Technology across the board is not family or parenting friendly -- in my experience. It seems like it would be, given the technology tools that make remote working and flexible work environments possible.
I recently was let go from my director of engineering position when I was 9 months pregnant. They said they were outsourcing their operations, but I was the only team-member let go. I also would be on maternity leave during a critical release... I can't say they let me go since I was going to have a baby, -- I think their decision to outsource made sense. I just think it was a catalyst as there was zero transition plan and probably would have been too hard to let me go during or right after maternity leave, which would have made more strategic sense.
I seriously consider leaving technology for good after dealing with the challenges of being a woman, mother and engineer for so many years.
I'm not alone, its pretty common for women to leave technology after having kids.
There is such a push to have more women become technologists, but if we leave once we become parents, what's the gain? The struggles of culture and technology are far deeper than getting more young women to be interested in engineering. Women aren't the only ones to suffer. It's hard for men too. The culture also seeps into the quality of products we create -- in both design and code.
Unfortunately, I have only seen the culture become more toxic as time goes on, not less.
Interesting...you should definately consider a lawsuit.
My ex-wife was "let go" from a national home improvement chain when she was 8 months pregnant with my daughter and suffering a difficult pregnancy. It was obviously a move to simply save money by the scumbag management and put my ex-wife and my unborn daughters health in pretty serious jeopardy.
It was a comedy-of-errors (without the humor, of course) for the management, and they broke so many laws the lawyer we eventually retained told us it was the most open and shut case he had ever seen.
My ex eventually settled for a decent settlement 18 months later, although I basically begged her to take it trial and make as much noise as possible about it to put pressure on the corporation to never do it to anyone else.
In the end, of course, it was her decision and she took the money and moved on.
IMO, you have every right to be jaded, and hope you do what you feel is right for you to do.
The firing illegally cancelled her health insurance even though she had worked more than the amount of hours necessary to earn the insurance benefits.
I forget the details...its been 13 years...but that was one of the more open-and-shut points our attorney used to easily force a settlement.
You do know there are federal employment laws that make it illegal to fire women just for being pregnant, don't you?
Also, there was no documented reason why they were firing her...her work record was spotless and in fact, she was the new store trainer for her position due to her hard work and skill.
One of the more egregious things I remember was the manager actually called her and told her, while she was in the hospital no less, that they would rehire her after my daughter was born, even thought they just cancelled her insurance and left us both in a huge financial bind and put her health and her baby's health is serious risk.
Do you really think that women should be fired and have their health insurance cancelled for no reason besides being pregnant?
No I don't think that. I think US employment practises are downright disgusting and that Americans should not put up with it. I've always been told there's no recourse with the at-will employment system so I was interested to hear more about this case of yours and what that recourse was.
If they are evil and stupid, such having put something discriminatory in writing then it is a winable suit.
The other way is to look for patterns over a longer period of time and maybe say "look all 10 last employees who were let go were women who got pregnant, there is something here".
But unfortunately if they are not too stupid they would use convenient double-speak euphemisms between themselves. Like say they'd call it "restructuring". Or due to "culture fit". Or just "business reasons". They could be winking to each other when saying that but you'd really need of the people in charge to turn on others and testify.
Statements like this are the problem. You've heard one side's version and have very few facts.
What is an employer to do? Never fire anyone in a protected class?
You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future.
Edit: Downvote away. The truth is, rushing to judgement and vilifying an employer without having facts is only going to make this problem worse.
Exactly! It's easy to rush to judgement and say "sue the employer" when you've only heard one side of the story. My wife's friend recently had a baby, and she exploited the situation to the full. She didn't come to work for almost 7 months using various excuses, and she was openly telling her friends at work about how she was exploiting the situation. I don't know how much management knew about it, but they didn't fire her because they were afraid of getting sued. Management isn't always bad by definition!
I am obviously not saying that everyone exploits maternity. I'm just highlighting that there can be another side to the story. Isn't it possible that the management was already considering letting the Director of Engineering (a role that by definition is not going to have a lot of peers) go? What do they do if she's pregnant at the same time? Wait for 6 months just so they don't get sued?
EDIT: Can't respond in a reply, so I am responding here. "Exploiting a situation" doesn't mean utilizing benefits legally given to you. An example of exploiting the situation will be: My employer is required to give me paid sick leave. So, even if I'm not sick, I'll claim that I am and get paid for taking time off. And usually, it's not the employer who gets hurt by something short-term like this. It's my peers who have to pick up the slack.
I would commend your friend's wife for choosing the right priorities. Family is the most important thing in the world. 7 months is a really short time for maternity leave.
How can someone "exploit maternity"? Maternity is not the same thing as being sick. Being sick is a transient personal thing while parenthood is a process that lasts through a lifetime.
People need sleep and eating. People are not machines. The fact that people are not required to work 24 hours a day recognizes this. People also need an occasional time off. This is recognized as well.
Family is a similar natural need, but with different temporal cycles. Any workplace that does not recognize the allowances required for family is not really in it for the long term.
Any coworkers that begrudge a maternity or paternity leave are themselves at fault, not the parent.
When they tell work that they need to stay home due to some "medical complications." while they hang-out with their coworker friends in evenings and show-off that they were exploiting the situation. Yes, people do that.
Family is the right priority. No doubt about that. In that case, such a person should say so to the employers. "I can't come to work for 7 more months because I prefer to take care of my baby. Please make appropriate plans." is very different from "My doctor said I shouldn't come to work for another few weeks. Continue paying me, and don't hire my replacement, because it's just a matter of few weeks." Especially if you then show-off to your coworkers in the evening how you were exploiting the situation. Who picks up that slack when the employer doesn't hire a replacement? Those same coworkers.
> Any coworkers that begrudge a maternity or paternity leave are themselves at fault, not the parent.
Oh come on! Nowhere did I say that her coworkers begrudge just because she took a maternity leave.
How dare someone exploit the benefits that are legally available! Employers can insure against the economic risk of having someone become pregnant. And you know what, just budget for that in your cost of hiring once you are big enough to have a full time payroll and HR person on staff. And start planning to give fathers leave as well.
If you (qua hypothetical business owner) can't cope with the fact that your employees are human being and that human beings have reasonable needs, then what good are you?
I was responding to: My wife's friend recently had a baby, and she exploited the situation to the full. [...] And I'm basically saying, why shouldn't she?
Maybe it's just me, but I thought it was clear that the author was referring to the abuse of such benefits, not that she was wrong for using that benefits legitimately.
Just to clarify again, I was talking about exploiting as in "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work." Not "the action of making use of and benefiting from resources." To make the difference clear in my edit, I used the term "utilizing" for the latter.
They should fire someone for well-documented causes, in which case there is no issue. I happen to think that it should be non-trivial to fire someone. If they are a poor performer then it shouldn't be hard to actually document that. If you're going to outsource a division, then lay off your pregnant women along with the rest of the workers that are going to be part of that lay off. Singling out a single pregnant woman for a pre-emptive firing, separate from the rest of her coworkers, reeks of discrimination and should rightly be cause for lawsuit.
> You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future.
I wouldn't be, actually, because people in general tend to hold onto unfounded ideas. I find that its pretty simple to fire someone in a protected class in practice if you are actually professional about it and document the reasons. Its just not trivial, which is what bad employers tend to want.
> Edit: Downvote away. The truth is, rushing to judgement and vilifying an employer without having facts is only going to make this problem worse.
Lawsuits are how facts in disputes are established. The question is whether there is enough doubt here to warrant a lawsuit, and it really seems like there is.
So, what if you want to fire someone because they're just really annoying to be around, and their coworkers are complaining that they hate coming to work and dealing with that person? (This is commonly euphemized as a "lack of culture fit.")
There's no actual productivity loss in such a case; there's just a bunch of unhappy coworkers who have one fewer reason to stay when a head-hunter approaches them.
This is basically why companies fight for at-will employment: they want the ability to fire people for what are essentially petty, yet still important reasons, without having to ever say that sort of thing out loud. Because, you know, any company that actually admitted that it did that would be tarred in the press—not for doing it, but for failing to be discreet about it.
In the past we've documented interpersonal issues in the performance review and developed goals around fixing any glaring issues. But coworkers are also expected to be professional and raise issues that are actually affecting team effectiveness, and not just complain about a person because they are not fun or personable.
> The truth is, rushing to judgement and vilifying an employer without having facts is only going to make this problem worse.
The employer hasn't been identified, and so can't be vilified. Sure, people responding to the characterization are responding to a one-sided characterization, but they are mostly providing recommendations of how the person providing that characterization should deal with it, based on the assumption that the characterization is accurate.
I'm not sure what problem you suppose this is going to "make worse".
If some employers think people in protected classes are more likely to sue when let go (even if the employer did nothing wrong), they might be less likely to hire them in the first place.
This doesn't help fix discrimination at all, it makes it worse.
> If some employers think people in protected classes are more likely to sue when let go (even if the employer did nothing wrong), they might be less likely to hire them in the first place.
If they are more likely to sue when they receive an adverse employment outcome (firing) why wouldn't they be more likely to sue when they receive an adverse employment outcome (not being hired), and, if the employer is actually discriminating, as you suggest, in hiring (but would be doing "nothing wrong" in firing), wouldn't the hiring discrimination pose a bigger risk than not discriminating, since they face the lawsuit risk with either adverse action, but a greater risk of losing the lawsuit in the situation where the facts will actually bear out that they are discriminating based on legally-prohibited criteria?
This is the real world. If I worked at a firm that I learned was doing this (for instance, because I was on the hiring committee, saw the resume feed, and noticed women weren't getting interviews), I'd blow the whistle. If we got evidence that a company was actively pursuing a strategy like this, they'd be a pariah overnight. Team members would quit. Every job ad they posted would be accompanied by comments and catcalls. Candidates would be embarrassed to consider jobs there. A huge fraction of the best-qualified candidates would select themselves out of consideration.
You'd have to be a comprehensively incompetent manager to allow this to happen at your company.
Conversely, given that the whistle is not blown at most tech companies, team members aren't quitting, and job ads are not accompanied by catcalls, we can conclude that discrimination is rarely/never happening in the tech industry.
That's the probabilistic converse of your claim. Do you endorse it? If not, why not?
What kind of discrimination (if any) do you believe can be common without triggering the negative consequences you describe?
I ask because you seem to be describing a world in which discrimination basically can't exist due to market self-regulation - i.e., all our industries problems are basically solved, which seems to differ from your usual position.
Fwiw I think the parent of your comment asked a very reasonable question and it's not really clear what distinction you are drawing from your GP comment.
One of the reasons I ask Tom these questions that he is one of the more rational folks on HN, particularly on other issues. It's pretty clear that he realizes he made a mistake, hence the deflection. Making a mostly rational person feel attacked is only likely inhibit their logical mind.
Not the kind where a board of wangbangers sit in their castle surrounded by scantily-clad ice sculptures and give toasts "to female misery," believe it or not.
What forms of discrimination does tptacek's argument not apply to?
Is there some reason that irrational taste-based discrimination would not trigger candidate embarrassment and self-selection, but rational lawsuit-fear based discrimination would? (More precisely, rational in a world where tptacek's hypothetical perfect market self-regulation mechanism did not apply, but irrational in such a world.)
a world where women are hired but not promoted? Or where the discrimination falls under the heading of "culture fit" instead of explicit policy? Or even where women are hired and promoted equally, but otherwise treated like shit in the office?
Why would non-promotion or "treated like shit" not trigger the negative consequences tptacek proposes? Would he and his fellow travelers not blow the whistle, quit or catcall their job ads?
What's perceived as discrimination varies. Society at large disapproves of discrimination, so everyone believes "it's not me". It's harder to pretend something as overt as a policy against hiring women is anything but discrimination, as opposed to "just having fun" or "random chance".
> What forms of discrimination does tptacek's argument not apply to?
Job ads that say let's bro down and crush some code? (Generally speaking if women are a small percentage of the applicant pool, it would almost certainly be the case that the optimal hiring funnel makes you more likely to hire a given man than a given woman.)
That would be discrimination on the part of the female applicants, not on the part of the employer. The woman is not hired because she chose not to apply, not because she was rejected by the employer's choice.
Don't get me wrong, but that is easy to say when you are you ;)
Most folks need that paycheck and don't live in the magical Bay Area where they find jobs laying in the street when they go for a stroll.
I personally would think about moving to a different company if that was the case, but I wouldn't make a fuss about it as I wouldn't know what the future lies ahead of me and who I'll meet in future companies (burning bridges and all that)
While bias is a big issue, so is individual manager bias (two+ managers completely different evaluations from each) As I've mentioned before, it's all nice that companies are inclusive, etc., yet that does little to prevent managers from hiring people who agree with them and retroactively finding clever ways to fire people who disagree with them.
It's like Ellen Pao, to use an example. She was a great employee till the day she wasn't and then she became incompetent. And the best reason to use for fire someone is to have "no reason". Just because. Or they can retroactively find "reasons" if necessary.
The idea that we should be less vigorous in pursuing the rights of women and minorities because managers will retaliate by discriminating against them is a form of concern trolling. Yes, policy changes come with unintended consequences. But this consequence is especially unlikely and silly, because it is culturally taboo, overtly unlawful, and hard to conceal from employees.
