Instead, we talk about how sexism is the biggest problem. Sure, sexism might be annoying, but in the west, it is hardly something that creates a genuine barrier for women.

Startups have it worst, and everday I count the number of years I have to work in the high stress places I want or do a startup if I want to have two kids before 35. No one talks about planning around fertility. When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien. As if wanting to be pregnant and not working at the same time as being sleep deprived and wanting to spend time with my own baby when they are at their youngest is some strange outlandish fantasy.

All careers are built this way. PhD to tenure, startups, generally high stress professions. I wish the world wasn't so male centric, that feminists actually cared about finding structural solutions instead of forcing women to become copies of men to achieve gender parity. But they care more about power than actual equality where we acknowledge that women have different needs and desires, that those needs and desires are equally valuable and not inferior to desires men have, that the two genders have different strengths and capabilities and it is equally important to reward both. And maybe not wanting to outsource your baby to a nanny during their most vulnerable years is not a heretical thought.

I wish we had more focus in allowing people to transition back from taking a few years off to raise young kids, and it wasn't automatically assumed that you would be a worse founder or professor or software engineer just because you have 2-4 years you didn't commercially work. Hell, I want to take that time to contribute to open source, something I don't get to do much usually and I'm looking forward to it because I am willing to face the consequences. But I wish more women could be less scared of their career prospects for choosing to have children.

It requires education to explain the right things and show good examples. It requires soft skills to be patient and persuasive. It requires people skills to counter out bad influencers. It requires time, dedication and patience.

It's not the same job as doing taxes or writing code. But being a manager or a consultant in a software company is also different from classical hands-on jobs, and nobody has a problem with that.

But our society has taken a weird turn. Instead of recognizing the importance of this job, respecting stay-at-home parents and encouraging as many families as possible to invest in the future by taking the best care of their kids, we have effectively destroyed it. And thanks to supply/demand, it's now expected for both spouses to work if you want a regular lifestyle with regular jobs. So unless you are considerably richer than your neighbors, your chances are very weak.

Here's a contrary (and possibly even more unpopular) thought: some say spending inordinate amounts of time on child rearing is "doing it wrong". Some groups (orthodox jewish, for example) will argue that many parents helicopter too much to compensate for a lack of educational focus due to not having a well-established ethics framework to guide them.

Part of that narrative is obviously to promote certain religious frameworks, but it has a grain of truth: religious communities will generally agree among themselves on what's "right" and "wrong", and collectively impart that as part of social life, through religious stories and metaphors, etc painting the "ruleset" in broad brushstrokes, and then relying on things like natural consequences for granular learning, such that one specific individual does not need to micromanage every single aspect of their children's behaviors.

Older european descent folks might find an interesting correlation between being able to stay out as kids and family religious history. Obviously, it doesn't need to be based on religion. Japan is an interesting example where it's fairly common for both parents to work while relying on a strong collaborative social fabric nurtured from early school years.

But... bringing up special needs kids seems a bit disingenuous as a point when they're, I believe, a small minority of all children no?

In Australia, the (reported) rate of Autism in the general population is 0.7%. That's pretty huge, over 170,000 people. That's Autism alone.

My daughter for example has Type 1 Diabetes. It's much rarer than Autism. However, when you start adding all these up, it's significant.

“Trigger warning”

This is my experience from my wife, our friends, and my community & family. But it might provide some insight.

90% of women I speak to would love not to work and would like to raise kids (most men too). It’s more about the wage gap. Most of the people I speak with believe (and I agree) believe the lack of wage growth (since 1970-ish) was created by offshoring jobs and illegal immigration that drive down wages to the point both members of the household have to work. Further exasperating the issue is the prison times and the push for “independence”, which leaves many single women.

Everyone my wife and I grew up with had both (or one) parent working - none seemed happy. The happiest and smartest people I know have / are stay at home moms.

I force myself to spend time with my kids because of all the older people who say that they wish they had spent more time with their kids when they were younger. Many people I know who use work as an escape from family don't force themselves to spend time with their kids, and in 15 years I'll tell you who is happier...

Do you believe that labor is a market that does not generally behave like other markets in terms of supply and demand for price discovery? Do you believe that immigration did not increase supply by more than it increased demand? I’m trying to tease apart and understand your certainty that there is no downward pressure on wages from immigration.

You might believe that it will catch up at some point, but no body think this will take less than a few generations.

Who benefits in the meantime? The largest corporations, the ones whose size is only limited by the size of the country. So not your local restaurant.

While the issue is still hotly debated, the biggest causes for inequality and wage stagnation since the 1980s in order of impact is: skill-biased technological change (tech favoring skilled workers and amplifying their output, network effects, winner take all economics), globalization and offshoring, and China.

For comparison, the rise of China alone is believed to account for the loss of 20%+ of the manufacturing sector. Income taxes across the board are inequality decreasing in their effect.

I agree that more distribution is better for societal welfare, but “not taxing the rich enough” isn’t the cause of inequality

> For comparison, the rise of China alone is believed to account for the loss of 20%+ of the manufacturing sector. Income taxes across the board are inequality decreasing in their effect

This narrative comes from people who have no understanding of manufacturing and don't take the time to check their predictions. An incredibly simple test is checking if decreases in american manufacturing employment coincide with increases in chinese and other overseas production (hint: they don't) or if american production decreased at the same imports grew (they didn't).

The main factor in manufacturing has been process changes which have dramatically increased worker productivity. For example, in 1920 it took 3 man-hours to produce 1 ton of steel in the US, now in the US 1 man hour produces 300 tons. And the improved productivity was not limited to developed countries with expensive labor markets - comparable changes were seen in countries like brazil and south africa over the same period.

People imagine such technological changes to be things like robots and machinery automating low skill tasks, and it's easy enough to see that's not happening. However people rarely appreciate where the real cost is in manufacturing. Take for example a plastic extruder: it takes a whole team of skilled people to get it started up, but a single unskilled person can easily operate it while it is running. Simple changes that allow you to run that extruder for longer without stopping, such as switching shift times and online maintenance, significantly reduce labor requirements even though no tasks are being automated.

