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Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone.

We're living in an era where, resource-wise, we could be post-scarcity, but politically, it's all locked up in a shitty, shitty system.

I want to keep imagining a world in which people are truly free, and not just free to keep grinding away at a job because the alternative is starvation or privation.

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> I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone.

Do YOU want to have surgery from a surgeon that hasn't performed in year?

Your idea is fine utopian, fluffy unicorn, ideology. But practically it just won't work. This doesn't have anything to do with politics or a shitty system. It is just the facts of reality, if you are out of practice of your profession for year your skills won't be as sharp as someone who hasn't taken a year off.

Surgeons can and do take a year off from their practice, and return to work. I would absolutely be patient #1 after some surgeon's sabbatical.

I also find it deeply depressing that "a person should be able to take a year off work" is now utopian, fluffy unicorn ideology on a forum for forward-thinking technologists.

Oh, you totally should be able to take off for a year. The same way you can elect not to go to university. Or look in the laser. You just have to live with the consequences. And in many, many professions, a year or so out of practice means that you are measurably worse. Maybe (but likely) worse than before you left, but almost certainly worse than you could be if you would have used that year to get better at what ever you do.

Are you still going to be worse after a month of work?

Are companies that short-term-oriented?

>Are companies that short-term-oriented?

Publicly traded ones. There are only 3 months between Earnings Reports.

Depends really on what work you are doing. Garbage collector, probably no. Helicopter pilot, probably yes.

In software, a year off might mean you get better. If you have more time to work on your own ideas and explore new paradigms instead of cranking out fizzbuzz all day in between commutes, you can become better.

Totally. Same goes for sabbaticals in science, for example. It really depends on what you are doing in that year though, and how fast your particular field is moving.

The year off isn’t the fluffy unicorn bit. The fluffy unicorn bit is that you think your choices should have no consequences.

If you want to take a decade off work, you certainly have that right. But that doesn’t mean employers should pretend that you have an extra decade of experience, just as your choice to forgo a degree doesn’t mean an employer should pretend you earned a doctorate.

Ah so discriminating against the posh kid who took a "Gap Yah" is ok now.

Presumably we should discriminate against all 4 year graduates as they took an extra year to graduate's who do it in 3.

> Presumably we should discriminate against all 4 year graduates as they took an extra year to graduate's who do it in 3.

We do. All things being equal, the person hired a year earlier will have higher pay. As they should, since they have an extra year of experience. Assuming equal candidates, the one with more experience will do a better job (second system syndrome notwithstanding).

What's absolutely amazing to me is that one of the biggest complaints about unions you see is how pay is tied to seniority; the worker who's there the longest gets the most pay, not the one who "deserves" the most pay.

And here people are arguing the exact same thing!!! One extra year of time working means higher pay!

That's exactly what a lot of union pay scales are structured like, but that's evil unions; this is somehow just right???

You’re misunderstanding. Rewarding for merit will bias towards higher pay for experience. More experience will in general lead to higher merit and thus higher pay.

Also HN, despite the meme, is not a hive mind. Some here are in support of unions and don’t consider them evil.

> I also find it deeply depressing that "a person should be able to take a year off work" is now utopian, fluffy unicorn ideology on a forum for forward-thinking technologists.

There is nothing stopping you from taking a year off work. Go right head. You won't get paid, and they won't hold your job, and you will have gap to explain when you are interviewing for a position when you want to return. Don't expect the world to bend backwards and ignore realities so you can take a year off.

>Do YOU want to have surgery from a surgeon that hasn't performed in year?

There can be something like a transition period. The world is not binary. Surgeons get sick. They get injured. They take time off. Just like everyone else. The reason they took time off should not be relevant.

The reason should not be relevant.

The fact that they did could be (in some cases), IMO.

Many people here have echoed the fears and complaints I've heard on this topic. Simply that somehow taking parental leave at all puts you at a disadvantage. Or puts you in a position where you have to explain yourself.

I feel like what is being done here is to [ironically] force an equality of outcome on every metric _except_ the one that swings the argument.

The very nature of equality of _opportunity_ means to me that it doesn't matter at all that I took time off. Am I qualified? Do I have demonstrable expertise? References? Education? A unique perspective?

You may be generally curious about my year off but the idea that it somehow invalidates _any_ of my other qualifications feels silly and limits my opportunity based on external factors which don't impact my ability to do the job. It's just that you don't seem to fit the world view of others so it's suspect.

