My 3 year old makes a lot of noise and is quite prone to tantrums. Some of my clients are also quite prone to tantrums. Combining the two seems like a recipe for disaster!
I get your concern but it's a non-issue here.
Edit: Thinking more about this.. If my team was deeply offended by this, I don't want to work there. My boys are important to me and if they're not willing to accept that, I'd rather find a new job than raise f-d up boys that don't feel loved.
- Says person with desirable skills in a hot job market who never changed jobs since graduating college
My desk has a number of puzzles and they have a ton of fun playing with it. Sometimes they draw on the whiteboard or write a quote.
A++, would definitely recommend bringing kids a couple of times a year.
Bonus points if you ever leave the webcam on while changing a diaper or breast feeding. :-D
If that is unprofessional, then so is working from home, I guess.
If that can't be arranged, you reschedule the call.
You do understand that sometimes the alternative to the kid sitting quietly in their parent's lap is the kid screaming their head off on the other side of the home office door, right?
Personally, I'll take the kid sitting in the parent's lap as being the lesser by far of two annoyances, thanks.
I am dodging meetings all day long...
Hmm.
...
The fact some people think like that is what dismays me with the corporate world, I'm glad I got out and I'm never going back. Thanks for reminding me.
Compared to my kid, all else is secondary. I realize that I may not always have the freedom to work with a kid-friendly employer, but it will be an overriding criteria in terms of my workplace/career choices. I'll happily negotiate on other terms, but my time and priority for my kid. And if an employer does not agree, it's their loss, not mine.
I guess it depends on the team/clients, but my kid comes first, 110% of the times. I don't care. I do good work, if a 5-10 minute interruption on a call because my kid wanted to say 'hi' to the people in the computer is enough to piss people off, I won't work with them.
I've had my infant on video calls and he mostly wanted to see all the people. And I've had to turn off my camera to change diapers before. But everyone's been cool with it. Clients seem to like seeing him.
On the flip side, I've been on calls with people whose toddlers were running around their home office screaming, and that's not cool.
What it comes down to is a trade-off. If you want me working on the off hours and working 50+ hours a week, or working on days I'd otherwise take as a sick day, I get to bring my kids to calls.
Once a kid knows how to behave appropriately in public, any exposure to their parents' jobs also teaches them how to behave appropriately at the workplace, and what to expect after leaving school. If you don't accept this at your own workplace, you are pushing that burden onto someone else's workplace, or accepting by default any cultural shift that may occur in future workplaces.
As I would not expose my own kids to a workplace environment that I did not find to be minimally acceptable, seeing kids around is to me a sign of a healthy work environment. Not seeing them is a red flag, but it could just be because your workplace does not allow visitors.
This is the same principle that causes me to lower my opinion of employers that do not hire people with zero experience. You are simultaneously pushing the burden of assimilation and training onto other people, stunting the development of the people you do hire--as they are denied mentorship and leadership opportunities--and passively accepting that you have a much reduced role in shaping the future of the industry.
With clients, I can definitely see it being a bigger problem.
Maybe this is just evidence that a lot of people I work with just aren't developers because they love development that much - they like it enough and it pays enough to get the things they want in the rest of their time and there's nothing wrong with that.
Probably not, but I usually don't mind. For that matter, the gloss of "professionalism" is highly overrated (I'll take empathy plus moral, ethical, and responsible conduct over "it's just business" type "professionalism" any day of the week).
Of course, it does depend on the behavior of the kid in question. I would expect a parent whose kid is disrupting the meeting to excuse themselves, or at least mute the mike on their end. That goes double for pets.
Frankly given the hours people work, I respect that they're taking time to be with their kids and trying to find some balance in between the insane hours we work.