The fact is americans are producing more, but they're not being compensated more. There aren't immigrants, foreigners, or robots doing the jobs cheaper, the jobs simply aren't being done because they are unnecessary now. Really, the issue is that the costs of these goods and services which are now so much easier to produce should have fallen but didn't (despite that 1000 fold increase in steel production per unit of labor, inflation adjusted the price of steel has remained constant over the same time period).

Like I said: skill-biased tech change is the biggest factor by far, but China dominating manufacturing apart from those technological changes has had a major impact as well.

see: h1b visas and ultra pro immigration silicon valley companies

If we did the same for the entire top 1% we could give everyone around 100k.

We could do this exactly once, and it would destroy enough wealth (most of this money is in assets, whose value would be destroyed in the process) that the real value you'd get out of that number would be A LOT less.

The rich are not the source of the working man's problems no matter how many times it gets repeated. People are payed based on supply and demand. Supply and demand is a byproduct of private property. If you like owning things, you're stuck with capitalism and supply and demand.

If we take everything from everyone worth 2 million or more, and distribute it at 10% a year, that's still only 10k a year extra.

This clearly won't destroy the value of Tesla since they will continue making cars. They made good cars before Elon joined Tesla, and they will continue after Elon leaves Tesla.

Musk became CEO of Tesla in Oct 2008.

As of Sept 10, 2008, Tesla had delivered 27 cars to customers.

That's about as "technically correct and practically wrong" as I've seen.

I wouldn't trust a company cutting so many corners. Recent recall is another example.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-tesla-newera-insigh...

So, while it's technically absolutely true that "they sold cars before Elon joined", it's a literal rounding error.

Perhaps things differ outside of software circles, but at least here this isn't true. People used to have larger families on much lower incomes. It is that with do much opportunity now, the opportunity cost of having kids keeps increasing.

I don’t accept the “we” here. Who did what exactly to “destroy” it?

And thanks to supply/demand, it's now expected for both spouses to work if you want a regular lifestyle with regular jobs. So unless you are considerably richer than your neighbors, your chances are very weak.

I don’t understand what you are saying here. At the bottom end, sure it makes sense, but not when you are talking to a bunch of people in the tech industry.

If you have a household income of $200k/year you can live a “regular” $200k/year household lifestyle in a $200k/year house in a $200k/year neighborhood. That’s true whether that $200k/year comes from one earner or two. In fact, if it comes from one earner you are a little better off tax-wise (because of the social security cap.)

It’s true that you can’t live a $400k/year lifestyle if your household is only making $200k/year, but so what?

> I don’t accept the “we” here. Who did what exactly to “destroy” it?

Companies decided to outsource manufacturing jobs to third world countries and politicians accepted free trade in the name of some stupid theories about "greater wealth" creation, without pausing to think about a fairer distribution of that extra wealth. That led to stagnation of lower- and middle- middle class in the West while yielding vast gains to the rich Westerners and the newly middle-class people in developing countries.

Because of their high prices, competition naturally occurred in those international markets, which led to a downward pressure on USA product prices, and ultimately wages, and job offshoring.

Basically, the global economy is a cycle: the USA was, for the large part, first to benefit by selling "overpriced" (to other countries' standards) products, but markets have pushed those products out, before readmitting them at somewhat reduced prices.

It is to the benefit of the US production for wages and spending power to grow throughout the world, since that leads to increased exports at — now — affordable prices for the world! Heck, it's a tactic employed in both recent crises to get US products to sell (2008 and 2020, USD was at the lowest level compared to eg. EUR for a while): basically, by decreasing the international value of USD, you are increasing the spending power of other countries willing to buy US products.

The only thing uncertain is if we ever get to wage parity throughout the world (unlikely at 100%, but I think effects would be felt even at 50%), will we prosper or fall?

Wait. What? Where are you that does not have tax brackets? Is that common in the US?

In Australia you are substantially penalised for being a household that draws all your income from one person. It's not even close. And it's infuriating.

One salary $200k/yr, in pocket after tax = $135,333

One salary $100k/yr, in pocket after tax = $75,813 Multiplied by two = $151,626

That's $1,385.50 difference in available income per month.

Does anyone know what the requirements are for the non-working individual to be considered for joint filing?

Say if you're on a working visa, but your spouse is not, presumably you don't get the tax benefits?

https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/family/claiming-a-non-c...

"In general, resident aliens are taxed just like U.S. citizens. You would list a resident-alien spouse on your return and provide his or her Social Security number (SSN). If your spouse is not eligible for a Social Security number, he or she will need to apply for an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) from the IRS.

If your spouse is a nonresident alien, you can treat your spouse as a resident alien for tax purposes. If you choose this option, you can file a joint tax return with your spouse and have an increased standard deduction. You increase your standard deduction, but all your spouse's worldwide income will be taxed by the United States."

Reference on "Standard Deduction": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deduction

The married, childless middle class really does get a bit screwed when it comes to taxes.

As a general rule the Australian Government make it very difficult for families to have a stay-at-home carer. It's substantially more viable (monetarily speaking) for most families to send their kids to daycare, which is Government supported, and both work.

Instead we offer rather large tax rebates to people with children instead.

I also want to say that it's not necessarily good to have one person be the house spouse only and then come out the other end with no skills. That can be a trap and be especially bad if a divorce or other split up happens, not to mention when your a bored empty nester.

It's good to be have some skilled profession to come back to. Kids are time consuming from the start, but they start spending less and less time with you as they get older.

I don’t want to speak for them but I think part of the OP’s point is that this isn’t the takeaway we should have, but rather recognize and value the transferable skills one acquires in the role of a stay-at-home parent. It’s not unlike the trouble many military members had decades ago before there were as many resources to help employees and employers understand what skills transfer across domains

Of course it hasn't been a breeze and we've both atrophied in some personal areas of skill due to this specialization. I tend to talk to people like each future action is a step in a project to be completed, then relieve myself of the details of any task I don't play a direct role in. Sometimes useful, sometimes not. She gets a list of things done in the time it takes for me to make a plan of action but is overwhelmed more when considering the large and/or complex tasks and the time management involved, though is otherwise equally proficient. There's some synergy in there that we're still figuring out.

