Ask HN: How do startups/lean teams successfully handle mat/pat leave? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do startups/lean teams successfully handle mat/pat leave?

143 pointsjd_illa125 comments

Husband and I are expecting our first kid. We have decent mat/pat benefits for the US (3-4 mo each) but manage lean teams and are stressed about the impact our leave will have on our teams & us when we return.

If you're manager of a lean team or startup, how have you effectively handled your or an employee's mat/pat leave when in reality, your biz is already short-staffed? Temporary promotions? Contractors? Spreading the work across the team?

(To be clear, both our companies are supportive of leave, so this isn't a question about whether to take the leave or working during leave.)

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I've done this. I lead a lean team and took parental leave last year.

* Start now by trusting your team with absolutely anything you can. For about 2 months before my leave, I was extremely explicit with my team that I was attempting to deprecate myself. I wanted feedback on what they thought were risks.

* Consider using the time for someone else to "test try" your job. Think someone would be interested in being a manager, it's their time to try it. You will need to be explicitly clear that they own your job while you're out and they will need to make changes as they see fit.

* Ask your boss or peer to do 1:1's with the person stepping in your place

-----

On my team, this was pretty successful. It created an opportunity for me to step to the next level and someone else to follow in behind me. That situation won't be true for all teams. However, startups are intended to grow. Grow your people now, so you're ready when you really need them.

Thanks for posting this! I'm CTO at a pretty new startup and hopefully going to be on paternity leave next year. This makes me feel a little bit better about it and seems like a great approach.

As someone who has been a new CTO before: I suggest you practice delegating. It will be great for your parental leave and, as you outgrow your current responsibilities, you’ll need those skills.

This is especially true if you were previously a good team-facing manager. When you’re accustomed to protecting your team’s productivity and well-being, delegating can feel very unnatural.

Also, if the company does well you absolutely have to be able to delegate or you'll quickly become a bottleneck, as the company and people who work under you scale out and you remain single threaded.

Adding on top my earlier comment.

One of the best things about parental leave was it felt like I was coming back to the open slate of a new job, but was already familiar with the company/culture/etc.

Since my team had taken over all of my responsibilities, it helped me realized what I didn't have to do so I could focus on the broader picture.

I second this. When our boss on my team went on maternity leave one of the teammates stepped up to take on her role and get that slice of managerial experience. It worked pretty well for everyone involved and kept the ball rolling.

Haven’t experienced this myself but I was contemplating the possibility of subordinate team members executing well in your absence and ending up with your job. Glad there was a higher place up for you. Where I am I already report to the CEO, the only “up” for me would be some sort of coup.

Saving this comment for later. Excellent game plan.

I don't really agree with the other comments so far, as they minimize the impact that your leave will have on your remaining team members. "They will self manage and someone else will step up." But the corollary there is that if your teams can handle just as well without you as with you, then the rational decision would be for your company to just fire you if you aren't raising the output or success probabilities of your team.

First off, yes, I agree with the notion that you should take the leave, and that being with your children at this time is much more important than work. That said, here is how I've seen other folks handle it:

1. If possible, especially for paternity leave, I think it's a good idea for both your team and your family if you can break up some of your time, e.g. take a month or two now, then come back to work for a month or two, then go back off for a month or two. Many folks have family that will help with the kids in the early days, so it was helpful to always have a extra pair of hands at home for the mom during the first half year or so.

2. Your team will feel the burden of extra work when you're on leave, but I think it's good just to recognize that and set things up as best as possible beforehand. Sometimes people get sick, or people leave for other reasons. Mat/pat leave is just one more thing people and businesses need to learn to handle, and (and I say this as someone without kids), even a small team will have to learn to deal with these "curve balls" at one point or another. You shouldn't feel guilty for taking your leave, just like one shouldn't feel guilty for getting sick.

> But the corollary there is that if your teams can handle just as well without you as with you, then the rational decision would be for your company to just fire you if you aren't raising the output or success probabilities of your team.

IMO, anyone who deprecates themselves from an important role within a team has successfully scaled themselves in a very interesting way (same output, but person is free to do other things). Such a person would seem very valuable and destined to scale in even more interesting ways.

Or they didn't really contribute before.

That's just manager talk for "we weren't needed here". For example, you say "important role" but who called it important? Were the engineers demanding someone do this job, or was it presumed to be an important job when someone was building out the team?

If someone came into a highly-demanded (by the team itself) role and turned the responsibilities around into work the team can take care of on its own, that's valuable work for sure. But if this was just a role created by an executive as a result of, "We've always needed one of these", then maybe not so much.

I've personally done something similar through mentorship. Learn something interesting and relevant to the company (in this case scheduling and convex optimization), build something, document, teach others how it works, move on.

You can create organizational chaos by skipping that last step, you may even achieve job security. But it's blatantly obvious to both your managers and coworkers if you fight to keep them off your turf. Don't expect respect or admiration.

If you can have the team work well without you, you could probably spend the same time that you used to on one team on five teams. If you're not getting promoted to the level that you can do that, you should probably find a different place to work.

If a good doctor cures their patients to no longer need them, should they be fired?

Absolutely not. The jobs that are the most respectable are the ones where your job is to put yourself out of a job. Management can be a noble profession because of this.

I 100% agree they have scaled / transcended their “job” at that point.

It could be as well that the patients were never sick to begin with. The doctor was not needed to begin with (middle management is not always needed, but “we’ve always done it like that”)

"If you can't replaced, you can't be promoted" -- sometimes attributed to Lee Iacocca

Don't manage your work from a place of fear. If you really don't want to be promoted, that's fine. I respect people that have that opinion. But don't try to ensure job security by slowing the organization down to reassure yourself you're too essential to replace.

The idea isn't that the team will have an identical quantity and quality of output, but that everything will keep working smoothly at an appropriate pace. Deprecating yourself refers to not being a hoarder of information, decisions and all the other nasty ways in which people try to make themselves indispensable. Your team should always benefit from you being there, but your absence should never make the team fall apart and stop working effectively.