It's not diversity should not be pursued at the expense of something else. It's that you also have to plug those other insidious holes while you're at it, else it's more show than go.
Great, you hire lots of underrepresented groups, but then you can just push them out and keep the grinder going.
This is the real world, in the USA, your particular city, in software engineering, software security.
Sure, it's still very commendable that you would do that, I can at the same time easily imagine other contexts where such actions would not have much of an effect and that's where the skepticism of the parent poster comes from.
> Do you imagine that these people will openly disclose that they are discriminating?
Actually yes, since mid-size or larger companies are required to file EEO reports [1] that are used to compare the hiring/retention rates of protected groups against the available labor market and competitors in the area.
Even unconscious bias (to say nothing of deliberate bias against women) could result in nasty lawsuits if actions are not taken and enforced by hiring managers to correct biases against protected classes.
I have posted in the comments here about Reddit's hiring policy where they now weed out people who don't embrace diversity and gender-balanced teams: http://archive.today/y6PJD#selection-1567.0-1570.0
Since no candidate with a functioning brain cell would ever admit to not liking a certain race, religion or gender, it's a stupid HR policy and the only way you could weed somebody out would be to resort to dirty tricks e.g. drinks after work to socialize with the candidate, deliberately let slip a few misplaced comments and see what the candidate says.
Doesn't seem complicated to me at all: adopt the policy you suggest people will routinely adopt if women and minorities militate for their rights and you are one whistleblower away from expensive settlements with every woman or minority you've ever interviewed.
Somehow I think there's little risk that competent managers are going to adopt this policy.
As for your frustration, let me be your tptacek decoder ring: my comment was a sarcastic response to the comment that preceded it, which was a non sequitur.
I can sue you, if I wanted. It doesn't mean you're guilty of wrongdoing. It means I'm exercising my right to use the legal process to resolve conflict.
I really don't see how you think that's the problem.
PS: The UNNAMED employer was really vilified here. Damn them!
If some employers think people in protected classes are more likely to sue when let go (even if the employer did nothing wrong), they might be less likely to hire them in the first place.
This isn't hypothetical. This is actually happening.
I can confirm this anecdotally with my father's factory. Even with documented piece rates, documented averages from all employees, and having a very racially and gender positive hiring policy, it became a running issue of having to spend time in court every time someone was fired for cause. Over a 15 year span they were sued 18 times and lost 'none' of them because they were very strict in documenting everything.
While not a the 'major' factor, it was a factor in reducing the size of the company and specializing rather than growing it and working on more generic product lines. by reducing the size of the company they were able to reduce the need to hire and plan for being sued at least once a year by someone in a protected class that decided that they had been discriminated against.
Based on conversations with him and others in similar positions this is not uncommon.
> If some employers think people in protected classes are more likely to sue when let go (even if the employer did nothing wrong), they might be less likely to hire them in the first place.
The solution is to make them also think that people in these classes are equally likely to sue if not hired, and particularly likely to win if the employer is, in fact, discriminating against them in hiring.
No one is "rushing to judgement". The response wasn't "you win your lawsuit, here is lots of money". The person simply encouraged them to look into a lawsuit, which in itself just means you take your case before a judge and the judge decides who should win the case.
You really did your best to create a strawman and beat the crap out of it here. If you are saying things like "You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future." to discourage a woman from considering a lawsuit when she got fired over maternity leave than YOU are the problem, plain and simple.
Adding anecdotal evidence using a throwaway for obvious reasons (some minor details changed for the same):
A long time ago in a location far, far away, I was hired into a mid-size (300 employees), relatively successful, few-years-old B2B startup (growing, starting to become profitable) to sort out major issues with a department that happened to be my specialty.
I rapidly figured out the problems stemmed from the top: the head of the department was a woman with an MBA who was utterly incompetent at her job, and who had been there for about a year and a half to build it. I came to this conclusion in various ways.
First, her work was abysmal when I looked at it, and demonstrated complete ignorance of the technical field she was supposed to work in - she had an MBA and her attitude was "I don't need to learn anything technical because it's my underlings' job", but her underlings had about the same technical skills. Her lack of output adversely impacted fundraising for the C round, which strained the company finances and caused management to hire me in desperation.
Second, every single stakeholder I talked to in the company - from heads of departments to junior staff - thought she was abysmally incompetent and her work was severely lacking. In some cases, the frustration was so strong as to border on the personal. I talked to over 40 people and could not find a single champion of her work. It was clear that the company expected me not just to fix her problems but to make a good case to get rid of her as well.
A month into the project, I realized management was very evasive whenever I tried to bring evidence to the case to be made to replace her. I learnt through the grapevine that she had gotten the management team into a room and announced her pregnancy ("hey guys, I have some really good personal news to share with you!" - yes, she was that transparent). The news spread gradually throughout the company, and as it did, an eerie silence replaced the comments as stakeholders resigned themselves to their fate.
I left the project unable to effect the change I had been hired to do (she refused to use any of my work and blocked anybody else from using it), and she was still employed there two years later.
For what it's worth, I've seen plenty more evidence of bias in the other direction, including an employee I had personally hired for her exceptional skill who was later fired - I am about 80% certain - because my replacement as team lead didn't like working with women (he argued budget cuts but she was the only one fired in a team of 30). But thought I'd throw this story in as an example from the other side.
Statements like this are the problem. You've heard one side's version and have very few facts.
What is an employer to do? Never fire anyone in a protected class?
You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future.
You're defending a company that fired a woman who was 9 months pregnant.
I did not downvote your comment. I downvoted you as a person for your comment.
All you know is this person is a woman and was pregnant.
Imagine a man who was recently discovered he had cancer was fired.
That sucks.
But it doesn't make sense to automatically assume the cancer is why he was let go. Sure, maybe the employer is shitty, or maybe he was just a shitty employee.
Well we know what they claimed, which is that they were a pregnant woman who was laid off because of outsourcing but mysteriously she was the only one who lost her job. It may not have been a discriminatory firing, but that would be one hell of a coincidence.
We don't know if what she claims is accurate, true, or even if this company exists. Any comments made are in the context of her statements and assuming they are accurate. Obviously, if she is mistaken then consulting with a lawyer would help reveal that. Telling her to investigate a lawsuit is the correct course given the information we have, and I don't feel any need whatsoever to give the employer a benefit of the doubt. If they are in the clear, then that will be revealed if said employee's lawyer states she has no case.
"Corporate Confidential" by Cynthia Shapiro draws a particular picture how corporate management thinks. If there is any personal detail that would reasonably lead to expect the persons performance to drop in near future and there is a legal way to let go of the person, there is a very strong motivation to do exactly that.
You seriously need to get in touch ASAP with EEOC.
My wife was let go from her position for being pregnant and although it took 2.5 years - she won a case against them and got a big settlement.
Many of the typical settlements (depending on the size of the company) are in the several hundreds of thousands range. Google typical settlements for this...
If you're interested in a more family friendly workplace when you are done cocooning with your new little one, please drop me a line. My contact info is in my profile.
It really depends where you work at (regarding to technology != family).
I have worked at both different places both where there was place for a family and places which didn't. Not very surprisingly the company where you could actually function with a family had a lot fewer employees leave - which again saves a lot of money for the company.
I mean well and this is not directed at you personally, but I don't get why employers should be forced to pay for someone's choice to have children. Unless that is their choice as well.
I would like to spend many hours of the day on my art. I don't want children. Should my employer be forced to continue to pay me if I want to go spend a year focusing on my art? Why is a couple's (or a mothers) choice to have children more important than what I choose to do in life?
The straight answer? Because their kids (maybe, just maybe) will have jobs and pay taxes that keep services running when you're retired. It's part of the social contract[1].
You might make the point that your art benefits society as well. It might, I have no idea. But more importantly, we as society haven't agreed on that benefit (which I think needs to be talked about as well), so you don't get recognized.
Like any "standard" contract, the social one does not address everybody's needs equally, but it's the one we arrive at by consensus. And so we are bound by it as long as that consensus stays. (Or we opt out of democracy, which certain SV nutcases are certainly considering)
You might make many other points about the social contract that are valid, like e.g. the scarcity of work, the unsustainability of current society, etc. I think we need to address them, and I think the social contract will change significantly in the next 30 years.
But as it is right now, that's why employers should support people who have children.
I find this argument exceedingly unpersuasive. The "social contract" argument would only be valid if people agreed on its terms. As it is, a company's responsibilities end where the law ends.
The "social contract" is an abstraction to quantify certain elements in human interactions through society.
What is real, is the necessity of a human population to procreate. This need has two aspects: does culture in general support procreation and who's procreation does it support?
First, companies do not work in a vacuum of financial abstractions. Their operations are always rooted in a very fixed cultural context. This cultural context for the most part is the cultural context of the society where the operations are based. The corporate operations affect the cultural context outside and vice versa.
Now, the first part - should there be procreation? Unless the answer is yes we can stop the discussion right here.
As for the second part, who should procreate? Let's skip the eugenics part, but, the fact is this: talented kids are usually raised by talented parents.
Should the society become more talented? I'm certain this would serve everyones best interests. Well, then, if we accept without proof that talented individuals tend to work in corporations and demanding workplaces, then if those workplaces discourage the procreation of the talented individuals they discourage the population in general of benefitting from their statistically talented offspring.
This is what is on the table. Not the happy motherhood of a single mother, or the irritation of single coworkers who begrudge parents their perks, but the future of a society. From a statistical point of view. Human urges will make sure there are kids tomorrow as there are today but the way careers treat potential parents affect directly the total human potential of those kids.
>The "social contract" is an abstraction to quantify certain elements in human interactions through society.
Yes, and we have a concrete implementation of that abstraction in the law.
>What is real, is the necessity of a human population to procreate. This need has two aspects: does culture in general support procreation and who's procreation does it support?
I don't see any barriers to procreation here. All I see is people who want to have their cake and get other people to pay for it. Go ahead and have children, just like people have always done. But realize you're going to have to make some sacrifices, and that it's not reasonable to expect other people to make sacrifices on your behalf because you want to have children.
The point I tried to make that having children is not equal to having cake - from the point of view of the society in total it is necessary as is eating and sleeping. The need is for the society. To maintain a healthy corpus the society requires children as people require food and sleep. Therefore it seems rational to me society participating in child rearing in form of financial support.
It's a political view. The way I see it a functioning society is a resource and a substrate for companies. A company that does not give the minimum support for family life of their employees is effectively reducing the quality of the society where the particular center of operations is situated. To me, it's a similar logic as to why there are environmental controls for companies and other incentives against negative externalities.
Yes, I'm familiar with the social contract. There is no such thing in the real world. It's a post-facto justification for what is enforced by other means. It has zero legal applicability.
There are laws passed by legislators who are elected. The rule of law is established by force, not by any sort of contract or agreement. There is no social contract except in philosophy class and books that have no legal standing.
> "I don't get why employers should be forced to pay for someone's choice to have children."
Because
> "There are laws passed by legislators who are elected. The rule of law is established by force"
That's why. The men with the power, who control the men with the guns, have declared that this is the way our society should work. There is your realpolitik answer.
The system these powerful men have set up does not prevent people from breaking the rules the powerful men have set. It does however lay out potential consequences for breaking the rules, should the victim choose to navigate this system in the correct way.
They are powerful, but not omnipotent. They are men, not gods.
Good point, now we can get a (for me?) more interesting discussion:
- Was something illegal done here?
- If yes, why is it (seemingly) so easy to do this?
- How can this be changed?
- Should it be changed? (In my opinion: Yes, a law which is easily breakable is useless)
Note: I only raise questions of legality here, not morality. I will not even start to discuss the morality of this action, because in my opinion anyone who says anything besides "horrible, not tolerable" in his analysis of what happened here has such a fundamental different set of core values from myself that any discussion would be a complete waste of time.
> Was something illegal done here? - If yes, why is it (seemingly) so easy to do this?
Laws don't exist to make it impossible to do the prohibited things, they exist to provide consequences for doing the prohibited things. Particularly, civil laws of this kind exist to provide compensation to those harmed by the act prohibited.
But they tend to require the person who believes they are due compensation to actively seek it.
An aging population is never good for any government.
Unless you are a really overpopulated country, having a positive birthrate is a good thing (translates to economic growth).
The case for encouraging the population to have children is pretty straightforward...
Economic growth isn't a desirable thing in and of itself. What really matters is wealth per capita. If growth is flat and population is down, that's a better situation where growth and population are both increasing at the same rate.
it will be very difficult to maintain the economically active population over total population ratio constant, you need a corresponding increase of productivity to offset the increased burden over the few working...
Right now in Europe and the US we have boatloads of people sitting around without jobs. How does it make sense to import more people to compete for the few jobs that are left? Automation means you need a smaller percentage of working people to maintain society. We can't figure out what to do with the people we have.
Although terrible for the affected, in the US the unemployment right now is 5%, hardly a catastrophe.
10% average in Europe is not horrible. If you take Spain (24%) or Greece (26%) yes, is bad, but is not sustainable and most probably things will improve in a few years... but I'm talking about decades of population reduction.
>Although terrible for the affected, in the US the unemployment right now is 5%...
U3 is a fanciful number, both because people are using disability insurance as a way to collect benefits indefinitely and because once you give up looking for a job you don't count as unemployed. The US has the lowest labor force participation rate in decades.
