How Silicon Valley can prove it is pro-family
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
> My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked so hard to build.
> That, I think, is the primary tension: not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between individual and collective ambitions. Both the state and the family ask us to make sacrifices for something bigger than ourselves — and this, perhaps, is why they have historically fought each other for mindshare. What tech offers is the opposite: a chance to realize a vision that is entirely one's own. Tech worships individual talent, and it's a unique thrill to live and work among peers who don't shy away from greatness. But it also means that tech has to work harder than other industries to demonstrate that starting a family doesn't require giving up these ambitions.
I'm the breadwinner in my family, and my husband is a SAHD. I have a 2yo and I'm 6 months pregnant with our second. Stereotypically, having a kid made me care less about professional ambitions — but I don't care zero. And as the breadwinner, earning money, ideally more money every couple years or so, is a high priority. God, the pressure to keep up. It's hard to balance with being a present mom.
I live in the SF Bay Area and being able to attend events and network in person has been a huge boon to my career. Being "in the scene" pays off. I can't really do that anymore, not without losing time with my kid, and I'm just not willing to make the sacrifice. Traveling to conferences, etc., is even more off the table. Don't even talk to me about commuting. But I know these lifestyle changes will have repercussions next time I need to find a job.
To secure jobs with the kind of flexibility I require as a mom, I need to be a high performer, an impressive candidate with plenty of connections. Being a mom makes it harder — more expensive, let's say — to be that kind of exceptional worker bee. Oy vey!
It shouldn’t taboo to say “I’m here to do good work, but then I’m going home; my job is not who I am, but merely a means to a reasonable amount of economic and professional success.” We have to enable people do their best work with reasonable accommodations.
Mothers are leaving the workforce, erasing pandemic gains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44894464 - August 2025
There needs to be one parent with flexibility, but it doesn't matter which. Just so that when a kid is sick at least one parent able to not go into the office. Most people reading this will have a job that can be done okay from home between cleaning vomit up and so it makes sense for us to get that flexibility. However there are a lot of jobs that must be in person (you can't work an assembly line from home)
They want you to feel invested enough to work 60 or 80 hour weeks coz they do. They want you to feel the need to be in the office putting in face time coz thats how they feel.
Not every founder or CEO is egocentric enough to want a bunch of mini-mes orbiting around them but a lot of them are.
I guess I don't see much difference? It would be hard to describe a family as anything other than an individual ambition in this country. The state certainly provides very little support to most people.
This in effect seems like a long-winded way of blaming people for wanting a family in the first place.
Edit: mod-limited so responding here: Sure that part I get, but isn't this also trivially a "family vs state" matter in addition to an "individual vs collective" manner? I don't get what is gained by ignoring the former interpretation.
Do I think parents should have secure jobs? Yes.
Do I think people that choose family over job should get all the benefits of someone who chooses job over family? No.
It arguably seems inconceivable for it to be any other way. I wanna be good at math but I don't want spend time doing math. I want to be good at ballet but I don't want to spend time doing ballet. I want to be good at my job but I don't want the spend time doing my job.
I'm not saying anyone should be expected to work extra hours or not get family support. I'm only saying that different people have different priorities. Some it's family. What they get out of that is being good at family. For others it's job, what they get out of that is being good at job. Job often include meeting people at industry events outside of 9-5 M-F hours just like being good at anything requires doing more of it than others.
That seems like bland fact, not a judgement to me. I'm sympathetic that a hard choice has to be made.
It makes me wish that we could figure out how to formally subsidize both parents for those first 3-5 years of their children's lives so that everyone could feel empowered to raise their kids in their most formative years without the stress of work and figuring out how to afford childcare. Imagine a society where having children didn't cost anything, where new parents could take on debt that got erased when their kids entered primary school (or some other milestone). At least I’d hope there would be fewer instances of people obsessing over a career because they were told they should “have it all”. I’ve come to understand that my values shift as I move through phases of life and I think socially we could do a better job elevating people who choose to raise families rather than denigrating them for not having a picturesque power career at the same time.