> Many folks have family that will help with the kids in the early days, so it was helpful to always have a extra pair of hands at home for the mom during the first half year or so.

This is a strange comment, considering the person asking the question IS the mom.

Secondly, I feel like your entire argument around the extra work the team will face (and the idea that the team being fine with them gone means they provide no value) has an unstated premise; that the amount of work the team has is constant and can't be changed.

When a team member is gone, we expect the team to be less productive. The team and company should plan for this, and commit to less work during the period. The idea is that the team should GRACEFULLY reduce their workload, and not grind to a halt completely.

> When a team member is gone, we expect the team to be less productive. The team and company should plan for this, and commit to less work during the period. The idea is that the team should GRACEFULLY reduce their workload, and not grind to a halt completely.

Good luck making that work at a lean startup or for a team that is already understaffed.

What is the alternative? If you have less people, you are going to be less productive, period. You have no choice but to take a hit to productivity. You can either be smart about it and choose which areas to cut back on, or you can pretend it won't happen and lose productivity in a critical place you can't survive.

If you can coach and build a team to the point where they are effective without you being present, when you come back from your maternity/paternity leave I would be delighted to have you take on that same challenge again but on a bigger and more impactful scale.

Hard disagree. This makes the assumption that this person can not put on any other hats, which would make me question how they got into a startup in the first place.

I can see your point in the case where the person does nothing already, leaves, and it has no impact. But in the top-comment where this happens specifically _because_ the person deprecated themselves then that person has definitely shown how valuable they are.

If they can do that well you know they'll fit in anywhere. You should definitely fight to find a place for them when they come back.

if you're indispensable, you're unpromotable

Counterpoint about breaking up the parental leave into multiple chunks: I did this once before (3 chunks) and would not recommend it. Each time when I came back, by the time I ramped back up and could finally start contributing again, it was time to go back on leave. Maybe I'm slow on ramp-up, or my team moves very fast, but that was my experience.

It's just a company. Take your time and spend it with your family, and don't stress about it. In a decade you're not going to regret bonding with your spouse and child and missing some work.

You'll also be surprised at how well people step up. You're going to be doing two productive things here: Bonding and giving room for growth to others.

never thought about the latter, lessons to be learned good call out.

Going to push back on this a little. I've been at multiple startups, and of course there is eventually people who take paternity leave.

As someone who did have to "step up", I think I did a fine job, but I wasn't exactly thrilled about needing to do 2 jobs now: my old job and the job of the person out on leave. For no additional pay.

I absolutely believe parents should take leave, and while the exact amount may be up for debate, I think that, generally, paid leave in the US is woefully short. But I think it's really shitty to just pretend the extra burden on your colleagues doesn't exist when someone takes leave, or that they'll necessarily see it as a great "opportunity".

> needing to do 2 jobs

It seems like either they really assigned all of the leave-taker's job to you, and that seems excessive, or this person was doing a TON of stuff. Were there no other people who could take over parts of the leave-taker's work?

A lot of these questions (not just yours) indicate that bad management is rare… that hasn’t been my experience. :)

I’m sure the impact to the parent commentor could have been mitigated, but absolutely sure that it almost always isn’t.

Sure. And people blame their peers rather than those in power.

I certainly don't have the opinion that bad management is rare. I was just unclear which form of bad management was happening.

Perhaps I was exaggerating a bit, but saying "I was doing 1.75 jobs" seemed to be in the same ballpark.

In this case, the startup was young, and (as is usually the case for startups) we had too much to do as it was. Also, coincidentally, we had a bunch of people having babies around the same time. There were simply not that many other people who could take on the work.

I think that's primarily the point I want to make: in a sizable corporation, probably a quarter of the company could disappear for a year or two and it wouldn't make any difference. A young startup just doesn't have that amount of spare capacity, so it's not realistic to think that going on extended leave (for whatever reason) won't have a large impact on the people that remain.

PS - if you want to argue that by "one quarter" should really be a third or 20% or 15% or whatever, knock yourself out. Point being that large corporations have a lot more redundancy that small startups, so the impact of someone leaving for an extended period is vastly different.

Be careful depending on this. I am on a team where this happened and while he was on leave for 2 months, not one ticket was delivered as nobody wanted to step up. Granted, this is not a startup and the team is very unmotivated, but literally every ticket with every ambiguity was thrown into "blocked."

That‘s a team I‘d never want to work in …

Your family typically needs your salary as well, so just ignoring your job isn't really the entire solution.

It's not "ignoring your job" when you take advantage of a policy set by your company (mat/pat leave). Give plenty of notice and work with your team as best as you can to help with the transition.

A lot of small startups don't have a mat/pat policy yet, maybe not a well developed vacation policy either nor a generous one, and the employment may be "at will" meaning they can let you go for no reason, just because they decide "why keep paying?" I know there are exceptions in law for parental reasons, but whether they apply depends on the type of contract.

On top of that, the startup may find it difficult to pay someone else while still paying you. If you're an early employee, there may also be financial incentives to the company letting you go, such as not having to pay out the higher rate or higher equity you negotiated as an early joiner.

You can take the time off but in some cases are risking losing your job by doing so for long. If you need the money, that's a tought spot. Even if you're good at getting new jobs (many people aren't), getting a new job can be a full time job in itself which you don't have time to do if you're seriously on mat/pat, and anyway few companies will hire you while you're still unavailable.

If you get fired for going on paternity leave when the company explicitly has a policy for it, you're going to have an easy lawsuit win. I don't know why your even talking about startups that may not have a paternity policy, since the OP's company clearly has one.

This 100%.

You’re not indispensable. Your team will be fine if you come up with a plan. Your manage should step up to fill the gap.

Go spend time with you family.

> if you come up with a plan

that’s explicitly the point of this post — OP is asking what their plan should be.

this, and the GP comment, are super annoyingly missing the point.

