Silicon Valley: Perks for Some Workers, Struggles for Parents
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I recently was let go from my director of engineering position when I was 9 months pregnant. They said they were outsourcing their operations, but I was the only team-member let go. I also would be on maternity leave during a critical release... I can't say they let me go since I was going to have a baby, -- I think their decision to outsource made sense. I just think it was a catalyst as there was zero transition plan and probably would have been too hard to let me go during or right after maternity leave, which would have made more strategic sense.
I seriously consider leaving technology for good after dealing with the challenges of being a woman, mother and engineer for so many years.
I'm not alone, its pretty common for women to leave technology after having kids.
There is such a push to have more women become technologists, but if we leave once we become parents, what's the gain? The struggles of culture and technology are far deeper than getting more young women to be interested in engineering. Women aren't the only ones to suffer. It's hard for men too. The culture also seeps into the quality of products we create -- in both design and code.
Unfortunately, I have only seen the culture become more toxic as time goes on, not less.
Maybe I'm jaded. I'm certainly sick of it.
I would like to spend many hours of the day on my art. I don't want children. Should my employer be forced to continue to pay me if I want to go spend a year focusing on my art? Why is a couple's (or a mothers) choice to have children more important than what I choose to do in life?
Because at a fundamental level, a society continuing to exist is predicated on people continuing to have children. Your art does not fit that criteria.
You might make the point that your art benefits society as well. It might, I have no idea. But more importantly, we as society haven't agreed on that benefit (which I think needs to be talked about as well), so you don't get recognized.
Like any "standard" contract, the social one does not address everybody's needs equally, but it's the one we arrive at by consensus. And so we are bound by it as long as that consensus stays. (Or we opt out of democracy, which certain SV nutcases are certainly considering)
You might make many other points about the social contract that are valid, like e.g. the scarcity of work, the unsustainability of current society, etc. I think we need to address them, and I think the social contract will change significantly in the next 30 years.
But as it is right now, that's why employers should support people who have children.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract (You're probably familiar with it, but on the off chance you aren't, here's the link. It's not meant as snark)
There are laws passed by legislators who are elected. The rule of law is established by force, not by any sort of contract or agreement. There is no social contract except in philosophy class and books that have no legal standing.
In terms of European countries there was an article about a week ago regarding Americans going to Germany for free college. The Germans were hoping they'd stay.
I think people worry about the quality of immigrants. We want more young Sergei Brins and fewer middle aged guys with a sixth grade education.
One could argue that saying that you're against illegal immigration and making legal immigration very difficult is the same as saying that you don't really want immigration.
Care for the elderly is still an intensive task. Maybe yes, in 30 years it will be done by (Japanese) robots but we're not close yet.
You have the economic burden too: how much more productive each working individual has to be if it has to offset an increased ration of non working individuals?
Lastly, I don't think a country is sustainable with a dwindling population unless it can be physically and culturally isolated and has an important deterrent against military action
U3 is a fanciful number, both because people are using disability insurance as a way to collect benefits indefinitely and because once you give up looking for a job you don't count as unemployed. The US has the lowest labor force participation rate in decades.
> "I don't get why employers should be forced to pay for someone's choice to have children."
Because
> "There are laws passed by legislators who are elected. The rule of law is established by force"
That's why. The men with the power, who control the men with the guns, have declared that this is the way our society should work. There is your realpolitik answer.
Obviously, in this case, that didn't happen or mindfulgeek wouldn't have been let go.
They are powerful, but not omnipotent. They are men, not gods.
- Was something illegal done here? - If yes, why is it (seemingly) so easy to do this? - How can this be changed? - Should it be changed? (In my opinion: Yes, a law which is easily breakable is useless)
Note: I only raise questions of legality here, not morality. I will not even start to discuss the morality of this action, because in my opinion anyone who says anything besides "horrible, not tolerable" in his analysis of what happened here has such a fundamental different set of core values from myself that any discussion would be a complete waste of time.
Laws don't exist to make it impossible to do the prohibited things, they exist to provide consequences for doing the prohibited things. Particularly, civil laws of this kind exist to provide compensation to those harmed by the act prohibited.
But they tend to require the person who believes they are due compensation to actively seek it.
Only Thomas Hobbe's take was based purely on force, because he viewed the nature of man as being vile and completely evil, which isn't surprising given the environment he lived in.
Incidentally, the U.S. government was set up in such a way where men were not beholden to others, but were equals, trading value for value with each other absent coercion. A strong but limited government was instituted to protect individual rights---to protect us against internal and external threats with retaliatory force.
