Tim Knowles
2 min readNov 30, 2019

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Your story has me giving my feelings on this issue a second look.

My first impulse is to say that if you want to excel at work, don’t have kids, you can't have it all. I also think too many people have too many kids.

Your story makes me more sympathetic. What can we do, let you work from home, ok. Give everyone more time off, sure. Force people who don’t need or want more time off to stay away from work, I don’t think so.

Single parents or even partnered parents are always going to be at a disadvantage compared to the childless or those who’s children have grown.

The ability to travel, work long hours or odd shifts or even just network after hours makes an employee more effective and valuable. Why shouldn’t that be rewarded?

I am sympathetic, when I was much younger my coworkers covered my overtime so I could spend more time with my girlfriend and decades later covered some of my travel assignments when my wife was in ICU. None of this helped me advance.

You might love or hate my current work environment. We work nine hour days but get every other Friday off. People work from home a lot, even too much. They work from home when we need them at work. They can’t seem to mute their phones in meetings when the kids or dogs are noisy. They don’t answer the phone when you need them to make a decision.

You can call it institutional racism that this might disproportionately affect people of color but it less an issue of race but more a matter of disadvantage. Starting at a disadvantage for whatever reason will make life harder.

I will admit two people of identical situations except one is a white male and the other is not, the white male most often in the U.S. will have an advantage.

TEK

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Tim Knowles
Tim Knowles

Written by Tim Knowles

Worked in our nations space programs for more than 40 years

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