Ask HN: What companies offer maternity/paternity leave immediately? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What companies offer maternity/paternity leave immediately?

11 pointsjagtstronaut24 comments

I have observed that most companies don't offer their leave benefits until you have a year of service at the company. Also, companies don't really advertise the specifics of their policies publicly.

What are some companies that offer leave before you hit that year tenure for both maternity and paternity?

EDIT: I meant the US when asking this

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In Norway, the parental leave is managed by the state so it’s not up to the company. The state will pay your salary, up to a limit. Some companies will pay the difference.

https://www.tekna.no/en/salary-and-negotiations/employment-l...

Please note that you need to work during at least 6 of the last 10 months before the parental leave, which isn’t great. But you get 49 weeks of parental leave, which is great.

I'd risk a statement that the managed by state/law might be true for most of the world (except US).

I wonder why that is. Wouldn't it make sense for the whole society to support the woman in this special period so that she can stay with her newborn 4 or even maybe 5 months if she desires instead of forcing her to go back after 12 weeks? 12-week old baby is really small, they really need a mother.

Not to mention the fact that the current recommendation for breastfeeding is 6 months - good luck doing it at work.

spreading out the costs to the aggregate state reduces the financial risk and allows for enabling the productivity of more members of society

a single organization takes on a large risk, merely hoping that other organizations do the same

so in the US, some organizations do it to be competitive but they are very few and far between, and are nowhere near offering to parents what developed nations do when spread across the state

people don’t start trying to do revenue producing things - like running a company - for those reasons. It has to be substantially greater financial reward than not starting the company or continuing it. I think this is often lost by people that want companies/employers to do other things with and for employees simply because of their prevalence. for companies that need employees, there are ways to make this easier for employees and less of a discretionary financial burden for employers

Just the woman? Is this period not special for the father?

While the spirit of this sentiment is admirable, I think it's also very important to encourage men to take parental leave. Both for the benefit of actually bonding and spending time with their child, but also because it benefits the mother and ultimately family unit as a whole by setting the expectation that both parents will be equally active in childcare.

I don't know the specifics, but I think where I live some portion of parental leave days are allocated specifically to each parent and cannot be transferred. There is also shared parental leave where the days can be allocated as desired, but some are specifically earmarked for each individual parent.

Anecdotally, I've had many coworkers regardless of gender take from a few months to a year off to be with their children, and firmly believe it benefits society and the work environment as a whole for them to be able (and encouraged) to do that.

Nice weasel word. So is it "most" of the world or just not the US?

Presumably they are hiring someone because they have an immediate need and wouldn't be too happy if said new hire went on leave leaving them in the exact same position with the added "benefit" of having a new, non-productive person on the payroll.

Big companies—and even established mid-sized companies—have the room and the motivation to hire people for long-term considerations. At that scale, some low % chance that a new hire will not do anything immediately is just part of the cost of doing business. If you're big enough that you can amortize costs like that, it's really not a big deal: if 1% of people took a whole year to get started and needed to be paid 300k, that's only $3k/employee, which is far, far lower than other up-front costs involved in hiring. $3k/employee/year is not a major cost for a benefit that people really value.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I prefer not to work for smaller companies.

I mean, if someone is trying to get pregnant, they don’t know if it will be tomorrow or in several years. Losing your leave because you moved companies and got pregnant at the same time would be a huge bummer.

This spreadsheet was pretty good. Not sure how up to date it is though. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GKWqhc3FVtSVKRZNBxyf...

Which country? I believe it's regulated by law of the country

It’s not done because people like you would specifically join with the intention of claiming the salary and then running away.

There’s literally no reason you would need this except if your intention is to immediately claim the money.

I know Bandwidth offers a reduced leave if you have under a year of tenure and Celonis offers full leave day 1, but I wondered if there were others.

Another perk to consider are companies that offer on site day care.

Really a game changer knowing your day care is handled.

Meta does and I’d assume other faangs as well

Sprout Social

Most any company in Australia.