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Comment by piqufoh | Hacker News Reader

Under parental leave;

> You may also choose to take an additional 8 weeks leave unpaid. Note that this does not guarantee your employment. We're simply keeping your job open for an additional 8 weeks, unless your position becomes redundant.

Is it just me, or does that sound a little harsh? (Maybe I'm used to UK workers rights) Isn't this exactly the reason why many parents don't take the parental leave they probably should? ie that they fear they will become obsolete simply from not being in the office...

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6 paid weeks parental leave for secondary caregivers puts them in the top tier of "major" companies, as does 16 weeks paid for primary caregivers; that's more than Google offered a few years ago.

It's a bit disingenuous to zero in on the unpaid leave policy; what they're saying is, if you need more than 6 weeks, they'll try to work something out with you, and it'll probably be fine. They're being explicit about something most companies are opaque about.

As a father of 11 month old, I can't imagine how people can live with just 6 or even 16 weeks of maternity leave. Even after almost one year it feels like care is (at least) full time job, which would be quite hard to outsource.

In my EU country you will get up to three years of paid maternity leave per child, so I guess I am just spoiled.

3 years sounds extreme. How is a person supposed to run a business with that kind of law? More than 6 months paid leave is too long from a business perspective. The government can tax and guarantee income, but I am not for paid parental leave > 6 months paid by businesses.

Business isn't the only thing in the world.

That kind of law would guarantee only quite large business can survive, which is counter-productive if one wants to empower individuals.

I'm pretty much always on the side of workers in any discussion of labor vs. employers...but, there's also small business to consider. I think there's some kind of happy medium to be found, where workers are treated well and small businesses can survive long enough to become somewhat bigger businesses. In the US this is codified into law; rules and regulations that apply to large companies may not apply to smaller mom-and-pop shops.

My company couldn't afford to give an employee more than a few months paid time off; we're a four-person company, and we'd literally run out of money if a quarter of our work wasn't being done for months. On the other hand, if we had a hundred employees, we'd barely notice if one or two people were out for a while.

> That kind of law would guarantee only quite large business can survive, which is counter-productive if one wants to empower individuals.

As others have pointed out, maternity/paternity leave in other Western countries are heavily subsidized through government assistance programs. The costs are not completely shouldered by the business.

So, why are the same folks trash-talking Basecamp for not offering more paid leave, since the US has no such subsidies? Aren't they based in the US?

I'm not opposed to such subsidies being implemented in the US.

You are right, the trash talk may be a bit misguided since social safety nets that exist in other countries do not really exist in the US. Family leave, universal health care, worker's rights, etc are huge political issues in the US. I'm not originally from the US but have lived here now for a good while and I still am shocked to this day that these kind of societal benefits are not commonplace as they are elsewhere.

Many of those countries also increasingly have a two-caste system of fully-fledged full-time employees and "temp" workers of various types. If you want Salaryman culture, like they have in Japan, you can set pretty arbitrarily high expectations about leave and job security.

It is my anecdotal impression that this is common in some European countries.

Japanese leave policies are historically pretty simple: the government says you get X weeks, buuuuut X is an inconvenient number for us, so you probably want to look around the room and conform to the practices of your coworkers, which are closer to Y days. Also, for you ladies: remember that the traditional expectation is that you have unlimited maternity leave when you leave formal employment after marrying or having a child. (Some re-enter when the child goes to school. This is largely not compatible with career advancement, with rare exceptions like e.g. translation/interpretation.)

It's not paid for by businesses, it's paid by the government. It's pays out up to 80% of your income up to a limit and some companies chose to fill in the final gap as well.

It is paid for by businesses as well, in that every person who takes that leave potentially creates another headcount requirement to fill the gap.

Something between the European standard expectation of a year's leave and the American top-end norm of 12/6 primary/secondary is probably the right answer here.

But this is all a tangent. It is totally unreasonable to criticize Basecamp for policies that are on the high side of normal in the market they operate in.