Another way to increase younger population is also to encourage immigration in that population group. However, for other reasons, this will never be acknowledged as a reasonable measure :)
There isn't much anti-immigration sentiment in the US. What we have in the US is anti illegal immigration sentiment.
In terms of European countries there was an article about a week ago regarding Americans going to Germany for free college. The Germans were hoping they'd stay.
I think people worry about the quality of immigrants. We want more young Sergei Brins and fewer middle aged guys with a sixth grade education.
While that may be technically true, AFAIK it's hard for someone to immigrate to the US. If I wanted to move to the US tomorrow, I believe it would involve me having to get a job before I got there.
One could argue that saying that you're against illegal immigration and making legal immigration very difficult is the same as saying that you don't really want immigration.
I agree that raw population grow is not a sustainable solution, but at least you need to grow at the replace rate or you're in trouble.
Care for the elderly is still an intensive task. Maybe yes, in 30 years it will be done by (Japanese) robots but we're not close yet.
You have the economic burden too: how much more productive each working individual has to be if it has to offset an increased ration of non working individuals?
Lastly, I don't think a country is sustainable with a dwindling population unless it can be physically and culturally isolated and has an important deterrent against military action
Not entirely. John Locke's take is that you agree to a rule of law by choosing to live in it, and that you can move to another government if you disagree.
Only Thomas Hobbe's take was based purely on force, because he viewed the nature of man as being vile and completely evil, which isn't surprising given the environment he lived in.
Groups must persist; therefore a group must sacrifice to ensure that the actual next generation is created and cared for. Schools, parental leave, etc, are all required. Any society that neglects these would seem to be self-limiting.
K, you are more than welcome to go ahead and break our laws. Oh you don't feel like suffering the consequences we've set up for doing so? Then you've agreed to the social contract. Countries that have to reestablish sovereignty with each succeeding generation are failed states.
So, if a person is born into a particular society, you are effectively telling them that they must toil for whatever amount of time is necessary to pay for the policies that preceded his existence. At the very least, this sounds like indentured servitude.
Incidentally, the U.S. government was set up in such a way where men were not beholden to others, but were equals, trading value for value with each other absent coercion. A strong but limited government was instituted to protect individual rights---to protect us against internal and external threats with retaliatory force.
The expansion of the government over the last 100 years has nothing to do with the protection of individual rights and the original intention of Founders (who were greatly influenced by Locke). The "social contract" is a way for some individuals to justify the abrogation of protecting the freedom of individuals in favor of a gargantuan rights-violating welfare state.
Finally, what is the objective measure of how much an individual owes? Do they owe 50% of their time? 70%? To whom specifically do they owe this? How does one come to these conclusions in an objective manner?
You are conflating taxation with indentured servitude.
The U.S. government has supported taxation from day 1, including for the purposes of funding collective welfare, e.g. collective self-defense. Current citizens pay for the democratic decisions of past generations all the time. Even if you don't drive, you pay taxes to support road and bridge maintenance. This is not "indentured servitude". It is how a democratic society functions.
How much do we owe? Answer: it is determined through a democratic decision-making process that weighs costs and benefits to our society.
Case in point: This very forum would likely not exist without the aforementioned expansion of government. DARPA and government funding for high-tech research to the tune of billions of dollars has been instrumental in the birth and evolution of Silicon Valley, and continues today (e.g. Siri, self-driving cars).
I think it is a stretch to presume that without DARPA there would be no internet (or equivalent). There were many other networks that had nothing to do with the government - FidoNet, BIX, Prodigy, CompuServe, MCINet, innumerable BBS systems, and even I designed one in my head before I'd ever heard of Arpanet. Everyone who had two computers thought of connecting them together (and often did, with existing or ad-hoc protocols).
That ['DARPA created the Internet'] wasn't the point they made though.
If anything I think your "many other networks" example reinforces the point. The private sector left to its own devices came up with tons of incompatible small networks all vying to be the juggernaut.
The government, when faced with much larger problems than growing market share, instead invested considerable resources into solving a problem in a way that could handle the needs of a large national government, and then later invested more resources into making that internet a public good.
Even if the government hadn't developed its own internet protocols (and standardized on a notional private sector one), the government would likely still have been instrumental in expanding the use of some other standard. E.g. Eisenhower didn't invent the road, but his Administration sure did ensure a lot of them got built.
Putting aside the fact that the minicomputers that ran the early CompuServe came out of a multi-decade period of government-supported development and procurement, and also ignoring that CompuServe, Prodigy et al ultimately failed while the DARPA-spawned open Internet succeeded... the Internet is only one of a long list of technologies developed by DARPA or other government agencies over many decades and many billions of dollars. I mentioned just two in the headlines right now: Siri and self-driving cars, both of which trace directly back to taxpayer-funded research. Silicon Valley owes much to Big Government spending.
"What if" discussions are always ultimately flawed because one cannot go back in time and try something different. But my point is absent DARPA, the internet would have happened anyway in all likelihood.
Just like if the Wright Bros had not invented the airplane in 1903, someone else would have probably within 5 years. We'd still be flying today.
I suspect that the number of inventions that would not inevitably have happened once the preconditions were in place is very small.
After all, as I mentioned previously, having worked extensively with computers before the internet, the first thing someone with two computers tries to do is hook them together.
Hell, I even did my own hardware and software to transfer files from my LSI-11 to a PC over a wire. The government couldn't have stopped an internet workalike from forming if it tried.
There is a classic aphorism: "democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner."
This country was very specifically founded NOT as a democracy, for the very reason elucidated above. If the mob wants to vote your rights away, they should not be able to.
Self-defense and transfer payments from one individual to another (i.e., welfare) are different issues fundamentally. We authorize the government to solve the problem of coordination---in terms of defense, we don't want a bunch of private militaries roving around the countryside. At the heart of this is the issue of rights protection: if one man steals from another, his rights have been violated and government must act in response.
However, if the issue is whether a man has a claim on another man's property simple because he "needs" it, this is not sufficient justification for him to take it by force. Indeed, most people would call this "theft". Why is it different if the thug steals a dollar in dark alley from you or if a government coerces the same action at the point of a gun? Because a majority have voted for it?
You merely referring to the laws that you like as "coordination" and the laws you dislike as "theft".
Even if we narrowly focus on a particular system of "private property right protection", which was certainly not the exclusive focus of the founding fathers -- who also advocated slavery and were extremely protectionist -- that nonetheless requires the enthusiastic embracement of the majority enforcing its will upon the minority at the point of a gun.
Incidentally, the U.S. government was set up in such a way where men were not beholden to others, but were equals, trading value for value with each other absent coercion
Only men? I always find it amusing when this kind of libertarian rhetoric forgets that women exist.
And if you want to talk about who is protecting the freedom of individuals, keep in mind that the US banned slavery considerably later than it's contemporaries. You talk of a 'gargantuan rights-violating welfare state' while at the same time lionising a state that was quite happy to literally enslave people. Not figuratively or rhetorically, but literally enslave people.
Can you read back my comments? When did I lionize the institution of slavery? The Founders got most things right philosophically, and fell short on some of the practical implementation. Eventually the Civil War rectified this contradiction.
Perhaps you should read your own link, which says that 'men' is not gender neutral. "By the 18th century, man had come to refer primarily to males; some writers who wished to use the term in the older sense deemed it necessary to spell out their meaning.". The US was founded in the 18th century. So whether you want to use the 18th-century term supported by your own link, or modern usage, "men" is not gender-neutral.
When did I lionize the institution of slavery?
You didn't lionise the institution of slavery, but you were lionising people that made a system that supposedly was all about individual rights but was at the same time supporting slavery.
You don't get to talk about how awesome the Founding Fathers were about the rights of individuals if you get to hand-wave away the multitudes of individuals whom they had no problems putting in chains. I mean, you even specified "absent coercion" about a society with legal industrial-scale slavery!
Edit: to be clearer, the Founding Father's philosophy quite happily allowed for slavery in practice. Perhaps you shouldn't talk of it in such reverent tones - the 'welfare state' you complain of is clearly better at being fair to all individuals, not just the blessed ones that are pre-approved.
Why should employers be forced to pay a minimum wage? Provide a safe work environment? Pay in to unemployment benefits?
Why? Because we are trying to have a civilization here. Our purpose on this planet isn't to work. It's to live, and creating life is just about the most mind blowing life experience we can ever have.
We let your employer exist, not the other way around.
In the case of employers that aren't individual persons but which are legal entities established under forms provided for by law, "we let you exist" doesn't mean "we could have destroyed you but chose not to", but "we took active steps to cause you to exist in the first place".
Corporations, LLCs, etc., don't exist in nature. They are creations of government through law that funnel benefits, at public expense, to particular members of society, in exchange for the specified obligations.
Oh, gotcha. Well, barter exists in nature, and gold as well, so from what you're saying I gather that you would not be opposed to:
- instead of a Corporation or an LLC, I just be myself
- instead of an employee, I choose to barter some natural gold for some natural manual or intellectual labor from someone else
if I don't care to oblige to the labor laws du jour?
Because right now that's illegal. I agree with you, if you benefit from creation of government then you should pay in, awesome. We agree 100% (I'd still prefer to see an itemized bill, though). But why should I go to jail if I have an ongoing promise to give someone a shiny "worthless" rock (not created by government) so long as they keep laying bricks at my backyard the way I tell them to?
> so from what you're saying I gather that you would not be opposed to
I didn't say anything about what I was or was not opposed to in the post you are responding to, I simply enumerated certain facts regarding the existence of the kind of entities that make up a substantial number of "employers" and how their existence is dependent on active actions and costs born by the rest of society.
So, no, there is no valid inference from that as to what I would or would not oppose.
Did you not say that a substantial number of employers owe their existence to creations of government and for this reason are bound by government obligations?
For that to be a principled argument, would it not follow that if one does not owe their existence to the government, they aren't bound by those same obligations, since the reason as present above is now missing?
If not, then you're really just saying "we're all bound by government business obligations whether you choose to benefit from government created "funnels" or not". Yes, but don't make my case for me.
> Did you not say that a substantial number of employers owe their existence to creations of government
Yes.
> and for this reason are bound by government obligations?
No, at least, not in the sense you are using "government obligations" (generally applicable labor law, etc.) I said a substantial number of entities are creations of government on the principal of granting benefits to certain individuals associated with the entities in exchange for certain obligations attached to the particular form of organization.
I did not say that those were the reason (sole or otherwise) that those organizations are bound by generally applicable law. (There is, I think, an argument that, whether or not a law should be applicable to people in general, the fact that those entities are creatures of government and not natural persons may be relevant to whether or not the law should be applicable to them. But I certainly did not argue that things like labor law were applicable to them because, and much less only because, they are creatures of government.)
I'm was not, in fact, saying anything about why people are bound by generally-applicable government business obligations. I was making an observation related only to your upthread comment on the meaning of the phrase "we let you exist" in reference to employers.
Who is the employer? It is either an individual or a group of individuals who have bound themselves together in some legal manner. Should they not be able to choose who they employ? How they employ them? What wage rate they pay? Should you, as the employee, not be able to exercise your judgement and either accept their offering, seek out someone better, or offer your services as a free agent?
The minimum wage: Black youth unemployment was higher than white youth unemployment before the minimum wage was instituted above market rates in the late '50s (see Thomas Sowell on this; he's a local at Stanford). Upon the institution of a minimum wage, the black unemployment rate skyrocketed, and has remained much higher than the white youth unemployment rate. If you can't get that first job, you are more likely to be consigned to a life of poverty. If you can get that first job (at even a low wage rate), you can build skills and practice your work ethic, eventually landing a job with a higher wage.
Unemployment benefits: The more you subsidize a certain behavior, the more you get of that certain behavior. What incentive would you have to look for a job if you were getting free money to sit on your ass? Finding a job would certainly be a less-pressing issue.
Yes, I certainly do want civilization---one in which the government protects my rights and doesn't sanction the mob to steal what I've worked so hard for. Men should deal with other men in the context of voluntary transactions, trading value for value; they should not live at the expense of others.
Having a child isn't really a "choice" in the aggregate. As a society we need to have kids, or else all this paper Silicon Valley wealth predicated on the extensive of successive generations of teenagers goes up in smoke.[1] It's more like paying to install bathrooms than for something societally optional.
[1] Or our debt-funded public services, or our socials security system, or our stock market. The inter-generational dependence of the old on the young and vice-versa is inevitable. All modern inventions like retirement savings do is create a level of indirection between young workers and the retirees they support. But at least until we obsolete human labor, having new generations of educated workers is essential, and having kids generates a large positive externality.
> Abortion is, fortunately, always a choice in the US.
Legally, it is sometimes a choice in America (many states have restrictions, both within the bounds which have previously been found constitutional by the federal courts and in many cases outside them and likely to be challenged in the future, but enforced until such a challenge happens and succeeds -- and there is no guarantee that a challenge will succeed, even if the precedent suggests it should.) Practically, it is even less of a choice than it is legally, due to various factors, including the restrictions, driving abortion providers out of large swaths of the country.
Unless the only hospital nearby is a Catholic-affiliated hospital. Or you live in one of several states with little to no access to abortion providers.
