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Comment by newfoundglory | Hacker News Reader

What do you want people to do when they are job searching while pregnant? Are you just wishing you'd been told on her first day on the job?

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Let me answer this with a counter-question. If you're pregnant and somehow hiding it really well, do you think it makes sense for you to job-hunting six weeks before you're due to give birth?

Literally the only reason to tell a prospective employer about your pregnancy status is to enable them to unlawfully discriminate against you based on that status.

You are, obviously, completely correct on the point that you raise. However, I am sold on those sort of laws on the basis that employers are discriminating on irrelevant dimensions, like race and gender.

An employee expecting, or indeed planning, to take a X months leave Y months after joining, with X > Y, isn't an irrelevant dimension. Especially if parental leave is paid, but I don't know if that is how the US handles leave.

An employee literally cannot be a high quality, productive worker if they are not working. Employers should not be forced to ignore relevant factors when hiring. That isn't fair on them.

While we're at it, why shouldn't any prospective employee with a health condition that might require extensive time off be required to disclose that? And, since people aren't often the best judge of their health conditions and the impositions they'll make on future employers, perhaps it'd be better if we all just disclosed our complete medical records along with our job applications.

Well, philosophically, at some point yes. There should be some level of personal responsibility not to sign up for a job that you don't intend to do. I don't think being required to provide detailed medical records is reasonable, a good faith, optimistic best-case is enough for me.

And while you might see pregnancy as equivalent to having a medical condition there are actually a number of fairly important differences. For example, in the modern era, pregnancy is more controllable than illness. Quite a number of people enthusiastically plan on it. Those aspects, intent and control, are important for determining who should bear the cost. The cost should not settle on an unwitting employer looking for a new hire.

I have a health condition which causes me to be suddenly absent for a week at a time 1-4 times a year. I absolutely disclose this to any prospective employer because I don’t want them to grumble when it happens.

It points to the state sponsored solution. If a single employer is supposed to carry the burden then they will obviously want to hire young healthy men above anyone else.

Fortunately this is exactly how it's implemented in most European countries: if the employee is not working the employer doesn't pay. The (usually state run) insurer does.

Requiring businesses to pay for someone taking time to care of their children is patently stupid and unjust and there is fully justified pushback against such laws.

"Employers should not be forced to ignore relevant factors when hiring."

But they are - that's the law. The same legal system that allows the corporation to exist at all and earn money in this environment requires them to ignore the fact that someone may be going on maternal leave and not discriminate based on it.

We the voters have decided that this is more important than the profits of any company, and in the end the voters (i.e. mostly employees) get to decide the rules of society, not the companies.

FUCK yes. Kids cost money. Jobs are how you get money. And I say this as someone who hired a woman who then told us she would give birth in two months, and we were fine.

Wow, that sounds like straight up fraud to me. Do companies in America get financial support from the government for employees on pregnancy leave?

My team has hired more than one person that immediately went on leave. We literally paid them for months before they started. We did this knowingly, and I cite this with other candidates as a concrete example of how well we treat our employees.

Guess what, in our industry the people that are planning to have kids are also very likely to be senior and experienced. They're hard to recruit. Consider leave as part of the cost of hiring good people.

If you're not doing things like this, you're not actually competing for top talent.

>We did this knowingly

Great, but the parent poster is hiding(again, rightfully so) their planned leave from their future employer.

Fraud is intentionally misrepresenting information in order to affect how the other party would act to cause a financial gain/loss. It is illegal for the other party to change how they act based on information about a pregnancy, therefore there is no legally admissible injury to the company. Legally, you're probably in about the same situation as a drug dealer accusing someone of stealing some of his goods - if you can prove that they actually caused you damages (ie: that you had a stash of drugs, or that you would deliberately not hire a candidate because they were pregnant), you're worse off than before.

Do companies you work at not hire employees for the long term?

They mainly hire people to replace others that quit/retired or to fill a new position created to support a team with a steadily growing workload. New hires are subject to a 3 month probation period during which both parties can end the contract at will. More than 80% of all positions are long term.

I would hope that someone looking for a long term employment at a company would be honest and upfront with something like a planned 1-year vacation. My only gripe with the parent poster is that they are hiding(rightfully so) this so close before their planned leave and thus do not appear serious about a long term employment at that company.

I sure hope you are not involved with hiring at your company because your perspective on this is a great way to get sued into oblivion.

It's actually in your best interest as the hiring company to not find out if the person is pregnant or expecting to have a child. Let's say that you decided not to hire someone for a set of reasons unrelated to pregnancy, but along the way you asked the candidate if they were planning to get pregnant. Good luck proving that you didn't make the hiring decision on the basis of knowing they would take leave. Which of course is illegal under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. This is why most companies make it a policy that you can not ask these kinds of questions so as not to taint the interview (even though technically it's not illegal to ask the questions, it's just illegal to use them as a basis for your decision).

As a candidate you might actually be acting more in the interest of the company to not tell them you are going to be having a child so as not to put them in that position? I honestly haven't thought through it that much so I could be convinced of a different opinion.

If you're planning to continue working after having a child, I think you should go about your career as if the pregnancy wasn't happening and just take the leave as appropriate. If that means you work 6 weeks before leave, so be it. You'll be back after leave to continue on.

What would the company do if instead of getting pregnant you got hit by a bus one day? I had to take 2 months of medical leave on 2 weeks notice when I got deathly ill, that was way less notice than a pregnancy. The startup I was at had only 12 people and they handled it. I'm unconvinced by all these arguments that it's too much of a hardship for companies to deal with their employees having a life.

People get hit by buses, but would you hire someone who you KNEW was going to get hit by a bus in six weeks?

1 year vacation? ROFL. In America 3 months of paid maternity leave is a good dead. Also, in America both parties can end a job at will at any time. Also also, referring to parental leave as "vacation" is pretty weird.

Raising a newborn is not a vacation, that’s a highly insulting statement.

If you knew you had to take time off in two months to recover from a scheduled medical operation, would you rather spend the next two months earning a salary or surviving on your savings?

My wife been searching for a job for quite some time (about a 2-3 years), during that time we've been trying to conceive a baby, but no luck, went through few eco sessions, still no dice. We decided to give up on idea of having a baby and just relax and live our lives. Then suddenly she gets a job offer she was dreaming about and one week later, guess what? She is pregnant. Now what would you tell your wife? Give up job you've been dreaming about?

If you're un-/under-employed and need the money, of course.

If your old job doesn't provide halfway decent health benefits or paid parental leave, of course.

If your old job sucks your soul and makes you want to slit your wrists, of course.

I think it always makes sense to go looking for a job when you don't have one and you wish to be an independent adult and support yourself through employment.

But, obviously, we're not talking the same kind of "makes sense" here, are we?

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