The expansion of the government over the last 100 years has nothing to do with the protection of individual rights and the original intention of Founders (who were greatly influenced by Locke). The "social contract" is a way for some individuals to justify the abrogation of protecting the freedom of individuals in favor of a gargantuan rights-violating welfare state.
Finally, what is the objective measure of how much an individual owes? Do they owe 50% of their time? 70%? To whom specifically do they owe this? How does one come to these conclusions in an objective manner?
The U.S. government has supported taxation from day 1, including for the purposes of funding collective welfare, e.g. collective self-defense. Current citizens pay for the democratic decisions of past generations all the time. Even if you don't drive, you pay taxes to support road and bridge maintenance. This is not "indentured servitude". It is how a democratic society functions.
How much do we owe? Answer: it is determined through a democratic decision-making process that weighs costs and benefits to our society.
Case in point: This very forum would likely not exist without the aforementioned expansion of government. DARPA and government funding for high-tech research to the tune of billions of dollars has been instrumental in the birth and evolution of Silicon Valley, and continues today (e.g. Siri, self-driving cars).
If anything I think your "many other networks" example reinforces the point. The private sector left to its own devices came up with tons of incompatible small networks all vying to be the juggernaut.
The government, when faced with much larger problems than growing market share, instead invested considerable resources into solving a problem in a way that could handle the needs of a large national government, and then later invested more resources into making that internet a public good.
Even if the government hadn't developed its own internet protocols (and standardized on a notional private sector one), the government would likely still have been instrumental in expanding the use of some other standard. E.g. Eisenhower didn't invent the road, but his Administration sure did ensure a lot of them got built.
And they also built gateways so they could interface with each other. The pressure to connect them together was enormous.
For another example, Unicode isn't a government standard, and has replaced the various earlier competing protocols.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#History
The idea that the private sector won't standardize has plenty of counterexamples. Ethernet, for another.
Just like if the Wright Bros had not invented the airplane in 1903, someone else would have probably within 5 years. We'd still be flying today.
I suspect that the number of inventions that would not inevitably have happened once the preconditions were in place is very small.
After all, as I mentioned previously, having worked extensively with computers before the internet, the first thing someone with two computers tries to do is hook them together.
Hell, I even did my own hardware and software to transfer files from my LSI-11 to a PC over a wire. The government couldn't have stopped an internet workalike from forming if it tried.
This country was very specifically founded NOT as a democracy, for the very reason elucidated above. If the mob wants to vote your rights away, they should not be able to.
Self-defense and transfer payments from one individual to another (i.e., welfare) are different issues fundamentally. We authorize the government to solve the problem of coordination---in terms of defense, we don't want a bunch of private militaries roving around the countryside. At the heart of this is the issue of rights protection: if one man steals from another, his rights have been violated and government must act in response.
However, if the issue is whether a man has a claim on another man's property simple because he "needs" it, this is not sufficient justification for him to take it by force. Indeed, most people would call this "theft". Why is it different if the thug steals a dollar in dark alley from you or if a government coerces the same action at the point of a gun? Because a majority have voted for it?
Taxes are the bill you pay for living in a place where the government provides some services.
When I hear someone say "taxation is theft," I think, what a freeloader.
Even if we narrowly focus on a particular system of "private property right protection", which was certainly not the exclusive focus of the founding fathers -- who also advocated slavery and were extremely protectionist -- that nonetheless requires the enthusiastic embracement of the majority enforcing its will upon the minority at the point of a gun.
Only men? I always find it amusing when this kind of libertarian rhetoric forgets that women exist.
And if you want to talk about who is protecting the freedom of individuals, keep in mind that the US banned slavery considerably later than it's contemporaries. You talk of a 'gargantuan rights-violating welfare state' while at the same time lionising a state that was quite happy to literally enslave people. Not figuratively or rhetorically, but literally enslave people.
Can you read back my comments? When did I lionize the institution of slavery? The Founders got most things right philosophically, and fell short on some of the practical implementation. Eventually the Civil War rectified this contradiction.
When did I lionize the institution of slavery?
You didn't lionise the institution of slavery, but you were lionising people that made a system that supposedly was all about individual rights but was at the same time supporting slavery.
You don't get to talk about how awesome the Founding Fathers were about the rights of individuals if you get to hand-wave away the multitudes of individuals whom they had no problems putting in chains. I mean, you even specified "absent coercion" about a society with legal industrial-scale slavery!
