The maternity and paternity policies outlined are really great at Google, and isn't it fantastic they Google show such desire to keep their team happy, ultimately makes them all the more successful.
I think even more radical thinking on employee benefits is required in general by most companies.
Taking my own personal case, I am a software dude as is my lovely wife. We now have 2 young babies, to look after.
I like what I do as does my wife, but we are definitely not willing to outsource our kids upbringing to some random childcare provider, so the only choice is, one of us must leave the workplace....now both of us are highly skilled and experienced ( seriously) and I guess maybe if the projects were planned in such a way that smaller contributions could be made to them, then there might be a way for me or my wife to continue with our profession! If you get my drift...
You are saying the 5 day 8.30-6 expected working availability is not a logical thing in the modern world for skilled jobs where goals are more important than presence?
I think for what I do that is true, 8:30 to 6, 9-5 etc is' old hat, its not how software Dev works IMHO...
Especially since its very much an intellectual endeavour.
Alot of time is spent thinking about things.
Also quantifying software development on the basis of time is also a broken paradigm, everyone is different.
What I am saying is that if tasks could be so well planned and decoupled, that anyone could pick them up and fulfill them, that would be the way to go, like a service bus, each task/unit has an associated monetary value.
The end goal is that if a business is operating at capacity but needs more they could push a component request onto to the service bus and have it fulfilled by whoever, whenever ( within reason).
So I could join this service bus and pop some task off and code it, a bit like a software mechanical turk...and get paid and get some good karma points!
I think even more radical thinking on employee benefits is required in general by most companies.
Taking my own personal case, I am a software dude as is my lovely wife. We now have 2 young babies, to look after.
I like what I do as does my wife, but we are definitely not willing to outsource our kids upbringing to some random childcare provider, so the only choice is, one of us must leave the workplace....now both of us are highly skilled and experienced ( seriously) and I guess maybe if the projects were planned in such a way that smaller contributions could be made to them, then there might be a way for me or my wife to continue with our profession! If you get my drift...