OP is already planning to take 3-4 months off. they ARE going to spend time with their family.

they’re just asking for advice on the transition, and half the comments are totally ignoring them, lol

The point you’re missing is planning isn’t 100% on them. They’re “stressed”.

Screw that. The planning is basically telling everyone “hey im gone, Bill will cover me, see ya”

While I completely agree with your comment, I have also seen repeatedly in my career where colleagues quickly became disgruntled towards the person taking mat/pat leave because that meant more workload for them while the other person was out.

> disgruntled towards the person taking mat/pat leave

If management are worth their salt, this sort of behavior won’t be tolerated. If it’s tolerated, you have poor managers.

Not much more to say about that.

You have three levers to pull as a manger in this situation.

1) increase the workload for who remains

2) decrease the workload and delay the deadline (which could affect other parts of the company, the pnl)

3) find a contractor or two to pick up the slack, this may take a while and can still fail or cause the rest of the team to stall while that person/people onboards.

Depending on your situation money can be tight or deadlines can be tight or both. Meaning the only appreciable option may be #1: which is part of why it’s harder to work in startups where both of the above may be true.

I don’t think it’s entirely fair to blame management, but it can be arbitrary limitations imposed by management for sure.

The problem isn't increased workload, or people having challenges or bad feelings about adapting to increased workload, it's spreading discontentment over someone taking maternity/paternity leave.

A manager and everyone else should be establishing that as much as their contributions are missed it's not a problem that they had a child or took the leave they are entitled to.

Are you saying it’s ok to feel bad as long as you don’t inform or allow the person taking leave that you feel bad?

I’m not sure how I feel about that honestly.

On the one hand it makes people feel more free and feel less bad in themselves.

On the other it will become an open secret among everyone including those who may eventually take leave and then be aware of it, passive aggression may ensure even if it’s not permitted, and of course on some level it’s dishonest.

> Are you saying it’s ok to feel bad as long as you don’t inform or allow the person taking leave that you feel bad?

You are reading it wrong.

It's not just about the individual taking the leave, it's about spreading discontent throughout the entire team because someone is taking advantage of a benefit they are entitled to.

Basically, you are advocating for the idea that someone using a benefit they have is bad.

i.e. I'm allowed to spread discontent on the team and make you feel bad for taking a salary.

Basically this is what I meant. I'm fine with someone saying "I'm feeling overworked" but I'm not OK with saying "I can't believe Jane had a baby during this important sprint."

The funny thing is that everyone agrees that it explicitly is a problem - it's impacting everyone else at the business negatively - the definition of a problem. It's also explicitly unfair in that there's no corresponding benefit for someone that is either unable to or chooses not to have a child. But we're all going to pretend that it's 100% OK.

So don't work at companies that offer these benefits.

Because you do benefit from those benefits even if you choose not to have a child. The people working there would most likely not work there if these benefits didn't exist.

> it's impacting everyone else at the business negatively

Clearly it's not. The companies offering this clearly prefer the type of people that benefit from this. And you do as well, as the people taking advantage of this are clearly important to your job satisfaction.

> And you do as well, as the people taking advantage of this are clearly important to your job satisfaction.

Isn't his point that the asymmetric benefit is unfair for non-parents and thus contributing to a lack of job satisfaction for everyone left picking up the slack?

> asymmetric benefit is unfair for non-parents and thus contributing to a lack of job satisfaction

Solution: work somewhere else, where another benefit structure is offered

Agreed, I'm only pointing out the discrepancy between what he's saying and the idea that he somehow has job satisfaction because of it.

His (and you can sure it’s a him) point is that he’s a busy navel gazing in contemplation of problems he doesn’t have.

It's not a requirement for "everyone else to pick up the slack". That's just the businesses choice.

At the end they could choose to let the team be less productive. Business should already assume that they may lose an employee at anytime, or roadblocks may come up, so if they're assuming the teams are always going to be at 100%, that's probably not realistic.

The business could also: hire another manager, or promote someone whose been looking for an opportunity to learn to manage. If they do want to shift the load to other existing employees, ideally the business is structured so that other managers aren't at 100% capacity and can help fill-in temporarily. That's still a form of "picking up the slack", but if it's planned for, it's usually less an issue.

Arguably, the problem is that there's not enough "slack" in the system to tolerate someone being out. You'd have the same issue if the person on leave got hit by a bus instead---or just quit!

Plus, benefits are often "unfair" in that they help some employees more than others. A sickly coworker gets more out of the health plan than someone who is as fit as a fiddle. Not needing glasses, I get literally nothing out of half of the "vision and dental" package. The tuition benefit does nothing if you're unable or choose not to take a course.

Good point. You know, I have a colleague who took two weeks off this August to spend time in the outer banks.

It impacted the business having him be absent for two weeks - I was forced to attend two meetings on his behalf and had to answer a bunch of email.

He could have chosen to man up and not take a vacation, or could have taken his laptop and attend meetings remotely and answered email. What a jerk.

Look, if Company, Inc. offers benefit X, and employee A chooses to exercise their contractual right to that, then A and A’s colleagues can have a reasonable expectation that their manager(s) have a plan for the situation.

Otherwise Company, Inc. shouldn’t have offered the benefit in the first place.

then perhaps when the person taking the leave is a manager, "just take the leave and don't stress about it" isn't the best advice?

They need to do prep work before leave so that the team doesn't become disgruntled to begin with.

If the behavior is exhibited at all, you have poor managers. If not tolerating it takes any other form than helping to ease tension, you have very poor managers.

I can see it, but I don't think it should concern you. That isn't a problem for you to fix.

I’m at a point in my career and as an individual where if someone is on mat/pat leave all my complaints go out the window. It’s just about understanding the situation, and maybe all of us can explain to those individuals complaining that even if they never have children, that them giving the parents space to raise a well-balanced individual is a net benefit for all of society.