Edit: to be clearer, the Founding Father's philosophy quite happily allowed for slavery in practice. Perhaps you shouldn't talk of it in such reverent tones - the 'welfare state' you complain of is clearly better at being fair to all individuals, not just the blessed ones that are pre-approved.
Insofar as the statement is even remotely arguably accurate as a statement of history, it would have to be about only men.
Even then, its still more mythology than reality.
What is real, is the necessity of a human population to procreate. This need has two aspects: does culture in general support procreation and who's procreation does it support?
First, companies do not work in a vacuum of financial abstractions. Their operations are always rooted in a very fixed cultural context. This cultural context for the most part is the cultural context of the society where the operations are based. The corporate operations affect the cultural context outside and vice versa.
Now, the first part - should there be procreation? Unless the answer is yes we can stop the discussion right here.
As for the second part, who should procreate? Let's skip the eugenics part, but, the fact is this: talented kids are usually raised by talented parents.
Should the society become more talented? I'm certain this would serve everyones best interests. Well, then, if we accept without proof that talented individuals tend to work in corporations and demanding workplaces, then if those workplaces discourage the procreation of the talented individuals they discourage the population in general of benefitting from their statistically talented offspring.
This is what is on the table. Not the happy motherhood of a single mother, or the irritation of single coworkers who begrudge parents their perks, but the future of a society. From a statistical point of view. Human urges will make sure there are kids tomorrow as there are today but the way careers treat potential parents affect directly the total human potential of those kids.
Yes, and we have a concrete implementation of that abstraction in the law.
>What is real, is the necessity of a human population to procreate. This need has two aspects: does culture in general support procreation and who's procreation does it support?
I don't see any barriers to procreation here. All I see is people who want to have their cake and get other people to pay for it. Go ahead and have children, just like people have always done. But realize you're going to have to make some sacrifices, and that it's not reasonable to expect other people to make sacrifices on your behalf because you want to have children.
Fundamentally, human society exists because it increases the chance of our species success. Everything else - from art to the internet - is a peace dividend from how much better we are at taking care of our young than the average species. Biologically human child birth & child care is actually really disadvantaged, but we more than made up for it by the advantages of society.
Keep that in mind anytime you compare "giving birth to a child" to literally anything else in society. Giving birth to a child is the core reason for it all.
[1] Or our debt-funded public services, or our socials security system, or our stock market. The inter-generational dependence of the old on the young and vice-versa is inevitable. All modern inventions like retirement savings do is create a level of indirection between young workers and the retirees they support. But at least until we obsolete human labor, having new generations of educated workers is essential, and having kids generates a large positive externality.
Abortion is, fortunately, always a choice in the US.
Elective abortions generally aren't mostly performed in hospitals anyway, but in separate clinics, so what kind of hospital is nearby is largely irrelevant (it might have an indirect relationship in states that have adopted rules requiring abortion providers to be doctors with admitting privilegs in a nearby hospital, but those rules have, IIRC, only been proposed in places where none of the elective abortion providers meet that description in the first place, and are intended as a backdoor prohibition on abortion.)
Legally, it is sometimes a choice in America (many states have restrictions, both within the bounds which have previously been found constitutional by the federal courts and in many cases outside them and likely to be challenged in the future, but enforced until such a challenge happens and succeeds -- and there is no guarantee that a challenge will succeed, even if the precedent suggests it should.) Practically, it is even less of a choice than it is legally, due to various factors, including the restrictions, driving abortion providers out of large swaths of the country.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/22/the-geograp...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/08/texas-abortion-acce...
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/maps-of-access-to-abortio...
Why? Because we are trying to have a civilization here. Our purpose on this planet isn't to work. It's to live, and creating life is just about the most mind blowing life experience we can ever have.
We let your employer exist, not the other way around.
I really like that little nugget.
To be said "we could have destroyed you" to, is to be oppressed.
So you really like this "nugget" that makes your subservience clear.
Corporations, LLCs, etc., don't exist in nature. They are creations of government through law that funnel benefits, at public expense, to particular members of society, in exchange for the specified obligations.
- instead of a Corporation or an LLC, I just be myself
- instead of an employee, I choose to barter some natural gold for some natural manual or intellectual labor from someone else
if I don't care to oblige to the labor laws du jour?
Because right now that's illegal. I agree with you, if you benefit from creation of government then you should pay in, awesome. We agree 100% (I'd still prefer to see an itemized bill, though). But why should I go to jail if I have an ongoing promise to give someone a shiny "worthless" rock (not created by government) so long as they keep laying bricks at my backyard the way I tell them to?