Really, what's happening is that Basecamp has been forthright about something most companies are deliberately opaque about, and people on message boards are beating them up for it. If their policies were bad, I wouldn't care, but their policies on parental leave are in fact quite good for this market, so this is some bullshit.

Just to be clear, this isn't some experimental new thing that the Nordic countries are trying, this has been in place for well over 40 years - It. Works.

Does it create a suboptimal situation at the workplace. Sure, sometimes. However, since the management probably have taken long parental leaves themselves they are very understanding and willing to accommodate the next generation of parents.

In short - troublesome in the short run for certain companies, very beneficial for society as a whole in the long run.

”very beneficial for society as a whole in the long run”

Exactly. Low fertility rates is something that most rich countries struggle with, so to me it does seem like a good idea to invest in good childcare policies.

Family leave policy isn't the only difference between the Nordic tech employment market and the US's.

You still have a headcount issue. You need to hire someone to fill in, but can't hire them full time without a full additional job available. Temporary employees result in a lot of wasted job training and investment.

> 3 years sounds extreme. How is a person supposed to run a business with that kind of law?

Easy, just take a look at companies in EU outside of Germany. The three years of paid maternity leave is slowly turning into lifetime unemployment for a lot of people. Then we act surprised when the companies are scared of hiring full time and decide to leave and take most of the jobs away with them.

You don't force businesses to pay directly, you set up a government benefit (payroll tax) that is then used to fund things like mat/pat leaves.

Here in Canada, we get a year that can be divided in different ways. Almost everyone takes it when they have kids, so it's the norm. We pay for it (60% salary to a hard max IIRC) through "Employment Insurance" which is basically a jointly funded payroll tax. Employers can choose to top up if they want. Some do.

Honestly, I can't imagine any other way of getting through that first yet without this set up.

In Germany, you can take several years parental leave in which you are protected against being fired. But you only get paid up to 14 months and only up to 60% or ~2000$/month after tax. This gets completely paid by your health insurance (which you have to have) and your enployer doesn't have to pay anything.

Whenever I am ready to have children, I'm going remote. It's far from a perfect solution, but at least I'm close to my children.

Speaking from experience: try this for a few months before you commit to it! I worked from home for 2 years, but 6 months after my son was born I chose to switch to a job with an office. It was impossible to get anything done at home with the constant interruptions (even though I wasn't the primary caregiver). My work and family lives are both loads better now that I have proper separation between the two.

I have the opposite experience: I have 2 kids (one 2 years old, and another 3 months old) and I work from home and remote 100% of the time. I _still_ get more done at home than I ever did in an office, even with 2 little ones who are taken care of by my wife when I'm working.

Long story short, I first worked flex part-time (handing off time with my then spouse) when my kid was very young, then switched to being in an office when my kid started school and I was a single parent.

I went remote when my kid was in middle/high school because my kid needed me and it was good for me to be around. You can tell a 14 year old to shut up if you're on a conference call...most of the time. Also, I could take a few minutes in morning to get the kid to school (we lived close by to the school) or take a late lunch so my kid could go to after-school practices, classes, etc.

When a kid is in elementary school, it's vastly easier to work in an office. Elementary school is when life will be the most predictable with a kid. When a kid is in middle/high school, that's when you need to be present. For all the reasons you're thinking of. Teenagers are jerks.

All in all, I did pretty well. Kid is at a highly selective college these days.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm about ten years away from having kids (if I had full control over my future!), so I have a lot to learn. I'd just rather be close to my children than a long subway/car ride away.

As a remote-working father of a 2-year-old, I agree with you. It's not perfect, but it's definitely better than being gone for 8+ hours per day.

Good luck with that...

Yesterday I was working the afternoon at home, my son barges into my office and takes over my laptop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Wkx4mMfFE

I think even 3 years is a little problematic. What are you supposed to do, take care of your child until they're 3 years old and then just go back to work?