> Unless the only hospital nearby is a Catholic-affiliated hospital.
Elective abortions generally aren't mostly performed in hospitals anyway, but in separate clinics, so what kind of hospital is nearby is largely irrelevant (it might have an indirect relationship in states that have adopted rules requiring abortion providers to be doctors with admitting privilegs in a nearby hospital, but those rules have, IIRC, only been proposed in places where none of the elective abortion providers meet that description in the first place, and are intended as a backdoor prohibition on abortion.)
While performed at clinics, local hospitals can have a disproportionate impact on access to abortion - for example, by influencing whether or not doctors in the area have access to training in the procedure, whether or not they provide referrals, and often are the places where poor and minority patients end up seeking care.
> Why is a couple's (or a mothers) choice to have children more important than what I choose to do in life?
Fundamentally, human society exists because it increases the chance of our species success. Everything else - from art to the internet - is a peace dividend from how much better we are at taking care of our young than the average species. Biologically human child birth & child care is actually really disadvantaged, but we more than made up for it by the advantages of society.
Keep that in mind anytime you compare "giving birth to a child" to literally anything else in society. Giving birth to a child is the core reason for it all.
1. Having children was until very recently (probably still is) the norm
2. Children are net-benefit for society (otherwise you have problems of lack of young people to support an ageing population)
3. The government should at least partially subsidise [pm]aternity leave - the rest is just part of the cost of doing business (along with all the hundreds of other laws business have to deal with)
4. Parental leave attracts more experienced staff (as they're older and more likely to have children)
As a european, I find it almost inhumane not giving statutory parental leave. Having children is a normal part of life, and in the current economic climate having a full-time job is basically a requirement for most people. You shouldn't need to be rich to afford children
1. Having children was until very recently (probably still is) the norm
2. Children are net-benefit for society
3. The government should at least partially subsidise
^ These make me feel that we had a population bubble that popped some time ago. Just compare it to housing: Buying it is the norm, it is net benefit for the economy, and yet it still sometimes pops and then no government subsidies help when people are not ready to buy anymore.
Same thing we have with children, albeit much more inertial.
In most western countries (basically all, except the US), maternity/parental leave is paid for, and not by the company. You're required to hold the person's job (except in extreme cases, like if you're restructuring and the job no longer exists, in which case you're required to try to provide a similar position).
> Why is a couple's (or a mothers) choice to have children more important than what I choose to do in life?
The reason why parental leave is important is that the first few years are extremely formative, and having an opportunity for mother and child to bond (or father and child, whatever the case) strongly affects development. Being able to focus on the care of your child is extremely important to their development[1], and because those children tend to become more well-adjusted, it's beneficial to society as a whole. That's why most countries provide parental leave for one or both parents.
So the answer is, women should be able to have children and not feel punished for it or discriminated against because of it because that discourages a society where people care about each other and feel like they're part of something.
I think the solution isn't to pay someone when they have kids. Allow _all_ employees enough time off or flexibility so that there is a work/life balance.
Whether your life consists of caring for others (children, elderly parents, or disabled relatives) or for your self (fitness, education, relaxation, or having fun) should not be differentiated.
The point is employers need to realize that you need to HAVE a life, and that will in the end make you the most productive and happy employee.
Perhaps what we need is acceptance of part time work in more high earning jobs. People who want to work 60-80 hour weeks and make the maximum money should be able to do so, while accommodating those who want to work 30 hours a week but are okay making less.
Work/life balance problem applies to very few fields. Imagine an average construction worker, if you give him/her a year off, what on earth are they going to do with it?
What life/work balance problems do they have to begin with?
It is only creative fields with blurry boundaries of what is expected of you that keep shifting somewhat, that this is brought up. It's a non-issue for most jobs, for most people.
I think you're really underestimating construction workers and people in general. Einstein was a patent clerk while doing amazing physics. Jimi Hendrix worked odd jobs and was a paratrooper. People are capable of amazing (and terrible) things and it is folly to think that you can understand people's problems and potential without getting to know them individually.
Shrugs - you're cherry-picking exceptions when I clearly used the word average.
If I say dancing around a fire and chanting, on average, doesn't help people with kidney disease and you retort with 'it helped my grandmother' - where do we go from here?
Should I get to individually know every person with kidney disease to see if dancing around the fire will cure them?
That seems to be what you're suggesting, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
If I'm reading your comment correctly, then I think I'm disagreeing with you on two points:
1) I find that the outliers make a big difference in any distribution. For example: the vast majority of start ups fail, but the ones that succeed can make a large impact. To your example, the vast majority of compounds tried as drugs fail but the rare ones like peniclilin change medicine as we know it.
2) Personally I've found that people's current status in life can be a predictor of future success but it far from perfect. I would suggest that rather than trying to predict who is going to succeed beforehand we come up with a system that gives them some opportunities to be successful.
> If I say dancing around a fire and chanting, on average, doesn't help people [...]
What if we really did give people the option of periodic sabbaticals where they could do whatever they want (including "dancing around fires and changing")? It could massively reduce stress levels, and given stress' negative impact on health, this really could help (on average).
We could perhaps achieve something to this effect via "basic income", such that people would be able to take leave of employment without fear of destitution, thus laboring on such a schedule as they would more genuinely voluntarily agree to.
I think they are objecting to your generalisation of construction workers as lacking in imagination or dreams beyond "living to work". Which I object to, as well, as when I worked in construction that range of people I met and the dreams and goals and ideas they had were immense. People are fascinating, regardless of what job you do, and I think you would be amazed at what people can do when given the opportunity.
> Imagine an average construction worker, if you give him/her a year off, what on earth are they going to do with it?
Whatever they want. You don't think the average construction worker has things they'd rather do with their time than grinding away at their job ceaselessly?
I think either I've misunderstood the person I replied to or I'm being misunderstood here.
Nobody's saying 'Hey, construction workers don't need free time. They're construction workers!'
We are talking sabbaticals and whether or not they improve the situation all around so much, that they ought to be implemented.
You know, like using soap was implemented, because it's cheap and it works GREAT. Now do we implement sabbaticals for EVERYONE?
I say no, not really. Because while MOST people would enjoy time off, how would you like to wait an extra month to get an operation you need? Doctors should have sabbaticals. Btw, they can definitely afford them.
Or you know, the president. Why don't we have presidents take sabbaticals? They're pretty stressed out.
If the only thing to consider is whether the person taking the time off is better off, then great, let's all go sabbatical tomorrow. If we think a few steps ahead, then maybe adjusting pay/working conditions/etc would yield better results than simply saying 'let's lose a productive member of society for a while, in the hopes that he/she will on her own make great use of their time.'
Every construction worker I've ever met expected time off, especially during the winter. They draw unemployment (perhaps construction firms have to pay a higher rate for this?), and typically stuff picks back up in the spring.
> Why is a couple's (or a mothers) choice to have children more important than what I choose to do in life?
Because at a fundamental level, a society continuing to exist is predicated on people continuing to have children. Your art does not fit that criteria.
> I don't get why employers should be forced to pay for someone's choice to have children
Discussions about the social obligations of "businesses" would benefit to have distinctions made between the different kinds of businesses.
A large profitable corporation with thousands of employees can probably provide paid maternity leave whereas paid maternity leave would put most small businesses and early stage startups out of business.
I'm sympathetic to both sides of the argument. My mom lost a few years of seniority working at the phone company (GTE) in the 80s due to pregnancy, and as a result was often outbid on higher paying jobs for the rest of her working life. On the other hand, my current startup would have instantly folded if we had to cut paychecks for a non-working employee.
I'm guessing the majority (by number) of businesses just cannot afford to offer paid maternity leave, and this needs to be acknowledged. There aren't simply "two sides" to this discussion.
The third perspective would be for governments to collectively provide social benefits in this category, decoupling many aspects of the big vs small business disparities - which also extend to the provision of healthcare by businesses in general.
Companies are not obligated to provide paid maternity leave--only unpaid. There are expenses incurred (namely, health insurance), but you won't be receiving a paycheck to raise your children or focus on your art, as in your example.
Children are the future. Companies and society as a whole invest in the next generation because they will need more workers and support for an aging population. A company without paid maternity leave is directly discouraging employees from having children. I think (most) companies, especially in SV profit more than enough to offer their employees paid maternity leave (and probably time for you to work on your art).
I find myself truly struggling to get past this point all the time. I think people too often think that having children is somehow granted as given for anyone who wishes to. I am a man but I expect then whenever I decide to start a family I will attempt to spend less time at work. At the very least, I'll be tired from trying to do both. That's not a burden I would "require" a company to bear, but if companies wish to compete for me, they would provide it. Perhaps it's not worth the price of keeping someone on once an employee moves into the family starting part of their life : /
Employers don't have to, at least in the U.S. Lots of people I know have used up their PTO and sick days for maternity leave. There is also FMLA, which is unpaid but guarantees you'll still have a job after 12 weeks. In some cases, like in the parent comment, they'll figure out a way to cut you loose.
My wife took FMLA for six weeks. Law or no law, HCA happily told her she had the right to apply for another job at another center when she got back. With no guarantee of the same pay. Of course, she ignored them and didn't go back, but we didn't sue either, as that wasn't feasible. Big companies can get away with a lot that isn't legal or ethical.
Oh, for some reason I was under the impression they were. Thanks for clarifying. A quick Google search seems to show that a few states require paid leave for a short period at a discounted wage.
I don't see the parent suggesting anywhere that employers should be forced to do anything. I kind of dislike how most conversations on these topics quickly turn into regulatory or philosophical ones.
I'd much rather have people discussing what can be done by companies, people and other agents.
A couple of reasons might be: Motivation, and political power.
"Motivation" is the idea that certain factors motivate people to compete harder in the workplace. One of those factors is having kids. A colleague of mine was dissatisfied with his advancement, and I suggested that he should become a project manager. His response: "Why should I take that horrible job when my engineer job lets me go home at 5 every day?" He had no kids, but lots of social activities.
An amusing story about motivation at my workplace, a Fortune 500 company, is that our management jobs tend to be pretty thankless, even if they pay more. Everybody I've known who has applied for those jobs, has kids.
I've read that after the birth of their first kid, there's a 50% chance that a worker will change jobs in pursuit of higher pay. I also read about a study of unskilled, single women living in the south side of Chicago. Those with kids tended to earn higher wages, and traveled further to their jobs, than those without.
It may be that the choice is not so much children versus art, but career versus art.
Providing family benefits might be one way to effectively pay people more without creating an overt caste system where all of the higher level jobs are held by people with kids.
Political power relates to motivation. From what I've read, people with kids tend to vote. Unsurprisingly, we vote our interests. And there are certain interests that can only be met, within our system, by influencing employers.
Women are the only people who get pregnant. If you force people to choose between a family and a job some people would see that as discriminatory against women.
First of all, your use of the term "breeder" is pretty disgusting and you should feel ashamed of using it.
I'm a man and maternity leave does not bother me despite it being "discrimination" on the face of it. For one, maternity leave isn't really equivalent to vacation. Taking care of a newborn baby is very hard, exhausting work. To add to that, giving birth is a pretty physically traumatic situation that a woman does have to spend time recovering from.
Ultimately, no two people at a company are going to have identical benefits. We should try to be fair and equitable, but that means different things to different people, and is not always clear-cut. I can either wring my hands that someone somewhere may be getting a better deal than me, or I can actually go ahead and try to improve my situation. I don't see any point in trying to knock down women who want to be mothers because they may be getting a benefit that I'm not.
And finally, there are strong arguments for mandatory maternal (and paternal) leave from a societal perspective. I'm not going to rehash them here, but they're there if you really want to understand the other side.
Maternity leave is not a vacation. And people generally don't have kids so they can take long paid vacations.
It's not a reward a company bestows upon an employee for having a child, nor is it a mechanism for discrimination towards those who don't have or choose not to have children.
It's a way for an employer to support an employee in an important life choice, and is one of many benefits that a company may provide to foster a nurturing and open office culture.
FWIW, most states don't even require employers to pay for maternity leave and are only bound by FMLA. Newly-minted parents usually take accrued PTO, sick days, and declare disability to take care of their newborns.
[EDIT] For context, the parent poster (whose comment is now deleted) wrote about feeling discriminated against when a company gives maternity leave to parents but got no vacation time for choosing not to have kids. As an aside, I am confused by why the poster felt discriminated against.
This comment is akin to the farmers who tell us we need to subsidize them because without them we will all starve.
There are hundreds of millions of people who would very much like to come to the United States. They are ready and willing to start working and contributing taxes now. We can pick and chose the skills we need, not invest for 22+ years and hope for the best.
We only need the product you are selling because you use your political power to prevent your competitors, with a superior product, from entering the market.
The irony of appealing to immigration to justify child-hostile policies is that all those immigrants (me included) think westerners are crazy for being so child-hostile. Hispanics in the U.S. have a fertility rate of 3.
> all those immigrants (me included) think westerners are crazy for being so child-hostile.
Westerners in general isn't child-hostile, even if US labor practices are, and many of those immigrants -- including the Hispanic ones -- are Westerners themselves.
If they do all think we westerners are crazy (and I'm certainly not going to take your word for it), that isn't enough of a downside to leave us with a shortage of potential immigrants. Your argument about freeloaders is just plain wrong.
