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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important?

If you can leave your job in a state that means the next 6 months are problem-free then you are amazing. You've obviously planned ahead, documented things, and foreseen potential problems that you've mitigated ahead of time. Any company would be crazy to lose you.

If you leave your job in a state where the problems are fixable then you're pretty good. You haven't foreseen things or left good enough plans, and maybe there's issues with documentation and strategy, but things were in a good state that others can recover from. That's more than most companies ask for.

If you leave your job and everything falls apart then there are issues somewhere. You, or people you rely on, are basically winging it, and the company doesn't see that as a problem.

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>If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important?

I would spin that arguement against the business rather than against people. It's clearly a business-PoV argument. If your business stops functioning after losing a small percentage of employees then it's a poorly planned businesses. It has poor redundancy measures and should fail.

This. I'm on a rather long paternity leave as of now, and I really hope everything runs as if I'd never left when I get back, otherwise, the bus factor is too low.

It also means that the normal day to day operation of the business must have a lot of overhead to have that kind of redundancy though. Redundancy is never free.

But “redundant” doesn’t mean “optional” if the fault-tolerance is actually valuable to the business. Sure, pretty much any company could gut payroll if the sole objective was to minimize costs over the next, say, 12 months. They could further minimize costs by ceasing to back up their data and not putting a fire sprinkler system in their new office building.

Normal day to day operation of a business should have enough slack to allow people to spend time on experiments and initiatives, or simply to do a particularly good job, rather than merely struggle with the strictly necessary part of their workload. Abnormal operation in which deadlines can be met by cutting corners and/or everything goes well and/or enough people are overworked appears to be more common. For example, think of the company culture in which multi-month projects can be planned without accounting for vacation time.

Lacking redundancy is also not free, the resulting downtime can happen unexpectedly, for unknown durations. Paying for the redundancy overhead is insurance against single points of failure.

>Redundancy is never free.

This. Austria has generous parental leave policies but the effect of that is that as a woman in your late twenties or early thirties, you will have a hard time changing jobs in highly skilled positions as the employer will expect you'll get pregnant soon and will need to find a temporary replacement for you which is impossible as no highly skilled worker wants to be on a fixed short term contract for the same pay, so many employers who can't or don't want to eat the cost of redundancy will prioritize hiring males instead and spread your workload while you're on leave to the remaining workers, causing them to be overworked for that period.

That's the hidden cost.

Seems like the correct fix is to make sure that men have the exact same rights to parental leave and all the same incentives to take them. If men and women are equally likely to disappear for similar amounts of time, then it becomes a wash. Of course it could then be difficult for men and women of a certain age range to find new employment, but I don't see how you can fix this aspect of things.

This is a bit of a problem in Estonia. Estonia has conscription. An employer is not allowed to fire someone that's being conscripted or is doing training for the military after conscription. This means that any business that hires a man that has gone through conscription might have to be able to replace him at extremely short notice (a few days) for the duration of training.

I haven't heard of any actual statistics about the problems it causes, but I've heard grumblings from small business owners.

Equal paternity leave is a thing but it doesn't change the fact that women get pregnant and men don't which is why most employers still discriminate against hiring women and why the salary gap is still a thing.

Edit: Don't get why I'm downvoted for saying the truth on how many employers think when hiring. Is stating the hard truth bad or something? I don't like it myself but that's how our society works.

Are men taking the time as much as women? So basically the difference is the 1-2 months (or whatever the average is) women take off before giving birth? Maybe the solution is to add that amount of time to male paternity leave?

>Maybe the solution is to add that amount of time to male paternity leave?

That sounds good, but who will pay for the extra costs of men being out of the workforce longer?

The same people who pay for the current maternity/paternity leave?

If it was that simple, it would have been done already but just saying "everyone should have nice things" is easy until you get to implementing it and ask who's picking up the tab that is hard, as taxes are high already and budgets are tight in most of Europe.

There is no free lunch. Like I explained previously, all generous benefits given by the government have hidden costs to the employers and end up biting some workers back through reduced job mobility as employers optimize by hiring employees who will burden them the least.

It's unfortunate that it's like this, but companies will always act in their best interest.