Every company should be legally obligated to provide 18 years of paid leave for each child a worker has. Anything less is signaling that they value money over the personal and family life of their employees, and it's ridiculous that I still haven't found a country or business that offers this.

why not set up your own business that offers this? Blaze the way.

My sister is a public interest lawyer in Chicago who will get a few short weeks of leave --- not 6 --- and then be expected back in court advocating for her clients. It is really difficult for me to connect with fathers who claim that 6 weeks of paternal leave is too onerous.

As a parent to two teenagers, both of whom were born in the early years of startups, I feel your pain --- having children is hard. But if we're going to lose our collective shit about this, can we start by getting mothers in blue-collar jobs 6 weeks of paid leave before we start worrying about six-figure fathers needing more than 6 weeks off?

I guess my wording was wrong, there was no worrying about fathers at all.

I just can't wrap my head about how all the people are doing it. You can't just leave that small kid somewhere, is there some way of taking unpaid leave or are people just quit the job? I don't know.

My experience of parenting has been that every aspect of it is like that. I was amazed the first night that we'd kept the boy alive at all. He's going to UIUC in a few months. I can't believe that happened either. Everything is crazy hard, and we're playing on SUPER EXTREME EASY MODE.

> I just can't wrap my head about how all the people are doing it. You can't just leave that small kid somewhere, is there some way of taking unpaid leave or are people just quit the job? I don't know.

People figure out a way to struggle and survive. It's in inherent to us as a species.

Some people have family help. Others have older children. Others can support on a single income. Others have paid help. Others bring their kids to work with them. Others work from home.

You just figure it out as you go.

I’m guessing that women quitting their job in order to take care of their kids is probably quite common in the US. I also think that nannies are more common there.

In low income households, particularly immigrant ones, the grandma or aunt becomes a fulltime nanny when the grandchildren are born. I don't know what people who don't have this kind of help do.

By that train of logic we should be fighting for at least equal paternity leave for the average dad before there can be any discussion about more maternity leave..

There is no logic to that whatsoever. But since Basecamp doesn't make that distinction --- it has "primary" and "secondary" "caregiver" --- I don't think we need to argue this point.

It is illegal (discriminatory) to have any policy based on gender. As such, you cannot have a maternity or paternity policy. Thus primary - the parent of the two who will leave their role temporarily as the main caregiver whilst the other partner continues to work OR secondary - the other.

Note though that a health insurance policy in the US will cover maybe 60% of 8 weeks of salary for the birth mother under a disability benefit claim (no joke). If a father becomes the primary caregiver, then the company is paying 100% of that time off, without support. So offering equal carries a cost and guarantees that all your employees, male or female, if they are having a kid will take that time and incur that cost, rather than a % gender of your workforce. All things you need to factor in and cost into a business, especially a small one.

> It is illegal (discriminatory) to have any policy based on gender.

No, it's not. Obviously, it's discriminatory to have a policy that differentiates on any axis, but not all policies (whether public or employer) that differentiate based on gender (or sex, which may be more to the point here, if we define "mother" as "parent giving birth" and not "parent of the feminine gender"; the two often go together but are not equivalent) are illegal.

> But if we're going to lose our collective shit about this, can we start by getting mothers in blue-collar jobs 6 weeks of paid leave before we start worrying about six-figure fathers needing more than 6 weeks off?

Some of us don't live in barbarous backwaters like Illinois, but instead in places that, if not actually civilized like the rest of the developed world, are actually aware of and occasionally making efforts toward civilization (e.g., California) and already have gotten most working mothers up to four months of pregnancy disability (typically, without complications, 4 weeks prior and 6 weeks after delivery for vaginal delivery, 8 weeks after for C-section, but longer is permitted with medical necessity) plus 12 weeks of bonding time, all job protected, with potentially all of the former paid as for other disability and up to six weeks of paid family leave that can be used for the latter.

So, can we keep talking, now?

Which states have those policies?