This has to be at larger companies, right? "Sorry, we don't have resources for a backfill," and no middle manager has the authority to change that. "Do extra work for free," is terrible management, and big companies basically exist to have terrible management. At a startup, 100% of the employees becoming disgruntled is an existential threat to the company, and the founders exist to own that and fix it, or their dream of a successful startup is over. That's different than large companies, where if some random department 300 levels down the org chart is unhappy, it doesn't matter, so the CEO is not going to step in and work extra hours while someone is away. It just doesn't matter to the company that one department is disgruntled, the company can do fine without them.

If taking advantage of your benefits is going to kill the company, then the company probably wasn't meant to exist. After you get your kid off to a good start in life, begin the job search. The market isn't quite as bad as the gossip blogs say. Companies still need people to write software and people to manage the teams that do that.

I really don't think any of this is going to happen to the OP. Their manager will handle 1:1s. Someone on the team can run meetings. Some decisions will be made while they're away, and they'll have to accept them even if they disagree. That's the worst case, but that's management in general.

> colleagues quickly became disgruntled towards the person taking mat/pat leave because that meant more workload for them

That's not really a place you'd want to work anyway, as this reeks of both bad management and bad colleagues. Would the same colleagues be disgruntled toward that person if said person had a death in the family? I mean shit happens and management needs to step up with better planning and scaling down the workload to account for the time off of the employee. If colleagues are disgruntled towards the employee taking time off and not at management for making them work more, they're either assholes or idiots.

That’s a them problem.

Imo, I'd rather have 3 months off when they are 1 to 3 years old. Those first few months are a slog.

I understand for moms, nursing is the real benefit.

As someone who had their first child the last couple of years I would really recommend taking the time off when they’re first born. Those are special moments but hard to appreciate through the sleep deprivation. Having more time to be present and not worry about work the better

> It's just a company.

But it's not just a company. It's also your family's income. It's how you're feeding the baby you now have.

I am doing this right now (paternity). I did what most of the comments suggested: asked someone to take on the essential parts of my role (CTO), and scaled back the non-essentials over the course of a few months.

It’s going extremely well. I think the person who took on my role is doing it better than I used to. A spring clean of responsibilities was helpful and forced us to document / distribute a variety of things that used to fall on me for no good reason.

Feel free to email me if you want to discuss more.

And most importantly, congratulations! You’re going to love it. Whatever you do regarding work, structure it so you don’t have to think about it when you do 2am feeds (because you really won’t want to).

> asked someone to take on the essential parts of my role (CTO), and scaled back the non-essentials over the course of a few months

Just curious - in this case, do you also increase their compensation and/or title to reflect their additional responsibilities?

Not for the temporary change - that’s a conversation for when I’m back.

CTO/Founder here. Coming up on 3 years with my co. Baby is 10 months now. Our tech team is small. Just me and three others.

My experience was very similar. Tried to make a gradual wind-down, spent more time documenting and planning while stepping away from core functions.

I will say that while “work” continued, “progress” slowed. People stepped up to manage, but nobody had the vision or the same passion for our product or future. I don’t blame them. It’s not their job.

Good to know. We are a bit more established (~125 people) so I’m hoping the vision can keep moving forward without me there. Thanks for sharing.

> If you're manager of a lean team or startup, how have you effectively handled your or an employee's mat/pat leave when in reality, your biz is already short-staffed? Temporary promotions? Contractors? Spreading the work across the team?

I usually make a replacement hire and ask the person returning from leave if they want to keep doing what they were doing (this is a legal obligation) and if the returnee says yes, I offer to move the replacement to a different role (if the replacement is redundant and productive). In a small startup, leaves are a great way to expand the team - you get a great person back, and have a no risk way to try out a new person. You just have to remember that people on leave... be it National Guard, maternity or any other contractual or legally mandated leave absolutely have to get their old job back, and excuses for not doing so will result in painful, often losing litigation.

If you are a manager taking leave then you need someone else to manage the team while you are out. Often there is nobody on the team who is really ready to manage it. Then you'll need to get help from elsewhere; perhaps your manager can help out, or perhaps a manager elsewhere in the organization can assist.

It can be a tough situation because as a manager and a leader you have to take responsibility for what happens when you are on leave. Sometimes the replacement manager leads a mess and you are left responsible for it. Sometimes things will improve without you and company leadership won't want you to resume your old job when you return.

Personally, and as a father, I was fortunate to work at a company which was very flexible about paternity leave. I really preferred taking a couple weeks off at the start, and then returning to work but just working 4 days a week for a while (and not very long hours). It was approximately the same amount of leave but just structured differently. I really advocate this (for men taking paternity leave, whose wife is going to take full time leave) if you can swing it.

There are two reasons. One is that it works out better at home. Honestly as a father with a young baby and a wife who is taking leave, your wife and child do not need you in the house 24/7. A day a week to catch up on errands is great. Leaving work in time to make dinner is great. More than that, you just run out of useful stuff to do. And a six month old baby is really just about as much work as a three month old baby! Having five Fridays off to run errands with a six month old baby is more useful than using those same days of leave to take a whole week off with a three month old baby.

The second reason is that it works out better at work. If your manager is only working four days a week for a while and not working late, it's basically fine, as long as you aren't at some super intense startup. It isn't disruptive to your team, you're still available to help people, you're still in touch with what's happening at work.

> then returning to work but just working 4 days a week for a while (and not very long hours).

Kinda depends on the structure of your job and whether you're able to shift a proportional amount of work to other people.

When I've worked 4-day weeks, people have 'helpfully' rescheduled all the meetings from that day over to days when I'm working, giving me just as much work to do but less time to do it.

It seems that you are saying your rescheduled meetings were taking time away from work: if you are a manager, meetings are, usually, the work you need to be doing.

What you probably wanted to say is that you were part of a bunch of useless meetings: you should have solved this in a different way even before switching to 4-day weeks: stop attending them (if they were useless for you) or stop the team from having them (if they were useless for everybody else too)

Eh, it's not unusual for a manager to have some meetings where their attendance is appreciated but not critical - and a wealth of important non-meeting work.

