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Comment by aetimmes | Hacker News Reader

I'm a US male who's 1 month into my 6 months fully-paid paternity leave with our first child.

My wife has roughly 4.5 months between banked PTO and FMLA/disability leave.

I'm sitting at home right now watching/changing/feeding our baby while my wife is out at doctor's appointments taking care of her health. Having the flexibility to practice a modicum of self-care without neglecting the health and happiness of our child has been such a huge boon to our family.

If anyone has any questions about the experience, feel free to ask.

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What happens to your responsibilities at work while you are out? And are you totally cut off from work while you are out or are you occasionally responding to mails? Also are you more of an individual contributor or have a leadership role?

I was/am an IC on a medium-sized team. I had a project I was the primary contributor for within that team that I've handed off to my teammates to continue (after writing up documentation and doing some knowledge transfer).

I occasionally log in to read my email to keep up-to-date with happenings among the team, but I haven't needed to respond to anything since I went out.

Our team made an effort in the last year to reduce some of the silo-ization of knowledge and increase our 'lottery factor', and I think those efforts have helped make sure that the team was prepared for one of us going out on leave. At the very least, nobody has called me up saying "hey, your systems are on fire!", so that's been nice.

Thanks for the reply!

First time I'd seen it called the "lottery factor." I like that much more than the "hit by a bus factor."

6 months paid? Holy cow. Even 1 month would seem like such a luxury to me.

It's been a pretty amazing workplace benefit to have. My wife and I remark to each other on a daily basis about how lucky we are to be able to be home together to take care of the baby. We're planning on having at least one more child and I can't see myself working for a company that doesn't have a similar leave policy.

Would you have taken 6 months off without pay to do what you are doing now?

If I could afford it, absolutely. In reality, my mortgage and other financial commitments would likely have necessitated me going back to work.

What we likely would have done instead is staggered my wife's medical leave with a shorter chunk of my own PTO rather than both of us being home at the same time, and put the baby into childcare earlier than we're currently planning on doing.

If you are a bet receiver of funds, who is the net giver?

I don't understand the question. Can you elaborate?

If you dont have the money to take 6 times off, who is giving you the money to do so?

The basic economic question of giving someone money is that you are taking it from someone else. Is it childless employees? Is it taxes? Is it the unemployed?

In my case, I get a paycheck from my employer as usual. I'm not sure how the specifics work; my employer might pay a premium to a private insurance firm and receive reimbursement from the firm when employees go out on leave so that they're not paying salaries of people who aren't working for them. But at any rate, the cost of providing this leave is similar to other non-mandatory benefits provided by a company (like health insurance), which gets rolled into the cost of doing business and likely gets passed on to our customers.

My wife's leave comes from our state's short-term disability insurance program, which I believe draws its funds from state taxes.

Your question makes it sound like he's stealing from someone by taking paid time off to be with his child. In reality, the money is coming from a corporation, who presumably has already costed the risk and is willing to accept it.

Moreover money is not zero-sum. The way you talk about it, there's only a finite number of dollars in the US and he's stealing some from someone else. This is not even remotely how our economy works. And frankly that's a crazy idea that could be applied to all kinds of things. For example, by working you're stealing money from your employer who could easily spend that money on himself. How dare you work?

> In reality, the money is coming from a corporation, who presumably has already costed the risk and is willing to accept it.

Then his salary, and the salary of all the employees have been lowered to provide the benefit. That means employees without kids pay for the parents.

> Moreover money is not zero-sum.

A handout is definitely zero-sum. But even if it isn't, the entire benefit of that handout is captured by the receiver, not by the giver. So its an even worse reason for an employer to give parental leave.

Or perhaps they use the benefit to attract better competence? Higher pay vs a more secure work life balance is of course the decision to make here, and seems like op of this thread made a decision. What are you trying to proove?

Making the claim that parental leave is zero-sum assumes that I'd be working at full productivity for those 6 months, which based on my current sleep schedule even without work obligations, I definitely wouldn't be.

My employer can either pay me for 6 months of work and get a substandard work product while I suffer sleep deprivation, or they can pay me for 6 months of leave and get me back recharged and ready to work at the end of that leave, when my child is sleeping through the night.

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