Ask a Female Engineer: Employees with Kids and Relationships at Work | Hacker News Reader

Ask a Female Engineer: Employees with Kids and Relationships at Work

themacro.com

144 pointscbcowans319 comments

I don't get this... Male engineers have kids and date too. Female employees, engineer or not, get pregnant. "As a female engineer" I would prefer if people -- including fellow women -- stopped treating us like we are some kind of exotic species.

I don't get it either. I'm a happy Dad engineer but I have no idea what I'm doing and could use this kind of testimonials/advice too!

The questions and answers here aren't necessarily specific to women. The idea of the series is just to ask women engineers questions and see what they say.

But it seems rather stereotyping to start out with kids and relationships for a series about female engineers. Or do "Ask a male or non-gender specific engineer" series also start with those questions?

I mean, they're important questions, but the stereotype seems rather blatant here.

This is the fourth post in the series, not the start.

http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/introducing-ask-a-femal...

http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/ask-a-female-engineer-2...

http://themacro.com/articles/2016/10/ask-a-female-engineer-3...

> But it seems rather stereotyping to start out with kids and relationships for a series about female engineers

Except they didn't "start out" with this post. I believe this is the 4th of the series.

I think it's hilarious that there are so many comments like this one that make it clear that people are criticizing this article without actually reading it.

[As others have pointed out, it's the 4th article in a series so they are not "starting out" with stereotypical questions]

Even before I read this, I expected the comment section to be full of comments being like "why can't it be ask an engineer" or "why are they asking questions about kids, men have kids too". I've noticed a pattern where if there's any social issue on hacker news that is politically polarized (i.e. women's issues in tech, BLM, diversity in hiring, etc.) you can expect a a huge wave of comments that criticize the article from authors who don't actually read it.

The funny thing is that when you get into social issues that are not that polarizing (i.e. living wages, ethical issues of AI, privacy) the community tends to have a much more intelligent, civil discussion.

I think it's hilarious that you assume we who are criticizing the article haven't fully read it.

To be fair - if these questions were asked to a male engineer, I would criticize the article too.

The funny thing is that these questions are not asked to male engineers.

I'm assuming people haven't read it because the comment (and a several others in the thread) starts complaining that the series "starts" by asking stereotypical questions to women. The first line in the article is talking about this is a series and that it's not the first post (it links to the first one). So I'm making this assumption because people are making a claim directly disproved in the first line of the article.

I do agree that every question in this article is just as relevant to men.

Why?

Well the problem of our world is that such article's actually support the gender/race/whatever split. I mean they basically want to solve it, but they create a paradoxon by treating these special. if people would just stop caring about differences we might start to actually have a better world, but I guess we are far far away from it.

well I mean when I search people for a job I mostly look at their performance and if they actually can't meet my requirements I need to say no. Well now guess what happens if I have 20 canidates and I now pick the canidate with the highest performance, the chance is pretty high that I also indirectly support the split, it's just because a minority will sometimes stay a minority which doesn't actually happen because you treat them differently, but because they either don't have the chance to get better or because some jobs are just not attractive for them. So the only way to solve the problem is just to stop treating people differently. Discussion is good, but overly discuss it is not, yeah there was a problem in the past, but I think it actually got better, while the last years somehow made it worse by unnecessary discussions or by people who actually seeked attention and actually put even more salt into the wounds. And the internet made it worse since it makes it hard to differentiate between attention seekers and truly suppressed people.

So you believe that by singling out women we may be adding to the problem because we are reinforcing the culture of treating people differently instead of judging them equally? That's a really fair point; it's exactly why I'm uncomfortable with policy solutions like affirmative action because I think they fight discrimination with discrimination.

This is exactly the type of discussion I'd like to have more of on Hacker News, I'm just making a broader call for us to do better as a community (and try to read the article if you are going to comment).

I think your point is interesting, but what do you propose to do regarding the injustices of the past in women and minority groups? You can't just unilaterally declare that the field is level, and ignore history.

Are you concerned about the women in the past and the injustices that they faced (in which case you're going to need a time machine to fix it) or are you worried about injustice faced by women in the present?

You're basically talking about reparations to a gender.

People of the present come from the people of the past. If society does terrible things to one person's grandparents and good things to another person's grandparents, one of those people is going to have more difficulties growing up. If this was condoned by society, perhaps society should take steps to fix it, otherwise the cycle may continue.

This only applies for segregated societies, though. I can see an argument for reparations to the grandchildren of slaves, for example, because their whole economic structure was impacted in a heritable way. The same doesn't apply across generations for women - if your mother was discriminated against, you suffer equally for it whether you're male or female.

Dude, if your mother was discriminated based on her gender, and you share that gender, you know that her story of discrimination (in the workplace, say) likely applies to you. If you're a man, you know that scare story doesn't apply to you.

> her story of discrimination (in the workplace, say) likely applies to you

Why?

This series isn't supportive of gender based discrimination, it simply acknowledges the physical fact that men and women exists as two separable groups, and then asks question to a small sample of the underrepresented group.

There are undeniable differences between women and men, and pretending that they don't exists, as you suggest, doesn't make them go away. It merely means that one of the groups will not have their specific requirements considered.

> why are they asking questions about kids, men have kids too

Rather, why are they asking questions about kids. This is "ask female engineers" not "Ask Mommy Engineers."

If you want people to improve, you must promote curiosity and indulge their questions. Even when those questions are stupid (in some fashion). Just about the easiest way to shut people up and send them back into their heads, with their patriarchal stereotypes unchallenged, is to tell them that the questions they're asking are wrong.

The industry is crawling. We'd like it to be running, but we need to be patient and allow it to walk first. You cannot build mutual understanding without patience.

I'm a male engineer and single father. So I'm responsible for all of the facets of child rearing including but not limited to dealing with a sick kid. All of the talk of making workplaces better for people with families seemed really foreign to me. I would prefer that my company not even be aware of the concept people having children. It's none of their business. Of course it's not practical for companies to have zero awareness, but the less they are involved the better. If I prioritize X over work, then that's an opportunity for someone else to move into that slot and get the promotion. It doesn't matter if X is boogie-boarding, playing video games, or taking care of a child.

I support extending maternity/paternity leave for everyone. But if I take 3 months off work every year for 4 years in a row I shouldn't expect to get the same raises and promotions as everyone else. If at N years of tenure I get more vacation days? Time spent on paternity leave shouldn't count towards that. It's the same as if I chose to take 3 months off to section hike the Appalachian Trail.

It is about retention and employee happiness.

Lots of people have kids. If a company is receptive of family issues, then those people will be happy and stay at the company.

If it is not then they will lose those valuable and expensive to replace employees.

and if you don't compensate your employees for the value they add, then employees with higher value will leave.

If you hugely (and it is hugely) subsidise your employees breeding, then you are under-compensating the ones that aren't.

There are very few, if any, non-breeding employees* at my company that out perform me, even with all my family related issues.

I don't think there is a strong correlation between the productivity of workers with or without kids.

I was a productive employee when I had no spawn. I am still a productive employee now that I have a mini-me.

* I can't possibly know that, but I am confident that I am a very productive employee.

So why do you think that other employees will become less productive when they get their Appalachian Trail leave?

I never said they would be less productive--I had no real opinion about allowing employees to go hike the Appalachian trail.

I don't think employers offer Appalachian trail leave, simply because they're not mandated to. They are mandated to offer leave via FMLA. Maybe REI offers it.

Not intending to debate anything here, just framing the FMLA requirements. The mother and father are allowed 12 weeks of combined leave. If they both take off, it's 6 weeks each. And businesses are not required to pay you while you're off. They just can't fire you.

I believe you are mistaken about the leave being combined.

http://family.findlaw.com/paternity/fathers-rights-and-fmla....

"Both or either covered parent may take 12 weeks for the birth of a newborn or the placement of an adopted or foster child. If both parents work in positions covered by the FMLA, they will both be entitled to leave for an expanding family."

In a family with an expectant mother and father, both are allowed 12 weeks of leave under FMLA.

You are correct, however, that this leave is unpaid, employers can require you to use all accrued vacation/sick leave prior to FMLA, and you aren't guaranteed your same job back, just an equivalent job.

Ahh, the combined 12 weeks is the case when both parents are employed by the same employer. So you're right, it's usually 12 weeks each.

https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/fmla/10a1.aspx

> A husband and wife who are eligible for FMLA leave and are employed by the same covered employer may be limited to a combined total of 12 weeks of leave during any 12-month period ...

But generally, even if they're both covered, they can both only take 12 weeks if the mother is somehow incapacitated.

>The mother is entitled to FMLA leave for any period of incapacity due to pregnancy, for prenatal care or for her own serious health condition following the birth of a child. The husband is entitled to FMLA leave if needed to care for his pregnant spouse who is incapacitated or if needed to care for her during her prenatal care, or if needed to care for the spouse following the birth of a child if the spouse has a serious health condition. See Serious Health Condition for more information.

> There are very few, if any, non-breeding employees* at my company that out perform me, even with all my family related issues.

I'll just copy-paste this from another comment of mine:

don't counter with "someone really good and a parent is better than a mediocre one without children", since you'll find that I said nothing implying otherwise, because of course that's true

But also:

> I don't think there is a strong correlation between the productivity of workers with or without kids.

Do you think that still holds in countries that give a year or more in paid parental leave?

To me being away for a few years will obviously make your career lag by a few years.

When you get bereavement leave, do you claim that the company is "subsidizing" someone's loss and that you need to get an equal amount of leave to offset that?

What if someone has a rash of deaths in their life? Should the company just fire them for having bad luck because they can't afford to give all other employees and extra X amount of days off so that "everything is equal?"

I would hope that bereavement is not a choice, and it's definitely not as time and mind consuming.

Parents often refer to it as if it's a second job. And you're not even allowed to take a second job if you have a qualified first job, in my experience.

Bereavement leave and sick leave I'm all for, but parenthood is a choice to spend your effort elsewhere.

Yeah, I guess I didn't make it clear in my OP, but I didn't mean to suggest that the way I feel about employment is "right" and the way those women talked about it is "wrong." I just wanted to offer a different lens through which I view the employer/employee relationship.

For me personally, it give me the creeps when my employer encourages or discourages behavior in my personal life. It's why even though I've never even smoked pot a single time in my life I'm opposed to workplace drug tests unless you operate heavy machinery or something. I'm as upset as anybody that Hobby Lobby gets to exert some ethical control over its employees personal health choices by not offering insurance that covers abortions or birth control. If it's not your employer's business when you choose to not have children (birth control/abortions), why is it their business when you do choose to have children?

It's not that people who want that stuff are wrong. I just honestly can't relate to wanting my employer to be involved in my personal decisions.

Kids get special dispensation because they will carry our societies into the future, and on a more personal note, fund our retirements.

A child is not the same thing as hiking the Appalachian Trail and should not be treated that way in policy.

But this is something the society (i.e. the government) should take care of, not individual companies (that might, but likely won't, benefit from future offspring). For example, by sponsoring companies that hire workers that have kids (or otherwise levelling the playing field between non-parents and (less-productive) parents in economic terms).

I agree that society and the government should take care of it, but I disagree on the methods.

I'm all for laws giving parents leeway to have extra time off to take care of kids, job protections for maternity/paternity leave, even the government chipping in for the extra days. Of course, I think everyone should be entitled to sick days - jsut parents have more.

You know, because they have more responsibility than I do - which actually makes parents more productive overall than someone like me it. It just doesn't all show at work.

That's how I see. As a society we need to decide if encouraging people to have children by setting up parent friendly policies is important. I feel it is given the same reasons you gave and thus am in a proponent of those policies. Claiming they are unjust to people without kids ignores in my opinion the societal need to keep a good replenishment rate of our population to support older generations and keep the working population large to support everything from infrastructure to social services funded.

Another option is immigration which has its own pro cons.