The site safety group needs the imprimatur of a senior leader as important safety matters deserve to be taken seriously - but half their time is spent on carpark speed limits and toasters setting the fire alarm off.

Less experienced managers need a forum where, if there's a part of the management role they're not familiar with, they can get advice. That forum needs some veteran managers - but it needn't be me every week.

Meanwhile, plenty of non-meeting work is very important - a manager also needs to chase up resources their subordinates need. Explain corporate policies and procedures. Approve holidays and expense claims. Review resumes and perform interviews. Evaluate and improve operating procedures. Gather data to support prioritisation decisions. Plan for promotions and raises. And be available for ad-hoc consultation on technical and workplace questions. Make sure employees are filling out their timesheets and doing their mandatory training. And of course answer whatever chat messages or e-mails come in from the guy who signs my raise letters.

And that's for a nontechnical manager - if the manager also wants to be making architectural decisions, doing code reviews, approving production change requests and planning the future roadmap for the product? Well, that's all more non-meeting work.

I am not saying non-meeting work is not important, but that meetings (or rather, communication) is equally important, but that there are usually meetings where we should be more considerate of everybody's time.

As I said, I think you just phrased it awkwardly, since I doubt all your non-critical meetings were exactly on the day you stopped working in your workweek.

Every one should be able to take leave and not kill your project at any time. If that's not where you are now the project is at risk. Someone might change jobs just as much as mat/pat leave. You should make sure that no one person knows how do perform any task that is needed.

Even/especially soft skills like being "leader for a day". Or being "last word on xxx" for a day. Or driving some change.

If you do that without fail the team is able to cover anyone else. Any team of 7 people has one 7th the extra workload when someone is absent, but nothing should stop working. When you are 7 again, if its the person with knowledge back, you are up to speed immediately; if it's someone new, it takes time to get back to where you were.

If you work like: this when it's your turn to be off, noone will miss you, or curse your absence, and they will be very pleased when you are back.

In short "spread the work across the team" and "temporary promotions" as everyday practices, before and after expected leave.

This approach pays off immediately, shorter absences such as plane delays, crisis at school or someone just being late to a meeting, are easier to deal with too.

So much this. If a team is run so "lean" that an extended absence for anyone can create a crisis, that seems evidence that the team is run excessively "lean".

And this is not just for parental leave: What if one of the singles has a hang gliding accident necessitating a lengthy recovery? What if somebody quits?

If that invariably leads to overwork for the remaining team members, you risk a cascade of departures/burnout, and even if you get lucky and run for a few years with minimal slack and no major absences, it's likely that this has consequences for the well being of some of the team members.

Director-level here. Given enough notice (let's say weeks, not days -- but hopefully you have months of notice!), I will figure something out. This is not your problem -- it's my problem.

I always encourage people taking mat/pat leave to take the entire time alotted by the company. It's just a job. I can deal without you. If I can't deal without you, then I haven't been doing my job. As a leader of a lean organization, I am constantly thinking about the bus factor.

It's not just mat/pat leave, but what if you got COVID and were out for a week? What if you had an emergency health situation and had to be out for six weeks? What if you just straight up quit tomorrow? How would I handle that? Well, it turns out that's the same way I would handle mat/pat leave. If we're down, we have to fill in the gap somehow. We'll manage. We have to.

Maybe that means hiring contractors temporarily. I've done that. It's a fine solution. But truth is that the only true thing to do is to work to make sure the workload is distributed across other people, deprioritize the least important things and put them in the backlog, and make sure that everyone is aware that any projects this person is responsible for will move slower until either this person returns or we can bring more resources to bear on the project. We can't overload the rest of the team, but we also can't operate at 100% capacity -- the business needs to realize that. And if they don't, then that's a Big Problem that has nothing to do with your paid family leave.

Right now there are currently 2-3 people in my org that are so critical that if something happened, we'd be totally boned. Fortunately, they are all healthy and happy and not expecting children at the moment, so it's not an urgent emergency, but I am still spending a chunk of my time getting some cross-training in with other team members to make sure that the bus factor is at an acceptable level.

Long story short: it's not your problem if your teams can't handle your absence, it's your manager's problem. And if they can't handle that... well, it's just a job. There are other jobs out there. You can find one that treats you like a human being worthy of respect and time and energy.

I wouldn't stress out too much about it, honestly.

In my experience, people who rush back don't end up staying at the job very long. There is resentment created/builds. Especially among the moms. There's been a few studies on % who return to work...much higher after being allowed to take a clean break for a child's birth.

Don't rush it. It's the 4 glass balls and 1 rubber ball rule. The only one that won't break is the job.

My friend is the CEO of a small startup. Her husband is basically the COO. They didn't really take mat/pat leave. They pulled back on their work a bit, stopped doing 1 on 1's for a while, and stopped traveling, but they were still both taking important meetings.

She did however have the benefit of both sets of grandparents being able to live with her during the first few months, so she had a lot of help.

So I guess the big tip here is, if you can get full time live in help take advantage of it?

Sorry if this isn't super helpful, but just another data point for you.

Doesn’t sound like a great life choice, but rather a symptom of terrible work/life balance.

I also worked at a startup before where the CEO and her husband were both working there, and it led to a terrible dynamic.

It's easy to criticize from afar, but in the meantime they have a successful growing business that gives them the freedom to spend a lot more time with their kid and family than most people get, even if it means taking a meeting for an hour in the middle of family time.

I think most people would envy their freedom.

Do you have a business continuity plan (for your team) that is part of the continuity plan for the overall business? If not, use this opportunity to create one. I am guessing based on my past experience that a fast moving startup may not have had time to fully plan an effective BCP (customer facting processes, technology, organization, people and process). So, doing this is generally valuable in the long run.

When you start thinking in these terms, you will be able to figure out obvious solutions that include rotating responsibilities amongst team members, how to handle inter-departmental expectations and agreements etc., Involve your team members as well so you get a full picture of all the risks and you can come up with mitigation plans (or at the least know the gaps so that you can go to your manager and have an intelligent discussion).