This puts you in an awkward position - it is really hard to get a half-time job, or at least a good half-time job - even if you can find one, you have almost certainly killed long-term career prospects because employers generally prefer full-term employees. And there is no point screwing up both of your careers by both going slightly part-time, so you easily end up in a rather awkward situation of either outsourcing a lot of parenting work that isn't ideally outsourced, or one of you giving up their career.

It is usually the person earning less who makes that sacrifice, so even a fairly small income disparity turns into a huge one.

Who says it's not a part time job for two people?

Who says our ability to cooperate in groups, the key to our success in practically every area, would skip this one?

I would have been happy to be a househusband because she's about 50 times the programmer I am, but she doesn't love business and I do. We ended up doing great, but we had to start out assuming that a 2-career life would simply be too much stress in the high tech world. Great thing is it forced me to make creative choices, but one thing that got us both hoodwinked was this notion that a woman is as fertile at 35 as she is at 21. Um... no. So we had two severely handicapped kids. It would have been nice if the popular press had been a little more honest about the biology--but of course I should have educated myself better.

You are not alone with this sentiment.

Some years ago, in my 20s/early 30s-something friend groups, any time the topic of declining female fertility with age came up, it was basically attacked as fake news and a conspiracy by older, conservative family members to get them to breed.

Moreover, sex education in school was 110% about all the wonderful ways you can avoid getting pregnant.

As I reflect back on it, no one calmly, but firmly gave the message that female fertility (in particular) is neither a given nor to be taken for granted, and that sooner than you expect it drops to zero. Beyond that point, it can only be extended by extremely expensive, painful medical procedures, and even then there is no guarantee.

----

Edit: Another thing that comes to mind is that women have it really tough, in a lot of ways, and this one feels the most relevant.

I think for women, people close to you and people who you don't even know seem to take particular interest in the choices you make with your body: How you dress, how you do your makeup, who you sleep with, who you date, what you do for work, etc etc etc. Infinitely more so than with men. I think with all that going on, for young women, discussions of female fertility just feel like yet another way people are sticking their noses in her business while telling her whats best and sapping her autonomy. And I think that's why to lots of friends groups with lots of 20-something women this all feels like fake news and sinister.

When you’re 18, marry a 30 year old guy — then take 6 years for undergrad, have three kids along the way, and let him pay for it. Then do graduate school while they grow up.

You’ll get out of school, debt free at 30, and already have three kids at school age — ready to be bussed off while you tackle that career. You won’t have to take a career break for children, because they’ll be in school when you start.

I imagine you are not a mainly stay-at-home parent who did that, let alone one who went to University at the same time.

But even if you are, some kids are just that much harder to deal with than others (you know, just like some people are).

Now, my wife and I, who started having kids only in their 30s, admit that some of the things would have been much easier if we've only started earlier. But the likelihood of kicking off on a long, shared life path with someone you haven't met intimately, or without knowing yourself intimately (which I think is true for most people at 21, let alone 18), is minimal.

Have a good one!

(Preamble: not trying to argue anything about parent comment's experience, just wanted to find data about this.)

Some data on the rate of Down syndrome per 10,000 births vs. maternal age appears on p10 of this paper [1]. The rate is a stable 6-7 per 10,000 for the mothers in their 20s, about 50% higher for mothers age 30-35, and then jumps to 25-30 per 10,000 for mothers age 35-40 (4x the 20s rate), and something like 100 per 10,000 for mothers age 40+ (>10x the 20s rate).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636004/pdf/nih...

Honestly, it should be a thing for guys to freeze sperm when we’re young due to the ease of it. Unfortunately for women it’s not so easy.

Biological clock and childrearing are well understood from an evolutionary perspective and are things that affect men disproportionately less.

When the topic of gender diversity in tech comes up, why is this such a controversial point to raise or am I missing the argument for gender diversity in STEM fields? More women are graduating college than men are they not? Why are fields like Human Resources and Nursing dominated by women? Are there simply different skill sets that differ between men and women that we are not acknowledging?

Anyone have any studies or data on this topic to explain why?

Women make up the majority of house cleaners. It's not because women are so in love with cleaning, it's because it's a flexible job you can get into through another (often female) contact that will sometimes let you bring your five-year-old kid along so you don't need childcare. Longhaul trucking won't, in general, let you bring your five-year-old kid along so you don't need childcare (you really can't stop for potty often enough), and many blue collar jobs men hold are also gotten by family and neighborhood contacts.

[1] https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data...

That's not correct, or at least, very misleading. The "programming" which you're refering to, would be more precisely called "data entry" using today's terminology. The actual software development was done mostly by men, even back then. In the 60s/70s, when computers increasingly had proper input methods (screen and keyboard), the data entry part was swallowed by the development part, but the term "programming" stuck.

What is today understood as "programming", has always been dominated by men. I don't know why that is, and I don't care to speculate, but the narrative that female software developers have been pushed out of the field is wrong.

Most programmers today are in the "data entry" business from Stackoverflow...

The funny thing is that at the start of the video game industry (I would mark that as the Atari era), TV advertisements for it really didn’t marketed it specifically for boys, it was more for “the whole family” and for both boys and girls. The heavily gendered marketing started in the Nintendo era (years after the Atari shock), around the late-80s to early-90s you see a large shift in style of TV video game ads. I don’t currently have links to the TV ad archives, but you can find lots of it on Youtube.

For example, he mentioned that women, on average, have more neuroticism. He's technically correct in terms of the psychological definition of the word (women will, on average, experience higher levels of anxiety than men when exposed to the same level of negative stimulus), but he didn't consider the political ramifications of describing 3.5 billion people as neurotic.

If a woman had written what he did, she would have been ripped to shreds also.

You're doing it too. If I say "men have, on average, more muderous tendencies than women", am I describing 3.5 billion people as murderers?

Just to be more tactful, I don't remember exactly what had happened with this whole thing, I'm only talking about this specific fact.

I don't think it's realistic to ask people to walk on egg shells is realistic when misunderstanding and offensiveness are always in the mind of the audience and therefore can't be fully controlled.