What we have going here is attractive enough that we have people lining up out the door. We don't desperately need you to do us a favor and bless society with your children, despite the fact that every parent seems to think we do.
It's not freeloading. It's a voluntary trade for value.
In any event, your logic is flawed. A person can easily be a net contributor over a lifetime without having children. And someone who has children, can easily be a net drain even after attributing some of the costs/contributions of the children (which may well also be negative).
> There are hundreds of millions of people who would very much like to come to the United States.
They aren't prevented from coming to the United States by people having children, they are prevented from coming to the United States by US immigration law (either because they are individually undesirable, or because they exceed the hard total or per-country caps in various permitted categories.)
It's not just what you traditionally think of as "welfare." Our whole economy is predicated on the assumption that populations will not collapse. This is especially true of Silicon Valley. Baked into the $50 million investment round that values your company at $500 million is the assumption that the company, if it succeeds, will have customers in the future. If, e.g., the whole world became sterile tomorrow, VC, the stock market, property values, everything would collapse.
Maternity leave is not a vacation. It takes time to physiologically recover from giving birth. Psychologically, new mothers need time to adapt to their new role. Between frequent feedings, diapers, sleepless nights, taking care of a newborn is a lot of work. Certainly there is no time for leisure so labeling maternity leave a vacation is disingenuous.
That being said, there should be a "leave" option for parents adopting children as well.
Human life has a few cyclic needs that are necessary. These include: eating, sleeping, recreation.
Family is also such a cyclic need, but with different temporal properties and statistic properties - the time taken by parenthood is localized over a brief period of time and reduces to zero. And as for statistics, the need is throughout the entire population but some individuals can avoid it.
Workplaces recognize the need for food and rest. The needs of a family is a similar need, although it is localized to a few persons, it permeates the entire population. A human workplace recognizes the critical needs.
Because there was a law passed in the United States in 1978 called "The Pregnancy Discrimination Act" which makes it illegal to fire people based on their pregnancy status. So assuming the commenter is in the US, it's the law.
Can we please stop downvoting comments like these? There were no incorrect facts, or mean statements presented. This person asked a sincere question in a non-aggressive way. I'm sure there are other people who had the same question, so why not discuss the point openly? Even if you disagree with this opinion, maybe you can change it, or change the opinion of someone who felt the same way and was just reading through the comments. Would it be preferable for people to be afraid of stating their opinions and therefore never have a chance to hear someone else's perspective?
This is another very important article about the difficulties of a career, rather than a stint, in high tech.
I've noticed that many health-care related professionals, such as dental hygienists and registered nurses, have median pay that is close to or exceeds the median pay for software developers [1], and that well paid professionals such as dermatologists or radiologists often earn vastly more. These fields also offer what I'd describe as career flexibility.
As a software developer, I can almost always go off and have a cup of coffee when I please. So in that sense, yes, it is "flexible." But one very attractive quality of being a dental hygienist is that you can step back from the field for a few years, work part time (or not at all), and re-enter a few years later. My cousin is a radiologist, and she worked half time while she had kids (collecting a much higher salary than the typical full time developer). I also know an emergency room physician who was able to scale back while she had small kids without badly compromising her career progress.
Add in open offices, back visibility, a dave n busters vibe, mass layoffs involving work visas and "knowledge transfer", frequent allegations of sexism and discrimination, an insistence that you locate to a place where the median 3br house is well over a million… and now, as it appears, a situation where you they don't want you if you have kids.
At this point, why do we keep acting like there's some mystery why people with choice (i.e., whose professional options aren't limited by the visa process) are avoiding this field? Why does President Obama nod gravely as he stands next to tech CEOs talking about severe shortages of tech workers at press releases?
[1] check out US News Best Jobs, which provides a summary of BLS data on median salary by region. In San Francisco, dental hygienists earn $112,970, software developers $114,400, and registered$127,670. Physicians and lawyers, of course earn considerably more.
To be fair, becoming a radiologist is so much harder than becoming a software developer that I'd sure hope it would come with some perks. Your cousin might be working half time now, but she almost surely worked quadruple time for a long time before that just to get to where she is.
Dermatology and radiology are some of the most competitive medical specialties in the world. Most doctors are neither dermatologists nor radiologists, and frankly if you did a truly detailed cost benefit analysis I'm not so sure the numbers would be so clear cut for the average doctor. As a very hard-working programmer, at age 25 I was making $120k base salary far away from Silicon Valley -- my friends in medicine were neck deep in coursework still with an income of approximately -$50k/year and another ~4 years on average before they'd match what I was making already.
And I assure you that not every physician is able to just "scale back". Yes, some can, but that's not the norm. Plenty of ER doctors work nights for decades. My best friend growing up is a resident physician right now and works 80 hour weeks. I haven't even talked to him for a year because he's so busy.
I certainly didn't intend to compare radiologists and dermatologists to median software developers. I bring these fields up as a reminder that career flexibility exists at a level that is considerably more elite than dental hygienist. In short, if you are a very ambitious and academically talented person, there are high earning and high prestige professions that will still yield considerable career flexibility .
I also think you may be selling "developer" a little short here. Part of the problem here is that "radiologist", "registered nurse", and "dental hygienist" all mean something very standardized and specific. Software developer, on the other hand, means very little. It can range from someone who just finished reading a book on php and myql (or didn't read it but claims to have) to someone with a PhD who is doing mathematically intense programming on genomics (though I suppose that person would probably have a different title).
A lot of jobs I'm interested in these days say "MS required, PhD preferred." These grad degrees require majoring in a STEM field, degrees that even at the undergrad level have a very high attrition rate, perhaps even higher than pre-med coursework (which doesn't honestly require the same difficulty in math). To get into a top school, you need to score at the top percentiles on standardized tests. In spite of this, elite PhD programs typically have an attrition rate between 35%-50% attrition rate (engineering is best, pure science is worst). MD programs at elite schools, by contrast, have vanishingly low attrition rates (UCSF, for instance, is below 0.5%). No joke, attrition rates at elite PhD programs are between 75 and 100 times higher than elite med schools. Of course, as people have pointed out to me in the past, it's not apples-to-apples. If you can even realistically apply to a PhD program in CS, you probably can already work in industry for a fine salary. If you leave with an MS, as I did, you have a valuable degree. MD tends to be more all-or-nothing, and (as you have reasonably pointed out), highly selective residencies in lucrative fields are hardly guaranteed.
It will never be apples-to-apples when comparing fields. But considering that when you go by pay, your typical programmer is between dental hygienist and registered nurse (in San Francisco), we should probably recognize that we need to compare outcomes for a comparable educational path. But I wouldn't say that becoming a radiologist or other medical specialist is so much harder than getting a PhD that the comparison is useless. Especially if we're going to take seriously the talk among silicon valley CEOs and congress about a critical shortage of PhDs in STEM fields.
Overall, I'd say that the career stability, pay, and flexibility of health care fields may win out over tech at a high level as well as a low one.
This doesn't mean there are no good reasons to want to be a programmer, but I do think it's relevant when the US president stands next to tech CEOs at press conferences and agrees that there is a shortage of STEM workers.
The similarity between pay for Software Engineers and RNs in the bay area is a bit of an anomaly nationally. My wife is a RN and before we moved here I was making twice what she did. Now our incomes are roughly equal - before factoring in any bonuses/stock I get.
It is kind of refreshing to see how the nursing industry hires and treats its professionals compared to software, though. No "10x ninja" BS just to get hired as a rank-and-file employee. Hourly pay, as well as unions, prevents anything comparable to the long hours and hero stunts that are rewarded at tech companies.
There are days where I do think it'd be nice to have the flexibility that they have, but then I remember that I could never do that job. Just like software engineering, nursing has attributes that make it only desirable to certain people. Patient is actively refusing care, shouting racial slurs at you, trying to assault you, etc? They still need to be cared for. It's still your job to take care of them.
It should also be noted that health care costs are astronomical and have been increasing much faster than inflation for many years. There may be a correlation there. Moreover, as "medical tourism" continues to grow due to unaffordable health care costs in the US, US-based RNs are going to start losing jobs, just like the auto workers who negotiated contracts so generous that they literally killed their employers.
Nurse salaries are a vanishingly small portion of health care costs. They're largely a function of the difficulty in finding qualified nurses. It's unlikely that will change anytime soon.
In enterprise software and consulting anywhere near customer-facing engagements, the work hardly seems that much better than wiping excrement from aging people incapable of taking care of themselves. The job security is certainly much better for nurses where you get paid and everyone knows you're supposed to be helping the patient, but keep recommending something to a client they just don't like even if it's one that will actually solve their problems and you'll get fired probably. Much like being a doctor to patients unwilling to change their lifestyle in so many different ways, there's a massive industry of people making money off of people that want change but just want to spend money (and do almost nothing else) to make their problems go away. They'll still keep opting for something marketed via mass media (CIO magazine or whatever) and better-looking Powerpoints than the more carefully-thought-out solution made by people that really want a sound solution.
Dental hygenists also only work 3-4 days a week. I'm told this is just the way the job works (usually they are 3 days at one office and 1 day at another if they desire). There's also the wear and tear on your body from crouching over someone with vibrating tools.
I usually add this to my comment above: I have absolutely no doubt that dental hygienists and registered nurses work hard, and deserve their compensation. In SF, they are well paid, and nurses tend to poll high in occupational prestige.
I wonder how much of the median salaries for those industries are driven up by licensing and accreditation to practice.
If you were to implement a license to practice software engineer (thereby eliminating many jobs at the bottom performed by people who wouldn't be able to earn a license, how much would the median income for software engineers go up?
Conversely, if you eliminated licensing for dental hygienists and let each practice determine the criteria for hiring, how many people would be employed handling dental hygienist roles and responsibilities that you don't need licensing to perform? How much would increased employment by less qualified individuals bring down the median income?
> At this point, why do we keep acting like there's some mystery why people with choice (i.e., whose professional options aren't limited by the visa process) are avoiding this field? Why does President Obama nod gravely as he stands next to tech CEOs talking about severe shortages of tech workers at press releases?
At a guess, because the people who make that choice are generally not in a position to consider those factors or know about them firsthand. You have to be careful, or you'll wind up concluding that wet streets cause rain.
A friend of mine was an RN. He worked 3 nights/week (by choice b/c it pays more), and had more free time than anyone I know. He would "quit" and travel for a couple months and come back and be hired right back into his job.
He just finished grad school and is now a nurse anesthesias making more than he did before and working roughly the same.
Whether or not the trend keeps up it is hard to know.
I honestly wish there were a job track for people who want to work part time for a while. I'd be more than happy being a bugfix monkey, not given any of the sexy projects, at 25h/wk and half the average tech salary because it'd let me pursue school or other hobbies
Unlike with radiologists, being a software developer isn't really a career, so looking at BLS numbers doesn't make much sense. Asking how much a software developer should make in a year is like asking how much a telephone user should make in a year; it's a nonsense question, because clearly there is almost nothing in common between someone doing low-level tech support and someone selling stock for an IPO or whatever.
The reason most software jobs pay less than most radiology jobs is because developing your radiology skills doesn't come with a potential billion dollar upside, so people aren't willing to do it on unsustainable terms.
That's not a good explanation. Very few employees will ever see billions of dollars and clearly the people taking jobs at big, established companies aren't doing it out of some hope that they'll suddenly become billionaires (how would that even happen?).
Your comment represents everything that is wrong about a monoculture.
Bias against employing parents is bad enough, but any notion of hostility against an "other" is unwarranted. Surely the tech industry has enough room for people who have kids and people who don't?
Definitely not. But you said you preferred working in an industry that is hostile towards people with kids. Here's a thought experiment: substitute "people with kids" with the word "homosexuals" or "immigrants", and maybe you can see how someone can find your viewpoint problematic.
I'm a developer in SF, and I moved here 2 1/2 years ago on a relocation package from a startup.
Immediately I realized that I would be the only parent in the office (there was one other remote worker with kids) once my wife and I decided to have a child. And sure enough that's what happened. I actually lost my job there (for unrelated reasons) and it was an enormous relief to be out of that culture.
In addition to children, I am religious and have obligations to my church, which were frowned upon (tacitly) by my coworkers. Nobody said anything, but I was the only one leaving work at 3 on Good Friday and 5:30 every Wednesday so I could be at church.
In hindsight I can see what I couldn't see before - the article is right in suggesting that single, young people are unencumbered by obligations. But it misses the point that we choose what obligations to tie ourselves to around the age that most people are starting at these startups - I chose wife, children, church. They're choosing company, work, and technology. It's not that different in principle, but it's a huge behavioral difference.
In my experience, leaving sf and working in the valley proper meant having far more coworkers with families. They tend to be older -- 30s to 40s rather than mid 20s. In turn, they tend to be much better about not fucking around in the office: they come in, work, then leave. Which is a much better cultural fit for me, and it sounds like for you. There's lots of places where working 40-45 hours per week while being productive in the office is part of the culture. Just not in sf.
Notice how there's nothing about family in this article about Reddit's hiring practices. It's pretty much the same at all start-ups, they just want fresh meat to push into the grinder.
> Reddit CEO Ellen Pao "has passed on hiring candidates who don’t embrace her priority of building a gender-balanced and multiracial team"[1]
My experience regarding my religion hasn't been very happy so far too.