This might have been true in the past, but it's not really true anymore. We have a shortage of many things on this planet, but people aren't one of those things. Having children, at this point, is exacerbating environmental issues without providing much tangible benefit to society. It's been well documented that society gets more benefit from immigrants anyways...first-world countries can easily get away with negative replacement birthrates because the third world is growing so quickly and many want to move here.

There are arguments that our society should support parents, but they're moral arguments, not practical ones. Society doesn't need to encourage people to breed. It's ingrained in our nature and enough will do it anyways that we'll be fine.

Calm down Malthus. Overpop has always been a slippery slope, and we've always been "on the tipping point!" You also pretend that culture and cultural attitudes are not important and potentially conducive to the success that a region has.

Notice I did say that there's a moral argument to be made for society supporting parents. Otherwise, procreation could end up the province of the wealthy and people should be able to exercise their biological imperatives if they choose. But the comment that I was replying to was arguing that society needs people to procreate, which is just laughably false. There's a big difference between limiting procreation (i.e. China's "One Child" policy) and not incentivizing procreation. You act like I was advocating the former when I was only talking about scaling back the latter.

> You also pretend that culture and cultural attitudes are not important and potentially conducive to the success that a region has.

I'm not pretending that...I'm acknowledging that more diverse areas consistently outperform areas with monocultures. Adding people with new perspectives almost always improves a situation. Why do you think there's such an emphasis on getting more women and minorities into tech? Hint: it's not just bad PR. Those new perspectives will make the workplace environments and the products and services they produce better.

I completely agree. All of this nonsense is related to the fact that health insurance and retirement accounts are unnecessarily wired into employment to our detriment.

Workplace policies aren't only in place to create an equal playing field or a meritocracy, they also exist as a recruiting tool and to make companies attractive. A company with your preferred policies may be more attractive to a certain demographic, but if I want to attract talented workers who just happen to have children and families, you bet I'll consider bending my policies to accommodate them.

My point is that for me personally I find it unattractive when my employer wants to get involved in my personal decisions. I understand I'm in the minority there, and I don't think others are "wrong" for thinking differently than me about the employer/employee relationship. I'm just extremely wary about any time an employer wants to influence my personal decisions in some way. I don't like that my employer gets to decide what my retirement plan looks like. I don't like that my employer gets to decide what types of health care I have access to. I don't like that my employer could potentially limit my access to birth control. I don't like it that my employer wants to tell me whether or not I'm allowed to do drugs when I'm off the clock. And I don't like it that my employer wants to incentivize me to have more children. The best thing to hear from my employer about those things is silence. Again, it's not that I think people who want their employer to be involved in the decision of whether or not they have birth control or have kids or use drugs are "wrong." It's just foreign to me to want my employer to influence those things.

As a consultant (freelancer) myself, I was going to recommend that as the best way to gain maximum control over your terms of engagement, but based on your username, it seems like you've already figured that out :)

"It doesn't matter if X is boogie-boarding, playing video games, or taking care of a child."

A guy at work this week called in to say his child was sick and had to be taken to the doctor, so he'd be working from home after that.

The company treated him just like the guy who phoned in to say he was going boogie-boarding; as you say, exact same thing.

> It's the same as if I chose to take 3 months off to section hike the Appalachian Trail

Only it isn't. If you don't hike, nothing happens. If you (or someone) doesn't take care of your sick child, including doctor's visits if needed and so on, that is a criminal act. You are responsible for your child.

We need folks to take care of their children. Both men and women. I'm more than willing to give parents extra time off work to do so. I support both maternity and paternity leave and I wish both would take it. I'm saying this as a childless woman.

And I think since our children are important, both for families and society in the present and future - I don't think folks should be punished for doing so. This includes holding future promotions and days off against them for doing the very things society thinks they should be doing - namely, parenting.

>> It's the same as if I chose to take 3 months off to section hike the Appalachian Trail

> This includes holding future promotions and days off against them for doing the very things society thinks they should be doing - namely, parenting.

You ignore the parent poster. His point seems to be the idea that a person can take upto 3 months off of work shouldn't be equivalent to someone who didn't take that 3 month block off regardless of the reason, child rearing or hiking the Appalachian Trail.

If I took that much time off and a coworker didn't, especially year after year, I wouldn't expect them to get more raises, more seniority.

This idea me at home taking care of my kid is the same as people at work is silly. Promotions shouldn't be given just because someone has worked at a place for an amount of time. The exception being cost of living increases. Seniority on the team, responsibility and the increases in compensation that come with that should be according to ability, time dedicated and skills, etc.

On the flip side, if my time is spent engaged with my child then it can't be on increasing my career if I'm at home full-time parenting. This isn't about working parents but, during maternity/bonding leave. It's either one or the other.

I might have ignored the parent: got lost in discussion.

"It's either one or the other"

The problem is that once a woman gets pregnant, you have different physical needs. Lots of women need healing time afterwards, and sometimes needs time off pre-birth. Especially if you have a cesarean. In a sense, this is just like punishing someone for having their appendix taken out or having a heart attack and needing time off.

Folks are generally willing to look over that sort of thing and give promotions based on the time they spend at work. Even if they wind up seriously sick or need surgery 2-3 times over 5/6 years - which more closely imitates the time folks take off with children. Actually, it is a bit better as a company can plan for the time off with children much better than a sickness or surgery.

Do some women take a very short break to give birth? Yes.

And that is just part of the health aspect. Nevermind that the maternity leave helps with knowing how the non-verbal little human operates and I've read somewhere that it helps descrease post-partum depression - or that it can be difficult (and more expensive) to find childcare for infants.

> You are responsible for your child.

You are, but it's a responsibility you chose.

If I choose to go camping instead, should my company pay for the permit because not having one would be a criminal act?

> And I think since our children are important, both for families and society in the present and future - I don't think folks should be punished for doing so.

So let's raise everyone's taxes to reimburse private companies for the cost. But let's not punish companies for hiring parents.

You might choose the responsibility... that could be argued to a point, actually. And I assume you are smart enough to realize that having a child and going camping are two different sorts of things. One has a lot more free choice than the other one - and a lot more control over when it happens and stuff like that. No one suddenly needs to camp: But some folks suddenly need to take care of a sick child or take them to the hospital.

I don't think the employer should have to pay the camping fees any more than I think they are responsible for directly paying for school-related costs for children: However, I do think paid vacations should be a standard thing for everyone, to the point you can take a month off to do that hiking. Even if you work at some fast food place. So in a round-about way, yes. You should bet paid for that through some manner.

I'm also very much supportive of comprehensive sick time so that you can take 2 months off after surgery and not have that held against you.

> So let's raise everyone's taxes to reimburse private companies for the cost. But let's not punish companies for hiring parents

First, I fully agree with having higher taxes for this purpose. I don't view taxes as a punishment, in general, though I have the understanding that applied correctly, they can be a deterrent or encouragement. This, to me, is on par with everyone being taxed to provide education to children. I don't mind because education is important and society improves because of it... even if I don't have children.

Heck, I'm willfully living in a country that does exactly this. There are a few downsides. Some folks do abuse it (true with any sick leave policy, really), and stuff costs a bit more. On the other hand, they credit these sorts of policies to better equality and things like that.

> One has a lot more free choice than the other one

What difference does this make? It means deciding to have a child is a much bigger decision than deciding to go camping, but doesn't suddenly push the burden of that decision onto anyone else. Taking care of a sick child should be the kind of risk you accept when deciding to have a child - your responsibility.

Ah, but society prefers[1] if people choose to take that responsibility and raise kids. I haven't seen evidence that society cares about whether one goes hiking for 3 months or not.

Now, you may be right and in the minority that this preference is wrong, and we should allow leaves of all kinds. But you will have to convince people to vote for legislators who will mandate those sort of policies.

[1] Evidence that society wants people to raise kids: child tax credits, FMLA policies, demand from the leading presidential candidate for increased parental leave etc

From my perspective the fewer personal decisions my employer is involved in the better. If my employer wants to offer 401k match, that's great. But I should get to opt out and put that into a 401k plan of my choosing, not be limited to the crappy options my employer provides. It's great that employers offer a health care plan. I should be able to take that money and shop around for options that are a better fit for me personally. I've never even smoked pot a single time in my life, but it's disgusting that so many employers do random drug testing. It's none of their business if people do drugs off the clock. And I could rant all day about Hobby Lobby and their ilk denying people coverage for abortions. The best thing my employer could say about whether or not I choose to have children, or what kind of health care I should get, or how I should plan for retirement, or whether or not I use drugs is nothing at all.

I recognize I'm in the minority for some of those. I'm not suggesting people who want their employers involved in their reproductive choices are "wrong," because I honestly don't feel like there's a right or wrong here. It's just that it's foreign to me to view my employer in that way.

I'm so glad that a parent is willing to admit that. There's nothing about parenthood that should afford employees special treatment.

Why should people who break for lunch get special treatment? We need to go back to the good ol' days when workers lived in company towns and got paid in company scrip. Who do you think you are, living outside of the company's property and using your own money?

Any benefit a company offers should be available to everyone equally. And if that benefit can't be provided to some for whatever reason, those people should be able to opt to get a cash payout for the cost of providing the benefit. If you offer babysitting services and I choose not to use them, I should be able to spend that money elsewhere regardless of whether I have a kid. Same goes for your health insurance plan, your retirement savings, etc. The less involved my employer is in my personal life the better.

Human beings aren't programs evaluating objective rules to come to an objective determination about raises and promotions.

Your comment carries the implicit assertion that folks with kids are given special treatment. But what you fail to show is that it actually is "special," except in the context where it is defined to be so.

The context to which I was responding to was that in the article the women were suggesting that people who have children should be given special treatment. Things like, if you choose to work less because you have a child you should still get the same raises and promotions as someone who didn't choose to work less (regardless of whether they reproduced). Things like your employer arranging for emergency daycare for you if your kid is sick, or otherwise allocating company resources (space) for kids to hang out in when they're out sick from school.

You're still defining that as special treatment. Why is that considered special treatment?

In what way is expecting the same pay and promotions as someone who works more than you not asking for special treatment? I really don't understand what you could be missing there.

I feel similarly, yet opposite, to you:

Perhaps companies shouldn't care at all what people do with their lives outside of work. Perhaps. But, given that we have to hitch ourselves to one to make a living, they damn well better allow people lives outside of work. Let's all be allowed 3 months off each year to do whatever we wish with.

I really wish HN would go away from this. Either make it "Ask an Engineer" or just drop it all together.

These issues impact men as well, and to move on we need to stop treating one sex differently than another.

I'm all for more exposure for female engineers. I think more visibility for women will help to make the industry more accessible and more inviting to women. And there are tons of useful questions you could ask, ranging from non-gender specific technical questions to sexism in the workplace. But starting specifically with kids and relationships seems a bit too sticking to the "women are about kids and relationships" stereotype, whereas men should be every bit as much about kids and relationships.

This is actually the fourth article in the series, and the first that really touched on anything that was "women are about kids and relationships" stereotype. The last question in the first article was about sexism in the workplace and how people could improve it.

As a man I can say that there are lots of problems in my life that women don't deal with, so I can only assume it is the same for women.

There are of course shared problems that both men and women face (obviously!) but getting something from a women's perspective is something that people could find useful.

Yeah I am another female here who doesn't get it either. I would much rather read "Ask an Engineer" posts that highlight women and men. When they do highlight women, make it about their engineering talents not this stuff. I feel these types of posts actually do a dis-service to female engineers and don't highlight their skills & talents. But what do I know?

As someone dating a fellow engineer coworker, I'm definitely curious to see further input on this sort of thing. She's incredibly smart and competent, but has received comments basically accusing her of sleeping with me to get ahead, or that she's only done so well because she's had my help and favor. (I don't have reports or any managerial power, but I am one of the most senior engineers on the team)

I've definitely spent a fair amount of time teaching her things, but it's been in no way her taking advantage of me, and I don't use any of my influence to help her more than I would anyone else. She's earned every accolade and piece of praise she's received, and it's heartbreaking to me to see these kinds of comments directed at her. Even without my help, she'd be incredibly successful - she's one of the smartest people I've ever worked with.