> but he didn't consider the political ramifications of describing 3.5 billion people as neurotic

I think people working at Google have a basic understanding of statistical distribution...

https://paa2013.princeton.edu/papers/132585

And this happens way more than people lead on and for the exact BS reasons you call out. As someone who dated in SF not for the hookup but to try and find a life partner who wanted to prioritize and raise a family, it was bleak. We almost seem intent on reinforcing “career is king”, not tearing it down.

I would guess that in cities with high skew (in either direction) this creates a disincentive to staying together for one person in the relationship.

I'd also guess the NIMBYs and extreme housing cost also incentivize delaying things.

If there was a lot of housing supply the financial risk of having kids would be way lower.

Contrast that to NYC where most of the folks I know who started families there still work in the city, though some did move a little further out into the suburbs.

When I ran the numbers on some offers years ago my estimate was that moving to Silicon Valley would be a financially sound decision if I lived frugally because I'd be less exposed to the high cost of living. But once you start factoring in things like owning a home, childcare, etc the salary premium compared to cities like NYC, Boston, Seattle, Portland, etc just isn't sufficient.

So it makes some sense that the area attracts young people looking to strike it rich but pressures them to leave if they haven't won the startup lottery and still want to have a family.

You know what leads to equity, rather than equality, and actually addresses some of the structural concerns the GP raises? Health care that allows for healthy pregnancies; time off that allows for healthy pregnancies and babyhood and recovery; and time off for all caretakers, whatever their gender may be. My husband used FMLA to care for his kid and now will use it to care for his parents. Give people support and they will do what is best for their families. All this worry about who is an exact copy of who is in general a desire to start an ideological fight in order to avoid taking any substantive action that will help anyone.

Until men that take on the former roles of women are viewed equivalently in the dating market, it's going to be a much harder slog

As a man, I don't fault this. The risk to a man of reproducing with a woman who isn't great at making money isn't as high, at a fundamental level, as it is for women. A man isn't incapacitated in any way by the act of reproducing. Nor is he prevented or blocked out of reproducing with others, at an evolutionary level. A woman is at great risk for mating with a man who isn't a good provider. If he abandons her, she's stuck. This was the reality for our ancestors, and those preferences are baked into our genes. The opportunity cost of mating with a loser was horrific for women.

In case anyone thinks that preference is cultural, it's not. It exists across every culture on the planet, not unlike the biological attraction men have to women who display physical features that are indicative of high fertility.

Biology is brutal and doesn't care about fairness or morality.

I still try to meditate on the evolutionary advances for sexual vs asexual reproduction to begin with. There's got to be a huge advantage of the separation of the sexes that is hard to fathom just because it's everywhere. Is it a springboard of genetic diversity that optimizes in ways we can't imagine otherwise? The 'compared to what' is always something I wanted to contemplate. Like why did organisms split into near copies of each other with male and female? Why had one developed that carried the womb and the other not? Was it just simple reproductive concurrency? The separation being the better evolutionary choice is so mysterious to me.

Sexual reproduction lets you grab non-harmful mutations from another genetic lineage en masse at each and every generation. This means that when circumstances change you are far more likely to have at least one offspring which can adapt to the new situation.

Because it can take hundreds of generations for helpful mutations to appear, and changing circumstances can wipe out an entire homotype, the advantages of preserving genetic diversity outweigh the costs.

It's more complex in practice for bacteria - there can be DNA transmitted horizontally - but bacteria usually win out by sheer numbers.

With regards to "why separate sexes? why two?", the technical reason is mitochondria, the "cells" within our cells: you don't want the copies from one parent to fight with copies from another parent. The standard solution for the multicellular organisms is that only one parent provides mitochondria, the other does not. There were attempts with more than two sexes, turned out to be too complicated.

So what happens when a cell wants to become two is that the cell nucleus will (command to) synthesize another copy of all other stuff, but mitochondria just create their own copies by splitting in two.

Now what would happen in sexual reproduction if each gamete would bring their own mitochondria? The "outer cell" would benefit from them living together peacefully, but if a mitochondrion would attack its competitors instead, it would be an evolutionary advantage. Even if it would reduce the probability of the whole cell surviving, as long as the chance of the cell surviving is greater than 50%, it is profitable for a mitochondrion to attack its competitors, because it will leave twice as many descendants if it wins. This would lead to arms race between mitochondria, and the cell would pay the costs.

Except, there is this neat trick when the cell creates two types of gametes: those with mitochondria (i.e. female) and those without (i.e. male). Then there is no internal battle after joining.

A few plants tried it with more than two sexes, where the rule was generally "any two individuals from different sexes can reproduce", and for each combination of sexes they knew which one provides the mitochondria and which does not. But most of nature settled on two sexes.

Variation = mutation + gene mixing (i.e. sexual reproduction)

Without ability to mix genes, the species is left with only one kind of variation: mutation, which is horribly inefficient.

Could you provide a cite for this? It's an extraordinary claim. It doesn't match with my understanding of some historical cultures.

The claim that the being who ends up exerting significant effort and time to reproduction (effort that immediately and directly eats into the non-reproductive economic output) is looking for a mate with enough spare (earning/capital) capacity to support themselves and a family is extraordinary?

Is this really true of the Sentinelese, an indigenous culture in the Indian ocean? Maybe if we define "income" in some funny way. There's a long history of "big man" cultures in anthropology, wherein authority and persuasion are more important that direct "income."

But, then, "income" is so tied to the modern capitalist framework that it's hard to even talk about this sort of thing, which is really my main point.

It's simply unreasonable to assume that the Sentinelese men who are best at procuring food/resources/etc aren't more desirable than their peers. Social status is likely a factor as well.

Authority is often derived in tribal cultures from being the best hunter/warrior, or being the son of the best fighter if the tribe has a monarchal structure of leadership transfer.

Not that any of us know, because the Sentanalese will kill us on site as trespassers if we show up on their islands.

To start a family you need somewhere to live. When housing costs are insane you need crazy money to afford it, so everything becomes about money.

It's not a problem limited to "expensive areas" though it is dramatically worse there as a result of zoning restrictions on top of everything.

