There is a team of 4 people. 2 have families, 2 don't. The ones that don't picked up the slack for the ones that did. Work quality was equal, but output was greater for the singles. The team has 2 slots for promotion. Do you ignore the fact that the single people put in more work or do you factor it in in the promotion decision?

Neither. The failure is with the team's manager. The team's leadership should have reduced the workload of the team.

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.

>> The team's leadership should have reduced the workload of the team.

This isn't always possible, especially given the target businesses that hang out here. This is just evading a tough question.

In my experience it is. One property of a good manager is that they have a good idea of how much their team can produce over unit time. Combined with experience on the teams ability to integrate with other projects at delivery time and repair defects that arise, gives them a good idea how much time something will take to get done, plus or minus a small delta.

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.

Then the leadership should plan around this, given covid has so far been an 8 month+ shitshow into the future. If leadership can't handle a chronic issue within the org then this is bad leadership.

Any management that isn't looking at the current situation and planning for another year of the same – or worse – probably needs to find a new role.

But we should never take "the target businesses that hang out here" as a "given".

If you aren't open to less working ours and less output, you will never get management's boot off your neck.

Yes it is. They should hire another person.

Thats nice and all for a big established company.

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

It's true of small companies too. If you don't manage well, there are negative consequences.

Is it possible that what's changed is the price of good leadership?

I've only worked for small companies. The one company that gave me a bad impression about how it treated its employees is the only one that ended up bankrupt.

Asking salaried employees to pick up slack to deliver to market to get revenue isnt treating employees badly though.

+1000 for this. If you're manager can't manage you're screwed.

By how much? 30 hours per week? 20 hours? 5 hours? GP didn't mention that the workload was bad, just than on average parents seems to get similar benefit for the lesser effort and hours than non parents. You just wrote this to evade saying anything negative.

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?

This reminds me of mandatory leave for male parents after childbirth. Women will stop producing because of childbirth, so let’s screw everybody over

>This reminds me of mandatory leave for male parents after childbirth.

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.

I am talking in regards to the business they work at, but you already know that.

As am I. Women are forever pulling ½ our load.

Assuming all 4 people want a promotion, there are only 2 slots. It doesn't take a genius to understand that there isn't a solution to fit all ;)

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.

> Assuming all 4 people want a promotion, there are only 2 slots. It doesn't take a genius to understand that there isn't a solution to fit all

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

You should realize that the trolley was never a trolley.

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.

You're wrong that success comes from the individuals always and never the team dynamic. This is a very common mistake I have seen a lot.

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.

There is of course trade off for having family as well as being single. One of the trade off of having family may involve lower chance to be promoted. Those who choose to have family can't expect to have the cake and eat it too.

If I were managing that team, I would consider a one-time bonus to the single employees going above and beyond, and award promotions based on more long-term factors. I don't think stepping up to the plate during a crisis necessarily makes you promotion worthy. If anything, I think many parents display better management skills.

I am 45 and childless for what it's worth.

I've been in both groups at different times. Before kids you can throw time at a problem, it's great. After kids you have to get smart.

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.

The former. You promote objectively rather than subjectively.

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.

This is a pretty easy question to answer. You focus on the things that you'd get promoted for with that specific company (output maybe, leadership skills, etc.).

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.

Failure seems to be on management for not allowing the people with families to flex their work schedule and work outside of normal hours. Or is this a specific example where the individuals are not able to perform their duties outside a specific window?

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.

How do you (legally) differentiate between people who put in less work because of their children and those who put in less work because they underperform?

Communication. Talk to your teammates, its usually pretty obvious if someone is bullshitting you.

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.

I know how performance is judged, functionally speaking. I am suggesting that the specific expectations that would be communicated in that context are straddling the boundaries of what is legal in some places.

Interesting, good point. I read your comment as suggesting a company with strict published policies around kids, benefits, work requirements, etc.

Didn't consider the case where individual conversations might run afoul of the law.

It is legal and normal to discriminate on the basis on how much work you do. I think you can even legally discriminate on whether someone is a parent - protected classes are Age, Race, National Origin, Religious Beliefs, Gender, Disability, Pregnancy and Veteran Status.

You are correct, under federal law, and for non-government jobs.

But, states and localities often add protected classes beyond federal requirements. As has the executive branch of the US government for federal jobs.

For promotion? You promote the person that is filling the higher role.

For bonus? Sure, hand out some extra money to the hard workers.

Can't speak for everyone but for the way I handle promotions it's pretty simple: Impact is what matters.

Found the facebooker who drinks the Kool-Aid.

In this scenario, is there a way to handle the promotions such that no one is upset? I can't think of one. Maybe put them on different tracks -- those who took "parental flexibility" can get promoted, but it occurs later, and the money saved from that deferred promotion gets given to the singles who put in extra time/effort? Not sure, just brainstorming.

Now you're in what is probably textbook discrimination territory.

Caregivers are not covered under federal law, but apparently they are under some state and city law.

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?

>“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.”

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.

There is a lot of cognitive dissonance in this post. This whole conversation is about mega corps giving a shit, and accommodating people who are having increased difficulty during COVID. You can't get mad that they are caring, and then in the same breath say they don't care.

Having childless people pick up the slack for no extra pay isn't caring.

And even that level of "caring" is not going to last.

Employees are not neighbors. Employees are responsible for negotiating their compensation (both monetary and non-monetary). It is absolutely appropriate to use information about others' compensation when negotiating for your own compensation.

At the same time it's kind of hard for me to be sympathetic. Their bowls aren't empty: they kept their cushy, white-collar, benefit-rich jobs while tens of millions became suddenly unemployed.

And that comparison can keep on going once you start bringing in folks from other parts of the world. A poor person in America is still well beyond the quality of life of a well off person in some villages.

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.

I generally agree with that sentiment, but I'm not sure it's persuasive when expressed by somebody who will never have to worry about his bowl being empty (e.g. a successful celebrity like Louis C.K.)