Due to this sort of thing, we keep the relationship fairly private. Some people know, either because we've shared it with them or because neither of us are particularly great at hiding it, but it means that we have to at least attempt to keep something that brings both of us a lot of happiness a secret. Since we have lots of co-workers on facebook, etc, I even have to be extremely conscious in things like tagging us together in group activities. We have to remember to try and keep at least some distance in work related social gatherings. That stuff is hard on me - as much as I try to imagine how hard that is on her, with everything else she deals with at work, I know it's even harder.

I have to quash a desire to be overprotective of her on this sort of thing, and other inappropriate encounters she's had at work, because she's an adult woman who wants to take care of things without me stepping in. I've got to respect that - but I would find it absolutely fantastic to be able to share with her stories of people who have been in similar situations and how they handled it.

I know none of that is expressly what was discussed here, but I think it's a problem that affects females in the workplace a hell of a lot more heavily than it does men, and it's certainly not the only thing. Sexism is alive and well, and I don't see how people talking about it does anything but help.

That is a very thoughtful comment and by no means I want to accuse you personally of anything.

But is there any possibility that you may be biased and see your girlfriend in a more positive light than your coworkers? Given that "objective assessment" of a coworker is hard to define, yet alone hard to enforce, I don't find it very unusual if other colleagues cast aspersions on her motives in such case.

Certainly something I've thought about!

I'm sure there's some bias, but I think my view is overall pretty objective on her ability and intelligence. Largely because most of my impression of her intelligence was built before I had any feelings for her - and ended up being one of the largest contributions as to why I fell for her in the first place.

She's only a couple of years my junior in age, but went through the whole Bachelors -> Masters thing, so is lagging behind me by more than half a decade in the actual work experience department, so she still makes a fair amount of mistakes when it comes to office politics, and her degree, while related, isn't directly applicable to what we do, so she still has had a fair amount to learn as well. I've tried to stay objective on both sides of this, and point out things she can learn, since I figure that objectivity will help her in the long run.

There's some outside validation as well - she received her first promotion very quickly, and is on the fast track for the next one, based almost entirely on the mountain of positive feedback she's gotten from her work with outside teams and both internal and external customers.

>Given that "objective assessment" of a coworker is hard to define, yet alone hard to enforce, I don't find it very unusual if other colleagues cast aspersions on her motives in such case.

Yeah. I know it's not anything that can be enforced, I just don't think that I'd be receiving anywhere near the same attitude and comments if the tables were turned and she was the more senior engineer. It's also that I have no direct way to help her get ahead outside of feedback to the management, which admittedly carries a decent amount of weight... But it's also something that I've specifically told her I'm not able to provide since I can't guarantee I'll be 100% objective, and something she has no problem with.

Sorry for another long response, but it's something I wrestle with many days of the week, and have thought a lot about.

> Never assume that all your employees are straight, all your employees only date one person at a time, all of your employees define dating the same way you do, or that you’ll know if your employees are dating. I think a flat prohibition of romantic relationships in your company is going to be very hard to enforce; most likely, your employees are not going to disclose their relationships.

Red Flag. Key advice: don't shit where you eat.

The problem with these sorts of things is that people have feelings and often react poorly when things implode. If you have people with their varying views of what's ok and what isn't doing their thing, you're going to have a big problem on your hands.

The corner cases are really painful to deal with. My wife had one where an ambitious female working for her was sleeping with 4-5 directors, created awkward situations, then started a lawsuit/eeoc complaint. The three months of depositions were lots of fun.

I witnessed one where two high-level director level people were engaged, which was great, until the male was discovered to be also "dating" a subordinate. He had to transfer, but there was nowhere to go due to his level, so he got canned. It was a bad situation on every dimension.

The point is people will shit where they eat, regardless of how much you like it.

To that point, what was the dating policy at your wife's company?

I believe it was no personal relationships within the reporting chain.

That's pretty common, those types of asymmetrical relationships are fodder for harassment complaints.

Yeah, people dating their equals is fine. People dating their superiors or underlings is a huge red flag.

What happens when one get's promoted and is no longer equals with the SO?

Here at $bigco, there's at least one couple where the person lower on the totem pole formally reports to someone you wouldn't expect in order to avoid their boss's [...] boss being their spouse.

I believe in most places that have actually faced this there is an obligation to disclose the relationship on the part of the promoted individual and an obligation on the company to shuffle people around so the one person isn't reporting to the other.

was the female director punished also?

No. In that case, that relationship was known. The female director wasn't in the wrong, and had done what she was supposed to do.

> Red Flag. Key advice: don't shit where you eat.

I mean sure it's good advice but a prohibition of romantic relationships doesn't actually work. When people get close after working together romantic feelings can happen its only natural. A study from 2006 found 40% of office workers had a romance with someone they worked with. 40% [1]. Hell, anecdotally almost half of everyone I can think (that I know personally of course) in a relationship I know met their spouse at a place where they both worked.

Yeah there are reasons why it's a bad idea. Yeah it shouldn't happen with supriors. But it will happen and a flat out prohibition on it will cause more harm than good. If you flat out prohibit it then it won't get reported and then no one will know about the possibile conflict of instrest that needs to be handled properly.

If you have open policies regarding this and encourage people to notice management and that they won't get punished then you can make arrangements to ensure no conflicts of instrests occur (or at least minimize them).

I would be curious if there have been studies between the two schools of thought.

[1] http://www.siop.org/Media/News/office_romance.aspx

If you flat out prohibit it then it won't get reported and then no one will know about the possibile conflict of instrest that needs to be handled properly.

Arguably this would shield the company from lawsuits if things go south and one party files a sexual harassment lawsuit. The employer can claim ignorance, point to the policy, and fire both parties.

Would it though? I'm not a lawyer but what's the difference between the employer understanding there is a consensual relationship and then sexual harassment is accused versus not knowing about a relationship and the same thing occurring? It's not like the company knew about sexual harassment and once they know about it they'll likely be terminating the offending party. So why would them knowing there is a consensual relationship add to their accountability?

Who's going to believe that reporting their workplace romance isn't going to involve consequences?

Why would it necessarily? I've done it without consequences and I've seen plenty of others do so as well.

Depending on the culture and management sure there could be consequences (especially if they have rules against it) but I'm not sure I understand the default position of assuming consequences.

Why take the risk? There's almost certainly no benefit to disclosing, and possible (even if unlikely) consequences for doing so.

I know someone who had a problem because they didn't disclose it and the other person ended up harassing them so it would've been waaayyy easier if they had talked to HR about it before.

The benefit in disclosing is avoiding the penalty for dishonesty (which is usually termination). It's true that many companies aren't going to fire you for being in a relationship, but they want to know so they can manage both their legal and professional liabilities.

Leaving the legal component aside for now, creating a reporting relationship between people who are romantically involved is usually a bad idea -- even if both people are perfectly objective about it, no one else will believe they are, and it will cause contention and suspicion in the ranks. No employer wants to deal with that.

> creating a reporting relationship between people who are romantically involved is usually a bad idea -- even if both people are perfectly objective about it, no one else will believe they are, and it will cause contention and suspicion in the ranks. No employer wants to deal with that.

Most employers I've worked at when this happened simply shifted responsibilities. So even if the person was "technically" under the other person, they would now report to someone else and their partner would have zero input into any performance processes.

Granted now perfect especially in small companies but most companies I've worked at seem pretty understanding that this type of thing happens and there are ways to work around it. Surely not all places are like this but I'd like to think a fair amount are and I'd also like to think this is a good way to handle the situation.

> I mean sure it's good advice but a prohibition of romantic relationships doesn't actually work.

What do you mean "it doesn't actually work"? Do you mean it doesn't work every single time? Or do you mean it never works? Because a prohibition that substantially reduces the relationship count (thereby reducing corporate liability, damage to team structures, morale, culture, etc) might be a very successful policy indeed.

Try reading the rest of the comment, you'll see that your questions are answered with "People will still form relationships, they just won't talk about it and things will be much worse than if they had."

He's saying that fewer people will form relationships if that policy is in place. Anyone with management experience knows that prohibitions are never followed 100%. It doesn't mean that they're useless. They minimize the incidence of the undesirable activity.

Believe it or not, there are some people with discipline and emotional control out there. Romance is not an unstoppable force (despite what Hollywood wants you to believe). In the presence of a prohibition on office romance, parties who take their job seriously will employ personal restraint and refrain from engaging in office romance.

"Telling people they're not allowed to do something just makes them hide it" is a tired and frankly juvenile argument. Yes, it's true that in some cases, which, generally speaking, are fairly rare (depending on what you're prohibiting), people will continue to break the rules and hide it. But many people will choose to avoid the risk altogether and follow the rules.

What is juvenile is having policies that treat adults as a whole as incapable of making their own decisions about who to get into relationships with.

Well, we know this tends to be a problem, so clearly not every combination of adults are capable, and the company as a whole tends to pay a price. Therefore the company has an incentive to try to minimize that cost as much as possible; the question is what kinds of policies (if any) will move us closer to that local maximum.

Maybe we should be asking whether a corporation should be attempting to implement such rules. Personally, I think it should be off-limits, just like all sorts of other things that business owners would love to enforce but can't.

> He's saying that fewer people will form relationships if that policy is in place[...]They minimize the incidence of the undesirable activity.

No, I said people will hide those relationships if they choose to pursue them not that fewer will happen. Attraction is a very natural thing and while such rules may be lower the amount I'm unconvinced it'll be anything significant (just look at our history of prohibition for multiple things that just doesn't work overall).

To me it's not an "undesirable activity". That's similar, in my mind, to making a rule that gay people shouldn't be gay at your place of work. You're not going to stop it. You'll likely make someone choose work over their social life but ultimately it's just going to make people sneak around and if there are clear issues with a subordinate dating a manager being closed about it will make it more difficult to find out about it and who knows what type of damage that could do to your organization.

> Believe it or not, there are some people with discipline and emotional control out there. Romance is not an unstoppable force

The problem is falling for someone isn't something within your control. You can repress it and you can choose not to act on it but you can't tell your brain to just not feel attraction (at least not in any direct, quick way). It's part of our biology and it's natural to want to be with someone that you're drawn to.

> "Telling people they're not allowed to do something just makes them hide it" is a tired and frankly juvenile argument. Yes, it's true that in some cases, which, generally speaking, are fairly rare

The prohibition of alcohol, the "war" on drugs and countless other times in history disagrees with your assessment. When you are dealing with a natural biological process banning it just ends up causing more problems. Banning alcohol and drugs still caused people to crave and want it due to the way it affects our brain's chemistry in desirable ways. Trying to ban gay people from various aspects of our lives didn't stop them from being gay because, again, it's a natural part of their biology.

So if you have sources which state that banning something that is part of a natural, biological process actually causes the majority to no longer do it I would absolutely love to read them. I haven't seen anything like that.

>No, I said

I was referring to the immediate parent post of the one I was replying to (the post in which the misunderstanding occurred), not your post. Sorry for any confusion on this front.

> That's similar, in my mind, to making a rule that gay people shouldn't be gay at your place of work.

Incorrect. We're talking about behaviors, not thoughts or impulses. It is completely within a person's control to refrain from engaging in romantic activity with another person. The policy makes no comment about attraction or thought because no one cares and it's totally irrelevant. Feel whatever you choose to feel, but keep it internal at work. This is aka "professionalism".

>You'll likely make someone choose work over their social life but ultimately it's just going to make people sneak around

I strongly disagree. I believe most employees would adhere to the prohibition. Not 100%, but probably 90%.

>The problem is falling for someone isn't something within your control.