I'm pretty sure identified the specific state that has the policies I described, though there are some other states with similar or better paid family leave provisions and/or longer allowances for job protected leave for either pregnancy disability specifically, or general disability that includes pregnancy.

The difference in Europe is that the UK, Swedish or German government subsidies a great deal of that one year. In the US, the company pays for it all, and on top of it perhaps around $2,000 a month for a family health insurance policy for that employee so they can get the birth and emergency care paid for. Again, this is mostly free outside the US. You're hitting up on some societal grade rather than company policy issues. I feel you though, being from the UK and living in the US, it is just insanity. So little care for mothers and parents.

This isn't really true either. In California, for example, 6 weeks of partially paid leave for a secondary caregiver are provided by state disability insurance. It's a state by state issue.

Dad of a 23 months old here, also europe. Let me tell you, even 11 months is far too short. Next thing for you kid is learn about the world around it and how to talk/interact. Just a day carer, even just one parent isn't enough, both parents are vital to give the kid the best start possible.

I'm in a great position to work part time and nowadays we both do. The work gets done and our child gets love and care. Those two days we put her to a day care place, she loves being there. Everyone's happy :)

Didn't take long before they removed the bit about redundancy. https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/commit/695f0bff611b3d9a...

Wow! What a great company :-D

Grow up.

So I should have spent more time adding that comment; it wasn't intended to be negative. I honestly believe that a company who can adjust their corporate guidelines that quickly is something to be admired, and the fact that they're doing it on such an important topic is excellent news.

I'm sorry. I'm taking out a frustration about this whole comment thread on your comment.

Again, I think Basecamp is being transparent and forthright about something that most companies are terribly opaque about, and it bothers me to see people cheering as they get less transparent so as not to trigger message board haters.

That phrasing is really bad, but probably is trying to make a distinction between the protections afforded by the laws like the Family Medical Leave Act, and how their additional 8 weeks unpaid leave work.

Assuming Basecamp is even covered by the parental leave portions of the FMLA (which they may not be due to size and geographical distribution of the company [1]), someone can't be fired or laid off while on the 12 protected weeks of parental leave. However, in this additional 8 weeks, they can be.

[1] The internet says Basecamp employs 50 people, which is the minimum requirement for a company to be covered by the FMLA. Additionally a given employee is only eligible if at least 50 employees work within 75 miles of where they do.

This is curious considering DHH's involvement in Basecamp and how often he espouses European ideals. You'd think they had a year of maternity and paternity leave.

50 person companies can't as a rule guarantee year-long parental leave; that's just not realistic. They can do their best to make it work, but no company of this size in this kind of market can make promises like that.

"Employees at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world, will be able to enjoy up to one year of paid time with their newborns during the child's first year after birth or adoption starting next year." - Business Insider

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can promise a lot of things that a 50 person competitive startup can't reasonably promise.

Also, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does not make a profit...

I'd hardly call Basecamp a startup. It's rather long-lived and has a proven business model at this point.

As of 2015 they had 1382 employees, a far cry from 50. They also had Bill Gates.

Wow! For some reason, this blows my mind. I guess I had my mind a dozen people sitting in an office writing checks and compiling reports. I had no idea it was a huge global organization with 1420 employees and 8 locations around the world.

In retrospect, it makes such perfect sense that I feel foolish :)

So basically a "super generous" company in the US is basically the average of the rest of the western world.

That's pretty amazing in and of itself.

I think it's fair to say that given DHH's lifestyle, Basecamp can afford to do this. No judgement on how David choses to spend his time or money, I just think it's a little disingenuous to act like they're a normal startup. It's a well-oiled lifestyle company that prints cash.

DHH's money <> Basecamp money. Yes obviously DHH gets paid from Basecamp, and he's earned it. But just because he has a lot of money doesn't mean he can turn around and insert a massive expense into the company that turns a nice perk into a huge financial liability.

That's exactly what it means. You can choose to take a yearly LLC dividend of $2M instead of $10M to make sure your staff is well cared for.