I didn't say anything about what I was or was not opposed to in the post you are responding to, I simply enumerated certain facts regarding the existence of the kind of entities that make up a substantial number of "employers" and how their existence is dependent on active actions and costs born by the rest of society.
So, no, there is no valid inference from that as to what I would or would not oppose.
For that to be a principled argument, would it not follow that if one does not owe their existence to the government, they aren't bound by those same obligations, since the reason as present above is now missing?
If not, then you're really just saying "we're all bound by government business obligations whether you choose to benefit from government created "funnels" or not". Yes, but don't make my case for me.
Yes.
> and for this reason are bound by government obligations?
No, at least, not in the sense you are using "government obligations" (generally applicable labor law, etc.) I said a substantial number of entities are creations of government on the principal of granting benefits to certain individuals associated with the entities in exchange for certain obligations attached to the particular form of organization.
I did not say that those were the reason (sole or otherwise) that those organizations are bound by generally applicable law. (There is, I think, an argument that, whether or not a law should be applicable to people in general, the fact that those entities are creatures of government and not natural persons may be relevant to whether or not the law should be applicable to them. But I certainly did not argue that things like labor law were applicable to them because, and much less only because, they are creatures of government.)
I'm was not, in fact, saying anything about why people are bound by generally-applicable government business obligations. I was making an observation related only to your upthread comment on the meaning of the phrase "we let you exist" in reference to employers.
Why indeed.
The minimum wage: Black youth unemployment was higher than white youth unemployment before the minimum wage was instituted above market rates in the late '50s (see Thomas Sowell on this; he's a local at Stanford). Upon the institution of a minimum wage, the black unemployment rate skyrocketed, and has remained much higher than the white youth unemployment rate. If you can't get that first job, you are more likely to be consigned to a life of poverty. If you can get that first job (at even a low wage rate), you can build skills and practice your work ethic, eventually landing a job with a higher wage.
Unemployment benefits: The more you subsidize a certain behavior, the more you get of that certain behavior. What incentive would you have to look for a job if you were getting free money to sit on your ass? Finding a job would certainly be a less-pressing issue.
Yes, I certainly do want civilization---one in which the government protects my rights and doesn't sanction the mob to steal what I've worked so hard for. Men should deal with other men in the context of voluntary transactions, trading value for value; they should not live at the expense of others.
Whether your life consists of caring for others (children, elderly parents, or disabled relatives) or for your self (fitness, education, relaxation, or having fun) should not be differentiated.
The point is employers need to realize that you need to HAVE a life, and that will in the end make you the most productive and happy employee.
Perhaps what we need is acceptance of part time work in more high earning jobs. People who want to work 60-80 hour weeks and make the maximum money should be able to do so, while accommodating those who want to work 30 hours a week but are okay making less.
What life/work balance problems do they have to begin with?
It is only creative fields with blurry boundaries of what is expected of you that keep shifting somewhat, that this is brought up. It's a non-issue for most jobs, for most people.
If I say dancing around a fire and chanting, on average, doesn't help people with kidney disease and you retort with 'it helped my grandmother' - where do we go from here?
Should I get to individually know every person with kidney disease to see if dancing around the fire will cure them?
That seems to be what you're suggesting, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
What if we really did give people the option of periodic sabbaticals where they could do whatever they want (including "dancing around fires and changing")? It could massively reduce stress levels, and given stress' negative impact on health, this really could help (on average).
1) I find that the outliers make a big difference in any distribution. For example: the vast majority of start ups fail, but the ones that succeed can make a large impact. To your example, the vast majority of compounds tried as drugs fail but the rare ones like peniclilin change medicine as we know it.
2) Personally I've found that people's current status in life can be a predictor of future success but it far from perfect. I would suggest that rather than trying to predict who is going to succeed beforehand we come up with a system that gives them some opportunities to be successful.
You haven't watched Office Space, have you?
Whatever they want. You don't think the average construction worker has things they'd rather do with their time than grinding away at their job ceaselessly?
Nobody's saying 'Hey, construction workers don't need free time. They're construction workers!'
We are talking sabbaticals and whether or not they improve the situation all around so much, that they ought to be implemented.
You know, like using soap was implemented, because it's cheap and it works GREAT. Now do we implement sabbaticals for EVERYONE?
I say no, not really. Because while MOST people would enjoy time off, how would you like to wait an extra month to get an operation you need? Doctors should have sabbaticals. Btw, they can definitely afford them.