Silicon valley isn’t family-excluding in my experience, it’s just not family oriented either. What makes a disruptive tactical technology squad capable of upsetting incumbents and capturing billions is not usually “a bunch of parents juggling potty training their 2yr old while feeding their newborn”.
Everyone looks at the happy people around them, and think that they can have it all, but have no idea what actually happens or doesn't. Reality is, you can't woo investors or yak at conferences on 3 continents and be meaningfully fully engaged with your kids. You try your best and make it work. If that family focused lifestyle is what you want, that's fine. But you're unlikely to be a high-flyer in a company that demands blood.
End of the day, you need to know youself, and figure out what you actually want and why. Most people keep moving to avoid doing that. Life put me in a place where I lost agency and had to make a choice, and while the circumstances sucked, I made the right choice.
I’m not sure I agree, though it probably depends on what our definitions of a “family focused lifestyle” are.
The most high-flying executives you can name from the Valley to the Street… I would bet that most have a family they would describe as being meaningfully engaged with.
There’s a certain niche of the Valley that takes pride in being busy to the detriment of everything else in their life, but they don’t represent career success, they represent dysfunction.
If you want a family life and a phenomenal career… you’re not playing golf every weekend, nor are you meeting your friends for beers after work at 5:30 on a Friday. You’re spending Saturday mornings with your kids, and you probably have a supportive partner helping around the house (or hired help).
So in that sense, you can’t “have it all,” but you can make choices that prioritize both work and family.
I’d agree that workaholics represent dysfunction, but the problem is that they drag down those around them.
A key thing is that the place matters. You don’t have to work for a particular company to have a great career. You need to know what you want to be in the place that is right to you.
They can describe all they want, but they have the same 24 hours a day as we all have (even if they're tweaked out of their mind like a certain one that cannot be mentioned in HN without a deluge of downvotes). If they're the archetypical high-performer working crazy hours, they are not spending that time with their family.
I’m not going to psychologically diagnose someone here, but I have a feeling a lot of this inferiority complex comes from feeling insecure about lack of achievement in one’s career. So people cope by saying, “well I may not have a chart-topping career, but at least I spend time with my family, unlike that guy!”
When the reality is… yes, ambitious high flyers often have just as stable and living family lives as anyone else.
Ask me how I know…
You can ad hominem all you want, but my central point remains: everyone has the same allotment of time. If you are spending it on something, that necessarily means you are not spending it on other things. That's just a fact and doesn't have moral judgements attached.
Most people are likely at best using 25% of their 24h towards something high value. Say, 4 of their 8-9 working hours, and 1 in the morning and 3 after work are "good family time". The rest, their body and mind are in a low power state for efficiency or recovery.
Where the super-performers likely have an advantage is in a biological superiority that results in them needing less recovery time (perhaps life damages them on a cellular level less) and they have more energy-efficient or high-throughput caloric systems to be able to do more hours of high-impact work in the day.
We are learning more and more about mitochondrial differences between people. If you could do 8 hours of high-focus work every day, be super in-tune with people for 4 hours afterwards, and only need 4 hours of sleep to be completely recovered, you'd acheive a lot more over a year, or 10 years, than your peers.
This is completely un-controversial when talking about something like Pro Basketball: it's self-evident. But people don't want to acknowledge it may be a factor in programming or business leadership.
Until you get a diversification in who holds most corporate shares (they're usually held by retirement and pension funds) you're going to see more of the same.
Whether we created organically, or capitalism lead us into, a worldview where both parents are better off as good reliable corporate wage slaves, we’re at the point where dual incomes are expected which puts a lot of strain on any family wanting to actually raise their kids, which not too long ago was the default expectation.
I am sure diversification of assets will help, but I don’t see 40 yr old “we’re over populating the earth” and “parents don’t know what they’re doing they aren’t suited to raising children” types having much shareholder empathy for an economy that takes a haircut to support 30 hour work weeks and 6 month paid parental leave.