I'm not saying he should or needs to do that, it's just the economics of the situation.

This is not remotely fair to say. To promise a year of leave for all employees, you have to be able to add headcount to cover the absence. It's not simply a year's cash salary we're talking about; it's a potentially uncapped obligation.

Exactly, it raises the question of how often you can take (m|p)aternity leave successively. For a lot of people, if you're guaranteed a year to eighteen months of paid leave every time you get pregnant, and you get to come back to your job at the end of it, then when you get married and want to start a family, you could ghost for four or five years.

I'm not sure that'd be a bad thing, in the grand scheme of things for society - childcare is an unbelievable racket, and we'd probably be better off if parents could actually raise their children instead of having to foist them off on strangers 9-5. But it'd be ruinous for businesses.

You're accounting for the worst-case scenario, which is fine, but I still don't know why we're behaving like Basecamp can't afford to hire folks to backfill people on leave.

So how to non-US companies manage to do that? 51 weeks is mandatory in Canada for example.

Isn't the mat leave in Canada is funded by your employment insurance benefits? IIRC, the latest budget also extended it to 18 months too.

It's paid out of unemployment insurance funds from the government.

I know how the leave is payed for (although most companies top up the meagre payout from the government). My question was to the point:

> 50 person companies can't as a rule guarantee year-long parental leave

That is clearly not legal or even true in most civilized countries.

The company isn't guaranteeing it. The government is.

For paid leave, you have a point - most European companies don't expect employers to foot the bill for a year of paid leave. For unpaid leave, however, this really is the norm outside of the U.S. Large and small companies manage just fine to "hold a spot" for anyone on maternity leave - either you bake it into your hiring plans, or you hire someone temporarily for the length of the paternity leave.

This doesn't make sense. A single engineer might represent as much as 10% of a 50-person company's engineering capacity (many of Basecamp's employees are customer support staff). Forget about the cost of a year's compensation for them: if a small company loses an engineer for a year, they have to fill the gap. What do they do about that? Besides discriminating against anyone who might potentially claim family leave, I mean.

You'd think it would be the same for both parents. How does my employer know whether I am the primary or secondary caregiver? How do they know there even is a primary or secondary caregiver?

You tell them.

It's also frustrating from a "feminism" perspective. Women need time to recover physically from childbirth and time to figure out a feeding/pumping schedule (even if they don't plan to breastfeed long term, there may be complications to work out). Those are things that men can't do. In order to get that time, they may need to legally declare themselves the "primary caregiver." Especially at companies like mine where "secondary" caregivers get only 2 weeks of leave and FMLA doesn't apply. You can't recover from a c-section in 2 weeks.

But "primary caregiver" is a loaded term that goes beyond biological necessity. What if a woman's husband is quitting his job to take care of the kid(s) and the woman plans to return to work? Is she the secondary caregiver because she spends less of her time doing childcare than her husband? What if the primary caregiver is a nanny?

Even if HR says "Oh, nevermind what you actually plan to do, if you're pushing the kid out, we can mark you as primary" it creates a terrible start to things if you have two parents who set out with good intentions to share childcare efforts equally. HR is telling one parent they're the "primary" and another parent they're the "secondary" and they have to sign legally binding documents attesting to this. It's just ridiculous. I think it's a great example of good intentions backfiring dramatically.

in european countries year-long p/maternity leaves arent paid by the companies directly but by the government

How long would you tolerate not having a fellow staff member, upon whose work you depend, away from their position? 8 weeks seems like a long time to have someone away from work, or to have to cover someone elses job during their absence.

A lot of things can go wrong when people are gone from their work environment in that situation.

From that perspective, it seems more than reasonable.

i think there's one important point that people are missing here: basecamp employees are remote employees and you work 4 days, not 5 days a week.

Agreed- they should clean that language up a bit to reassure those utilizing parental leave that the "leave itself" won't lead to their job loss. There should also be language that commits them to at least notifying and discussing "redundancies" with you well in advance of you returning from leave.

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