Paul Buchheit

"Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000. At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company’s plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company’s T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — to plead their case, and conducted surveys showing that most parents with children in Google day care would have to leave Google’s facilities and find less expensive child care." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

Strangely written -- hard to believe this is in the NYT: "Faced with this dilemma, Google decided that the way to solve the dual problems of a too-long wait list and a too-large subsidy was — are you sitting down for this? — to get rid of C.C.L.C. and make the Kinderplex more like the Woods!" - Paul Buchheit

wow. - edythe

Sergey Brin comes off as a real gem. Looks like 'don't be evil' is morphing to 'let them eat cake'. Amazing what a 40%+ drop in share price can do. - Peter Simard

I found it odd that NYT quoted Sergey multiple times but each quote was disputed by Google PR after the fact. Seems like their PR folks are trying to do some "damage control"? - Alex Barbara

$57,000 just for someone to watch your kid? Remind me to not have kids for a while.. - Alex Barbara

Slowly but surely the shine will finally come off of Google and reality will set in. - AJ Kohn

The sense of "entitlement" is pretty stunning to an outsider who is an occasional visitor. It's pretty obvious (to me) that the "gimme" attitude is going to be an albatross around Google's neck when the time comes that their stock price returns from the stratosphere and settles around something reasonable and in line with the true value of the company. - Jason Wehmhoener

Geez. I don't know one solution that didn't generate new problems as a result of its having solved an old problem. Can't win no matter what in the eyes of the media. Also, this is news-worthy enough to be in the Times? - Ginger Makela

I have no thoughts on the day care issue in and of itself but people changing "don't be evil" into "do no evil" makes me grind my teeth. http://www.google.com/search?q... - Erica Baker

@Paul, agreed -- it's a strangely written story. The writer's bias is clear. Using heresay from employees then vaguely referring to the official statements. - Sprague D

$57,000 was for two kids... and after the price reductions, it won't be that expensive. - Michael Leggett

The author feels that employee-provided day care should be a requirement just like health insurance (not sure I agree), but fails to applaud Google's effort to make it available to those that want it. A 700-child waiting list (over 2 years) is unreasonable as is Google paying a $37,000 subsidy per child. I love working at Google... and I want them to stay around. Paying that large a subsidy is irresponsible to its employees and its shareholders. - Michael Leggett

You could argue that they should just lower costs then... but the main cost is the teachers (as it should be). Google believes teachers should be paid more and I'm proud that they are putting their money where their heart is by doing just that. If you don't want to pay so much, you can always find day care else where, right? Am I missing something? - Michael Leggett

When I visited HP I noted that they don't have the coffee carts anymore that they used to have. The employees noted that other benefits had gone away too. When the high profitability phase of a company ends, the benefits usually go away. At Microsoft they tried taking away things too, like towels in locker rooms, and the employees rebelled. - Robert Scoble

wonder what is average daycare costs there, in area? - silpol

It's absolutely incredible that day care would cost more than the mean national income ($48,201 according to Wikipedia). I understand that this is Silicon Valley, and therefore not applicable to the rules of the rest of the country, but still...it's astounding. - Bradley McSpinn

We were paying $21,000 a year for two kids and that was top of the line in Charlotte. In theory I like the idea of company sponsored childcare but in reality I don't want my employer to have any influence over my kids. - Lori Reed

I posted this to reddit and got on the front page :P - Bjorn Tipling

probably I have to stop bitching about local tax - I pay monthly for not-full-day at kindergarten in about 100 meter from my house about 130 EUR, for full day it might reach 200 EUR/month max, i.e. annually 2400 EUR (~3600 USD)... hmmmmmmm - silpol

"Google can’t just have low teacher-child ratios — it has to have the lowest of anybody." - Shouldn't it be high teacher-child ratios? Unless they want more children to less teachers. - nadim

I had a hard time believing this was a NY Times article when I first saw it. Talks about child care at the beginning, then references a blog post talking about how Google is not a good place to work and then goes on to detail the child care issue. - Turker Keskinpala

@Michael -- $57G's .. not expensive? ... I don't even make that much in 2 years anymore .. - Steven Hodson

"If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to “scale” day care for everybody no matter what their salaries." - Gabe

Even $33k for 2 kids seems like a lot -- at $16/hr it seems like you could just hire a babysitter for 8 hours a day to watch your two children. For $57k you could just hire a child psychologist full time. - Gabe

@Steven I didn't mean it wasn't expensive. It is expensive. I meant it won't be as much as $57k. Maybe I'm not being fair... but I thought the article was bias (not invalid). It does raise some interesting issues... are companies responsible for providing child care? Something seems backwards with how we live when we work so much that we expect our employer to take care of our children. I don't know the answer... but good things to think about. - Michael Leggett

This same guy also wrote the weird 'open letter to Jerry Yang' the other week: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06... - j1m

So basically by having my wife stay home and do a superb job of taking care of the kids and the house during the day she is worth about $90,000 a year. Thank you babe! You are awesome! - Christian Burns

But what about people who don't have kids, should Google pay them because they are saving the company money? And what about those people who want to have kids, but can't meet the right person, should Google pay for dating services? Google is an awesome place to work, and sometimes they go overboard. Witness the swimming in place pools with lifeguards that almost nobody used. Let's agree to compare them with other companies. It's only fair. - Chris White

hmmm... let's see, four years ago, i was making $45 000 a year before i quit to take care of my daughter full time while my wife continued her job; because it made more sense than spending my entire salary on a nanny just so i could go to work. plus i get to hang out with my kid(soon to be kids) all day and do cool stuff like help them learn the alphabet, count, play their first casual computer games, go to the park, swim, museums, etc. there's always that option. - Nailed Jello

It seems like everyone has ideas on how to do this at a lower cost than Google. Maybe someone should open a competing "google" daycare near the Google campus -- from the sounds of it there would be hundreds of eager customers. - Paul Buchheit

I'm interested to see if these kids actually turn out to be uber-smart. How many of the Googlers went to intense, research-driven, daycares like these?We'll see in ten to twenty years, but at times, one has to wonder how people ever became intelligent without having the latest and greatest learning craze forced down their throat. A better indicator of their intelligence will most likely be how much learning is re-inforced (deep breath here) at home by their parents, instead of video games and TV. - David Adewumi

I was raised on TV and video games, and I'm very happy with the way I turned out. - Amit Patel