Now there are 13 (a large portion of which are folks from my team I brought with me from NCsoft when we were collectively let go).
Benefits generally are standard (PTO, flex time, etc), but since it’s such a small company, the ultimate benefit is the flexibility involved with that. The founders brought in a CEO from outside their social circle (yes, even with 13 people) which I think helps tremendously in the nepotism department.
And no one talks about their nannies.
The company I work at (Flying Lab Software) has been pretty good about all this stuff. They’re not to the level of Google, but we also aren’t raking in the Google level cash, so it’s understandable. Still, when my boss had his kid, he took two weeks plus a bit off, in the middle of a big crunch, and no one batted an eye. My sister got married 4 days before what was supposed to be our launch date (though that was eventually moved back), and I took a week off to attend the wedding and related festivities (authorized before the launch date was moved).
The big thing for us is humanity. If you want two weeks to go to Bermuda in the middle of a big push, it’s going to get denied. If you need two weeks to tend to a sick relative, you’re going to get it. Same thing for schedule flexibility and all that stuff.
A demonstrative anecdote: we have a big document full of policies and proceedures, all the normal stuff you would expect. Included in that document is our official attendance policy. Our unofficial policy, the one we’re actually expected to follow is, and I’m quoting the CEO here, “be an adult.”
I second the recommendation for Microsoft as a family-friendly employer. The healthcare benefits are surreally good, and my time is generally as flexible as I need it to be as long as my work goals are met.
Tomorrow, we’re having in-office trick or treating with employees’ kids wandering the halls in costume, knocking on offices for candy.
I work for Perot Systems as a Systems Specialist (sysadmin). In general the company is family friendly, but it greatly depends on what team you’re on and what kind of immediate leadership you have.
I started with about 3 weeks of vacation (had to be earned the first year), but I get to work from home once a week, and my management is very understanding if an emergency pops up or if I simply have to go pick up my kids in my wife’s stead.
The down side is, we really earn the down time. Our team sometimes has to work odd hours, work long hours for a week or more or work on the weekends. If it’s a really excessive effort (worked all night reloading a server, for example), then we often get a paid day off for compensation.
Today we’re having family trick or treating and a carnival. Basically at 3:30, everyone with their kids will be roaming the halls, looking for candy and then enjoying a pony ride, bounce house and cake walk until 5.
Just the nature of the work causes it to be a stress roller coaster, so we take advantage of down time as often as possible, and family comes first. Best company I’ve worked for in my 24 year IT career.
Near as I can tell, when a head clown is talking about his company he’s talking about his associates. This may not actually include everyone who reports directly to them.
Everyone else is a jerk they have to pay to implement their directives.
As a general rule (for most things) if someone has to tell you they are something, they almost certainly are not that thing.
Hmm,
The more I listen Sanya, the more I rule out the possability of ever working in the games field. You folks seriously need a union.
The one -really- stupid thing about companies with draconian policies, (i.e. not granting PTO) is that it erodes employee loyalty amazingly quickly. It really is in a companies best interest to allow for employees to actually have a life outside of work. (At least, companies that want to be around for more than a year) It’s one of the best ROI’s you can get.
The happy side of it is that the place will probably fold in due time.
So….how about those employment prospects?!
If you don’t like where you are, then look elsewhere. It’s as simple as that. The grass is always greener.
Companies are first and foremost about their own success. Consider yourself your own company, and do what’s best.
If your field demands more than you want to give, then it’s time for a literal paradigm shift for you.
Oh, this isn’t a gaming industry thing. There are plenty of companies in every field that know that the best way to get the best work from people is to recognize and plan for their lives outside the office, and plenty of companies that think they own you. I get annoyed and rant a bit when those in category two claim to be in category one, just because the most senior people wander off whenever they like. No, no, no.
Furthermore, everyone claims to be family friendly because they know that’s the right thing to do. That means the companies that punish people for having lives know they are doing something ethically wrong, and they feel like they need to hide it under a thin layer of token gestures.
The problem is everything within and from without is and should be about competition. So, how does a company tow the family friendly line and yet reward it’s hardest working employees in a fair, yet productive manner?
I think what you want is better accountability from top to bottom, perhaps? It’d be nice if that was the case, but it goes against human nature.
Hrm. I see what you’re saying, CR, but your mindset is exactly one of the issues – why are “hardest working” and “people with a family” mutually exclusive? The 22 year old who sleeps under his desk is not necessarily a harder worker. He’s more likely to screw off during the workday, because he figures he can stay longer. He will roll into work on Sunday, sure, but he’ll be as hungover as a gutter bum, and his work won’t be what it could be. And after six months of this horseshit, that 22 year old is a burned out husk doing very little work because he hasn’t taken a mental break since the day he started his job.