Because of my religion, I avoid working from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday (the 7th day Sabbath). I do work if something went bad and people will be blocked because of me, but that's an exception.
I always try to come clear about this with any new team or manager, but I've never had a very understanding response from that. Mostly people will not say anything, but I can tell from their faces they're not happy about my strict non-availability at that time.
My current team has started doing deployments on Saturdays. That was imposed without anyone being consulted on it, which I found very disappointing. I wish religious considerations were taken into account in the workplace, but since so many people in tech are so removed from religious knowledge of any kind, they probably don't even know there are religions where working on a specific day of the week is not allowed.
I wouldn't want to work somewhere that expected me to be on the job between those times unless of course I was contracted to work weekends. I'm not religious in the slightest.
By that standard, love, beauty, great products, and yes, money are all delusions too. So why are you even working? All I see are bits and bytes in a bank's computer system; why do you care so much about them?
I'd hope that we have the empathy to recognize that people should be able to indulge the things that are special to them. That's what celebrating individuality is about, right? As long as they're also productive in the things that matter to us, it harms nobody.
That belief exists only in your head; why should I care about your delusions?
(Sorry I'm giving you a hard time, but I'm trying to make a point that took me a long time to learn but drastically improved my effectiveness as a human being. Things that exist inside other peoples' heads are every bit as real as things that exist in your head. And as far as can be empirically proven, everything exists inside somebody's head. We have this notion of objective reality because it's convenient to have it and it works most of the time - as Peter Norvig says, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." But objective reality itself exists inside our heads, and when - empirically - clinging to reality gets worse outcomes than bending reality to accommodate the people we interact with, why bother?)
I really like your thinking here, however I'd point out that the converse could just as easily be argued as well. That by embracing things like religion, we're actually getting worse outcomes, and therefore we should not do it.
The difference is between collective "we" and individual "we". I believe that I would get a worse outcome by embracing religion, and so I don't. I've always found science to be a much better model of reality (the two are not mutually exclusive, but in my personal belief system, I've always had one but not the other).
But as for "we", as in everyone else? It's not for me to say. I can't make the judgment for someone else that they're better off changing their belief system. I can explain mine, I can offer a different perspective, but it's not like I can reach into their head and twist their thoughts around.
I agree that the individual question is less interesting than the collective, but it was indeed the collective that I was referring to. If we recall context; we're discussing a person who has allowances made for his religious observance, and that process being described by someone else as effectively pandering to his mental illness at an organisational cost.
That is, why should an allowance be made for him to go to church at 3pm, but not for Mitch in sales to go gambling at 3pm? At least gambling offers the potential for a return. By the interpretation under discussion, which is not entirely without merit, religion is just a mental illness that people unfortunately fall into. Why should it be encouraged or facilitated by workplaces or allow for the abrogation of duties which they would otherwise have on the same level as raising a family which is indisputably essential for the continuance of society?
This has been my experience, too. I want to leave early Fridays to get a head start on the commute to Tahoe during ski season, and it's generally not acceptable.
(2 stories down)
Why can't we hire developers? There's a developer shortage! Why do people hit mid 30s and leave sf?
What are slacking engineers doing when I'm not watching them? If I can't supervise them coding, how do I know they aren't fucking off?
edit: No fucking way can you leave early during the week, but if shit goes bust on the weekend, all hands on deck and no comp time. Aren't startups fun?
Good Friday is one day a year, who doesn't take off early at least one day a year for something. It could be a dentist appointment or to pick a vehicle up from a mechanic before they close, or simply to go see a movie. I wouldn't even blink if someone left early for a religious holiday, a fishing trip, or because they just needed to get out of the office. If it's not impacting their work who cares.
(In Canada, Good Friday was a holiday, so I had the day off anyway). And really, who cares if you leave at 3 pm once/year regardless of the reason? It should be a non-issue.
That is how (many of) us foreign atheists look at it. It's self-evidently a social hobby with some funny rules. It gets special treatment because the practitioners of this hobby get significantly more aggressive about it than the people playing collectable card games.
Religion is a social institution, it's connected to culture. Should people not get paid days off if it's in their culture to attend funerals or weddings of family members? Where do you draw the line between hobby and culture?
You should get your paid days off to do whatever you want to do with them. I didn't object to that. If you read the rest of the thread, you'll see that I misunderstood the initial post and thought to OP was simply slipping out early. OP confirmed that it was in fact part of a paid time off allowance; what I would call part of someone's vacation or holiday time.
Where do you draw the line between hobby and culture? They're not exclusive. Something can be both hobby and culture. Just you, on your own, with no interaction with other humans? Hobby. Involves someone else? Both. Can something be culture without being a hobby? Sure. Eating, for example (but if you like eating competitively, and practice your technique and subscribe to "Big Mouth Monthly", its hobby too).
while i understand where you are coming from, religions can not be compared directly to collectable card games because of social impact. i begun to get interested in religions recently (i am, what I would call, atheist) from that standpoint and find many benefits it bring.
Just suggesting not to throw it in one bucket with card games and may be research it more.
I disagree. They can be compared to collectable card games. In this case, you have compared them and you have found in your comparison that many (but by no means all) religions have a bigger social impact than card games.
I don't understand this article. It fails to mention that tech companies have the best paid parental leave policies[1]. There are other family-oriented perks: on top of normal life insurance at Google, "The surviving spouse or partner of a deceased employee will also acquire vested stock benefits, and children will receive $1,000 a month until the age of 19. The timeline can be extended if the child is in school full time."[2] I bet there are more perks at other companies which I'm not aware of.
The article is full of anecdote and false implications. So, "Yahoo told employees they could no longer work from home." If you are working from home because you're taking care of your children, I think it's fairly reasonable to expect that your attention is split and you won't be as productive. Much of it describes the work habits of top execs. I don't think that's representative of the industry as a whole, and probably aligns pretty well with work habits of top execs of other industries.
I think the point of the article was to point out that while tech companies supposedly have perks for people with families, those are rarely enjoyed to their full extent due to diverse factors. And also that those tech companies might say they offer a family friendly environment, but depending on your team, the culture will not reflect that.
I've experienced a bit of that. It's hard not to feel bad for going home at 5pm to be with your family when all the driven single 20-somethings around you will continue to work late into the night and produce a lot more than you.
My 2 cents... I'm a reforming Jerk Manager. When I was late 20s and early 30s, single and travelled full time, I believed that everyone should commit 100% to the project. My rationale was, "Winning breeds positive mindsets" and not the other way around. I really abused some folks that were married with kids.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, and I have to worry about working for a jerk like the younger version of myself.
The one thing I can say is that as a parent, it's good to work at a place where the management team is all from in-town, and most have kids. Almost all the managers at my current employer have young kids. This means that "office hours" are 10-5, with a ton of flexibility, and nobody bothers you until 9 at night. But the trade-off is that everyone is expected to be online until 1 or 2 in the morning if needed (after the kids go down) and be current on their email first thing in the morning before coming in to the office.
I feel very bad for the people who were laid off when pregnant.
Last time I interviewed, I actually strategized to mention our infant multiple times when talking to people. If that will turn off some orgs, I really don't want to work for them. I ended up finding a job at a great company this way. Being able to filter out so many companies that don't care about you having a life outside of work definitely feels like a luxury made possible by the current high demand for skilled tech workers, which is a little worrying.
actually strategized to mention our infant multiple times when talking to people
I hope you understand that by doing so, you placed your interviewers in a very awkward position. It would be the same if you revealed to them your e.g. religion or sexual orientation, when they never asked. It smells like you were setting them up for a future lawsuit.
IMO the benefits of seeing the company's reaction to one's lifestyle far outweight the risks of making the interview process slightly uncomfortable for risk-averse interviewers.
So it's ok for a company to say "he's not a culture fit", but not ok for an employee to say "that company is not a culture fit"?
The reason every startup asks "so what do you like to do for fun" in interviews is that kind of "cultural" fishing. The OP is just flipping the game around.
Its perfectly fine for a candidate to look for a culture fit.
The problem here is that familial status is legally protected, so by bringing it up it puts the interviewer in a tight spot. If I reject a candidate who states such things, then there may be lawsuit risk, and my superiors may not be sympathetic to the fact that I did not ask the candidate.
Unfortunately, I don't think theres a way out of this problem. Family friendliness is probably the most important culture question for anyone with a family. The only solution I can think of is to dig up information online from previous employees, but that is a crap-shoot for small companies.
That's not what I said, I am talking specifically about an interview. A company is not allowed to ask you about your family plans, religion, sexual orientation, blah blah, and for good reason, these things are nothing to do with job performance, yet may be the basis of discrimination. It's therefore in poor taste to "force" your interviewer into knowing something they should not and would never have asked.
> A company is not allowed to ask you about your family plans, religion, sexual orientation
More accurately, a company is not generally allowed to discriminate in hiring on those basis, and thus will generally have policy in place not to ask about those things. The law doesn't actually prohibit asking, it prohibits discrimination on those bases; but asking the question is something that can be used as evidence of intent to discriminate.
Of course, someone volunteering the information is substantially different than the company asking it.
One societal and corporate response to such laws could be to encourage supportive work environments for various subgroups. In that scenario, the interviewer would pre-emptively advertise employee benefits which are relevant to all candidate subgroups, obviating the need for candidates to ask identifying questions. It's therefore in poor societal taste to "force" your candidate into asking questions which are specific to one subgroup.
Because all religious people are anti-gay? C'mon, the point of anti-discrimination laws is so you don't make snap judgments about a person based on the attributes of a group they belong to. Your comment is just as bigoted as those who say that a person's sexuality means they can't have a family.
It is not bigotry to assume that someone who self-identifies in a religious group believes the things that the community of that religion identifies as its beliefs. While it is true that not all religious people discriminate against homosexuality, most Western (and particularly Abrahamic) religions disapprove of homosexuality as part of the standard interpretation of their doctrine. Other people cannot be expected to know what exceptions you personally make to the rules of the religion you follow.
“Young people just have simpler lives,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a talk to would-be entrepreneurs in 2007, when he was 23. “We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.”
Don't have kids so you can focus on what's important to Mark.
"Important" was a bad choice of words on Mark's part, since its a value judgement that is necessarily going to differ from person to person.. However, he essential gist of what he's saying is true. If you don't have kids, you can spend more time focusing on things other than taking care of your kids. I'm a dad and it does take up a lot of time and limits what I can focus on. My only disagreement is based on a personal value judgement of whats important; raising a child is the most important thing to me, but that's not a universal truth for everyone.
I don't think its any more wrong to fully devote yourself to a job that is the important thing you want to do with your life than it is to have a job that exists to enable other important things you do outside of the job.
Yes, instead of wasting time on mindless social interactions with friends and family those young employees can devote themselves to something important like Facebook, which is a tool for... oh, never mind.
Ya, well the quote is from a larger response regarding why it is hard for older (30+) people to get a job in Silicon Valley. It also included the phrase 'younger people are just smarter.' The point he was making was to only hire young people who do not have this distraction of an outside life to prevent them from burning themselves out for the almighty founder.
It very much carries a 'so they can work at making me rich' vibe to it.
America's lack of guaranteed Parental Leave is already a shameful situation for such rich and developed country; it doesn't even compare to anything out there where every OECD country has such protections. [0]
But I believe the tide is turning, and companies that embrace this human right will be rewarded with higher quality employees. As entrepreneurs and leaders ourselves, we have the opportunity to set the culture we want. So I must congratulate and highlight how one YC startup, AeroFS, is standing up and making a difference:
"..AeroFS employees of any gender are eligible for:
10 weeks leave, paid at 100% of salary,
8 weeks additional leave, paid at 50% of salary, and
*10 weeks additional unpaid leave—or more, if approved
.." [1]
The US system has always treated vacation, healthcare, ____ leave as BENEFITS, and expected the market to provide them as necessary. Sadly, the supply has never met the demand, and it will probably take legislation to make this universal reality. Considering how awesome our legislature is at making fair and just policies, I wouldnt hold my breath
I'm sure it's not shameful. It might bug you, but I don't see it as something worthy of shame.
I do not have kids, do not plan to have kids, so I'm not sure why I should pay for someone else's decisions to create life. Whenever someone goes on family leave, other people who were not involved with that decision have to pick up the slack.
Now, maybe if I could take paid (or unpaid) leave-of-my-discretion as an alternative, I'd be okay with it. Otherwise, it feels like federal level discrimination against unmarried, child-less, individuals.
Over your childhood you received plenty of money from the previous generation in the form of schooling, subsidies or tax breaks for your parents, publicly funded resources, etc. The assumption is that you'll pay it back over your lifetime so that the next generation has access to the same resources which you did. I'd suggest starting your quest for fairness by paying back this money, because by your own standard you're freeloading.
Welfare is ultimately an insurance scheme and the idea of getting your money back is as silly as getting your money back on your car insurance because you never crashed it. You're human and on average you're ~50% female and will eventually have children. Maybe if you volunteer for a vivisection then you can have a lower premium, but you're a member of the group whether you like it or not.