Or you know, the president. Why don't we have presidents take sabbaticals? They're pretty stressed out.
If the only thing to consider is whether the person taking the time off is better off, then great, let's all go sabbatical tomorrow. If we think a few steps ahead, then maybe adjusting pay/working conditions/etc would yield better results than simply saying 'let's lose a productive member of society for a while, in the hopes that he/she will on her own make great use of their time.'
1. Having children was until very recently (probably still is) the norm
2. Children are net-benefit for society (otherwise you have problems of lack of young people to support an ageing population)
3. The government should at least partially subsidise [pm]aternity leave - the rest is just part of the cost of doing business (along with all the hundreds of other laws business have to deal with)
4. Parental leave attracts more experienced staff (as they're older and more likely to have children)
As a european, I find it almost inhumane not giving statutory parental leave. Having children is a normal part of life, and in the current economic climate having a full-time job is basically a requirement for most people. You shouldn't need to be rich to afford children
2. Children are net-benefit for society
3. The government should at least partially subsidise
^ These make me feel that we had a population bubble that popped some time ago. Just compare it to housing: Buying it is the norm, it is net benefit for the economy, and yet it still sometimes pops and then no government subsidies help when people are not ready to buy anymore.
Same thing we have with children, albeit much more inertial.
I'd much rather have people discussing what can be done by companies, people and other agents.
> Why is a couple's (or a mothers) choice to have children more important than what I choose to do in life?
The reason why parental leave is important is that the first few years are extremely formative, and having an opportunity for mother and child to bond (or father and child, whatever the case) strongly affects development. Being able to focus on the care of your child is extremely important to their development[1], and because those children tend to become more well-adjusted, it's beneficial to society as a whole. That's why most countries provide parental leave for one or both parents.
So the answer is, women should be able to have children and not feel punished for it or discriminated against because of it because that discourages a society where people care about each other and feel like they're part of something.
[1] http://now.uiowa.edu/2012/10/parental-bondinghappy-stable-ch...
Discussions about the social obligations of "businesses" would benefit to have distinctions made between the different kinds of businesses.
A large profitable corporation with thousands of employees can probably provide paid maternity leave whereas paid maternity leave would put most small businesses and early stage startups out of business.
I'm sympathetic to both sides of the argument. My mom lost a few years of seniority working at the phone company (GTE) in the 80s due to pregnancy, and as a result was often outbid on higher paying jobs for the rest of her working life. On the other hand, my current startup would have instantly folded if we had to cut paychecks for a non-working employee.
I'm guessing the majority (by number) of businesses just cannot afford to offer paid maternity leave, and this needs to be acknowledged. There aren't simply "two sides" to this discussion.
They will be the ones paying your way when you are old and frail.
"Motivation" is the idea that certain factors motivate people to compete harder in the workplace. One of those factors is having kids. A colleague of mine was dissatisfied with his advancement, and I suggested that he should become a project manager. His response: "Why should I take that horrible job when my engineer job lets me go home at 5 every day?" He had no kids, but lots of social activities.
An amusing story about motivation at my workplace, a Fortune 500 company, is that our management jobs tend to be pretty thankless, even if they pay more. Everybody I've known who has applied for those jobs, has kids.
I've read that after the birth of their first kid, there's a 50% chance that a worker will change jobs in pursuit of higher pay. I also read about a study of unskilled, single women living in the south side of Chicago. Those with kids tended to earn higher wages, and traveled further to their jobs, than those without.
It may be that the choice is not so much children versus art, but career versus art.
Providing family benefits might be one way to effectively pay people more without creating an overt caste system where all of the higher level jobs are held by people with kids.
Political power relates to motivation. From what I've read, people with kids tend to vote. Unsurprisingly, we vote our interests. And there are certain interests that can only be met, within our system, by influencing employers.
Family is also such a cyclic need, but with different temporal properties and statistic properties - the time taken by parenthood is localized over a brief period of time and reduces to zero. And as for statistics, the need is throughout the entire population but some individuals can avoid it.
Workplaces recognize the need for food and rest. The needs of a family is a similar need, although it is localized to a few persons, it permeates the entire population. A human workplace recognizes the critical needs.
What is an employer to do? Never fire anyone in a protected class?
You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future.
Edit: Downvote away. The truth is, rushing to judgement and vilifying an employer without having facts is only going to make this problem worse.
> You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future.