Absolutely false. This is the lie that Hollywood wants you to believe because it makes it easier to sell movies (it also makes it easier to destroy a society's moral fabric). You do not have to be a victim of your impulses.

> It's part of our biology and it's natural to want to be with someone that you're drawn to.

I'm all about biology but we aren't apes -- we can control our impulses. That's part of the expectation in a professional environment.

>The prohibition of alcohol, the "war" on drugs and countless other times in history disagrees with your assessment.

First, no they don't. Use goes down during prohibition. There will always be people that break the rules, but prohibition does have a high-quality prohibitive effect.

Consider gun laws that prohibit ownership or carriage of certain types of firearms. They don't stop everyone, but they stop most people. That is in fact part of the 2nd Amendment argument; if you make gun ownership illegal, only criminals will have firearms. Most citizens follow the law and do not consider the risk involved in violating prohibition reasonable.

>When you are dealing with a natural biological process banning it just ends up causing more problems.

You're conflating behaviors with biology. In society we manage our impulses so that they don't destroy us. Hedonism is incompatible with productivity. Discipline IS possible and must be re-enshrined as a critical value if we're going to make it as a culture.

>So if you have sources which state that banning something that is part of a natural, biological process actually causes the majority to no longer do it I would absolutely love to read them. I haven't seen anything like that.

There's really no reason to humor you on things you could easily Google yourself, but I'll throw one your way: "We find that alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level. During the next several years, however, alcohol consumption increased sharply, to about 60–70 percent of its pre-Prohibition level." [0]

Prohibition initially caused a sharp decrease in consumption. As it became obvious that few people respected the law, a lot of people picked the habit back up, but there was still a very significant suppressing effect, keeping consumption down 30-40% from pre-Prohibition levels. That lasted until the 18th Amendment was repealed.

That means that initially, 7 in 10 drinkers stopped when it became illegal. Even as it became apparent that the law would be widely disregarded, 4 in 10 pre-Prohibition drinkers still declined to drink because it was illegal.

Now, I'm not saying there weren't negative effects associated with prohibition, but the truth is that if you make something illegal or against the rules, many people will comply because the risk of rule-breaking isn't worthwhile to them. There's some "evidence" for you, which you really shouldn't need -- you must be young if you haven't figured this out yet.

[0] http://www.nber.org/papers/w3675.pdf

No need for snark; after all, you're the one who failed to read properly. In particular, my question was not "will people still form relationships?", it was "will a prohibition cause fewer people to form relationships?".

You have to protect the company.

If you have a policy and the couple doesnt follow it, you reduce the risk of getting dragged into their litigation.

Unfortunately for work-place romances the 'rule' is that you either get married or the guy quits.

That is NOT a hard and fast rule and is not universal, but generally that is how it works out (anecdata). How a same-sex/multi-person/trans relationship works out usually, I have no idea and would love some perspectives on it from HN.

Fun fact: The rules on coworker dating in the post-WWII era were originally intended to get the woman to quit.

Here's how it worked:

A company would hire a bunch of high school or college grads. Young women would get hired as secretaries at a salary of $X. Young men would get hired as salesmen, clerks, etc. at a salary of $X+Y. There would be plenty of time to socialize at the company cafeteria, office parties, and happy hour. Naturally, many of the young men and women would start dating. When they announced they were getting married, they'd get hauled in to the boss's office and told that one of them had to quit. It was then strongly implied that it should be the woman since her salary wasn't going to support both of them and she didn't have much upward mobility. This created openings so you could hire a new crop of young women ready to be paid poorly and marry the next crop of young men.

That fun "fact" claims a degree of nefarious plotting that requires at least a smidgen of evidence.

You may want to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar and especially its references.

Which doesn't support the above description of firing women for the purpose of hiring a new younger crop at lower wages.

Oh, the exact purpose of forcing married women out of the workforce varied depending on whom you asked. But the wikipedia article does explicitly give

> Marriage bars provided more opportunity for those whom proponents viewed as "actually" needing employment, such as single women.

as a claimed reason for marriage bars, which is actually quite similar to "firing for the purpose of hiring younger people", though it's being spun as for people's good, not to decrease salary expenses.

In a world where 1) traditional gender roles and family units are the norm, 2) jobs are known to be a finite commodity, and 3) employers are expected to provide adequate wages and benefits such that employees can support their entire family, then it stands to reason that is a fairly straightforward example of benevolent sexism.

I would hesitate to ascribe identical motivations to everyone involved in instituting marriage bars; I expect that there was a variety of reasons people did it. Some people probably did feel like they were doing good for society.

But the effects were somewhat pernicious, because as usual people didn't think about second-order effects. Or in some cases first-order ones, like women delaying marriage so they would not lose their job.

> My wife had one where an ambitious female working for her was sleeping with 4-5 directors, created awkward situations, then started a lawsuit/eeoc complaint.

Ambitious is not the word I would use to describe this type of person.

Why not? You can be both ambitious and a dumb ass.

There are pithier descriptions.

> It was a big relief that I could take a sick child with me to work (of course only when the illness was not serious).

Please don't bring a sick person into the office for any reason. This is why work-from-home policies are so important.

My daycare has a policy where kids have to go home if their temps are over a certain number, and can't come back for 24 hours, even if they are not sick. I have to take a handful of days off a year to stay home with a kid who isn't sick.

You also have to remember that little kids frequently get sick from things adults are already immune to. Both of our kids went to daycare at about 6 months, both were frequently sick for that first month with things there were exposed to for the first time.

This just isn't true.

Kids' developing immune systems enable them to pick up things that we would be immune to, then cultivate those things until they reach a basically a weaponized status. Kids are all kinds of infectious to adults.

I've never in my adult life been sick so frequently as when I shared an office with a parent who'd moved his young school age kids from the east coast to the west. I really liked him, but the experience was awful. Every 8 weeks I was sick.

As a person with a child and many small nieces and nephews, and multiple teachers in the family, I will tell you that you're wrong.

The disease they bring home may be something you were exposed to but it will ~~mutate~~ grow stronger in the child as the weak ones are killed off and infect you anyway.

And there is a reason you can't come back for 24 hours. Many diseases are still contagious after your symptoms have cleared. If you throw up and feel better, it doesn't mean the disease is now gone.

So please respect the science and herd mentality and keep sick kids away from kids and adults for at least 24 hours after symptoms subside, or at least make sure the other adults are explicitly ok with you being around them.

>The disease they bring home may be something you were exposed to but it will mutate in the child and infect you anyway.

Not true, viruses do not mutate at such a rapid pace. If they did vaccines would be entirely ineffective.

>And there is a reason you can't come back for 24 hours. Many diseases are still contagious after your symptoms have cleared. If you throw up and feel better, it doesn't mean the disease is now gone.

With influenza and the common cold children are no longer contagious after the symptoms have faded. Anything else that is infectious should be treated by a doctor and you should ask him.

"How long can I spread it?

About a week. You’re contagious from 1 day before you have any symptoms. You stay that way for 5 to 7 days after you start feeling sick. Kids may be able to spread the virus for even longer, until all of their symptoms fade."

http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/how-long-flu-contagious

Look at the sentence you posted. You are contagious for one day before you have symptoms and then you are contagious until all the symptoms go away. Usually the sick day that you stay at home for is the second day of seven. So really, you should stay out for the week. But 24 hours is a nice compromise.

Also, how do you know they influenza and not something else?

And as to mutation, you're right, they don't actually mutate. But what happens is the weaker bacteria/virus will not affect you but will affect your child. After a while, the child starts to kill off the weaker ones and then the concentration of strong ones increase, and those are the ones that neither you nor your child can fight, and that's when adults get sick too.

Most laymen call that mutation which isn't correct, but it's still correct to say that the bacteria/virus that are stronger increase their concentration in the child until it is potent enough to infect the adult too.

>And as to mutation, you're right, they don't actually mutate. But what happens is the weaker bacteria/virus will not affect you but will affect your child. After a while, the child starts to kill off the weaker ones and then the concentration of strong ones increase, and those are the ones that neither you nor your child can fight, and that's when adults get sick too.

Source?

You also have to remember that little kids frequently get sick from things adults are already immune to.

Which would explain why every parent I know is sick certainly more often than my wife and I are with no kids, and usually sick every time the kids drag something home.

This doesn't sound like my experience. New parents maybe, but with 3 kids, I have taken literally 0 sick days in the past year (I did WFH 1-2 days last year where I wasn't sure but turned out I could even workout on those days).

Back when we had a single kid we did get sick more FWIW.

Seriously. Ask any elementary school teacher you know how often they and their families get sick - it might well be an order of magnitude more than other people.

It's pretty possible to avoid (contagious) illness for a year at a time if you don't have kids and don't spend time at schools/campuses/conventions. Change one of those things and you'll be sick in a month.

Yes, I get sick more often now that I have kids (once or twice a year instead of none) - but they still get sick 10 times more than I do.

This is why we send our kids to a home daycare (mixed with a couple days a week at a more formal french immersion preschool).

Our home daycare teacher is fine if they've got a bit of a temp or sniffles, and I think my kids are stronger for it (other kids there get sick too, but we haven't had many bigtime infections passed around).

> You also have to remember that little kids frequently get sick from things adults are already immune to.

...but also things that could kill my elderly parent.

oh man, my little kid is a biological terror.

He got my parents sick. then He got my wife sick. then He got me sick. then He got the nanny sick.

It's going to be a long 20+ years.

When you employee others you do so on the understanding that if they have kids then they are going to take a bit more "sick" leave than someone without a kid. That is just life.

Actually saying "if they have kids" isn't actually correct, it is if they have any dependants. Almost everyone has dependants at some point in their lives and you have to accept that.

> You also have to remember that little kids frequently get sick from things adults are already immune to.

And they also spread things that many adults (and children) are severely impaired by. A "mild" chest infection to you or your child is a cough, to me it's a week in bed and antibiotics.

of course only when the illness was not serious

Yeah, it's "just a cold", not tuberculosis. Stay home, that's why you have sick days.

If you can work at work with a sick child, you can work at home with a sick child.

(For the record, I've had to stay at home with my sub-year-old kid for several days, and I cannot work from home even if she's well. I can't imagine getting anything done with her at the office, either.)

Exactly. Anyone suggesting you can work while looking after a small child has clearly never looked after a small child. I can barely make an occasional cup of tea and put some laundry on when looking after our toddler, the thought of doing productive work is hilarious!

Having worked both at places with "sick days" (tracked or not), and lumped-all-together PTO policies, I loathe PTO arrangements. Extremely ill people dragging themselves into work because they have no PTO or feel the reasonable need to preserve it... It places an unfortunate choice on the employee.

I loathe PTO arrangements.

Oh, thanks for picking that scab. Worked at a place with the "all-in-one-bucket" PTO. Hated it for the exact reason you outline. I rarely get sick (about once a year), and it seemed like I was sick on a monthly basis working there.

Wait a minute: If you have 10 sick days, then (in theory) you can only take them if you're sick. If you have 10 PTO days, you can take them for any reason, including if you're sick. Isn't that more flexible?

EDIT: Ahh, good point, thanks repliers! I forgot the case where PTO comes out of your vacation days (which I have been subject to in several jobs). Yea, those jobs suck.

Only if the PTO doesn't come at the expense of other holidays, or with the expectation that you'll use less of your "unlimited holidays" because of it.

When you have sick days, you typically also have PTO days.

When you just have a set number of PTO days, you're forced to decide whether it's worth dealing with a couple of days at work with a slight fever in exchange for being able to go on a family trip in the summer.

If you have 10 PTO days, you can take them for any reason, including if you're sick.

Or I can take those 10 days on a nice vacation to Europe with the spouse...but only if I come into work on days that I'm sick.