If you have enough time to plan this out, you can consider adding a couple of paid interns to the group to help your team members with the workload, freeing them up for taking on your tasks while you are away. Or if additional hiring is anyway planned for the future, you may be able to talk your management into advancing one or two hires sooner to help the business sail through this.

Most reasonable business managers will be able to look at things wholistically and help you find a solution that helps you and the business. There may also be resources from other departments that they may be able to borrow to help you, so don't assume anything.

Enjoy your well-deserved timeoff with your family.

I took two months of paternity leave in my funded startup of 2 people. I told my colleague (an experienced guy but nonetheless my subordinate) to take a 2 month vacation and said nothing to anyone else. It was fine. My wife is in a profession with 65hr actual weeks and it was the maximum time she had.

The reality is that in places that are big enough to have subordinates / tiers with enough autonomy, it doesn’t really matter.

Your work is going to seem so easy compared to the baby. Especially because you go from working like 10-20 real hours to 70.

That said, now is the time to find another job. Especially if you are going to start your leave before delivery. There is so much discrimination in workplaces against this “change of arrangement.” Every high powered intelligent new mom I know who came to their own conclusion to seek new work was delighted she did so.

I've done on parental leave twice as a founder. Each time was very different and it was dependent upon the size and stage of the company.

The first time was when the company has 8 employees, and I was handling all sales/customer relationships. I took 2 days prior to my wife giving birth and then 4 days afterwards. The team was prepared and handled it well. I was then part-time for the next month or so. I did all nighttime feedings and then handed off our little girl to my parents at 7am (who come to our house during the day) and sleep until around 12 noon and then went to work on site until 5/6pm. This was pre-pandemic of course.

The second time around the company has grown to 100 employees and we have raised a few rounds of financing and we have a well developed management team. This time I am taking 12 weeks fully off. It is quite nice to know that the company is now scalable. I am currently 3 weeks into the 12 weeks.

I took 5 weeks off from my startup when I had my first, and I’ll be taking 3 months off for my second who arrives end of the month. I’m at a larger organization now in a leadership role, and my past startup I was one of three.

As others are already writing, you should take some bonding time and adjustment time, regardless of company size. Those first few weeks are a huge adjustment, and you need to focus on your family, partner, and newborn, more than a company.

How long is appropriate then becomes a question of a number of factors. I don’t want to make a value judgment on anyone who feels like 2 weeks is enough vs someone who says 12 weeks is the minimum. Life is complicated and nobody knows your situation better than you. But, you should optimize first for your family, and then once that is finished, figure out what a return to work timeline looks like.

Parenthood is such a wild journey with its own unique set of challenges, struggles, and joys. My best to you and your partner.

Godspeed.

Im the CTO of a company that got funded, about the first time i became a parent. In the year since i have been promoted to CEO. Living in Sweden i have access to generous paternity leave, but taking it out would kill my company.

Some how im making it work and am pretty close to an equal parent. You learn tricks, like you best friend is a headset. Keyboard time is extremely valuable, so i try to use it for code, and use voice for a lot of communication. I love my job so if i can spend 8h working and 8h with my son life is good and i dont need more, if i can do both like taking a meeting when in the park things are stellar.

Dont get me wrong its hard, but loving what you do is the key to doing anything that is hard.

Generally, everyone should have clear goals - use OKR’s if you want for this.

If the goals are clear and time bound, then execution be straightforward enough. The trick is what to do if things don’t go according to plan.

I generally ask my team to do a little tabletop for the quarter on what “release valves” or alternate routes we have to accomplishing the goal.

Also - if you’re essential to the team executing, you’re already behind. Engineers aren’t fungible cogs, but part of a leader’s job is to teach team members how to do their job.

A resilient team can execute without all members because there’s shared goals and roles/responsibilities.

A quarter is like a decade at an early stage startup though. I'm not sure how many employees OPs company has though, so maybe they're at a bigger stage.

We're at 4 people currently and it would be extremely difficult to set goals that span 3 months. There is too much in flux.

The goals don’t need to be minute and fine grained.

They could be as simple as “onboard 20 new customers by December 15”.

From there, you build whatever is necessary to capture 20 new customers.

The place I work now has a really wonderful policy: maternity/paternity leave can be used in a part-time fashion. People who are recent parents frequently come in for a couple days a week, or a few hours a day -- as they think will work best as they try to balance two worlds.

Now, don't get me wrong -- for a few weeks after birth, you're injured and shouldn't be working at all. At all. And for a few months after, you're in an intensive time of bonding and sleep disruption, and outside demands should be kept to a minimum. I found that my time of maximum stress and exhaustion with my three babies occurred when the babies were 3-7 mo old. So be gentle to yourself; it's a marathon. Minimize work commitments. I tell first time parents that all the stuff you want to do, that you want to get back to, that you feel like you lost... you can do it next year. Take a baby year. Nobody ever listens to me, but... ;)

Anyway. Don't threaten any of that with part time work. But if you have a few hours of the day to give to the company, it lets you really get done the stuff only you can do, and gives you a break from baby baby baby all the time to boot. I have found that such an approach forces me to be efficient. Turns off I can hand off some tasks I thought I couldn't, or can scale back some I didn't think were scalable. In turn, I'm a lot more willing to come back to work a lot sooner if it's not for a full day.

I cannot speak to how you live your life, but I find myself very invested in my job. This is in general a good thing (I think) as it provides me the mental state to try and do the best job that I can as working hard is easy. The question you have posed leads me to believe you may feel similarly.

That said, my two boys (5 months, 6 years) are the most important thing in my life (along with my wife of course). My second son is 5 months old now and I just took 3 months off to care for him. I wish I had more time, 2 years might be enough. When my first son was born I only took two weeks of vacation, which was not even close to enough. It is something I still regret.