Your original post asked how to make it so that women's career doesn't take a hit. The answer is obvious: make it so that the likelihood of men and women going on parental leave is roughly the same. It's totally doable. It would require some changes, but it's totally doable. If your concern is cost specifically, we could always _remove_ parental leave from women and allocate it to men instead. So this could even be done on a financial cost-neutral basis.

But yes there is no free lunch. Either more money needs to be allocated to parental leave, or the current parental leave needs to be shifted over towards men at the cost of women. Somewhere something has got to give. But it's not some sort of mystical problem. We know how to solve it. Whether we choose to do so is another question.

The following is just an idea, but it would be prudent to consider all possible solutions to this problem before making widespread changes to labor law in this country [USA]…

Why do we want to strive for an equal amount of parental leave so much? Seems like an obsession borne out of a political ideology rather than an increase in productivity.

Could it be that the reality is that women have a lot more stress under pregnancy and childbirth cuz they are actually the ones giving birth?

This would lead to a lot more time out of the workforce and probably reduced productivity whilst caring for an infant the first couple years.

What if we just removed all employment protections/protected groups/parental leave and replaced it with a universal basic income? This would solve our leave-inequality problem as you get the same UBI payment everywhere and the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.

> Why do we want to strive for an equal amount of parental leave so much? Seems like an obsession borne out of a political ideology rather than an increase in productivity.

The point of striving for equal parental leave in this instance is to even up the playing field economically for men and women. If they both have a roughly equal probability of going on parental leave and the time they'd take is roughly equal, then it makes no sense for a business to avoid hiring women of child-bearing age over men of child-having age (obviously it isn't as cut at dry, but generally there is a range of normal ages for men to dad's as well). It would of course not be perfect, but it has a chance of working at least.

Now if don't want to solve these issues (maybe you don't believe this is a problem) or if you want to look into entirely different ways of solving them (like universal basic income), then okay that's interesting but it's kind of a separate discussion.

> the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.

Random aside. Why do we care if they use it as a selling point? If we want to remove that option we could also just make it national law. (Here I assume you're referring to the US since many countries have these laws already.)

Some European countries "solved" this by having the child leave as a shared pool which the parents can split between themselves as they wish but it still doesn't solve the fact that women have a greater hit on their careers and income due to the baby-making capabilities of their bodies.

That's not "solved". They would have actually solved it if parents _couldn't_ split it as they wish. It should be allocated 50-50 (or at least reasonably close). If a mom or dad doesn't want to take their time off, they should lose that portion. This would balance the incentives and actually have a chance of evening things out over time.

Is this really true though? From my experience in the job market in Berlin on both the hiring side and on the other side, it doesn't seem that there's a dearth of women being hired into individual contributor and management positions. Late 20's are women's starting years if they did a Masters or PhD, so we'd see that in the labor force participation numbers if it was true.

Maybe in some top echelons / old Boyd clubs these things are discussed, but I was never made to feel like there's a bias towards males. In fact, in tech and product it's more the opposite.

Don't know the Berlin job market but TBH Austria is way more conservative than hip and liberal Berlin as proven by having a conservative party at the helm and the lowest number of women in top management positions in Europe. The corporate world in Austria (excluding young start-ups) pretty much is the embodiment of the "old boys club" meme.

Also, Austria has stronger parental leave than Germany AFAIK from my German colleagues working in Austria so that could also explain why employers there are less affected by this.

I mean, that depends pretty heavily on your job. If your job is highest grossing salesperson in a large team or small forward for the Lakers I'm not sure the above breakdown is really applicable.

I'm curious what job you're describing where this is the case. It seems like one where extensive long term planning is common, and adaptability is not required.

Everyone at my company who is good at their job would have their absence felt over the course of six months. For different positions, it would be different amounts of time, but I can't think of a single role from entry level to executive where someone could be so thoroughly good at their job that the company could ride along fine in their absence.

> If you can leave your job in a state that means the next 6 months are problem-free then you are amazing

That's not the point. In high-pressure, competitive environments being out of the loop for 6 months means that you have to catch-up for the next 3 months to get back to speed. It slows down people's careers.

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