EDIT: and to clarify for any confusion that I might just be imagining that you might have, the PTO arrangement to which I refer is where you get a lump of days to do with what you wish, be it vacation/holiday or illness. Versus x days for vacation/holiday and y days for illness.

It is, but employees count all flexible PTO as vacation and resent wasting a vacation day on being sick.

Similarly to "unlimited" vacation, it takes a bit of work to get yourself in the right mindset to use generic PTO well.

Perhaps for the individual (all else being equal), but for the group it is detrimental. It incentivizes your coworkers to come in sick (to conserve precious PTO days they can use for actual vacations/traveling), potentially getting you sick and eliminating some of your precious PTO.

I am from Europe. What are limited sick days? When I am sick I get a paper from my GP saying that I am sick (sic!) and when I'll be able to work again (this is filled in on the day I start working again). My vacation days (25 per year where I work) are not affected by this.

I wonder what happens when the vacation days are used up. Do you go to work with a fever? Are you staying in bed and getting paid less?

Where I've worked, if you're completely out of PTO then you stay home and take unpaid leave.

To me, putting this much pressure on a sick employee seems really harsh and detrimental in the long run. I hope employees with such contracts just get paid more in general, so they have more financial wiggle room to account for bad streaks.

> Do you go to work with a fever? Are you staying in bed and getting paid less?

Yes and yes, unless your employer is especially gracious. Welcome to the good old US of A!

That's unfortunate. I know how stressful it is even here to be sick, because despite getting infinite sick leave in theory, you still fall behind at work, which is already unpleasant enough by itself. But it's also frowned upon to come to work when you're sick, because you're either risking other people's health, or simply not taking care of your recovery (which will have a negative impact on your productivity).

As a mother with children, the idea of a sick room is terrifying. It's bad enough to bring a sick kid (or even post-sick kid) into an office full of otherwise healthy people, but the idea of my kid then being incubated in a room with everyone else's sick-kid germs, touching things and sleeping in the same sleeping bag... ick.

As a manager, my policy is that the worse thing you can do is infect us all. If you are sick, please, quarantine yourself! Work from home. You will not be dinged for working at home, but if I end up sick, I will be grumpy indeed ;)

This was my first thought also. Dealing with illness is always hard, but the idea of having a room full of hard-to-sanitize objects like sleeping bags, specifically for sick people, is downright alarming.

Daycares, schools, and hospitals are already excellent at spreading illness. Setting aside a non-sanitized room for sick kids (or adults) seems like a way to ensure that everyone leaves sicker than they came in.

You guys are looking at it all wrong. A sick kid room is like a little workout gym for their immune systems.

EDIT: while this is somewhat true, I was trying to make a joke

And like lifting weights, if you go too hard too fast you'll get yourself into trouble. Except lifting doesn't make your neighbors' muscles sore.

Yeah. It's like a trading card game except the cards automatically copy themselves and make people miserable. "I'll give you my strain of the cold if you give me your strain of the flu."

It seems people think that if you're already sick you can't get another illness added on top.

If someone I work with brings their sick kid to work then I am working from home.

Honestly wtf kind of idiot thinks bringing a sick person into an office is a good idea??

One person's toxic biological WMD is another person's precious unique snowflake.

How about a dont-work-when-your-child-is-sick policy.

I'd probably go a step further. If you have a sick child with an infectious disease, and even if you have arrangements that would allow you to come to work, don't come to work. Work from home.

Why? Because you can be an asymptomatic carrier.

15 years ago, I caught chicken pox thanks to someone whose kid had it coming to work. (and chicken pox is more severe and dangerous in adults... it was a "fun" week)

Unrelated, but as a 21 year old (male!) who knows little about society, human psychology, etc., can I ask with sincerity what is probably a really dumb question?

Why do companies/society need to accommodate people who have kids? Why are maternity/paternity leave a thing? How come we don't expect people to price the fact that having a kid is a lot of work that will inherently set their life back into their decision of whether to have one?

Is it really so "evil" when one makes the assumption that someone with kids is on balance less dedicated, more tired, more preoccupied, etc. than someone without? Can't we rephrase that as, someone who has a matter in their life they need to spend hours a day on will have less time for other things? Is that discrimination?

Where do you see yourself in about 30 years? Would you like to have a healthy society, innovation in arts and sciences, a strong economy, a strong national defense, etc.?

Well, the kids who are babies today will be providing that for you--even if you don't have kids yourself. That's one reason childrearing gets special treatment in policy.

Another more practical reason is that quite a lot of people have kids, and so families make up a large block of votes in our democracy.

I get that humans should have kids, and obviously it's terrible (and should be fixed) whenever kids are neglected. We should have (more, better) programs for this.

But why does it fall on companies to create an "environment" that treats people with kids the same way when in fact their circumstances are different?

During the YC/Thiel thing, I saw someone cite "I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon", as an example of a morally outrageous statement. But surely people with small kids are more preoccupied?

Because kids do better when their parents take care of them, and "programs" can't replace this.

Companies have to help out because they're part of society. In exchange they get to do things like limit their liability and collectively enter into contracts.

There seems to be this amazing doublethink in Silicon Valley where people convince themselves that their startup is going to make the world a better place in some huge disruptive way, while arguing that companies have no responsibility to make the world a better place in small, normal, achievable ways, like setting family-friendly policies.

Silicon Valley startups are apparently so powerful that they will fundamentally disrupt and reshape society, but also so fragile that having some women with kids on staff will cause total mission failure.

> having some women with kids on staff will cause total mission failure

hyperbole

> But why does it fall on companies to create an "environment" that treats people with kids the same way when in fact their circumstances are different?

In the US. It doesn't. The Federal Government mandates every eligible employee gets 12 weeks leave to deal with certain "family" related issues:

* Taking are of yourself, your spouse, your parent, a new child

In countries like Sweden, the government mandates that parents can take up to 480 days paid leave per child.

As others have posted, for tech companies, they are doing it to remain competitive. More recently, companies like MSFT, Netflix, Facebook have started to offer paid paternity leave, as employee incentives.

Put it this way, if my company did not make concessions for parents, we would leave and find jobs else where. That would make the jobs of all employees that are left that much harder, and in all likelihood, cause the company to fail.

> "I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon", as an example of a morally outrageous statement. But surely people with small kids are more preoccupied?

Is there evidence that startups with female co-founders with small children fail more, less, or about average? What if that family had a nanny (like I do), or the spouse was planning on staying at home? There are women who have small children, work full time, and attend night school. If they can do that, then certainly they can start a company.

Personally, with a young baby, I much prefer the stability and predictability of an established company, to that of being a co-founder, or very early employee of a startup.

> How come we don't expect people to understand that having a kid is a lot of work, something that will inherently set their life back, and price that into their decision of whether to have a kid?

Specifically because people understand this is why we need to accommodate people who have children. If having children starts really setting you back because it's not accommodated in the slightest, all the ambitious, driven, and responsible people will decide that they can't afford to have children. If it gets bad enough, it becomes so common that the fertility rate of your entire country falls down.

The other reason is a business oriented one: a very large portion of the population intends to have children. It would be rather strange to exclude them all from your employment pool.

> Can't we rephrase that as, someone who has a matter in their life they need to spend hours a day taking care of will have less hours for other things?

Now a question for you. Would you want to live in a world where the only way to survive was to dedicate 100% of your life to your job? No relationships, no hobbies, no time for things like exercise. Just your job.

Makes sense. Ok, you changed my mind.

I did read once that humans basically evolved to handle childcare as a society. Apparently villages used to raise all the kids together. So I am probably arguing against biology here.

I'm still not sure assuming that people with kids have less time left over is discrimination, but I am probably projecting my own lack of desire to have kids onto the separate issue of how society should be run.

>humans basically evolved to handle childcare as a society

On that, you are right. It's incredibly frustrating for many trying to raise a family in Western-style living arrangements being so separate from their extended families and community. Child-raising is most efficient when done by a group: alone, it's exhausting and challenging and it's bad for the economy in the long term:

http://www.historyfuturenow.com/wp/why-the-nuclear-family-ne...

Even if you don't care about the emotional aspect, there are many impacts on society caused by the very recent rise of the Nuclear Family.

Don't forget that even childless adults are sometimes put in situations where they need time off to take care of someone else, such as a sick spouse, sibling, or parent. Having a system where theses events are accepted helps companies retain their employees through times of crisis.

Not accommodating kids in the workplace has worked pretty great for us for a few hundred years now. I'm not sure your arguments for changing that are compelling.

For the last few hundred years women were effectively required to stay home and look after children. We've pretty much doubled the size of the workforce, but have to make some accommodations now that there isn't an assumed stay-at-home caregiver.

Pretty sure you didn't think this through since in the last few hundred years we absolutely accommodated kids at work. In coal mines and factories.

Pointing at historical norms is generally a poor way to argue for what's right.

It comes down to living in society. A very large proportion of people will, at some point, have children. Many countries have decided, to varying degrees, it is good for society as a whole to make companies support parents, as children are the future of society.

In many cases it's not precisely "make companies support parents", at least not directly. In many social-democratic countries, companies are required to accommodate the parental leave, in the sense of allowing the absence, but the pay during leave is funded by the government, via taxes, not expected to be covered by the company on its payroll. It's considered part of the social security system in those cases, like old-age pension, free schooling, and other such universal, state-funded benefits.

You might try reading this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave for some background. The short answer is that family leave is good for companies, especially companies that are innovative and employ a lot of knowledge workers.

Because you/the-company/society wants ambitious hard-working people to copulate.

One large multinational company that I know of actually gave people bonuses for having kids, growing a multi-generational loyal employee base.

Some employers also accommodate side businesses and hobbies. One place I worked at even encouraged employees to use their equipment to work on side projects. My current employer lets me work on my side business in the office when I don't have other work to do. Ironically, that same employer discriminates against staff in relationships because they're a child-having risk!

So I think one aspect of accommodating kids is the same. Not a moral thing so much as a way of attracting workers.

Why do companies/society need to accommodate people who have kids?

People are giving you these answers about the importance of children, etc, etc, etc. They're right, but I don't think that's the reason companies accommodate people with children. IMO, it's pretty rare to see policies that are truly based on altruism.. there's usually at least some financial/economic basis for those policies.

This is simple really... if you don't accommodate them (something that costs little), they will go somewhere else that does. So you're left with a smaller pool of employees.

Some of those that you've lost, may be very good, but they will go work somewhere else where they get what they value. So to attract those people, you can try offering more money (likely more than what child-accommodating policies would cost).

Either way, you've reduced the employee pool, and increased wages to compensate. That's not a good situation for any company to be in (unless the cost of such policies costs more... which is unlikely).

Edit: also consider that the older a person is, the more likely they are to have children. So if you didn't accommodate them, your employee pool would be filled with younger, less experienced people (ie: 18-30). That's also generally not a good thing for a company.

The thing about a Netflix room for sick kids really reminded how good we've got things in Denmark. I have two days off every time a kid gets sick, no questions asked, as does my partner. I work in the public sector though, so I'm not sure what the standard arrangement is in the private sector.

I believe even in the private sector at least one day is typical ("barnets første sygedag"), because the union framework agreements of the major unions include it as a standard clause.

Right, but are most developers in the private sector covered by a collective agreement?

Well, the reality in America is that in most places you can take time off if your kid gets sick... you'll just be "downsized" during the next "reorganization" if you ever do.

You almost had it here. In America, most employers of professionals are flexible, sympathetic and understanding. They'll usually give you the time off without further ramifications. Just because the law doesn't require it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

There's no correct answer to this. But, from personal experience, there are companies and roles in which too many sick days and even maternity leave can shaft your promotion. They usually give fuzzy reasons like "you weren't fully present," etc. and won't necessarily directly say "you took too many sick days to care for your kid!" There is an implicit assumption that at certain early-career roles you are childless and managers and peers at such levels are quite poor at accommodating working parents.