There's really no way to know who will and won't have children, ask a man under 20 if they want kids and you'll probably get 50% "no". Yet some 98% of them will have children. Somebody who has had a vivisection can easily have it reversed and somebody who is infertile may yet be treated my some future medical technique. From an insurance perspective everybody "may" have children and so needs to pay into the insurance scheme.
The government has to operate like any other insurance company, otherwise it will become bankrupt. Because it's impossible to gurantee that any straight health person will never have children, i.e you must be a member of the group. Much like car insurance, where you can't promise to never crash your car - you can have a lower premium for not crashing but you can't have no insurance. These are the simple financial facts of insurance.
While individuals do have a choice of whether to procreate (and it's not always a choice), society as a whole does not. Without procreation the economy and society would quickly collapse and the human race would eventually come to and end. So there's tremendous societal benefit to procreation and it should be supported by any government which society chooses to put in place. What you're suggesting would insentivize large numbers of people to not have any children, which is harmful to society and the wider economy. Indeed, without parents, you yourself would not exist.
A world in which you don't have to incur costs for others's children, is a world in which the benefits of those children should arguably be denied to you: no pension, lesser pay because you can't sell to children (or adults once those children are grown up), expensive services because you won't be allowed to use young cheap labor, no universities, larger tax and medical burdens as your own generation becomes older and more sickly, no hip young music or art, no interactions with people more than 25 years younger, no younger workers at your company as it grows, no technologies invented by or provided by those children in their adulthood, etc. Since you didn't contribute to raising the children, it's only fair that you don't get to reap the rewards, right?
The fact is that as a member of society and our economy, you derive a huge financial benefit from other's children which is inescapable. No man is an island.
And while we're at it, I'm not currently ill, so why should I have to pay for disability benefits for others? I'm not old, so why should I have to pay for Social Security?
you are probably being sarcastic, but as someone in their late 20s, I do not believe I will every get a social security payout. either the age requirements will keep getting pushed back as people live longer or the whole program will be abolished by the time I qualify.
I don't think I should pay into a system that I will never receive benefit from.
No, they don't. Some people have to get pregnant or humanity collapses. If you think that is an acceptable outcome, then your moral compass is so far off that your opinion wouldn't merit any respect.
Holy hyperbole, Batman! When did we go from my original statement, "I'm sure it's not shameful. It might bug you, but I don't see it as something worthy of shame" into the utter annihilation of humanity, and me as a bad person for wanting that?
It's kind of weird that humanity has managed to procreate without extended, government-funded maternity leave up to this point, isn't it?
(I'd also like to mention this discussion is scoped to US Governmental legislation, NOT the debate over humanity's continued existence.)
My original point was that it's not shameful to not provide this entitlement. Somehow we managed to go completely off the rails into zero-population Armageddon.
I would also ask that you tone down the rhetoric, personal attacks, and broad generalizations for the sake of civility.
"It's kind of weird that humanity has managed to procreate without extended, government-funded maternity leave up to this point, isn't it?"
Effectively without supported maternal leave, men have a financial leverage over women. One might find this problematic or not, depending on political inclinations. Personally I prefer a society that attempts to balance out this leverage.
I wasn't responding to your original point, but to the comment I actually responded to. Reproduction is not a choice if some of us must do it.
Like, I don't have to drink water, I can just eat meat and get my water from that. But it would be absurd to suggest that "drinking water is a choice" because there are alternatives that I could personally take.
This is a Hobson's Choice: a choice between one option. You could wrangle that kind of argument into justification for anything! Slavery: "You chose to be a slave because you didn't run away." Rape: "You chose to get raped because you didn't stay inside." Pregnancy: "You chose to get pregnant because nobody actively forced you to have a baby."
Never-mind any notion of practicality. Forget about the fact that these things literally need to happen. It's a choice because you don't agree with the politics.
I feel you are collapsing societal-scope with individual-scope.
Individuals choose whether or not to get pregnant when a man ejaculates inside a woman without protection. If you wish to do that, and bear the fetus to term, I do not wish to pay for your decision.
Individuals should bear the burden of their own decisions, not me.
Right now, good parental leave, flexible work hours, and allowing remote work allows companies to have a competitive advantage when hiring. For example, this article (link below) on Treehouse was popular last month which talked about how they have 4 day work weeks because it's not a drag on productivity and people want to spend time with kids.
I work at Trello, and the company has a similar philosophy in terms of treating people like humans who have responsibilities and interests that enrich them outside of work, which only benefits the work environment. A big draw to working at Trello, in addition to loving the product and team, is the fact that these policies exist.
I hope in the future- "perks" like paid parental leave will become something we laugh about as being painfully obvious. Who cares when work gets done as long as it gets done?
If you're at a start-up and some unforeseen problem occurs that needs to get fixed right now, and you're the only person who can fix it: yes the start-up expects you to fix it before you can pick up little Suzie from soccer practice. Yes, they will hire the person most likely to make that choice. If they don't do that, their chance of failure is much higher.
We make sacrifices to work in some areas of tech, and we get paid well to put work before most other priorities because that's what's needed in some (not all) tech jobs. If you want to put kids as a priority before work, that's fine. There are plenty of jobs in tech you can take, but don't expect the same positions as the lady who puts work above all else and consistently delivers when stuff's on fire. She's devoting more of her life to the company and deserves a better title and more pay.
One of the commenters on the NY Times site said it best:
"My experience is that a lot depends on your boss. I always got my work done quickly and thoroughly, but I've had bosses who made you sit in your chair even when there was nothing to do, I've had other bosses who were much more accommodating. It is about the culture of the department. My best job was in a very hard working engineering department, when we were on deadline we worked killer hours, but when things were slack, we went home. Everyone had kids, family outings were encouraged and our boss took us to lunch and treated us like humans. I worked my butt off for that boss. When I have had a boss who treats me like a child, I act like one. If you treat people with dignity and respect and give them time off when they need it, they will work harder."
>> Bret Taylor, former chief technology officer at Facebook and a founder of Quip, with his son Sam and daughter Jasmine.
>> He leaves work at 5:30 p.m. so that his employees will not feel obligated to stay.
Bret is pictured in his expensive home, standing in front of a gas range that was at least $10,000. He can afford to take it easy. He's already sacrificed and put in the 16 hour days.
Yes, Bret has a nice home, expensive stove, and kids. It sounds to me like he's doing the right thing by not pressuring his employees to appear like they are "putting in the hours."
First thing they told us in training sessions after promoting us: you head home at 5:30, and remove pressure for your subordinates to stay in the office.
You may login after hours to wind up your day's work (it is, in fact, expected), but you are to make damned sure nothing hits your subordinates' inboxes until 8:30AM the next day. If that means putting delays on your messages in Outlook, so be it.
Makes for a much more relaxed and productive team.
When the top guy leaves, that signals to the rank and file it's OK to leave. It tends to look bad when the rank and file leave before the boss. It's an extremely well understood social signal (whether you buy into that or not, doesn't matter. It's the signal).
So there is a strong understanding of this in aware managers - they will leave in the 4:30-5:30 bracket, so their employees don't feel compelled to work long hours.
So what's your argument? He should actually work late? Working sixteen-hour days actually reduces productivity so much that someone who does it regularly gets much less done than someone who's in at 9 and out at 5.
The OP's argument (I believe) makes an unjustified assumption that the CEO is falsely implying falsely that people who leave at 5:30 can make it to the C-Suite. That assumption lies in the subtext of an experienced, well paid, successful individual encouraging a work-practice that he did not follow himself. Read literally, the CEO is making no such claim about career (and wealth) advancement at his company beyond "you won't be intentionally penalized for leaving at 5:30."
Well, if it's true that people who leave on time can't do that I'd argue it has more to do with signaling than with actually being productive. Everything I've ever read about productivity suggests regularly working long hours makes your productivity go through the floor to the point that there is not any net benefit.
I agree with you and have read similar studies/articles.
Hours worked is a useless signal at best and a misleading signal at worst. (as an aside, I also believe the 40hr work week is a waste for both companies and employees)
Number of hours a superficial signal that it easy to imitate. People know that productive "hustlers", "gamechangers" "showrunners" get promoted. They tend to know who the hustlers are and thus they know that hustling often requires more than 8 productive hours a day of work. So they stay after hours despite diminishing returns and lower median throughput.
Once a large enough percentage of the imitators stay afterhours, now your average operational employee has to stay in order to conform to the perceived status quo.
So I agree with with the CEO leaving early as long as he enforces a culture that not only encourages people leaving at 5:30, but penalizes people who stay late. Then the hustlers will follow, and then the imitators will follow and the operational staff will feel comfortable to have their 40 hour work week.
I've read a lot of articles with this general tone and theme over the last year or so, and they always bother me, for a number of reasons. They tend to paint the overall industry with a very broad brush, and are, in my experience, often caricatures (this one certainly isn't the worst). This article is based mostly on anonymous anecdotes and is peppered with weasel words, for example: "More broadly, some economists say..." "Workers with children say..." The one piece of data I saw, the number of women in the workforce, has a truncated Y scale.
I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley at tech companies for the last 17 years at many small and large high tech companies, including Apple. My wife also has been working in tech for longer than that, and she enjoys it. I have two young children. When I read these articles, I feel like I'm reading about another universe, as it is so vastly different than my experience. Of course, I can only offer my own anecdotes in response, but here are a few of mine:
- My wife interviewed at a small startup when she was pregnant with our first son. During the interviews, she informed them she was pregnant and wasn't sure how much time she wanted to take off after the baby was born. They were totally cool about it and said they'd be happy to have her for as long as they could. She ended up working there and loved it.
- I'm 40 years old. The people who work with me are a mix of ages. I've rarely been the oldest, and I certainly don't feel like I'm outnumbered by people much younger than me. I've interviewed at a number of companies with young founders, and never felt discriminated against. I still get pinged by plenty of recruiters, so I'm not seeing the ageism that is supposedly so rampant here. I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who are close to my age, and I'm not hearing these complaints from them either.
Honestly, I think this is sloppy journalism, designed to provoke an emotional reaction. I don't want to deny the very real problems in this industry that we should be working on, but I don't think articles like this are helping. If anything, they are scaring women and minorities away from the industry and making the diversity problem worse.
Yes, I certainly agree. However, the thing that bothers me about the article is that it insinuates that the problems they talk about are the norm. That is a strong indictment and, I believe requires more evidence than they've given. I'd go farther and say it does a disservice to many decent people in this industry.
The harder you make it to fire someone, the more reticent the employer will be to hire that person in the first place. This may apply to employees generally, or to a specific race, gender, or subclass.
For example, after the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed, it led to a decrease in the employment of people with disabilities. If the employer has a higher likelihood of lawsuit in the event that the employee must be let go, they have to make damn sure they can't find someone else (who isn't disabled) to fill the position in the first place.
The existence of this sort of legislation actually exacerbates the employment problem for minorities and women in tech!
I think a major reason that Americans expect employers to give them maternity leave (among other things) is that health benefits are covered through your job. Getting fired while pregnant, while difficult, would not be nearly the same disaster if you were still able to get necessary medical treatment in the duration.
I'm 23 and never, ever reveal that I have a wife and 2 sons until after an offer has been made. I suppose potential employers could find out fairly easily, but I know very well from personal experience that start ups do not like when I tell them about my family life, so I leave it off the table until I'm ready, despite it not inhibiting my ability to work just as hard and for as long as my single coworker counterparts.
I guess it really depends on the size of the company, and it's really something you have to kind of feel out for yourself. Naturally I haven't really had this problem with large companies, only small teams.
FWIW, Sheryl Sandberg also leaves work at 5:30pm to spend time with her kids - strange that something she's been talking about for some time (before Bret left Facebook, even) isn't mentioned.
The Facebook hackathons used to start at like 6pm with the implicit expectation that one worked through the night (and weren't expected to work the next day), but these days they start during the day (the next one is 9:30am). There's still time to work all-night if that's your thing, though.
One thing I noticed at a previous hackathon was one of our engineering VPs showing their kids around. I've seen a few parents doing that - often their spouse will bring their kids to visit for dinner and to spend some time, sometimes they go back together, or the kids and spouse heading home for bedtime. Not sure if that's a "this is how I get through this horrible expectation people have of me" or "this is how I blend these two parts of my life that I value", but I'm hopeful it is the latter.
It is discrimination. The question is if that discrimination is a bad thing or not.
For instance: you are discriminating against people who don't know javascript if you are hiring for a job that requires javascript and don't hire people who don't know it.
You are discriminating ... if you are hiring for a job
that requires javascript and don't hire people
who don't know it. Is that a bad thing? I dont' think so.
You might be overlooking good coworkers or employees, especially older ones who have experience in other languages. I knew zero Python or Javascript before I started this job, and now write in it 100% of the time. (My previous job was Lisp + GWT.)
Similarly, I recall an article from Matasano that said that some of their best candiates did not have prior experience with something that one might have expected to be a prerequisite: "Some of the best testers we've worked with didn't have a formal security background." [0].
If you only hire people who "know" $Language, what will you do if six months down the line you decide to rewrite in Clojure, or find that Haskell is the best way to move forward?
>The question is if that discrimination is a bad thing or not.
In colloquial American usage, "discrimination" in the context of hiring and employment refers exclusively to judging people by illegal or inappropriate factors.
>you are discriminating against people who don't know javascript if you are hiring for a job that requires javascript and don't hire people who don't know it.