It's a problem caused by near-zero interest rates inflating housing prices everywhere.

Of course, that doesn't mean we can't lower the COL of the Bay Area! Make Silicon Valley as dense as Tokyo, and I assure you rents will fall.

But, just as there are other forms of wealth than financial wealth, there are other forms of economics, like social economics.

Your decision to take the XX% improved pay in the higher COL area surely will improve your balance sheet over a decade.

But what will your peers look like after that decade? Will they be a bunch of 40yo millionaire single people all secretly worried that they took a bad tradeoff?

Will the dating pool be full of careerist greedy types? Or family-focused types?

I've lived all over the US, and can't recommend enough making actual sacrifices for family. As in, yes, less 401k contribution this year, but I get a house proper for raising children and a stay-at-home wife that is extremely happily homeschooling our brood.

So funny, too: Building intergenerational capital for your family is now easier in low CoL areas, because the sacrifices imposed upon children raised in high COL areas are arguably much more damaging than them having smaller college funds.

(specifically: dual-income requirement means less parental time, plus high COL areas have spent the past decade making their schools less competitive in order to eradicate, for one example, the horrid specter of white supremacy from the math classroom, where it has loomed large for generations, apparently, which makes the "but the schools" argument basically irrelevant).

Can't recommend enough: Move to the country, homeschool your kids, spend as much time as possible with them.

Finally, basically the very most common deathbed confession is guilt regarding prioritizing work over family.

Do you actually care about regret-minimization? Or do you really truly care about buying baubles and ensuring your children are just as entranced with the rat race as you and all your peers are? If the latter, stay in SF!

If you are happy living in a rented room and you like to order your food in bulk over the internet, the high-cost city will be a better deal. The 10x higher cost of housing isn't much for your rented room, the 2x cost of most things is avoided, and the 2x increase in salary can go toward ordering more stuff on the internet.

If you want some room to spread out, that 10x higher cost of housing will destroy your finances. The 2x higher salary doesn't come close to making up the difference.

I know a San Francisco native who left. On an ordinary developer salary, he bought 11 acres of land. He has sheep, because he likes sheep, I guess. He can even shoot an AR-15 in his yard. Just how much would it cost to get that in his native San Francisco? What salary would be needed? Do normal developers get that salary? (for calculation purposes, you can skip the lobbying effort)

Scaling down a bit, I'm also a Bay Area native who left. (at age 9 though) My house is 3109 square feet on 0.39 acres, just 0.9 miles from the ocean. How much would that run? My food costs are high already, due to a huge family, recently about $48,000 per year. That would double. What kind of salary would I need to get this? Is it normal for a developer?

I’ve done in-depth studies of successful people since I was a young kid, and the richest ones simply didn’t seem to have time for family. You could probably crack that nut. I can’t. I have a house and a farm and a family close to me, however flawed. I’ll take it.

It's all around just awful to pit human biology against corporate norms.

And the parent commenter you responded to above really hit the nail on the head with the things women's rights activists have prioritized. Because activists are primarily based out of universities and urban centers, they are really pre-occupied with the wants/needs of 20 something women, and could give two shits about things outside of landing that sweet job at Google.

The effect on our society is insane. It's basically incredibly common now to encounter a stereotype:

The couple in their 40s with twins, often born premature, a consequence of IVF technology leading to incredibly high rates of multiple births.

My brother and I are identical twins, born before IVF was remotely affordable. Twins used to be rare. Now they are everywhere, and fit a certain demographic. It's absolutely twisted and toxic that workplace norms and cutthroat competition in said workplace have been allowed to remain static, and demanded that humans delay reproduction.

What a testament to how absolutely corrupt the feminist movement is that it looked at the Don Draper character in Mad Men, and concluded that their mission should be to create female Don Drapers, instead of challenging and upending whether ANYONE would want to be Don Draper.

Edit: Dang and other commenters correctly pointed out that I violated some HN norms in here and also my wording was poor and undermined my point. I'm leaving the above unedited for others to learn from my stupidity, and will clarify here:

I have zero problem with people having kids later in life. I only have a problem with people being FORCED to have kids later in life when they otherwise wouldn't have, due to inflexible and arbitrary corporate norms which were established for male only workplaces. (That forced decision was what I viewed as toxic) I'm a full advocate of women's rights as well, and my frustrations with feminism expressed above were intended to express my view that it didn't go far enough, and "settled", leaving women in a perpetually unfair position compared to men.

The pushback from the men in power was enormous, and the eventual compromise was, "Ok, we'll grudgingly let you work in our companies, as long as you accept worse treatment, lower wages -- and most importantly, always pretend to be little men."

This isn't the fault of "the feminists." This is a bum deal that was the best women of the 80's could get, and then they tried to make it work.

There are some kernels of insight there, but this is not a remotely accurate characterization of any of the women's rights activists I have ever met, and it largely comes across to me as paternalistic victim-blaming.

20-something feminist activists have limited power and influence, and are not responsible for toxic workplace culture in industries dominated by middle-aged men.

And «I had my kid at age 23, and it is 'twisted and toxic' that other parents delay having children until their mid 30s. They should do what I did.»

Neither of which is likely to be your intention, which is why I would recommend rephrasing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you’re really that into high pressure job and grinding the ladder why would you be so attracted to raising a family as a sahm ? You can’t do everything at once. No one is stopping you from raising children but yourself. Many don’t go for the business route and that’s a respectable choice but of course you can’t have it all. If in the end your fertility is more important than your career then have kids without making a fuss about it. Especially if you know that for some ecologically unreasonable reason you want numerous kids then start early.

Also I’ve seen so many female acquaintances wanting to keep up their old life ambitions and eventually just never go back there because child rearing became more important than anything (and sometimes their sole motivation left in life). How can you be so sure you won’t fall for this ? Especially if you aspire at staying at home for a few years, it seems a higher predisposition to stay in that state forever than when you long for your office job.

Because some manage to do it both and it seems right that they be rewarded for it.