I'm in the UK and have never had a problem taking time off to look after a sick child, although I work for a company which is generally excellent about these things (I took something like three months off after our kid was born due to complications).

Can you negotiate that benefit away for additional salary or vacation time off?

No, i don't think so.

If you’re going to have a policy on employee romantic relationships, my suggestion would be to focus on relationships where one partner is in a position of authority over the other ... And yes, this policy should be clearly spelled out in a company handbook – it shouldn’t be something your team is confused about or has to ask about.

This pretty closely describes the situation at the Fortune 500 company I worked at for a time. I thought it worked pretty well.

>> Dorothy : I’ve never seen policy on employee dating that was effective. I’ve seen policies that made sense in theory – i.e. like don’t date within your reporting chain – that lead to bad outcomes in practice – people hiding their relationship.

I sure as hell do not want my boss asking me out. Ever. I do not want that kind of situation at work and I am totally fine with people being fired for "inappropriate relationships" as happened in my department per the company policy.

When you start with "I" you can say anything, but with an objective look I'd say everything is fine as long as it does not affect the business itself, i.e., if they continue to do properly as before their own jobs. A per-case approach is way better thus.

In theory, this may work in small businesses. In practice, there are very serious problems with a) potentially being subtly pressured into a relationship because your job depends upon it and b) potentially getting promoted because of whom you are sleeping with instead of that being based on job performance.

The military treats certain situations similar to statutory rape because if you are being threatened or pressured in some way, the perp will expect you to swear it is consensual. They jail officers (or did at one time) found to be sleeping with the wives of lower ranking men in their unit, and her testimony is irrelevant.

This is considered a morale issue in the military. You don't want an officer to have to order a man to do a job that might kill him under circumstances where the motive might be "I want you dead so I can have your wife."

The stakes may be lower than that in most jobs, but I think the effect of wondering why Sally got promoted or wondering if Anna got fired because the boss asked her out and she said "no" is still incredibly corrosive to the environment. I don't see any good coming from it.

Hey I'm sorry but it's disgusting to compare a romantic relationship to rape, and then I don't like the sexism in your comment. Also, army is an extreme case in comparison with anything that's not army. I'm not a US citizen so what I know about your army is limited to what I see on the news, but what I know of armies in general is that they are organisations of legitimised killers with loads of weapons at their disposal and tamed with the power of dogma and discipline and submission. So go figure.

Whatever, staying on topic: if some people abuse a given freedom, it does not mean that the freedom itself need be banned. The abusers need be punished. In my mother tongue we have this expression: don't burn the quilt for the flea. The initiative for a relationship need not come from the superior, and in case it does, it need not be corrupt and exploitative. And then it's not that the lower-ranking one is always a Sally or an Anna, can also be a Joe or Tom. (edit:) At the end of the day, each case is different and should be taken in its own.

You say you don't see any good in it, but partners of such relationships that lead to happy families will beg to differ. Usually people get to meet each other in school, work or friend gatherings. It's not like you can stop people in the street and ask them out.

edit: grammar are hards

The point is that the concept of "consent" gets rather fuzzy as power imbalances increase.

This applies to all sorts of things. It's why click-wrap eulas have limits on what they can do. It's why there are limits on what companies can put in employment contracts. It's why romantic/sexual relationships between adults and children are often illegal. It's why consumer protection laws exist.

it's disgusting to compare a romantic relationship to rape

Maybe, but it's also perfectly reasonable to ask how much of a power imbalance there is, and whether claims of consent can actually be trusted.

I am not comparing a romantic relationship to rape. I am telling you that there are ways to coerce someone into sex that look completely polite on the surface. If you want your business to function well, it should never be okay to put someone in the position of feeling they have to date their boss to keep their job.

It was perfectly fine to date people from work at my old job. It was not fine to date someone whom you had power over. There were plenty of people there that were married to other employees or dating other employees. In some cases, they worked closely together.

Such a policy protects both the boss and their underlings. It means the boss doesn't have to worry if someone is asking them out in hopes of sleeping their way into a promotion. No one is allowed to ask their boss out either.

Edit: Since you say you are foreign, "Statutory rape" is a term that means you had sex with someone who was legally too young to consent. So even if that individual was totally enthusiastic about sleeping with you, due to their status as a legal minor, they are not deemed competent enough to fully consider the consequences of their actions and provide informed consent. It does not mean you dragged someone off down an alleyway and violently assaulted them.

This is pertinent in situations where one party is not in a position to freely say "no" because the other individual has power over them (or some other advantage that is allowing them take advantage of someone).

Dating need not include sex. Sex is not abuse. And that there is possibility of abuse does not mean that the abuse will happen. Precautions need be taken, but an outright ban is uncivil, because it carries prejudice towards individuals, i.e., the superiors are filthy exploiters who'll do anything for sex and the underlings immoral people who'll trade their bodies and emotions for professional returns.

WRT statutory rape, I didn't know, sorry. WRT me being foreign, I din't know that HN was a US-centric forum.

Y Combinator, the company that owns and runs Hacker News, is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA. There are plenty of people who participate in discussion here that are not from nor in the US. But, yes, it skews US-centric.

I did a little googling, and it appears that countries like China, India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, France, and Germany all have the concept of statutory rape, even if you aren't familiar with that particular wording in English.

is fine as long as it does not affect the business itself, i.e., if they continue to do properly as before their own jobs.

There are other ways things could affect the business. There could be a risk of getting sued, there could be morale issues related to accusations of someone "sleeping their way to the top", there could be reputational problems making the company less attractive to potential new employees, etc.

I agree. The downsides for abuse of authority far outweigh the befit for a few.

Since we're not living in totalitarian regimes, out of curiosity how was this found out:

>people being fired for "inappropriate relationships" as happened in my department per the company policy.

If this were to happen, I imagine HR would say, "You two are dating" and the two people involved would say, "No we're not, we don't meet outside of work."

How would it even come to the attention of HR absent any kind of complaint whatsoever? Clearly in such a consenting relationship it's not in their interest to bring it up - surely "but rumor has it" is not actionable. I can't imagine that they would kiss or physically touch in the workplace. They're not slaves. How can HR know about their private lives?

As for your "I sure as hell do not want my boss asking me out. Ever." together with your second longer sentence, as a matter of policy your statement actually translates directly to "if I [meaning you, Mz] had a boss that I wanted to ask me out, I would like for us to have this choice only at the option of seriously risking both of our jobs for me to let them know this or for them to do so if they felt the same way." Because that is the rule you are suggesting. And what anyway is dating? Should employees not be allowed to meet after work, period? Are they allowed to meet, but the minute they touch even outside of work, even when keeping it a secret, and even if both of them really, really, want to, then they should both be fired? What if they secretly meet and talk about work things for months, but it's never a date, because they know they're living in a totalitarian regime that will fire them both if it judges that these meetings are anything but fully professional? What if they bring work materials with them, or perhaps the man in question tells everyone he is gay or if the woman tells everyone that she is a lesbian, just to throw HR off of the scent? Should there be a secret court -- how about a court-appointed psychiatrist and/or detective, so that anyone can file an anonymous complaint with HR against any man and woman who are in each other's chain of command, accusing them of being in a relationship, with no repercussions for the accuser but both of them being summarily fired if the detective says, "they seem to like each other, yes. Wouldn't surprise me." Will this atmosphere help enable women to join male teams -- where in many cases a staggering 100% of certain teams are male?

Also let's go farther than "did two employees in each other's chain of command ever touch each other." Your policy suggestion also implies that rather than start a foundation that they invested with $28 billion, after being married and living happily ever since, that Melinda Gates and Bill Gates should have been fired from Microsoft rather than being married. (Since in their position as a head on Encarta and Expedia, Bill Gates was their 'boss.')

Or does this not apply to the actual bosses, the CEO's (not a gendered term), who lead company cultures by example? Are you saying this was a bad outcome, that instead they should both have been ousted, fired? Because the minute they got married, the cat was out of the bag. It would be pretty hard to mount a defense that you're not actually in a relationship with someone, when your two Facebook statuses change to married to that person, don't you think?

How it works in normal, balanced workplaces is that employees don't harass each other, and nobody would ever ask you out unless you really, really wantd them to -- not only not your boss, not even the person sitting next to you. Don't you think that is a fairer policy?

EDIT: downvoters (3 of them), could you kindly explain yourselves? I am open to the possibility that I am wrong, in this case please answer the rhetorical questions above literally or tell me why you disagree.

Among the ways I could imagine HR finding out, we have social media being a major factor. Additionally, depending on how far along your relationship is you'll probably end up at the same address, though I suppose you could claim "roommate" in that scenario. You say "rumor" is not good enough, but if you're at-will as many people are I would assume they can just fire you, no?

[retracted].

Please give the clarification you state below. I'm curious what happened in the scenario you mentioned.

if you need my retracted comments for some reason they're here - http://pastebin.com/EPXJTgEE

You are wildly misinterpreting my comments. I did post a long explanation giving the details of the situation as best I could, but have deleted it because your very long comments here are a reaction to things you think I said that I never said. So I retracted it in part because I think it just muddies the waters.

I did not say two consenting adults were fired. I have not said there is anything wrong with people dating colleagues at work and just a great many other things that you assert that I said.

If you would like to go back and reread my comments and rethink your concerns and rephrase them, I would be happy to discuss your concerns with you. But you are so wildly misinterpreting what I have said, I think it only deepens the misunderstanding here to try to "rebut" or "clarify" things in your statements.

EDIT:

This is my retracted comment. I am rather tired of the discussion and the degree to which people are wildly misinterpreting my remarks and "rebutting" policy suggestions I never made, amongst other things. Please read it carefully before responding further. Thank you.

----

Mz said that two consenting people in their (Mz's) department were fired for an "inappropriate relationship" outside of work, so I asked this poster how, in fact, HR found out in that case.

That strikes me as insane. I am open to other alternatives however. In particular I'd like to hear the details of the case Mz. just reported to us.

This was not a dating situation. I don't know the exact details. It was handled discreetly, which I think is appropriate.

The man that was fired was a middle management type. He was married. The rumor mill suggested either that he was having an affair with a particular lower ranking female or that he had been found to be sexually harassing someone.

I discussed this with both a male friend who was rather high ranking in another department and with a female friend who had been an employee of the man who was fired. She and I had been teammates at one time.

The man in question was someone who had called me "doll" and "babe" at one time under circumstances where there was absolutely nothing wrong with that as I had no idea who he was. I only knew him socially as someone who worked in my department of about 500 people that I ran into sometimes in the cafeteria. And then, days after he began calling me "doll" and "babe," I learned that he was about to become my boss.

I arranged a private meeting with my boss and explained the situation. I told him the man was not guilty of doing anything wrong and his intentions were ambiguous and I did not even know if he was married or not. I was told he was married. My boss suggested trying to trap the man into a guilty reaction. I told him that seemed like a bad idea and I asked him to just go talk to the man. I told my boss "He has done nothing wrong. Worst case scenario: I get moved to a new team and do not work for him."

I was not told what happened in the meeting between my boss and the man who was about to take over the team. After the meeting, the man would not meet my eye for a month and I was quietly moved elsewhere when he took over the team.

Shortly after he took over the team, my female former teammate asked me why I was moved. I kind of shrugged and indicated "You go where you are told" and did not give her the back story. After he was fired, she told me he had been saying inappropriate things to her, loading her up with work and giving her so-so reviews/ratings. She was an extremely attractive, busty woman who dressed well.

I have no idea of the exact nature of the "inappropriate" activities he engaged in. It was company policy to not disclose such things. I am confident he was doing something wrong and finally got caught and I was thrilled to pieces when he was fired. He was very popular and the department had a funerary atmosphere and I was trying to hide my desire to dance in the aisles and hand out kazoos.

The Q&A talked about the fact that you cannot assume everyone is cis het monogamous. So if you allow "dating," no holds barred, then a married man can swear he is polyamorous and sleep with whomever he so desires and perhaps his wife goes along with the claim so he can keep his job because the family needs his income.

