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I don’t try to hide my love for technology that lets people work from anywhere. If the best developer I can find for a project is in Anchorage, Alaska, and I’m in Florida, why should I let something like 4,787 miles get in the way? Seriously, we have all worked in jobs where everyone is in the same 15,000 square feet, and all communication happens by email anyway!

Penelope Trunk, at Brazen Careerist, has a post today about CEOs and bad parenting:

Fortune magazine ran an article about Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony. He is married with two children is quoted as saying at company meeting, “I don’t see my family much. My family is you.”

Fortune ran a profile of Jeff Immelt, chief executive of GE. Immelt said that he has been working 100-hour weeks for the last twenty years. He also said that he is married and they have an eighteen year-old-daughter.

I can’t decide which is more pathetic - the way these men approach their role as a parent, or the way that Fortune magazine writes about it without any commentary.

How can there be no mention of the fact that these CEOs are neglecting their kids?

We have a double standard in our society: If you are poor and you abandon your kids you are a bad parent. But if you are rich and you abandon them to run a company, you are profiled in Fortune magazine.

She has a point about the double standard, but that’s not what I’m most concerned about.

The generation entering the workforce now makes it very clear that they would rather make less money and have more time for their family. The 100-hour work-week is something they are just not willing to do. Add that to the fact  that there are a lot fewer of them to begin with, and it’s not hard to see that ‘total hours worked’ is going to go down for the economy as a whole.

But now we have much of the technology that could let people have more time, commute less and do interesting work regardless of their geography. Much of what stands in the way of virtual organizations is cultural at this point. We have to break down those barriers if we are going to continue to  grow our economies with fewer workers working fewer hours.

And maybe CEOs will be able to see their kids again.

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  • I'm Bob Crosley. Since 1995, I've been involved in the web and software development as a developer, project manager, program manager and product manager.
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