The feasibility of having children has to be supported by society and systems that work against it have to be kept in check.
I don't have any personal aversion to working more to pay for more expensive options but the tradeoff of time keeping my relationship with my kid and my marriage healthy is hard to ignore and seems like a really concrete deal-breaker.
We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento where my extended family is from. We thought it might be temporary before getting pulled back to the bay for work or schools maybe but the culture here has just been so positive and conducive to family. The public and private schools are excellent with dozens of options, everything is bikable and green, there are literally more museums and restaurants than we can keep up with and the parks / sports options for kids are amazing. And it's swarming with healthy young working / middle class families about half of which are bay area expats. The city obviously has some known issues but I'm continually grateful with the amount of new development going up in every direction and the overall feeling of being a culture / city that supports young cool people having families.
Anyway I'm just surprised and disappointed at how hard it is to justify moving to SF right now as a native who loves it there. Even as someone working in tech / AI with a strong desire to go back. If you have a family, it just seems impossible to make SF make sense right now. I could be missing something of course.
Curious what other SF or Sac tech parents have to say about all this. So much of this has had to be hypothetical on my end because I know so few parents with young kids in SF...
In time, those arriving here from elsewhere will remedy it, but the war SF natives wage on families will take a lot of work for the rest of us to fight.
SF is fortunate as a city that it draws people from across the world. It's possible that with that it can stem the stagnation. One day perhaps you will find it worth your while to return!
There's a new system that they've been working on since 2020, but implementation keeps getting delayed. The new system is zone-based, so instead of choosing from any of the district's schools, each family gets to choose from a smaller set in a geographic region near their home. That should in theory make it so pretty much every kid gets to go to school fairly close to home.
The racial integration goals of the original lottery system were well-meaning, but IMO frankly disastrous in its outcomes for many families, like yours.
I don't have kids, but several of my friends do. Some have moved out of the city once their kids have reached school age, but others have made it work. Unfortunately I expect they've had to spend a decent amount of money to make it work, though, more than they would've if they'd moved out of the city like many others do. And most (all?) of my friends with kids who have kept them in SFUSD (rather than going private) have moved out to the Sunset; the schools on the eastern side of the city still rank much lower from a student performance perspective.
If I do have kids, I would love to raise them in SF, and would very much prefer they get a public-school education, as I did (NJ/MD; I'm an east-coast transplant). But I definitely see that this can be challenging, to put it mildly.
> We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento
Hope you're keeping cool during the heat wave! I just drove through Sac on my way back to SF from Truckee this weekend, and my eyes widened when I saw my car reporting the outside temp at 108F. Looks like it's "only" 87F there now, but still!
There's no way any of these people can sanely start and maintain a family without a spouse at home full time. Which maybe you can afford on those salaries, maybe. Being on single income in the Bay with kids can get tricky.
It'll be interesting to see how Varda changes to enable this, and how FF advises their portfolio to act.
My company has a branch office near LA. I asked someone there once why they don't move just a few hours north to the Bay - they could easially double their salary. There was no interest in that though - the LA office you arrive to work sometime around 9 or 9:30, take a lunch break, and if you if you are not clearly preparing to leave at 6pm they remind you to turn the lights off when you leave. (that is you are allowed to work later if you want but it is expected that you won't) That is worth far more than the extra money that they could make and so we have a lot of people who have been in that office for 20 years.
Why would any company encourage that? The only use that business had with people having family was that having family put workers at a disadvantage, pressed them against the wall, forced them to suffer through even more exploitation than they would if they were childless. Make them existentially fear even trying to look for other opportunities. And give them a place to escape the burden of care of their children.
How many actually sincerely follow through on these claims?
I've yet to encounter a single one.
Exactly which is why this article is so useless and misunderstands capitalism and does not know economic law. Corporations can never be family friendly becasue it is antagonistic to profit and therefor in direct violation to shareholders rights.
See Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919)
“A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.“
EDITING TO ADD: Down voting this comment is typical the sociopathic world we are living in where you cannot even show the truth of the law lest it affect sociopathic sensibilities. If one person would explain why my comment, which is just a fact, deserves to be downvoted I would appreciate the conversation.
This can be false (can, not is!). When good employees demand family live then the company that gives it to them can get those good employees. There are good employees who are willing to settle for less money if the company allows for a good family life and so the company makes more money. (hint you won't find many of them in the Bay area, but if you can expand your reach to other cities they are not uncommon)
We need to change the laws to make corporations "family friendly" like mandatory 4 week vacations, better family leave compensation, and Medicare for All. Corporations are essentially sociopaths and have to be forced to have emapthy.
No, they will only do these family friendly things if it benefits them. That is what a sociopath does.
> Medicare has little to do with corporations
It has everything to do with the workers.
> most people prefer extra wages over vacation
Do you have statistics for this? Because all my friends want more time off with the same pay.
Healthcare definitely impacts workers, but the only reason for widespread employer-provided healthcare in the USA is the tax exemption. This is not an employer-driven phenomenon.
I am talking about revealed preferences; it’s not a real preference if you are not willing to give something up for it. Extra vacation time comes at a cost in productivity and availability, which aren’t free, so your friends want their employers to give them something for nothing.
The presented alternative (written by you, oddly enough) was extra wages without vacation. His friends aren't wanting something for nothing. He asserts that they are willing to give up the apparent extra wages coming their way in exchange for vacation.
- Same annual income for fewer days worked. This is increased daily pay
- Same daily pay for fewer days worked. This is actually increased daily compensation, because of how vacation pay accrual works (you’d have to be accruing at a higher rate).
- Same daily pay with fewer days worked, and same number of paid vacation days, along with additional unpaid vacation days. This one is the only interpretation which does not come with increased compensation per unit of work.
Two of these financially benefit the employee, and none of the three benefit the employer.
What alternative are you considering where the friends are actually giving the employer anything?
If you read it in complete isolation, fine. But it wasn't written in isolation. It was clearly written alongside a hypothetical offer of extra wages as per the context of discussion. Accepting the extra wages would not equate to the same pay. That would be higher pay by any reasonable interpretation.
> What alternative are you considering where the friends are actually giving the employer anything?
If you really need it mechanically spelled out, imagine you are paid $x, accept an additional $y (the extra wages), then give $y back to the employer in exchange for vacation. $y is what is given to the employer. In actuality you would skip some steps because they are pointless in practice, but the outcome is the same.
If the will was there, we could also simply exert that as a condition on employment. You don't really need laws when you can just do what the law is going to have you do anyway.
The problem is that the will isn't there. Only around half of the population are in what this thread seems to consider a family, so you are fighting against the wants of the other half who find their family-less situation, where they don't have the same "family friendly" concerns to worry about, to be a business advantage. That means it is hard to exert as a condition of employment and for the same reason hard to turn it into law.
A union, if you will...
> which would influence the policy and law making calculus
Along with negotiations in the workplace. But this is all hypothetical. It could theoretically be done, but it is unlikely it will be done. Even amongst families, there isn't a whole lot of desire to do it. Don't let comments on the internet fool you. Talk is cheap.
If you look at Delaware's code for Corporations, it doesn't spell out the duties of a corporate officer. https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc04/index.html
Legal cases said their duties are as follows. And "profit at all costs" is not one of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule
act in good faith;
act in the best interests of the corporation;
act on an informed basis;
not be wasteful;
not involve self-interest
Quote
There is much more to Dodge v. Ford Motor Company than meets the eye. Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule protects many decisions that deviate from this standard.