You need to make policies that protect the company from scandal and protect the other employees from potential predators. If you require everyone to prove "guilt" of something like rape, coercion or whatever, then the policy is broken. The line needs to be drawn at "dating." (for people with specific business relationships, such as boss-underling)

I am an older woman. There were a number of men at the company who were my age, plus or minus a few years, who seemed to like me. Some of them were married, some not. They tended to be men in positions of power due to the age bracket we are talking about. (I had been a homemaker for many years and this was my first full time paid job acquired at age 41.)

So, for a lot of different reasons, this is a problem space I contemplated a lot while at the company and I continue to contemplate.

You aren't required to agree with me, but I am expressing my support for what I understand to be a "best practice." The company in question has an excellent reputation for diversity, employee quality of life and for being ethical. I think people who are in a position to be making such policies should take that under advisement.

I do not know if you are familiar with my blog. I write sometimes about the types of things you are expressing concern about. I do not believe that saying that someone cannot date their boss makes the problem worse. This is a problem space I have put substantial thought into, fwiw.

I think this is an excellent write-up (thank you), gives very important clarification and is really good for this thread it's in. No followup questions.

Thank you. I am glad we were able to so effectively clear up our miscommunication.

Best.

> The rumor mill suggested either that he was having an affair with a particular lower ranking female or that he had been found to be sexually harassing someone.

This is the problem here, in your thoughts and in what you poster as a good policy on relationships among employees. There are mountains among a love affair and molestation. I firmly believe if a company takes action on employees for the former, it's a breach of privacy and human rights, whereas the former should be punished in different ways both by the company and by the state.

> You need to make policies that protect the company from scandal and protect the other employees from potential predators. If you require everyone to prove "guilt" of something like rape, coercion or whatever, then the policy is broken. The line needs to be drawn at "dating." (for people with specific business relationships, such as boss-underling)

This is pure prejudice at show. Rape and exploitation are criminal cases, not the company's business. After all, thinking the most banale way, the company can be sued for defamation and libel. And that's indeed it if there is no exploitation or molestation, that is if the "dating" is with mutual consent.

> This is a problem space I have put substantial thought into, fwiw.

This does not really mean anything, many people put substantial thought into developing ideas that later are proven to be wrong.

Not all people are that good in starting relationships, but not all such people are creepy molests. It's civil to make an offer and to refuse and offer, and for someone to declare that a particular way their interlocutor engages in communication is unpleasant to them. It's nice to not be too much unmerciful in these cases because sometimes it's you on the less courteous side.

You are using a lot of "yeah but what about this extreme edge case?".

Edge cases are edge cases for a reason. If two people are dating, it is usually obvious and everyone knows.

It is obvious, and out in the open, and if someone asks, the people dating will probably say "yes we are dating" or humm and haww like they have obviously been caught.

People in general are very bad at lying and keeping secrets, especially from people that they spend 40 hours a week with every week.

Eh, things happen.

Policies are neat because they let you impose limits to human behavior in a very binary and arbitrary fashion. But humans are complex beings. People fall in and out of love all of the time. It needn't be exploitative.

To mandate whom I can or cannot fall in love with is something I will never accept. Nor should anyone.

So what happens if the relationship starts when people are equals, and one later gets promoted? What if the people are married?

Depending on the policy, you might have people having to leave the company or decline promotions.

How is that a bad outcome? I'd suspect the purpose is less about personal sharing and openness, and more about the company not getting sued when people do things they shouldn't.

I used to follow that, exempting advances from flirty or relatable coworkers, but working in startups there are so many exceptions where you stay for a year or two maybe.

First, its not long enough to really get to the awkward part. This isn't an absolute clearly, but you should be able to play along during the various phases of attraction and relationships, as employees come and go, you being one of them.

Second, there are many quirky work environments. Like when you sublet from a larger startup. Then you get the pool within your startup as well as all the other people in the other company that are totally fair game, where both people are immune to the other company's HR gimmicks.

A more useful policy would be to understand the consequences, like adults.

If you agree that there has historically been a disparity between the genders and you agree that there is currently an gender disparity in the workplace, it is not much of jump to believe that elevating women could help to correct that problem.

I see a lot of comments on posts like these claiming that it is sexist or just reproducing the problem to give women visibility or an advantage in the workplace. Usually these comments are supported by anecdotal evidence. I think these comments are supporting the status quo. Given the mountains of evidence showing gender disparity today in hiring, salary, etc, as well as the historical fact of women's position vs men over the last few thousand years, shouldn't we be leaning in the direction of trying things out?

Hi! Cadran here from YC. If you'd like to anonymously ask a question, please email ask@ycombinator.com or post it here. Thanks!

I'd like to see some thoughts on "unlimited vacation." How many of the ladies work at companies with this policy, and how do they decide how much to take?

Thanks for asking! I'll add it to our list of questions.

You should also do "undefined vacation" - the company that I work has, as far as I can tell, no vacation policy. People do take vacation, but it has never been mentioned as a coherent thing.

Another good one would be alcohol and alcohol related events... I really see no reason for those to be in the workplace, since they're not work. I am male but I hear so many stories from (non-engineer) female friends about creepers in bars, so I worry about that sort of thing moving into the workplace.

Could you edit the posts so its easier to navigate the series? Currently one has to search HN to find posts other than the first one.

I've worked at places that allowed many of the flexibilities mentioned.

I sometimes felt that it was more socially acceptable for men and women with kids to use the WFH and leave early flexibilities than it was for those of us who are child-free.

yes, it's a double standard. usually the people who make the rules have kids also, so this is how it plays out.

I've also heard that most of those rule making people were at some point children themselves. It's a vicious circle really.

It would be better if it people were encouraged to not reveal the reason why they want to WFH

People often "feel" all sorts of rules that aren't real, then modify their behavior based on these unreal rules they've perceived, then harshly judge others for not living in the exact same dreamworld. I'm endlessly amused by it.

Honestly I upvote this simply because women get asked and can reply uninterrupted, I don't actually care all that much about what they say just that they have been given the space to say it (as none of these engineers are the one I married).

This Q&A Series seems like it would have the opposite of it's intended effect.

You want to ask woman engineers about family matters? That seems analagous to giving your wife a vacuum cleaner for her birthday.

It isn't ideal, but there seems to be no good path forward. If this simply makes women more visible and more empowered to talk on HN, that will be a step forward.

Are women not empowered to talk on HN? I feel like it's pseudo-anonymous.

I seem to be the most "prominent" openly female member in terms of forum participation. My research indicates that the short answer is "no."

It has gotten better over time, but there is lots of room for improvement.

What exactly does 'not being empowered to talk' mean in a place where no one can really tell anyone's gender and everything is online?

I'm just taking your word you're a woman and you have as much opportunity to post or reply as anyone else.

Women get responded to differently here in ways that women themselves report is problematic. (http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/01/oh-my-god-it...)

There appear to be no women on the leaderboard. The leaderboard lists 100 names. The top of it is stable, but, my understanding is that your name drops off of it if you are inactive for X amount of time. The bottom is not stable. Names appear and disappear. So there are likely something over 100 members with enough karma to qualify for the leaderboard, at some points during the year. I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard.

I posted a question or two trying to find out who was female here. Some women created accounts in order to reply. So, there appear to be a lot of women who lurk and read but do not feel comfortable participating.

I ended up gathering some objective data to the best of my ability because the social piece is pretty opaque here. I did not have an agenda initially. But I was experiencing a lot of friction and there was soft social evidence suggesting I was "prominent" for a woman here at a time when I had something like 3000 or 4000 karma. I put that data on my blog. For example: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-dat...

I can't prove any of this. If you want to be pedantic, hey, you win. But as a woman who ended up inadvertently researching how prominent I was because I was having what I felt was an excessive amount of friction for a "nobody," my opinion is that a) HN is not very welcoming of women and b) it has gotten better over time and is continuing to improve.

Do with that opinion as you wish. I don't feel like getting dragged into some stupid argument where multiple men verbally beat on me while swearing women don't face challenges here. Such situations never seem to strike the multiple men engaging in the pile on as either ironic nor as de facto evidence supporting my assertion that there are issues.

The problem is, that the assumption "Women get responded to differently here" is just impossible to check, as this is an anonymous forum and you can choose the login name you want and their is no gender data associated with you (which is obviously fantastic). In particular I would assume there are many people here that just do not give a fuck about who writes comments, at least I rarely check the user name.

> I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard.

Although I am not sure how important that is (HN Karma), I would say you can not know that, as this implies, that you know the gender of the top thousand HN commenters?

I am not the only person who has observed that women get responded to differently here. You do not have to (in your words) "give a fuck who writes comments" to respond differently to a population that is likely to have a different set of experiences and a different way of expressing themselves.

> I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard.

Although I am not sure how important that is (HN Karma), I would say you can not know that, as this implies, that you know the gender of the top thousand HN commenters?

I phrased that very carefully and it is factually correct in the way it is phrased. No, I do not know the gender of all members.

Like I said, if you want to be pendantic, whatever. But, yes, I can know for a fact that I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I sure as hell know for a fact that I am thousands short of the leaderboard. That last detail is very easily checked.

> You do not have to give a fuck who writes comments to respond differently to a population that is likely to have a different set of experiences and a different way of expressing themselves.

I am not sure I understand your point here, but if I do not care who writes the post, the only information that would leak the gender is the comment itself, and I do not think that one could reliable deduce the gender of a commenter by inspecting the comment (considering the comments in most HN discussions). Sure there might be discussions where this is possible, but I do not believe that this is the case for most of HN's discussions.

The issue isn't that people think "hey, woman, I'll treat her differently". The issue is that people with different experiences will communicate in different ways, hold different priorities, and they'll react differently to the same stories and comments.

And they very well might decide that they don't want to spend their free time attempting to talk to people who they can't communicate effectively with because of some combination of the above. Feeling like you're one of the only people who understands your experiences in a community really sucks.

> Feeling like you're one of the only people who understands your experiences in a community really sucks.

Yeah that might be true. It is just hard for me to imagine why a non-male might be inhibited to comment on e.g. the current dtrace discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12806941)? Obviously this is cherry-picked, and there _was_ (and _is_) discrimination against women in the tech scene, but I would have guessed that HN is a positive example and I rarely stumble across discrimination here.

HN is a positive example. See my comments here: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/before-hn.ht...

Perhaps you should go and actually read some of the stuff on my website that I have given you several links to already before continuing to argue here. I have written probably thousands of words already on my blog about the situation on HN and I am pretty even-handed and not all man-hating or man-bashing. I strongly suspect that the fact that I fundamentally like and respect men generally is germaine to my ability to a) get upvotes here and b) critique the forum without just being thrown out on my ear.

But your behavior here is really problematic. And it is this kind of behavior that discourages a lot of women from participating.

I am a woman. You refuse to take my word for it that women experience things differently. I didn't even expect you to take my word for it. I gave you links to supporting data. You do not appear to have done me the courtesy of reading any of that before jumping back in to continue to assert that I must simply be wrong because people on HN are so nice or something.

This is really, really frustrating behavior for a woman to deal with and we face it constantly at every turn.

Please do read the links you were given and, if you still have questions after that, come back and ask more informed questions later.

Thanks.

> Perhaps you should go and actually read some of the stuff on my website that I have given you several links to already before continuing to argue here.

I read your blog post, but I am unsure how the content is related to our discussion (the assumption that women get responded differently here).

> But your behavior here is really problematic. And it is this kind of behavior that discourages a lot of women from participating.

Just for clarity, can you point out which behaviour of myself discouraged women from participating here? Please understand that you made a pretty strong accusation here.

As I do not think that I made a statement in this discussion, that is off-putting to women, let's just agree to disagree (about the assumption, that women get responded differently here).