While I do not like to give parenting advice, I can say with certainty, you should take as much time as you possibly can. Don't think about work, don't look at work, try not to worry about work, it will be there when you return. As a mother, spend time to recover physically. No matter how the child is born, the process is very physically taxing and your body will change a lot in the following weeks/months. Make sure you are keeping an eye on your mental health, postpartum depression is not something to take lightly. Most important, try to relax (it is hard) and just love your child. The first months are wild.

If you're a manager, and you're not director or c-suite (i.e., you don't control the budget), this isn't your problem.

Go to your manager and present the situation, and see what they have available to you. Do they have budget for contractors, new hires, etc? Because, if they don't, you don't have any real options besides dumping the work on one or more people, or allowing deadlines to be pushed back.

They either have/make headcount or they don't.

If your business is already short staffed, the employees are already being exploited.

Let me repeat: Perpetual short staffing is exploitation. "Running lean" isn't a real thing, it's just a fancy way to say that the company is making compromises that an established business wouldn't make. You either need staff or you don't.

The business will miss deadlines and that's fine. Unless you own the company, it's not your problem.

Take your entire leave. Do not check email or Slack while you're on leave. Take your entire leave. Do not check email or Slack while you're on leave. Take your entire leave. Do not check email or Slack while you're on leave.

CTO of a 4 person org.

Took 4.5 months of paternity leave, and 1 month of flex-time in December 2021.

Worked for us by knowing it was coming to plan ahead for in terms of breaking down knowledge silos, dry runs of delegating niche tasks, and documenting tasks I became owner of in tenure.

During paternity leave, I was fully disconnected. Upon my return, I had a team who grew during that time, and we're more resilient as a result of my time away.

If you are an essential part of your startup as, for example CTOs are in very early stage startups, you may find it difficult to completely detach for more than a few weeks especially if the business is negotiating a complicated part of its development.

There is much good advice here but I would add a few things that I have not seen in other comments. My advice is not for people who are employees as I believe they should take at a minimum their entire statutory allowance, but for founders with a greater stake in the success of the business:

- although the first few weeks are certainly the most challenging especially if you end up staying on in hospital for a few days, there will be many challenges over the entire first year unless you have excellent family (ie grandmother) help - so pace yourself and your team's expectation of your involvement.

- Plan to be completely absent for the first few weeks and adjust your team's expectations accordingly, but then optimise asynchronous communication of all but the most pressing issues from that point on. This helps if your business is remote because it's likely you will already be successfully using asynchronous communication through tickets / slack / email.

- While it would have been great to spend my downtime watching series, early infancy tends to give you a lot of time at unexpected hours and it can actually end up being quite painless to put in 2-3 hours of problem solving or pull request reviews. These can make the difference between a team heading radically off path and staying on track.

- If you can (ie if you're not the one breastfeeding -- that's totally consuming and you won't be able to do anything) try and distribute some of your leave later because babies get more engaging every extra day they are out of the womb!

Good luck!

Few things that would help:

- Find the next best person/team members who could shadow some of what you do, if not all. Work closely with them to pick up your stuff even before you leave

- Document all the complex stuff you do as much as possible. Never underestimate the power of documentation, even if not perfect. We maintain an internal Wiki and I am always pushing everyone to document whatever they can especially repeating processes. No matter how small.

- Start delegating already and do trial runs. For example, you run that monthly meeting ? Let the other person run it while you are still around and on the meetings.

- Set expectations early on that you will not be available and the rest of the team has to work accordingly.

Unfortunately, in lean teams, there is no easy way. But it is also true that nothing stops just because 1 person is not available even though it can be a bit difficult. Human beings are very good at adapting especially when they have no choice.

So do your best and enjoy your time off.

3-4 months leave is "decent"? I only get 6 weeks...

I get none or infinity depending on how you look at it (I quit my job when my wife gets close to delivery). I'm looking again right now!

I've thought about doing this.

Companies in the US are required to give a minimum of 12 weeks unpaid parental leave.

Or, alternatively, you can get an infinite amount of unpaid leave! See how generous parental leave laws are in the US /s

FMLA leave is job-protected and it’s illegal to retaliate against an employee for taking it. You can be fired when you return for reasons not related to the leave but - it’s also dangerous to play that game if you don’t have a documented history to support it.

Huh, looks like you are correct: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/benefits-leave/fmla

This is good info, thank you for sharing.

Edit: Wikipedia has clarification on eligibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...

> “Highly compensated employees” have limited rights to return to their jobs. They are defined as “a salaried eligible employee who is among the highest paid 10 percent of the employees employed by the employer within 75 miles of the facility at which the employee is employed”.

I guess I should clarify my 6 weeks is paid time off.

I think I've had 2 or 3 weeks with each of mine.

6 weeks is all you need, before you can hand it off to your wife as she should have recovered by then.

It depends on how long this leave takes. 6wks, 12wks, 6 months?

All your current work loads can be categorized into A)urgent -important; B) urgent - not-important; C) not urgent- important and though we thought for startups, there won't be D) not-urgent and not-important, but there could be - if you question those tasks really hard lol.

I would recommend treat ABCD with different approaches. For A)Have the plan and directions, hand over to a current colleague you trust, or your manager. B) Hire an immediate contract for this, or ignore it for now. C) Have a thought and plan on this, have your stake on this, but depends on how long you are leaving - this could be the best re-entry task for your coming back! D) the key take away for D is really to identify those and then cross them.

Hope this helps.

I cofounded a company and had my first kid 4 months later - it was brutal. I took 2 weeks off completely but then had to take a bunch of days after because babies are hard work.

What I would do next time:

- Take more than 2 weeks (lol)

- Communicate expectations before and during

- Assign out your core responsibilities (start by looking at last months meetings and seeing who wouldve been best to replace you)

- Be available via Slack and E-mail when needed

- Put wife and baby first (this means slack/emails only get tended to when baby is napping and your not cooking/cleaning, etc.)