With kids you just have to focus on a few priorities with the time you have left and if it really is software then one will find the motivation to cultivate it and to make it work. Heck we have the perfect job for it you can remote you can freelance you can contribute ... But talking about aspirations not pursued without a kid to be developed while child rearing when you will have even less time sounds like a fantasy to me.

The problem with this viewpoint is that, at scale, having kids isn't just an individual "life choice." It's a basic requirement for a sustainable human society. People have to have 2.1 kids on average in order for society to keep existing. We're well below that in almost the entire developed world. That means the most liberal societies in the world, where women can choose to pursue careers and business, are also not sustainable and can't continue to exist without importing people from societies with traditional gender roles. In other words, they currently exist only due to a sort of arbitrage and aren't viable in the steady state the way they're structured now.

If you think liberal societies are a good thing, then we really need to figure out a way to allow women to have careers and also children. It's not "having it all." It's about pursuing two pillars of life that for most people are both necessary: work, and family. We should be thinking about it in the same way as we design buildings to have sufficient bathrooms for everyone--as a biological fact of life that we must accommodate.

I disagree, I think in the countries and social spheres where this is an _actual_ choice for women, it is very much a "life choice" (because the rest of the world makes more than enough children to resolve the issues of "sustainable human society"). When we'll get to a point where world wide population growth drops below 2.1 factor, maybe then we can start reconsidering this policy.

And that said, longer term, what is not sustainable is a continuing growth of population, not reducing it. Yes I realize reducing population invalidates many things currently supporting our civilization but having to deal with the pain of those changes seems much better than dealing with the issues of an overpopulated planet.

That's not really a rebuttal to my point--just an assertion that we should take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity while we can. It tells us nothing about what a sustainable liberal society looks like.

And the fact is that the arbitrage opportunity won't last long. If you're 30-something, the world population is currently projected to start declining within your lifetime.

I think we are going to have to adapt to a post-growth world. Or maybe things will grow in other ways. I am not worried about declining birth rates. It's not like we are heading for a "Children of Men" scenario. The population will stabilize before it goes to zero. Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.

I'm not talking about endless growth. I'm talking about simply maintaining existing societies. The fertility rate in South Korea is now below 1. That's a society that's basically gone within three generations.

> The population will stabilize before it goes to zero.

Right--so what does society and culture look like then?

> Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.

We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.

Culture and societies change. No one can predict the future. If the population of South Korea goes down to 49 million (from 50 million today), why does that automatically mean that they will lose their culture?

>We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.

I'm sure we will fix that before the population gets to zero!

Elon Musk used to be bald. Now he’s not.

Who will raise the people who were made in vats? Which is the real problem here, not who reproduces.

I would say it depends. My wife would not want to miss it. Especially her first birth was indeed a wonderful experience. The second was too fast but still a wonderful experience.

Why children per woman? In such a world where humans grow in vats, it would be children per person...

Especially when there are other women (or people actually) looking for the same professionnal success while minimizing the impact of bearing (the only exclusively female element in this matter, note) and raising children on their careers as much as possible.

All I meant is of course you will be penalized for taking years off when some people (even of the same sex and with the same supposed disadvantages) don't.

And how do you ever fix that? There will always be people willing to not have kids to further their career. Or work 16 hr days. Or never see their family. These are often the people at the top. Do you force them not to do it?

Reminds me of this scientist I worked with. He’d work all day, go home get dinner, come back and work until 9 or 10. He was an internationally known scientist. No way he could do that and have a healthy family relationship.

Now try having a family and competing with this guy?

The problem is that there is overshoot - when you watched half your siblings die young, you don't simply take the doctor's word for it that your kids are all going to grow up strong and healthy. It takes a few generations to adapt. During this period of time, you have excessive population growth, and then even if these people have children only at replacement rate, the population will still increase as the more populous younger cohorts replace the smaller previous cohorts.

Eventually people start having sub replacement rate children as there are just too many people. In theory this is good, but soo too here will there be overshoot. If you were an only child and your parents were only children, it's hard to start having large families. Even if you wanted to, you need to support a lot of older generations, which puts a severe strain on your ability to also have lots of kids. Eventually yes, things will turn around and the population won't go to zero, but decades of population shrinking and the associated economic issues will do a number on the population. India will have to deal with this problem in a century, much of the developed world will have to deal with it a lot sooner.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...

The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely

Probably true, but eugenics motivations aside (and if you insist on going there we have egg donation technology), we probably don’t need to figure out a way to make motherhood and a small fraction of the most demanding jobs compatible.

There’s nothing fundamentally unworkable about a world where you can be a unicorn tech founder, big law partner, or Harvard professor or you can have children in your 20s but not both.

I don't think it's really that small of a fraction. It's not just tech founders who are faced with career tracks that have a pressure to perform in the key 25-35 age range.

> There’s nothing fundamentally unworkable about a world where you can be a unicorn tech founder, big law partner, or Harvard professor or you can have children in your 20s but not both.

Insofar as these are the people who become CEOs and politicians, that actually is a problem.

It's quite normal to have a population that increases exponentially, hits resource limits, and then decreases rapidly. (This was like literally 1/3 of my calculus class - it's a pretty classic example for coupled partial differential equations.) Eventually the population declines enough that the resource limits no longer apply, and people start having babies again. Population isn't a monolithic concept: there will always be some women who have children regardless of their incentives.

I'll just be happy if we can get there without war, famine, pestilence, and death, which are the normal results when a society hits resource limits.

Your best case scenario is population collapse, but to do it without disease or conflict? Just everyone peacefully getting old and dying without having children?

Oftentimes, what's good for the empire isn't good for the citizens of the empire. So yeah, I'm happy to leave behind the wreckages of a dead empire if it means more for the people in that empire.

Unfortunately, I'm guessing that we'll get the war, or the pandemic, or both. That's how things have historically ended.

We have some additional complexities in that a lot of those growth limits are because of the interplay between economics and population. There's plenty more room for humans on earth; there's not more room within major metropolises without triggering our "It's too crowded; better not breed" instincts. But economic forces needed to sustain those high populations promote concentration and crowding.

I think what you're missing is the fact raising a child is something that all human beings are biologically engineered to find overwhelmingly fulfilling, yet office environments are not designed with employee fulfillment (or even basic wellbeing) in mind.