The first link provides supporting evidence of my statement that "women get responded to differently here and report that it is problematic" as that post starts with the following:

A woman posting under a throw-away account explained why she does not post as openly female on Hacker News. In part, she said:

Whenever a female posts, you put away the boxing gloves and take out the kid skin gloves.

And it provides a link to the source material where that was said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828289

The other link provides the raw data I dug up concerning "prominent" female names and how their karma compares to that of "prominent" male names. The difference is quite stark and dramatic.

I did not say you made any statements that were off-putting. I said your behavior is off-putting. I presented a cogent argument backed up by firsthand testimony ("women are treated differently here -- I am a woman and here is a link to another woman testifying as to her experiences") and raw data and you continue to insist that it is simply not so without in any way addressing the substantive evidence provided to you.

It's pretty crazy making stuff and it happens to women enough that we have terms like 'mansplaining' to express the tendency of men to completely ignore all evidence and tell us what we (women) are supposed to think about our lives or something.

Let me propose theory as to why women are treated differently on HN, specifically why prominent women have less Karma.

What you are observing is that in many communities, women are not accorded the same celebrity status than men do.

Specific to the US: society tends to idolize men for their work, more so in science and technology, but also in film, music, and television. Women are worshiped for their beauty.

Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jack Welsh are pioneers of industry, but women, don't have the same status ascribed to them.

Women pioneers in their field have to be propped up to be used as inspirational role models for girls. Men are naturally propped up by the media.

In communities, Micro celebrities are created. Outside of communities for "traditional" women roles (cooking, being a mom, nutrition), very few, if any, are women.

Ellen Pao, Marisa Mayer, and Elizabeth Holmes have been skewered (for better or worse). In fairness,

In their own communities, and related communities, micro-celebrities gain a natural boost to (karma,reputation,skillpts).

HN, a tech community, tends to idolize pioneers of tech and creators of successful startups.

WRT that throwaway account:

That comment was from 6 years ago. A lot has changed since then.

The owner of that account admitted that she could not attend YC because she does not have impulse control and would cheat on her husband during those 3 months. It's hard for me not to view her perspective through a certain lens--my armchair psyche degree indicates there are issues from her past that cause her to want to sleep with other men the moment her husband is not around. She has found a maladaptive coping mechanism, which is masking the symptom, but not addressing the underlying issues. Similar to how someone with anger issues represses their anger, instead of releasing it (constructively)

Seemingly proving her (and your point) in that same thread, she said being around geeky guys would be like an ethopian being by a buffet. No way that comment would acceptable today.

My theory: micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zone.html and let's leave her sex life out of this.

Maybe. On the other hand, most people lurk and read a lot before signing up for forums, and they're more than likely going to come across one of the many political discussions on here, which are... slightly less meritocratic. They could keep to just discussing tech here and pretend the politics don't exist, or they could go find other communities where they're more likely to get along with people.

(Or they could, on occasion, be like me and try to communicate with people who won't listen and occasionally burn out.)

> Feeling like you're one of the only people who understands your experiences in a community really sucks.

Yeah political discussions here are not better than on reddit, but if you go to HN to discuss politics (which is a broad term in itself), you are doing it wrong. E.g. I mostly discuss tech here (this discussion being an exception), and try to be a lurker in shitty politics, economics, feminism, SV-"make-the-world-a-better-place", etc. discussions and would have assumed that many do the same.

Indeed, except that when people are literally talking about you - which they are every time women's issues turn up on here - it's kind of hard to ignore it. Nobody is here primarily to discuss politics, but political discussions happen anyway, and having to ignore them sucks.

I don't know, I think there are two issues: first the field is very masculine, that a participant is male is the standard and rarely incorrect assumption that permeates almost every aspect of IT development. So an average woman must adjust herself in a more masculine direction to fit in.

Secondly, many men absolutely treat women "worse" than men purely because of their gender (sometimes they even think they are being accommodating to the real differences that exist).

I'm discussing the specific case of women on HN.

I don't think that restriction changes anything beyond making it easier for women to appear to be manly enough, and that the instances of a user being discovered to be female are lower than the actual prevalence of females among the users.

My points where general statements, applying equally to the wider culture in IT and to the specific subset tied to HN.

Man it feels weird reading 3), its not often I come across a text that is so coarsely generalizing about me solely on the basis of my gender. I frequently see people complain about how they feel uncomfortable with generalizing descriptions about them, and you gave me a glimpse of that experience!

Though thinking about it, I've seen that sort of blunt, obtuse language about "how men think" before, it just didn't occur to me that the "men" being refereed to was intended to include me!

Of course, since I don't identify with the behaviour described (or indeed think many non-assholes would), I rather confidently exclude myself from the set of "men" being refereed to.

In any case, here's to the idea that men tend to treat women differently from men will one day not be such a contentious issue!

Maybe they aren't comfortable posting here.

The question people should ask is "what is it about Hacker News that makes women uncomfortable and unlikely to participate in? "

What's wrong with HN community? In my perspective it's the most open community I've seen online.

Disclaimer: [M27]

"What's wrong with HN community?"

I'm going to go kinda meta here. Feel free to dismiss if that's not your bag. "wrong" implies good/bad, which also implies a purpose: good or bad for what? Consider the question "what kind of community should HN be?" From here, let's move on to your statement:

"In my perspective it's the most open community I've seen online."

It sounds like in your opinion HN should be an open community. Is it as open as it should be? Is the "most open community [you've] seen online" as open as it could be? should be? As you want it to be? Given that there are people that don't feel as welcome as they want to, what does that imply about the community's openness?

I don't have the answers to this. I think it's human nature to tend to group, and not every group is for every body. I have seen behavior here that I think is unwelcoming, uncivil, and uncalled for. Maybe that's not the same as open, but I think they're closely related. Does that mean people should toughen up? Be more considerate? Leave if they don't like it? This doesn't match what I would like the HN community to be, but I know I'm relatively new, and that reflects me.

Like I said, I don't have the answers.

Thanks for your comment.

As everyone here I have my own idea for the community. But that's just my opinion and what I see here is quite good.

As for comments which are "unwelcoming, uncivil, and uncalled for" they are usually downvoted. I use RSS, so usually I'm late to the party. And I rarely upvote anything.

I'm glad to see that those kinds of comments are usually down voted as well. And compared to Twitter and what I've heard of Reddit, in general it is pretty good here. As I'm learning how the community works, I've been leaving "showdead" on so I see a lot of stuff, and the different color calls my attention to the worst of it, at least for now.

These types of conversations continue to pop up, with varying levels of civility. In your opinion, why is that? Do you think we eventually will find some sort of agreement? Will they diminish? How do they contribute to the community?

Getting women together to get their perspective on things, sounds good.

Asking them about things that pretty much all women are asked about, as if that's the only thing they are qualified to talk about, seems counter.

It is part of a series of Q&As. This is not the only installment. Refusing to ask stereotypically "girly" questions is another form of sexism. Work-life balance is a concern for both men and women. Refusing to hear women's voices on the topic is just as problematic as only talking to women about this sort of topic and nothing else.

Except no one is refusing to ask questions, nor refuse to hear women's opinions.

> Work-life balance is a concern for both men and women.

Yes it is. But the questions were about making the workplace more family friendly, and workplace dating, which to me, feels like a real missed opportunity to share real insight. I get it though--I don't own the topics of discussion. I was just sharing my perspective.

TBH, it doesn't really matter what anyone thinks about workplace dating. In the US, HR have policies in place to prevent legal issues.

Full Disclosure: My wife and I started dating while we both worked at the same startup.

I always have mixed feelings on these types of posts.

It is good to ask these questions because there are simply biological issues that the other sex is not going to have personal experiences with. Pregnancy and breastfeeding? I know there are considerations that someone who has not gone through these events (including women without children) are just not going to relate to.

We also can't control how people react to us in person and the assumptions that are made based on our appearance, regardless of what are personality is. You aren't going to resolve those issues without identifying what they are in the first place.

Personally I would like it if the series was "ask an engineer who is female" rather than "ask a female engineer" though.

I also have mixed feelings, but I am trying to be supportive of this effort because it is at least shooting for the right goal, which is building bridges instead of trying to hang men high.

One of my favorite professors had an excellent saying: I am the primitive of my way.

It kind of encapsulates both the idea that anything worth doing is worth doing badly and also the idea of fail fast and iterate. Perhaps if people keep giving constructive feedback to this initiative in a not ugly way it will evolve into something that more effectively promotes their agenda without so many glaring defects. Perhaps one option would be to change it to "Ask an Engineer" and then have each installment be about some category, such as senior programmers, multicultural engineers, older people, and also sometimes women. So then it could be, for example, "Ask an Engineer: Senior Programmer edition" or "Ask an Engineer: Female edition" or something like that.

Yes, I also don't like the 'us vs. them' mentality a lot of women-focused groups seem to have.

I really like your idea of rotating through different groups who are statistically underrepresented (not just women.)

The point of this series is that a lot of women engineers already do get asked all sorts of awkward questions, or worse, are subjected to uninformed assumptions.

This Q&A series is intended to put information out in a public form to help preempt some of that.

> That same CEO would go to my house and stay with my kids when we had emergency technical issues requiring all of the tech staff to stay late.

Bravo for that CEO! Things like that engender crazy amounts of respect and loyalty.

The first thing that strikes me is that the first two questions asked of a female engineer are about kids and relationships. Of course those things are relevant to some women (though hardly all), but they're just as relevant to men.

I know tons of male engineers with kids (I'm one of them) who have to leave early to pick up kids from day care, or suddenly can't come in because their child is sick. Many work 4 days a week in order to have more time for their family.

I think you're missing the point of this series. I think the point is to get women in tech to answer questions about their experiences (as women). I don't think it's meant to be limited to them talking about experiences only relevant to females. But you're right that many of the questions could be asked of men too.

This is the fourth instalment of the series, the first question answered was actually:

"On a typical day, how conscious are you of being a female engineer and can you tell us about the ways in which you feel (or are made to feel) this way?"

I was expecting this to be a complaint that the only questions people ask female engineers are about kids and dating, instead of engineering. Who can tell which way public opinion will spin these days!

This is the fourth instalment of the series, so these weren't the first question asked to the engineers.

But yes, a lot of comments have been from people not seeing the reference to the earlier parts in the beginning of the post, or seen the earlier threads on HN, and reacting like you.

Small countries which lucked out free oil seem to have the best social policies.

Denmark doesn't have any oil, you're probably thinking of Norway.

plenty of oil and gas from north sea, second biggest of their exports.

Denmark has free oil? I think you're thinking of Norway. Danes have melancholia.

Do Germany and Britain count as small countries?

The situation is similar.

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"ladies" is old-fashioned and patronizing. say "women" instead. :)

What's patronizing about the word "ladies"?

So I'm curious as well but I know many female friends who prefer to be called a lady / ladies so I'm not sure you can necessarily win when you attempt to converse with someone and you have zero context about them.

I think people need to be more forgiving with most labels when the conversation happens anonymously without context of that user's preference. Now if you referred to them as "bitches" that would be a problem but I feel like we can be forgiving for "ladies", even if a majority of women do not like it.

Right? At least that's what I think.

I don't particularly care for the term "lady", but I would never consider it patronizing or an insult.

I agree that people need to be more forgiving, this is just not worth the effort to worry about it.

Nothing. It is a term generally used out of respect or formality like gentleman or Lord. Though I guess there are usages where it is just a gendered pronoun.

The only context I've seen where 'lady' might be offensive is when some men enter a room full of other men and addresses them like "hello ladies".

I'll be sure to inform PyLadies post haste. ;)

>"ladies" is old-fashioned and patronizing

I thought "lady" was analogous to "gentleman," is it really patronizing? I've always used both of those terms when I'm trying to be more polite or formal than usual.

And in some circles, "women" implies they aren't complete without "men". Use "womyn" instead.

E: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn

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