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Comment by scurvy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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