an unfair credit for child care expenses, telling our director she’s not invited to a meeting, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Is a credit for child care expenses fair to employees without kids?

Recently a viral video and announcement has gone around of a company offering credits up to $3,000 a month for child care expenses. This is fantastic! However, as a child-free person I’m concerned about a benefit worth tens of thousands of dollars a year only being offered to a segment of employees who have young children. When point this out, am I the bad guy? How can a workplace support all their employees?

I don’t think you’re the bad guy. I do think, though, that child care expenses are in a different category than nearly anything else — this country does a terrible job of supporting parents with young children, there is very little safety net available, and daycare costs are exorbitant. There’s little else a company could offer that would meet a pressing need on the same scale … and it’s a need that, if it’s not met, is far more likely to drive women out of the workforce than men.

You could definitely argue that if they’re going to offer it, they should also offer a similar dependent care reimbursement for employees caring for sick or elderly family members … but I can’t fault them for seeing a very pressing and significant need and responding specifically to that.

That said, I’d hope that any company that’s doing this for parents has also ensured they’re offering really good health insurance to everyone and is flexible when people need time off for reasons other than young kids.

2. Interview question: “what does ChatGPT know about you?”

I just saw something post that a “great” interview question a potential employer should ask is this (paraphrased): “Go to ChatGPT or another AI you’ve interacted with and ask it to summarize what it knows about you from your conversations.”

Bananapants, right? I don’t have work-related conversations with AI, so I don’t see how that would be relevant. This smacks of an interviewer trying to trick a potential hire into disclosing information like their sexuality, family status, religion, and the like. No decent company should endorse this technique, and I’d run like my tampon string was on fire if anyone asked me this, whether or not I even chat with AI!

Agreed. Moreover, lots of people don’t have conversations with ChatGPT or similar AI’s, or don’t log in when they do (so nothing is saved). This is just bad thinking.

3. How to tell our director she’s not invited to a meeting

I work on a team with five other coworkers, and we all work remotely and in a global capacity (some in the U.S. and some in Europe). We have a weekly team meeting that has recently gotten out of hand attendance-wise. Our department director, who manages several teams (including ours) has forwarded the invite so many times the meeting now has 15+ people on it. A few of my colleagues expressed a desire to have a very informal, small group meeting every week with just our team so we can catch up on our weekends, ask questions in a casual way, and just generally team build together. Our director found out about this meeting and now not only demanded we forward the invite to her, but is asking us to move the time to fit her schedule. Is there a way to nicely say her seniority changes the vibe of the meeting?

“We’d planned this just for X staff — the idea was to serve a different purpose than a larger meeting or one with senior managers.”

If she asks what that different purpose is, you could say, “It’s part connection-building, part informal updates and mutual help. We wanted to keep it very casual so we could maintain that vibe.”

If she insists on being there anyway, you may need to let the meeting die off and then reconstitute it in a different, more casual (and perhaps more impromptu) form.

4. Why is it taking so long to get rejections?

This morning I learned that, after careful consideration and with utmost respect for my impressive credentials, a potential employer would not be moving forward with my application.

I submitted that application on January 5. I am writing this four months and two days after I submitted that application. And this is not totally out of the ballpark for response times since I started trying to transition from freelance to full-time a whole damn year ago.

I’m not sure how to phrase this question except: “What the actual fuuuuungible tokens is going on here?”

It can’t possibly be taking this long for all hiring decisions to be made, can it? Is this the “new normal”? And if so, how are employers okay with leaving roles empty for so long?! And if not…WHAT is WRONG with me?

This doesn’t strike me as that weird (or new)! A lot of employers don’t send out rejections until they’ve made a hire for the job (as opposed to rejecting people on a rolling basis as they go), and four month from advertising to hire isn’t pretty solidly within the range of normal.

Sometimes you hear about someone getting a rejection a year or more after applying for a job, and that is ridiculous, but four months isn’t. It accounts for time for applications to come in, time reviewing those applications, deciding who to move forward, doing initial screens, doing a couple of rounds of interviews, checking references, extending a negotiating an offer, and waiting for the offer be accepted. Four months is actually pretty decent for a lot of professional jobs.

Related:
how long should it take to hear back after you apply for a job?

5. Can I say no to a new job duty?

I work in the hospitality industry. My official title is general assistance. My main work is supposed to be in the kitchens. It’s mainly to help assist the chefs. However, lately we are being made to spend less and less time doing that and we are being required to spend more time collecting coffee cups from other parts of the building, on top of our normal jobs of assisting the chefs. It’s not something I enjoy doing. Do I have the right to refuse a job that’s not really have anything to do my official role?

Legally? No. They can add new duties to your job, and can make doing those new duties a condition of remaining employed with them. That said, you and your coworkers might be able to push back if you can show that it’s negatively affecting your primary duties (like if you’re not available for your main job when needed). Or if you have a lot of capital and know they don’t want to lose you over it, sometimes you can simply explain that it’s not work you’re interested in doing. But when it’s something like collecting cups from other parts of the building and your job is “general assistance,” you probably don’t have a lot of leverage, I’m sorry to say.

Related:
how to say no to things at work

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