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Comment by payne92 | Hacker News Reader

My anecdotal experience: companies are much more "family friendly" when the CEO and senior managers themselves have families.

Stated differently, paraphrasing the CEO that just had their first kid: "holy crap, this is a lot of work!!!!" You have not truly experienced sleep deprivation until you have had sustained, parental sleep deprivation.

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I'm not sure having a family by itself is a good indicator that the company will be family friendly. Marissa Mayer might be a good example. She has twins, so she should understand. But...

"If you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed...Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies don't just happen. They happen because of really hard work."

Marissa Mayer has a nursery next to her office. If she were family friendly, she'd have her kids in the same daycare as the rest of the company.

Well, Marissa Mayer can afford to pay someone to take care of her twins. The typical small company or early stage startup exec, not so much.

Not unusual, though, for a lower end CEO to foist off all parenting on their spouse.

Good point.

Startups can't be family friendly by definition IMHO. At least in the early stages - startup is a lifestyle not a job.

Seems about right. My company is HQ'd in (typically family friendly) Utah (I'm in Seattle office) and the CEO is a family guy. The culture has pretty healthy expectations.

I always think this a naive view. There are plenty of ways to be incredibly sleep deprived without a child.

I imagine it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, not a blanket statement that being a parent is the only way to become seriously sleep-deprived. More like it's one of the most common ways a regular person will experience significant sleep deprivation, so the experience resonates with a lot of folks.

Also, in my limited experience (two kids), the sleep deprivation part isn't really all that bad, unless you're mom. She usually gets the brunt of it. And in any case the newborn phase is done in less than a year for most kids and you settle into an easier rhythm of just mild sleep deprivation :)

You have to make a serious effort to be as sleep-deprived as a new parent. You could sign up to have the CIA torture you, for example. But unless you're being kept awake by guys with guns, or you have fatal familial insomnia, you've got nothing on the parent of a newborn. Especially a newborn with colic.

Not to take away too much from what you said, because its valid in some ways, but "family" is broader that that. Families aren't just "having young children" and "family friendly," in a workplace setting, fits in a broader category than "accommodates parents with young children."

(Its also important to have personal time to yourself even if you don't have a family as well)

You mean CEOs and Senior Managers that have kids and actually give a shit about them.

Lots of people get forced into having kids.

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