_This_ is the complaint: that a talented professional coming back to the work force loses out not because of ability but because of violating social norms.

I'm not at all curious about your year off (other than as incidental conversation if you choose to bring it up). I am curious about your experience and competency, both overall and in terms of recency/currency, as I believe both of those are strongly correlated to your projected contributions to my company.

A pilot with 5K hours of experience is more experienced (in the pilot job market) than one with 4K. I don't care that you could have had that extra 1K hours if you'd worked an extra year instead of doing something else. I only care whether you do or don't (as it pertains to this dimension of the evaluation).

The point I'm trying to make is that you do seem to be making this A > B comparison without caring about the quality of those hours. Again, it seems to present the argument in a way that echoes the concerns I've heard. "A" simply starts off with an advantage in how you keep presenting it.

There doesn't seem to be room in your opinion or examples for a pilot with 3k hours flying commercial vs someone with 5k hours flying as a hobby on the weekends. 3k is simply less that 5k, right? You don't care _how_ they spent those 5k hours...simply that they have them?

If you agree that this is a ridiculous over simplification in order to prove my point then we may be on the same page.

The very nature of your comments makes me envision a women on the other side of your hiring decision wondering why she couldn't get you to focus on the _quality_ of the work and stop fixating on the _quantity_ of time spent doing it. Because that is exactly what I'm trying to do now.

> You don't care _how_ they spent those 5k hours...simply that they have them?

I didn’t go deep, because this isn’t an aviation forum, but sure the quality of hours matters. Retract, multi, instrument, PIC, dual given, high-performance, turbine, jet, 91, 135, 121, etc all matter. Smash-n-goes in a 172 aren’t the same as flying the line/signing for a transport jet.

Anything past the FAA ATP 1500 hour mark, the quality matters. Before that, quantity dominates for airline candidates.

Blerg. Then also an apology. You did say that your post was in your _opinion_. I chose to engage. You were kind enough to respond and expand on your opinion. If I missed that and used a needlessly harsh tone then please know that was not my intent. At least not originally.

No sweat; it's impossible in a typical HN-length post to cover every possible expansion of an argument; I took no offense to the post that ended up flagged/dead [by others] and hope I gave no offense with my own.

>A pilot with 5K hours of experience is more experienced (in the pilot job market) than one with 4K. I don't care that you could have had that extra 1K hours if you'd worked an extra year instead of doing something else. I only care whether you do or don't (as it pertains to this dimension of the evaluation).

This example, along with ones others have given, all reduce to the same thing: You are not interested in determining the skills of your candidate - you are interested in determining experience. Presumably with a dubious belief that your metric is a good proxy for those skills.

>I am curious about your experience and competency

Yet your example only addresses one of these.

To the last point, I believe that, ceteris paribus, competency increases with experience and decreases with time out of the daily exercise of those skills.

Of course everyone tries to evaluate absolute competency (ceteris non paribus) in an interview. I’m not suggesting that anyone stop doing that. I am stating a belief that experience is positively correlated and perhaps a necessary precondition of competency. If that's the case, considering experience as a component of the overall evaluation is indicated.

But we don't want surgery from an overworked surgeon either.

I completely agree. In fact the whole residency thing in the medical profession, is an awful, awful, system.

Scandinavian countries do not go that far. This privilege is only granted to parents. The goal is NOT to give people the right to go on un-paid leave for any reason, but rather to promote gender equality as well as encourage people to have children. (The latter to prevent birth rates to fall too far below the replacement rate.)

The Scandinavian economic model relies heavily on high work life participation for funding, so encouraging people to take time off for other reasons would not make sense.

Also, maybe it’s good for the newborn to have a parent around during their most formative time.

Taking a year off probably isn't "being held against you" per-se. But after that year, you're competing against all the people who didn't take a year off. And in many contexts that year of honing skills, staying abreast of industry developments, etc., is valued enough to tip the scales.

I'm surprised nobody thinks that people who come form a leave may be more "thirsty" to catch up with their time off and filled with a good energy. Am I alone to think that? People also reflect a lot while on their leave and may end up knowing what fits them better upon returning to work.

Agreed. To arbitrarily rule against someone who took time off is very short-sighted. So please don't think that I'm exactly defending that mindset or the practice. Just trying to point out how (some|many|???) prospective employers might view the situation.

What on Earth are you actually proposing, that all else being equal someone who takes a year off work should earn the exact same pay or get the same job as someone who spent that year working? You are falling down an extremely slippery slope.

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