Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/17/jobs-legacy.html
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But tell us what you really think, Cory. 
Welcome to Vancouver, BTW!
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No day care? Color me surprised. I’d figure they’d want to initiate and indoctrinate the young as soon as possible.
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I work for a large financial services firm. We have one campus that has 3 large scale buildings, each has a gym. There are softball fields, basketball courts, and volleyball courts in between. There are walking trails all through out a very spacious wooded campus. We have a health clinic and pharmacy. We have a Starbucks cafe in the largest building. We have mother’s rooms and yoga facilities.
There is no daycare.
There are two reasons for this. First…insurance & liability. Simply put they didn’t want to cover the additional binders and waivers for this to be on campus. Second…and I think this one is a damn good reason…They expressly stated that for there to be work/life balance associates need to LEAVE! When you come to work…work. Leave work at a reasonable time and go home to your family.
Honestly…this isn’t a big deal.
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Sounds about right.
But it would be handy.
The argument could be made that if you want coffee or softball you should leave too.
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So, why the fuck do you have the rest of this shit?
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My work has child care and a gym. I have kids in child care and I use a gym, but I do not use the ones that my job offers. First off, there are cheaper and (in my opinion) better options. Don’t think for a second that if Apple provided day care that it would be cheap for employees. And in spite of that, it would have a waiting list so long you’d be lucky to get in and if you did the cost would be outrageous. Supply and demand folks. Same with the gym. I bet they happily take $100 out of each paycheck every two weeks for that state of the art facility. And even if I didn’t care about price, I’d still go somewhere else. The thought of coming to work with my kids, feeling like I need to check on them, and working out here sounds a bit like a prison. I enjoy being somewhere else where I’m not reminded of work when I work out (and don’t see coworkers). I also enjoy having our daycare close to home (not work). It feels separate. Sure, convenience is great, and I get that’s what some people want, but not having it does not make Apple a bad company. Their crappy overpriced phones do. HA, couldn’t resist.
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It doesn’t work that way bro. People with kids, even if they aren’t pulling overtime, still leave work at the same time everybody else does; that is to say, they leave work after their children finish school for the day.
Or, if their children are too young for school, they end up using daycare somewhere else in the city: this is expensive, and very, very time consuming to add upwards of an hour to their commute, which already could be an hour or more one way.
It makes no sense to ask employees to tack on that kind of stress when a daycare is relatively cheap to run, especially compared to costs saved with employee retention and stress reduction.
And insurance? C’mon, it’s not that harsh a deal for the company.
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Yep, I think Cory nailed it. Younger workers will “put in the hours” - however useless that incremental effort truly is - which just keeps the bad culture rolling forward.
Idiots.
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If, of all companies, Apple can’t afford that…
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Perhaps not a big deal for you because you’re not a woman with children?
Empirically, the case study of Patagonia seems to suggest that it is a big deal for at least some women.
Logically, we know that if maternity leave is 3 months, then 3 months after giving birth a woman who wants to keep working at her job will need childcare, and will continue to need it for about 5 years.
At that point, the child should start school and then the mother will only need childcare 3PM - 6PM every weekday, and possibly in the morning depending on her commute. Except during the summer, during which time the mother will need full-time childcare again. Oh, there are also several school vacations that are not automatically granted to employees at private companies as holidays. There are also infrequent half days, usually corresponding to teacher professional development seminars. The child may also need to occasionally stay out of school due to illness, etc.
So uh, it could be anywhere from “not a big deal” to “a very big deal indeed” depending on how badly the woman needs the job, how active the father is in caring for the children, whether the father lives with the family, the family’s commutes, and probably a few dozen other factors as well.
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You don’t become the most profitable company in the world by spending a bunch of money when you can avoid it.
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Because it is far easier to run to the gym or a quick Dr appointment in the middle of the day here on campus then to have to leave to go elsewhere for it.
We have associate run leagues and pick up games and it isn’t possible to use community locations for this since they are across town or ya know…being used by the community youth.
I have 3 kids, and I survived sending them to a local day care near my home, when I commuted. Our company has great remote work options and flexibility for associates who would rather not commute or have the need to stay close to home.
Not sure why you have such a condescending attitude about this.
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It’s a commuting problem, which in turn limits where your onsite workforce can live and still get to the office, limiting your potential pool of employees.
With a 15 minute or less commute, it’s no big deal.
With a 45 minute or more commute, it’s a huge hassle.
Somewhere around 30 minutes is the breaking point.
With a daycare near home, you’re contracting daycare for the entire work day plus the commute time, plus any traffic impacts or unplanned traffic impacts. So, 10 hours of daycare for an 8 hour office day is pretty normal.
And you bet you’re sticking to that 8 hour clock, daycare charges a buck a minute when you’re late. Double bonus, it’s a contracted start and end time that are 10 hours apart. Drop off 30 minutes late and that time is gone the pick up doesn’t change at all.
Put a daycare in the office and boom, the commute time is immediately eliminated, or can become working time instead.
Unless you’re playing in lunch time leagues, they’re all useless for after work leagues for anyone with kids in daycare. Leave work, commute home, get kids, commute back, hope the league is still going and started enough after work to allow for the round trip. Daycare at the office, pick up kid and bring to the after work league.
That’s just an excuse. Create some space, lease it out to a daycare company. You’re just the landlord. They’ll handle all the other stuff. Exactly the same way then handle it when they rent space from someone else for any facility.
See above, that eliminates the need for all those facilities supporting after work leagues of any type.
If you want employees to socialize after hours and become part of a team, having local daycare facilities directly helps to include the population that has kids. Otherwise, those employees are excluded from all those events automatically.
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As a working parent with a 16, 13, and 9 yr old. I know exactly how it works. But thank you for educating me on what MY life has been for the last 16 years at my place of employment.
Somehow I am not shocked that this story about the initial lack of a dedicated day-care facility at an unopened company headquarters was ‘cleverly’ twisted to attack Steve Jobs’ abilities as a father and Apple’s use of offshore bank accounts. Because, sure, why the hell not, really.
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It is basically the last product he had his hand in.
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Why should Apple think different from any other Silicon Valley firm in terms of its priorities? They can certainly afford a daycare centre, but allowing it would introduce an element of home life that’s at odds with the industry’s attitude that the office is the central reason for an employee’s existence. Pharmacies, clinics cafeterias, gyms, etc. are designed to keep (preferably young male) employees on campus and so they’ll get back to work or bond with team members.
They’d sooner allow a dog to come to the office on a daily basis than they would an employee’s child, because unlike a dog a child can speak and requires the employee to talk about and consider matters outside the corporate mission.
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I was talking to a friend who has onsite childcare and these excuses don’t pass the smell test to me.
All of the other things mentioned require insurance and liability.
This argument really confuses me. If childcare ends at 5:30pm, then everyone has to pick up their kids and go home. If you have offsite or at-home childcare and some work deadline you can try and negotiate to work late. If onsite daycare closes then you have you no option to work late. This was something my friend said was very freeing about having daycare at work.
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