Having been both the 22 year old with no life and the 32 year old with obligations (but still no life, mind you), I can’t say as I necessarily accomplished that much more, despite being a wholly owned subsidiary of The Company.
It’s subjective, but not difficult to determine who is the more productive employee.
It’s about accomplishments. It’s about worth. A good programmer is worth 40 bad ones. See John Carmack.
The problem is certain fields, such as sales, have easily determined deliverables and a simple way to compare who is golden and who is the goose. Others do not. They have a lot of people working as a team dependent on organization and knowledge.
I’ve worked as a programmer and DBA for the past 16 years. When I was young I put in a metric ton of hours simply because there was so much I didn’t know. Older, more experienced people completed the same amount as I in 2/3 the time. This is as it should be. As the 22 year old you should be working your guts out. As a 32 year old, provided you are in the same field, you should be streamlined, wise, and understand how to budget your time. You should also have enough of a knowledge gap to do even more in your limited time.
The problem from my vantage point is when a group or person tries to look at things from an apples to apples comparison. For example in most of my shops there was the ‘guru’. He was a guy who knew more, and tended to get the difficult assignments. Unfortunately, this person was often not significantly better paid, and often was used and abused. He didn’t necessarily work more hours, he just knew his stuff.
This is the guy who makes the IT world go round, and is the hidden MVP. Since his success is wholly dependent on how he is represented by management, therein lies the crux of the problem.
People complain about family friendly and other things that are utterly meaningless, but most could careless that the true superstars tend to go ignored, unpromoted, and by the nature of their own talents mired in the same position while lesser talented, better marketed people take more pay and responsibility.
That to me is the real travesty.
“People complain about family friendly and other things that are utterly meaningless”
Meaningless to you. For the most part, meaningless to me as well, at this point in my life, but hopefully that will change one day. Certainly family friendly is extremely important to a large number of employees.
To address your point of the “unappreciated hero” yes, that happens. My experience, however, is that people who are really heroes for the company, who are really pulling two or three times their load, are well known to their management. Sure, some managers are short sighted and try to take credit for all that work, but managers who have been around the block even a little bit know that it’s always better to share the credit.
My experience has been: most of the people who feel that they’re under appreciated at work are either: suffering from a terrible direct supervisor (which happens, and is why middle management is actually a critically important job), or think they have a much greater value to the company than they actually do. I’ve seen a lot more of the second case than the first, though I suspect that is in large part because terrible supervisors rarely have heroes working for them for long, one way or another.
That said, you also have to stand up for yourself, at least a little bit. A great supervisor will sit down with you, at least occasionally, and ask you about what you want to do, and where you want to go. A great supervisor will do what she can to get you there, but, at the end of the day, you have to get there yourself.
Anecdote time: back in January my company started negotiations for our second project. It was clear that the lead designer for Pirates was not going to have the time to be the lead designer for this project as well. I made it known that I was interested in this project, that I wanted to be a lead designer, and that I wanted to be lead designer for this project. I went out of my way to find out about the project, and involve myself (in a limited way) in the earliest stages of the project. I ended up getting the lead designer position on the project. Would I have gotten that position without being proactive and getting involved early? Maybe, hell I’d say even probably, but because I went out and got involved early, I was the obvious, immediate choice.
I work for a local tax software company that was recently purchased by H&R Block.
Get vacation time and sick time upon being hired (40 hours each) along with floating holidays (another 20 hours or so) along with national holidays and the such. Comparable health benefits (we just switched to a better model – Bit more expensive but it covers a lot more).
Our work schedules are very relaxed outside of tax season. Need to leave? Get on outta here. Sick kid? Stay home for the day. Etc etc.
During tax season though, we are only alloted 3 vacation days scheduled a month in advance. Outside of that you can only call in sick for yourself. They are humane about things though, so if your wife is sick or family is sick, they’ll let you go.
We have quite a few parties and social gatherings here. Tax season kick off party, end of tax season party, thanksgiving, halloween, christmas and then random things throughout the year as well. This Halloween we had all the families and such go around to everyone’s desk and collect candy. Then we had a magic show afterwards with free snacks for everyone attending. The neat part about the candy… is that we have like 250 employees here. Our building is fairly easy to walk around so it took maybe an hour to bank some serious candy
I would say this is one of the more friendly companies to work for in Utah.