Once you become a parent, over time your viewpoint shifts from seeing the baby as an obstacle that gets in the way of other things, to everything else getting in the way of your time with bubs.

I suspect the reason that many of your friends aren't going back to the office is that raising a child is simply more satisfying.

This is very much not a fact, and I really wish society as a whole would stop pretending that absolutely everybody wants to be an actual parent. Then maybe the people who do find parenting fulfilling can do that while those of us that don't can make up for them instead of being pressured into a role that we can't and/or don't want.

I guess that word choice was mainly a reaction to the parent's langauge, where she seemed to be suggesting that career success is the be all and end all. It's an idea that was shoved down the throats of my generation (late milennials) by corporate/university propaganda and had to be unlearned painfully.

> When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien.

Is this really that common? As an anecdote, a few years ago, my kid's preschool teacher announced she was quitting half way through the school year due to health reasons. When I privately asked if everything was ok, it turned out to be that she wanted to have kids of her own. I was relieved and totally supportive of her decision: everyone ought to have the chance of choosing the life and family they want to have.

I can see how a certain "why would you want kids" attitude might come out from some young folks, but I think it's not so much that they're judging you personally, but more that they are expressing their own preference for not wanting kids at that stage in their life.

As for gap years, I know someone who got into software development relatively "late" in life (coming from the culinary industry and doing occasional freelance web stuff). My mom took some very long gaps and still had no problems working afterwards. The idea that one has to toil without gap years or else be banned from the industry forever is a myth. As you said, I think the mantra "if there's a will, there's a way" is very true.

I also see the shift in priorities over the years being very common, and I don't think there's anything inherently bad about changing one's mind about whether kids are more important or even the reverse (deciding that career work is more fulfilling than being a housewife/husband after all).

You can't do everything at once. It's a simple fact of life. Be a stay at home mom, sure. Be a mom with some daycare. Later on, allow your child to go to school. Make some choices! That's what growing older is about: pruning the tree of possibility so some branches can grow strong.

I am far, far more career-oriented now that I have a kid than before I did. Now I have someone who depends on me financially, who I want to provide for, who I want to be a good role model for. Having a kid flipped a switch in me that is leading me to much more ambitious work. Before the kid, I figured the world was just going to broil slowly and that it didn't particularly matter what I did. Now I have a drive to make a difference for her future life and ensure she'd be taken care of were something to happen to me. And for everyone who's gonna assail me for letting my child spend 23.8% of her waking hours not in my direct presence... well, you do you.

> With kids you just have to focus on a few priorities with the time you have left This focus has been beneficial for me.

My wife and I have twins a little less than 2 years old, we are both ~35, but we live in rural-ish NH not SV. She has taken the last 2+ years off for the pregnancy and to function as primary caregiver while I continue to work. While I don't feel a need to work (perhaps a "need to project" would be closer) I do feel a need to provide for my kids while being with them as much as possible. As such I have chosen a low-stress, 9-5 SWE role optimizing for family time over career advancement. At least for the foreseeable future.

From what we can tell she seems to be the only woman from her MBA class that has taken so much time off from career to have children. I don't want to speak for my wife but my impression is that she feels torn by desires to have a high-power career and to spend all the time with the kids (though pandemic parenting in NE with no third spaces available means that some days it would be an easy choice). Maybe that is society having an outsize impact on her internal valuation of family rearing, but I am not sure.

The point I am making is that kind of gender bifurcation doesn't fit the mold that I (a cis-gendered, white man) fit so I find it less plausible that a less-represented person would match it either as my "group" [more accurate term requested] has largely set the social norms.

I acknowledge I could be an outlier.

I don’t understand this conclusion at all. You just described a fairly standard situation, and then said trying to apply historical understandings of gender don’t work... and yet they fit perfectly within the story you provided.

To me the issue has always been allowing other to define success for you.

If you find success is being a high powered executive who spends 90hrs a week working, then do that, and don’t let someone else tell you that having kids is the only metric of success.

If your definition of success is raising children who are normal humans and can function in society and make it a better place, then do that; and don’t let anyone tell you that success can only be found in working and being valued at ever higher dollar amounts.

Your definition of success is exactly that: YOURS not anyone else’s and you shouldn’t take anyone else’s definition and try to apply it to yourself.

I think most of society’s current problems stem from everyone using some amorphous societal understanding of success that no one has defined, but thinks everyone else knows. You be your best as you understand that to be. That’s the only path to happiness. Trying to conform to some gender philosopher’s definition is a rabbit hole that leads no where good.

The reason we appear to have the 1950s responsibility split is my wife sold her business (not HN-levels of success, hence me keeping my job) concurrent with discovering she was pregnant. She didn't have the next thing lined up so she has decided to enjoy being a full-time mother. When she finds the right fit there is a good chance that I will jump to being a full-time parent to support her career aspirations from the domestic side. Presently I do 5 hours of childcare on a normal workday (0600-0900[alone], 1700-1900[with wife]). I would far prefer to do 10 (the entirety of their waking hours).

> To me the issue has always been allowing other to define success for you.

I still find it embarrassingly easy to fall subject to "keeping up with the Jonses" thinking. I hope that ends as some point as I don't want to pass that on to my kids the way it was to me. It sounds like you have gotten over this hurdle so I would definitely like to hear how you did it.

I wholeheartedly support the idea that, as a society, we ought to value childcare/child-rearing and (perhaps monetarily) support those who perform this service. But I don't believe corporations ought to be the ones making a space for that.

Something of a chicken and egg problem there.

If you want companies to stop talking about gender, you need to get the NYT to stop writing articles about how a gender ratio any lower than 50:50 in any role at a company is proof positive that the company is evil and must be destroyed.

This would require that culture, broadly, stop believing women need to have a formal job. Such cultures exist, but I feel there would be a certain amount of resistance in moving the West to such a model.

No it doesn't, the gender imbalance in one industry can cancel out over all industries.

