[nigelk]

The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge.

It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.

[apwell23]

is it available to all employees and do they all get on a single waitlist or do executives get a preference.

[nigelk]

It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.

[apwell23]

> to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google.

oh got it. Top comment made it sound like it was cheap/free of cost

[nigelk]

as did the Google recruiters and HR people I spoke to before accepting the job :)

[swozey]

Another comment in here says it could be up to 4-5k/mo. Idk about googler parents but thats pretty much an entire 2 week net-income paycheck to me.. IIRC my friends with kids pay something like 2-3k/mo I think for their daycare but I'm in CO not CA.

[apwell23]

we pay 2k/month here in chicago, so that number kind of makes sense to me.

[MarketingJason]

I'll bet many people were willing to pay that if executives and managers had there kids there. Daycare can provide unique kinds of networking and job-security/promotion options.