This may be an appropriate statement for other English-speaking countries, but in the US, this is a statement that borders on sophistry.
Discrimination is normal and beneficial. We discriminate on skills, we discriminate on location, we discriminate on ability and style of communication, etc.
Our whole team is very relaxed and smiles a lot. We aren't going to hire someone who is cynical, tense, and overly opinionated and has different values than us. That's culture fit. Yes, that is discrimination. But not based on gender, sexual orientation, race, or age.
I mean, it is, but there is all sorts of cultural discrimination which many people find reasonable—if not actively positive. Not hiring somebody because you don't like their bearing, because they said something rude, because they posted something non-politically correct on Facebook, because they belong to some ill-favored political organization, because they don't conform to existing norms for hygine: all this is as much cultural fit as anything else.
On one hand, startups strive very hard to become more diverse workplaces, believing that by having different kinds of people, more and better work will be done. On the other hand, "culture fit" bars exist so that any diversity achieved by such initiatives is entirely superficial.
But what does that actually mean? Too shy? Too loud? Too uncultured? The concept of "cultural fit" is so vague it can easily be used to mask actual discrimination, along with general arbitrary "I don't like the cut of your jib" decisions.
As a young woman developer this is a very saddening article to read, and especially upsetting the comments of women engineers being let go while/because they became pregnant. My hope is that the industry will become more balanced as the many millennials working in tech start families...
The funny thing being: actively avoiding parents, while simultaneously complaining about the lack of tech workers. New workers with the aptitude you're looking for don't magically spring forth from php code you hacked on for 20 hours per day.
What bothers me most about this article is that it chooses to fixate on the "new" tech industry where 20-hour days, and complete dedication to your job are common. However, why does the author not mention the finance industry? Hundred hour weeks have always been the norm, and new mothers are encouraged to come back to work as soon as possible or risk missing their next promotion. Some would argue that finance is even more male-dominated than tech, and because of this it makes working at a big bank/fund even more difficult for parents.
Same is true of healthcare, and big law. There are plenty of industries that suffer from unfriendly family workplaces, not just the tech industry. I'd love to read an article that attempts to compare how family friendly different industries are for parents, but unfortunately only a large, costly survey can provide the non-subjective data readers can appreciate.
I guess it is completely lost on the NY Times that one of the main reasons the tech industry is the main engine of economic growth in the US (and one of the few things we do better than other countries) is exactly BECAUSE many companies expect long hours and hard work. We can certainly switch to the European lifestyle the NY Times is fawning over, but it's going to have a huge negative impact on the success of our country's tech companies.
You may be right (I doubt it though) but that is a horrible reason not treat employee's as if they are human beings. Good culture isnt having free snacks and a ping pong table.
This article reminds me of the HN post about the newly planned Google office, where the renderings featured young twentysomethings, almost exclusively.
Considering the Zuckerberg comment, we have to realize that ageism in tech is not only wrong, it's not sustainable. We all age. As this article mentions, twentysomething grads will become thirtysomething parents. Building a tech culture that ignores this fact is ridiculous, but it's our current reality.
Ageism isn't even on the radar, my friend. And it's ironic too, because as you mention, it affects every one of us.
But the current hot topics are diversity and gender discrimination. No problem there, but I have noticed that even people who take those two issues very seriously implicitly blow off the ageism thing. I think people just do not want to acknowledge that they're going to get older too, I think they put it out of their minds.
I've literally had a conversation with someone who said he wanted to make sure we don't just hire a bunch of people like him (i.e., white males who went to the same college he did). Then a few minutes later he made a snide remark about "some old guy" (the old guy was an engineer he was unfamiliar with).
So, I am very pessimistic about the prospect of this issue getting any real attention.
>Considering the Zuckerberg comment, we have to realize that ageism in tech is not only wrong, it's not sustainable. We all age.
Eh, what? Sure it is. As long as they can find new young people they can replace the older people. How do you think things got the way they are? The tech industry in Silicon Valley is far older than a single generation.
Considering the Zuckerberg comment, we have to realize that ageism in tech is not only wrong, it's not sustainable.
What we have to do is make sure that all of the older engineers who "age out of" the Valley move to the same place: could be Chicago, Boulder, Austin, maybe Portland or even Minneapolis. Probably not NYC (I'm fond of it, but it's too expensive to raise a family). Doesn't matter where so much as that the place exists. If any one urban area can capture 15% of the programmers who age out of the Valley, for a decade or two, it'll have more talent than that shithole and be able to out-compete it.
I sympathize with SF parents, but one must understand the nature of the job and try to work with it. As a software engineer, I know I must work towards a path that allows me to prosper as a father and have time for my family.
SF/Wall Street/ Hollywood/... all have their own problems, which is a side effect of their excellence. Yes, WS analysts work 100h/week, but that's how the industry works. The key is to work with, not against, it.
On a somewhat related note, I find it interesting to note that a lot of technology per se is not very family friendly. Family Sharing was only recently introduced by Apple. Before that, it was very cumbersome for a couple to share their music libraries. The same applies to most subscription services. Take Amazon for example: my wife can share free Prime shipping with me, but not Prime Music.
I wonder if this is for legal reasons (licensing, etc.) or because of the people that create such services. My wife's hypothesis is that since a lot of technology is created by single, young and not very social people, it doesn't even cross their mind at design time the fact that a couple (or a whole family) might want to share some of their contents while still keeping their own individual accounts.
Strangely, the discussion around this article seems to indicate to me that children seem to be looked as trophies for their parents.
Children are as necessary for the society as a body as is food and sleep for individual humans. I understand the individualism that drives peoples toward libertarian ideals but children are beyond market mechanisms. They are part of our humanity, the structure without any efforts towards economical or other goals are pointless.
A child is not like a new SUV or an expensive hobby. A healthy, happy child is a net plus for the society to which he or she is born, that benefit all in the long term.
Here's my New Yorker perspective: Everyone I know who has a job that pays them $150k-300k a year doesn't have much work/life balance. Jobs in finance/law/tech are all consuming and the pay is commensurate with that. This seems little odd signaling out tech.
Bret Taylor, former chief technology officer at Facebook and a founder of Quip, with his son Sam and daughter Jasmine. He leaves work at 5:30 p.m. so that his employees will not feel obligated to stay.
Why not leave work at 5:30 p.m. so that his kids will get to see him before bed?
I see a lot of problems with our society or our economy generally, discussed only within the context of technology. I mean, what, is finance a wonderland for parents? Not that it excuses tech of course, but sheesh.
I would point out that a lot of these perks are meant to keep the employees working longer hours. Parenthood and longer work hours go only so well together.
Should employees at larger, established firms be able to demand parental benefits? For sure, it's healthy for the organization to help their employees (often the more senior and experienced) achieve their life goals of starting a family.
But should startups be required to do the same? Is it discrimination if they don't? This is where it gets blurry.
Let's say me and a friend start working on something. Someone is being considered as a potential co-founder. During the vetting period, I learn that they are about to become a parent, and will need certain logistical allowances for the next 6-18 months. I decide to pass on this person - at this stage in the company (very early), everyone needs to be able to hustle long hours. I can't risk having a cofounder not put in the sweat. Dead weight kills startups. So to me passing seems fair.
Keep in mind I didn't even mention if the company was incorporated; if it wasn't, surely you can't call this "discrimination" in a legal sense. Two guys just decided not to partner with a third person. If it was just incorporated yesterday and I make this decision, do things realistically change? The company is at pretty much the same point - 2 people who need more that can work long, hard hours.
But what if we're now 5 people and one key employee stops pulling their weight because of family obligations? I don't have the resources to support them in this manner, so I either have to let them go or keep on the dead weight. The first option reads like "discrimination", while the second seriously messes up my startup (imagine I could replace him with a similar skillset person).
And you could think of the same scenario at 10 people, 15, 30, 50, 100, etc.
As final food for thought,
> The American workplace has always prized people who prioritize work over family, and European countries have long had more generous policies for working parents. But in the last two decades, that gap has widened significantly. Other developed countries have expanded benefits like paid parental leave and child care, while the United States has not.
Yes, but who's leading the world in technological growth? Certainly I can't claim causation either way, but simple logic implies that more work means more growth and tech.
Scanning through the comments, it seems like the readership here would rather re-balance this in favor of more benefits and less work (thus meaning less growth and tech). Remember you don't get to have all of both.
So that's great and all, but are you justified in trying to impose this upon Silicon Valley? SV started like this because a bunch of people with the opposite opinions got together so they could work hard and drive progress as much as possible - sacrificing in the process. Should they leave, or should you? I suppose the answer is to vote for the political representatives that support your world view.
However, I'd argue that it'd be a bad thing, on a moral level, to enact policy against the SV hard work culture. I worry that too much lobbying will result in restricted options for employers and entrepreneurs which would ultimately drive progress down. I believe technological progress is a moral issue; we need our high-performers and hard-workers to cure diseases, combat food scarcity, create better hardware, etc. And we need a place where they can congregate.
> Yes, but who's leading the world in technological growth?
Actually, China, Mongolia and India are leading the world in GDP per capita growth. If by "technological growth" you mean labor productivity growth, other countries with parental benefits, such as Denmark and Sweden, are doing fine.
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDYGTH
It's not impossible to grow while supporting enjoyable lives for your citizens. In fact, as median wealth and median income increases, automation and broader technological advancement become more worthwhile.
The first group of countries are using existing technology to "catch up", so clearly their growth rate ought to be higher. This is "globalization" rather than "innovation". And as I mentioned, there are certainly other countries with great work-life balances that still enjoy high productivity. By the common sentiments I see in this thread, it seems that a lot of people would much prefer these places than Silicon Valley, and I encourage them to research further as in the link you posted.
That being said, here are some questions: where are the leading computer science researchers? Machine learning experts? Software entrepreneurs? Largest and most successful technology ventures whose market caps are greater than the GDP of a lot of countries?
While I can't prove it, I strongly suspect that you don't get world-changing technological innovation without living an unbalanced life.
According to QS World University Rankings, countries such as UK, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Singapore, which do offer parental benefits and are a fraction of the population of the United States, all place well in the rankings.
Also, the USA is a very large market which is why a lot of pure software companies are headquartered there. Specialization is inherent in larger markets. A lot of other large vertically-aligned technology companies are headquartered around the world, such as Volkswagen, Samsung and Alibaba.
The lionization of specific billionaire entrepreneurs is more due to abnormally low tax rates (by Western standards) on extremely high incomes.
We could go all the way down the list, parent-unfriendly, sexist, agists etcetera, but it's way simpler to describe SV culture as what it is: an immature frat boy culture. Amplified by the lack of government regulation in the US in general.
When it comes right down to what really matters, when you see through all the fancy "perks", what remains is a business culture that is not just immature, but downright conservative to the point of being reactionary.
I mean, what kind of 21st century Western company that employs highly educated middle class people doesn't facilitate parenthood?
"I mean, what kind of 21st century Western company that employs highly educated middle class people doesn't facilitate parenthood?"
Ones that are in do-or-die mode. You know, facebook, amazon, google, etc? All these companies could be irrelevant 10 years from now and they know it.
It's war out there for these folks. Facilitating parenthood is the government's job, not the employer's. The employer who's out to create wants young and ambitious, managed by older and wiser.
Think of the NFL - the land of concussions and wrecked super-athletes. Who facilitates the strongest and most athletic to mindlessly hurt themselves in exchange for some drunk fans' entertainment? The culture we're living in :)
Sacrificing the young and the brave in the name of pretty shallow returns is quite common. All we're seeing is the mental athletes getting their social-life concussed. They oftentimes don't know what they're missing to be honest, they're not terribly social to begin with.
Besides, they can retire to a sane company anytime and build up their life outside of work - you can't say the same for somebody who almost made it to the NFL, screwed up his knee and is now working god knows where.
> When it comes right down to what really matters, when you see through all the fancy "perks", what remains is a business culture that is not just immature, but downright conservative to the point of being reactionary.
You're kidding, right? Health care and defense industry in the US are incredibly economically unprodictive (in the technical economic sense). Finance has similar work ethic/hours as tech.
You make it sound like they have some kind of moral objection to parenting. I'm very certain it's motivated by fiscal conservatism nearly all the time. To answer your question: ones that don't have a lot of money to dole out to parents/soon-to-be parents.
I recently was let go from my director of engineering position when I was 9 months pregnant. They said they were outsourcing their operations, but I was the only team-member let go. I also would be on maternity leave during a critical release... I can't say they let me go since I was going to have a baby, -- I think their decision to outsource made sense. I just think it was a catalyst as there was zero transition plan and probably would have been too hard to let me go during or right after maternity leave, which would have made more strategic sense.
I seriously consider leaving technology for good after dealing with the challenges of being a woman, mother and engineer for so many years.
I'm not alone, its pretty common for women to leave technology after having kids.
There is such a push to have more women become technologists, but if we leave once we become parents, what's the gain? The struggles of culture and technology are far deeper than getting more young women to be interested in engineering. Women aren't the only ones to suffer. It's hard for men too. The culture also seeps into the quality of products we create -- in both design and code.
Unfortunately, I have only seen the culture become more toxic as time goes on, not less.
Maybe I'm jaded. I'm certainly sick of it.