"If women cannot work while simultaneously having/raising children there will always be at least a slight difference in the amount of men vs women in the workforce."

  a gender ratio any lower than 50:50 in any role at a company is proof positive that the company is evil

If not that, the only other answer is the parents. Are you as parents willing to give your kids a better childhood at the price of throwing away 10% of your career, with no (monetary) compensation? I suspect, very few. (More will do so with only one parent giving up the years.)

"You can have it all" is a lie. You can't both have a wonderful career, a great marriage, and give your kids all they need from their parents. You can't. What we really need is for people to stop believing that "having it all" is possible, and therefore expecting that someone owes it to them. Instead, people need to prioritize and choose what they want out of the tradeoffs that reality imposes.

I think the brutal/ultra-competitive work culture is uniquely American - Europe seems to do OK with giving working parents generous amounts of time (and money!) to be with their kids; 4 weeks PTO per year is unthinkable in the US, but I'm sure its a multiplier for good parenting.

I do not know if it is possible to change the work-culture when money is king.

American work culture is only moderately competitive. Many Asian work cultures are much more competitive than the US, where women taking a break to have children will basically end their career (and indeed this is how many women plan their careers), and paternity leave greater than 2-3 days have only started to show up in the past few years. Most of the drive towards more parent-friendly policies actually come from the government, as they try to stem the tide of low birthrates emptying out the countryside.

But yes, Europe does much better at this than the US. Can the US culture change enough to give what Europe gives? Maybe, but I'm doubtful.

But until it does, my point remains - in the world we actually live in, you can't have it all. You have to choose between various less-than-what-you-want options.

Literally every single person that has children does this. That covers almost 90% of the population.

1) See having children as a right and benefit to society, then society should shoulder at least some of the "burden" of it. By providing child care, (paid) maternity and paternity leave etc. Many countries already do this.

2) See having children as a privilege and a choice made by individuals knowing there will be sacrifices in time, finances, career etc. In this case, the individual (or couple) deals with the consequences. In some cases, incentives can align such that companies provide paid leave, but at least right now it's not the norm.

Looking at countries that provide paid leave vs those that don't, the ones that do seems to have a healthier society.

In Sweden doing so is quite normal and an employer is not allowed to object in any way, as long as you give a few months' notice.

For each of my children my wife and I took two months together at birth, then she stayed at home for another ten months while I worked. After that I spent six months on parental leave while she went back to work.

This means our children have each had a year and a half of at least one of us being home with them before they started at daycare. It's been a magical time and I feel blessed to have had that opportunity. Months where every day was built entirely around just playing and learning together.

Of course, you might note that my wife was home for about twice as long as I was. This was definitely a financial decision and shows there's still plenty of room for improvement.

What is happening is destroying both men and women in their roles: sure, men can have their great enjoyment at the male and performance centric workplace, but providing for a family is also part of being a man, and it's being ignored. Sexual life of most men is in a strong decline.

Sadly man hating and women hating increased together (according to Google trends), and more and more relationships are just transactional.

What's even more interesting, upvalue work that is traditionally female, and you may see more men drawn to it, staying home, teaching etc.

Instead, those can be thankless jobs from a money standpoint, and only folks who sell their souls into a male centric hellhole of work environments (PhD life is silly, medical residencies are nuts etc) are rewarded and women are told to lean in.

I don't think we should push women into these job, but I don't think we should push men into those jobs either.

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids

Actually, my kid's day-care provider does exactly this! In a few years, he'll have teachers doing the same.

Valuing work is complicated. Personally, I'd be happy to be a stay-at-home parent if finances made that easy, even if seemed a little thankless. It's not like I feel that the webshit I build all day long is really valuable.

If someone feels undervalued as a stay-at-home parent, it's probably because they feel stuck in that job, either because of lack of education, lack of available child care, or otherwise lack of jobs.

Are you suggesting that the father should pay the mother a salary for raising the kids? (Or same thing with the sexes reversed if it's the father raising the kid)

Isn't that just a more formal arrangement of a stay-at-home mother/father? The main difference would be: more financial independence to the stay-at-home party, which is good in my book, but I'm not sure if that's what you're suggesting.

Of course some people prefer to raise their kids themselves, but that seems more like an expensive lifestyle choice than a necessity.

The economy of scale isn't as big as one might like. Child care staff ratios for infants and toddlers are something like 1:3 to 1:4. Between that and the cost of compliance, licensing, insurance, and the inevitable scandals when deployed at scale, (If you have 1 million caregivers, you absolutely will have some number of murders or molestations. Unfortunate when a parent does it to their own child, but A Public Scandal when a government employee does it) you have got to start wondering if it's worth the hassle.

Or you can have mothers take care of their own children. Which has been the default of every human society for tens of thousands of years.

Paying people to be stay at home parents would make it a viable choice for a lot more people. It would also help reverse the trend of the fertility rate dropping below 2.1

Well, until they run out anyway.

Because she already collects a massive amount of utility associated with raising her own children. The economics of paying people to raise their own children doesn't make sense; the externality allocations are completely wrong. I'm sure you can imagine some of the perverse incentives that come into play.

A woman benefits from raising her own kids (with an associated opportunity cost in employment availability), and the father also benefits from her raising the kids (without the same opportunity cost), so the rational economic strategy is for the father to defray some of the opportunity costs to the mother. This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".

Well said.

The modern inclination to tear down tradition institution and then replace them with increasingly more damaging and convoluted schemes is an endless source of confusion to me. It's almost if we've become so arrogant that we assume if something has been done for generations that it must be wrong, which seems like the exact wrong assumption to make.

The modern notion of traditional parenting is about 60 years old. Before that, things were much less straightforward, unless you were rich, because the absense of modern machinery and whatnot meant that that often both parents had to work.

Now with the legal necessity of 24/7 adult supervision before they are 12, that is gone and as a result you have helicopter parenting making it a shit ton more work to do.

Indeed, the proverbial rose colored glasses. I think this is where a lot of conservatives get tripped up.

Being willing to make improvements is necessary to avoid stagnation, but it's equally important to remember change is not necessarily improvement (and often isn't).

But we seem to want to be paid. It's interesting that socializing the payments seems to strike people as more freeing than just social obligation.

This seems like the kind of thinking that eventually requires payments to give up the thrill of killing each other.