Courts accordingly treat Dodge v. Ford as a dead letter. (In the past three decades the Delaware courts have cited the case only once, and then on controlling shareholders' duties to minority shareholders). Nevertheless, legal scholars continue to teach and cite it. This Essay suggests that Dodge v. Ford has achieved a privileged position in the legal canon not because it accurately captures the law - it does not - or because it provides good normative guidance - it does not - but because it serves professors' need for a simple answer to the question, What do corporations do? Simplicity is not a virtue when it leads to misunderstanding, however. Law professors should mend their collective ways, and stop teaching Dodge v. Ford as anything more than an example of how courts can go astray.https://fedsoc.org/contributors/todd-henderson
And again, Stout is only making an argument here, but the case is still the law. And she is actually against shareholder primacy.
I used to tell my employees to go home / not work late, because working longer hours doesn’t produce more output. You may get an initial uptick in output, but then it falls away as people get burned out/sick of work. Long hours also equals higher turnover of staff, which is expensive in many ways.
There’s nothing good over the long term that comes from long hours. It’s bad for morale and it’s bad for the business.
Respect your employees, consider their needs and you’ll have a more committed workforce with higher retention and higher quality output.
Jurisdictions vary, but around here that isn't a desirable quality. There is much more legal exposure if you have employees who have been around for a long time.
Firing people who needed firing was never a problem and it didn’t tend to be people who’d been there for a long time that I wanted to fire.
High turnover of staff has outsized costs: loss of institutional knowledge, loss of momentum on key projects, time taken onboarding/training, recruitment fees, etc. it’s to be avoided imho.
Of course, and one has to measure the tradeoffs, but in many cases those costs are cheap insurance.
But, again, jurisdictions vary.
this mindset is the problem, if raising children is a burden to escape... what is life exactly?
Is it that clear cut? It may be problematic for a family unit if a member is regularly engaging in those activities instead of being with family. However, at the same time, many a family have been established with activities like playing ping pong and drinking beer.
So there's an existence proof here.
though even then work is the worst place to meet someone even though it often happens (and often works). Your company doesn't hire for the values you demand to share as a family. If your company has problems you both are in the same worry at the same time. And your company is very limitied as to the number of people you could meet.
Of course, but family doesn't exist in a vacuum.
> If your company has problems you both are in the same worry at the same time.
Someone once said: "There is a difference between how you meet your future spouse and how you live after you have a family." Meeting at the same company does not imply that you will forever both work at the same company.
> And your company is very limitied as to the number of people you could meet.
How many spouses are you planning on having, exactly? Most people are satisfied with one.
I trust it even less coming from these people. Boyle presents family is essentially anti-authoritarian, and praises Marc Andreesson’s supposed opposition to authoritarianism, despite Andreeson’s well-documented support for oligarchy.
What we’re actually seeing here from Boyle is more likely increased convergence between the tech oligarchs and the Christian Right.
I mean...When you spend your entire life up to that point focused on personal development and skillsets (all that studying, exams, interviews!), it feels like a "downgrade", or at least a significant pivot, when you become a parent. And most tech workers grew up in an academic-focused environment with few opportunities to learn parenting skills. There were no lessons growing up about basics of childcare or household management!
It's not surprising to be reluctant.
Yes. There are families on the fringe that tries to make it work. But it’s an exception. Not a norm.
Haha, these people are always being "betrayed" by people who are having their "mask-off moment" who were just "playing them for fools" and they never stop to think it's their behaviour. It's like all those girls who post online that they "hate drama" but for some reason their life is a complete shitshow.
if you move out to Illinois and other companies move to Kansas or Montana, how will you poach their workers? how will you fire and replace people easily? better to be concentrated for that.
Same way as everyone else...? But even if we assume, for the sake of discussion, that girls only exist in cities, you can, like, go to the city. It's not hard. They don't put impenetrable walls around them. In fact, thanks to the insane efficiency of the highway, you can more of often than not arrive at city destinations faster from small towns than you can being in another part of the city proper. Small town boy meeting big city girl is a tale as old as time.
Living in a small town can actually be quite advantageous if you want to bask in the amenities of the big city — especially if we're talking about all the "poorly designed" North American cities that prioritize transport from outside of the city to the detriment of the local population. You must be under the impression that if you live in a small town that you are permanently chained to your property?