It's a job. There are others. If your team is worth its salt its members will be supportive, excited, and will yearn for your return.

With regards to time off in general, writing shit down is my best advice. Get people used to searching some knowledge store before asking you. That way you won't be missed when it comes to explaining to individuals what you've already told fifteen people in separate one on one conversations. You're left to innovate.

Depends on the people. I promoted someone from my team, and when I came back it was much easier to pick up where I left off. I can imagine that that's going to be more of a challenge when the company hires someone entirely new to do your job. Several ex colleagues who came back, started job hunting after a few weeks in, because their expectations changed and less intensive jobs at larger companies seemed better paced.

My experience is that there are no problem. The same oh so important bugs are there waiting for you in the bug tracker when you come back.

Take the leave.

It is already hard enough to adjust to parenthood. Use it or you will regret it in the future.

You should not be worrying about your teams. If you did your job right, they will self-manage and someone will step up to help call the shots while you're out.

Take the hit to productivity of not having another person on the team for the duration of your leave. The world will go on without you.

I've done this and we have someone currently out on leave (both of us founders). We do 2 weeks of radio silence, 1 week working half time remote, 1 week of full time remote, then back in the office. The two weeks is tough but we've been able to spread the workload to other members of the team.

First, get the priorities straight:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/wwpzhh/whe...

View it as an opportunity for your promising team members to step and develop. It will give them space to flourish. Sell it that way as a win-win. When you come back, you will hopefully have a stronger team and can build on it as you grow.

If you are short-staff try to hire ASAP.

Had a kid at startup. Not much paternity leave, about 2 weeks. I don’t know how new moms could do it. It is pretty intense. Knowing what I know now, I would have probably preferred a large co during this period.

That is way too short! Should be at least a year or two imho but I can see why more and more companies are covertly avoiding hiring women and why professional women avoid pregnancy. In some places, taking such leave could affect your career, so much that when women get married they opt to not have children or give up their careers altogether, leading to decline in birth rates (ex. Korea, Japan)

There should be more subsidies and tax incentives for companies to provide longer mat/pat leave.

I’m originally from israel, and we have very generous maternity leave over there (no paternity as far as I know, moved to the US back in 2012).

i joined a startup in 2007 and we’ve had numerous pregnancies (one of our team leaders had 4 kids from 2007-2014), each followed by 6 months of maternity leave.

how did we handle it? people pick up the slack and it just works, it’s not even an option so you get by, end of story. it really is that simple.

Wife should quit the startup and raise the kid

Not quite connected to the main topic but Mat & Pat (originally 'Pat & Mat') [1] was the cult bedtime cartoon in the 70s and 80s in communist block countries. As the main (and only) two characters were great tinkerers I thought you might like it. Just to get a taste [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_%26_Mat [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXbwF38gYB8

Oh! I am just (next week) wrapping up leave! First - congratulations! My husband and I just had our first kiddo earlier this year and went through a similar "what do we do" sort of moment. We managed our time and workload by going to a "one week on, one week off" schedule, alternating between the two of us. Oh aside from all this - definitely pay money for Huckleberry (or an app like it). It will help you just manage your life. :-)

A lot of this is borrowed from Manager Tools "How To Go On Vacation" podcast. [1]

Here's what worked and what didn't for me:

What worked:

A. Name a clear "number one." [2] In my case I named two since I have a tech leadership role. I called out one of our lead architects as my "number one," and my peer director as an HR focal.

B. Make a list of everything on your plate, and your team's plate. For each item, write down a small summary of it, and then figure out who owns it. Tell that person they now own that work item. If you don't have a clear owner, the "number one" you chose becomes the owner.

C. I gave my team ~6 months (after we told family), a three month reminder, a one month reminder, and then "it's go time" when our baby showed up three weeks early. :-)

D. I took the list of projects and made a company-wide (not public) shared read only doc that had "if you're looking for X, contact ___," and put at the top and bottom "if you need anything that's not on this list, talk to ___" (your number one).

E. My husband and I both took off the first two weeks, then started the "on/off" schedule. I set two different out-of-office notifications when I'm out. The external one said I was out for paternity leave, promised baby pictures, and had the two contacts (my number one and director). The internal one said the same as the external, but also had a link to the "coverage doc" that explained project-by-project who to reach out to. It also said in blunt instructions: "No news is good news. Please make a decision without me. If you can't, or need help, contact (number one). If you need air cover, contact (director). If we will do irreparable harm to the business or you have a business continuity or ethics concern, text me. I won't be checking email or slack."

F. Turn off notifications / uninstall email / slack etc on your phone. Enjoy those first two weeks. :-)

G Book a "catch up" meeting ahead of time with your number one and any key contacts for when you return.

J. Book 1:1's with key contacts for every week you return from leave. DEFINITELY DO THIS. YOU WILL BE OUT OF TOUCH. THIS IS A WAY TO LESSEN THE PROBLEM AND MAINTAIN RELATIONSHIPS.

Some warnings:

M. After a few weeks we "got the hang of it," and caved on the "I won't check in" rule and started lurking on slack. Once people figured it out they started slacking me, which started a feedback loop. Don't start the feedback loop.

N. A few times I tried to work a day on my "off" weeks because it felt like "I got this!" or something urgent came up. It wasn't a good use of time or a good idea. I was out of sync with the team, and about 1/3 of the time behind b/c I hadn't scrolled through -all- of the slack channels to see that issue X had already been addressed.

O. You're pushing work down. That means that folks are going to have to push work off of their plates themselves. They should not turn around and delegate something you are delegating to them. You should expect them to take a task from you, and then stop doing one or more other tasks by either delegating those "smaller" things to someone else, or dropping them to the floor ("Mike's on paternity leave, I'm covering for him, sorry I can't do your TPS report" is a fair answer). Emphasize that delegation model.

[1] https://www.manager-tools.com/2015/05/how-go-vacation-part-1

[2] You should have a lieutenant / number one anyway just for succession planning / hit-by-a-bus reasons.

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