> there are only so many jobs in the small town
But also only so many people, so in actuality you often find "more jobs than people". Curiously, people living in cities tend to not look for work beyond city limits, so you don't even have any added competition beyond the local population.
What small towns normally lack are the extreme outlier jobs like CEO of a F500 or professional sport player. If that is what you seek, you aren't going to find it in a small town. Ironically, though, those CEOs and professional sports starts quite often live in the small towns. I know because I live amongst many of them in my small town! Where you work and where you live are not one in the same.
> The larger city also means more jobs
But also more people competing for those jobs. Not only from the local city population itself, but also all the people in the small towns. Interestingly, while city people tend to never look outside of the city, small town people understand full well that they can work in the city and aren't afraid to look. As it turns out, as surprising as you may find it, they don't put walls around cities (anymore), nor are you chained to your small town property.
Unfortunately our national attitude around population growth would need to change.
Adding on to existing cities in any direction other than “up” is frequently denigrated as “sprawl”.
New cities seem to be the sole purview of idealistic libertarian billionaires… which would be fine except they’re the only ones who even talk about it. Not that these ever get built.
Getting citizens and then the government comfortable with the idea of building nice new places would really help - in addition to all the heroics already being done in existing cities around zoning, transit, and housing regulations.
Because most people (not all) in the U.S. associate location with status. If you're in the defacto location for innovation, people (foolishly) take you more seriously. That, and socially, people want to be able to say "we're based in SF" or "we're working with this team based in SF." Ego will always trump rational, practical thinking when big bucks are on the table.
It's all just hobgoblins of the mind, but the market isn't rational, so...we get a concentration of talent/companies because that's what the market responds to (whether or not it's a valid perspective).
Some of the absolute best people I've met live in places you've never even heard of—in fact, nearly all of the top people I've met.
Despite most people in SF dragging a duffle bag of credentials behind them, relatively few are truly technically or creatively impressive. The ones that lack competency beyond their resume rely on the status factor to keep their grift running.
For once, stop worrying about maximizing profit.
Every big tech company has tried to improve infrastructure. They've proposed free Internet, evaluated running train systems, redeveloping bridges etc. and the opposition is always the non-techies who oppose "company towns" and so on.
Hacker News just seems bizarre these days. It's full of people who say things no one familiar with the Bay Area (where YC is from) would say. Just completely divorced from reality.
Stands to reason. If you are familiar with the Bay Area, implying that you are there, what would you use HN for? You'd simply go outside and run into all the techies and the inane ideas they have to the fullest extent you can handle. Naturally it is going to attract those in flyover places that don't have any kind of meaningful tech scene connection otherwise.
Because that's where the customer places them. "If you build it, they will come" is for the movies. In reality, successful companies emerge where the people are already raring to go.
If you look hard enough you will likely find out that someone in Monowi, Nebraska also built something like Amazon, but it didn't go anywhere because, well, who wants to buy books from someone in Monowi, Nebraska?
You are welcome to start buying from, and encouraging others to as well, things from the guy in Monowi to break the cycle. He will be thrilled, I'm sure! But are you going to? No, probably not. Why bother when you can get the same thing from a guy in Seattle? Seattle no doubt sounds far more trustworthy, and certainly more impressive, than Monowi.
How would anyone know? Which web sites show postal addresses?
This isn't Fast and Furious, ffs
Tech bros are actually traditional family men. Here's why
10 reasons why RTO mandates are pro-family
Possibly, Silicon Valley (and the larger California) has had more exodus of (and lack of inbound) families for this reason than most others IMHO.
Obviously, there are other factors too, and this is highly controversial (not to mention counter to the politically-correct/institutionally-endorsed position).
But to not mention this issue seems to miss something major. Or do we not talk about that?
Like, SO FUCKING MANY
Maybe there is an opportunity to create vibe coded products that fit into the rhythm of a given family.
Collective emotion as a construct for a bigger family goal is an interesting optimization problem.
Mint for tracking your family’s mental and emotional health.