I wouldn't be, actually, because people in general tend to hold onto unfounded ideas. I find that its pretty simple to fire someone in a protected class in practice if you are actually professional about it and document the reasons. Its just not trivial, which is what bad employers tend to want.
> Edit: Downvote away. The truth is, rushing to judgement and vilifying an employer without having facts is only going to make this problem worse.
Lawsuits are how facts in disputes are established. The question is whether there is enough doubt here to warrant a lawsuit, and it really seems like there is.
There's no actual productivity loss in such a case; there's just a bunch of unhappy coworkers who have one fewer reason to stay when a head-hunter approaches them.
This is basically why companies fight for at-will employment: they want the ability to fire people for what are essentially petty, yet still important reasons, without having to ever say that sort of thing out loud. Because, you know, any company that actually admitted that it did that would be tarred in the press—not for doing it, but for failing to be discreet about it.
I realize that's America, but that does not seem like the kind of world I would want to live in, if I were making the rules.
Do you imagine that these people will openly disclose that they are discriminating?
Good luck proving that a manager has an (un)conscious bias against women/minorities because they are afraid of lawsuits.
You'd have to be a comprehensively incompetent manager to allow this to happen at your company.
It sounds like you and I have had rather different professional experiences.
It's like Ellen Pao, to use an example. She was a great employee till the day she wasn't and then she became incompetent. And the best reason to use for fire someone is to have "no reason". Just because. Or they can retroactively find "reasons" if necessary.
Great, you hire lots of underrepresented groups, but then you can just push them out and keep the grinder going.
Sure, it's still very commendable that you would do that, I can at the same time easily imagine other contexts where such actions would not have much of an effect and that's where the skepticism of the parent poster comes from.
That's the probabilistic converse of your claim. Do you endorse it? If not, why not?
Is there some reason that irrational taste-based discrimination would not trigger candidate embarrassment and self-selection, but rational lawsuit-fear based discrimination would? (More precisely, rational in a world where tptacek's hypothetical perfect market self-regulation mechanism did not apply, but irrational in such a world.)
Job ads that say let's bro down and crush some code? (Generally speaking if women are a small percentage of the applicant pool, it would almost certainly be the case that the optimal hiring funnel makes you more likely to hire a given man than a given woman.)
I ask because you seem to be describing a world in which discrimination basically can't exist due to market self-regulation - i.e., all our industries problems are basically solved, which seems to differ from your usual position.
One of the reasons I ask Tom these questions that he is one of the more rational folks on HN, particularly on other issues. It's pretty clear that he realizes he made a mistake, hence the deflection. Making a mostly rational person feel attacked is only likely inhibit their logical mind.
Most folks need that paycheck and don't live in the magical Bay Area where they find jobs laying in the street when they go for a stroll.
I personally would think about moving to a different company if that was the case, but I wouldn't make a fuss about it as I wouldn't know what the future lies ahead of me and who I'll meet in future companies (burning bridges and all that)
I have posted in the comments here about Reddit's hiring policy where they now weed out people who don't embrace diversity and gender-balanced teams: http://archive.today/y6PJD#selection-1567.0-1570.0
Since no candidate with a functioning brain cell would ever admit to not liking a certain race, religion or gender, it's a stupid HR policy and the only way you could weed somebody out would be to resort to dirty tricks e.g. drinks after work to socialize with the candidate, deliberately let slip a few misplaced comments and see what the candidate says.
Actually yes, since mid-size or larger companies are required to file EEO reports [1] that are used to compare the hiring/retention rates of protected groups against the available labor market and competitors in the area.
Even unconscious bias (to say nothing of deliberate bias against women) could result in nasty lawsuits if actions are not taken and enforced by hiring managers to correct biases against protected classes.
[1] http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/whomustfile.cfm
I am obviously not saying that everyone exploits maternity. I'm just highlighting that there can be another side to the story. Isn't it possible that the management was already considering letting the Director of Engineering (a role that by definition is not going to have a lot of peers) go? What do they do if she's pregnant at the same time? Wait for 6 months just so they don't get sued?
EDIT: Can't respond in a reply, so I am responding here. "Exploiting a situation" doesn't mean utilizing benefits legally given to you. An example of exploiting the situation will be: My employer is required to give me paid sick leave. So, even if I'm not sick, I'll claim that I am and get paid for taking time off. And usually, it's not the employer who gets hurt by something short-term like this. It's my peers who have to pick up the slack.
If you (qua hypothetical business owner) can't cope with the fact that your employees are human being and that human beings have reasonable needs, then what good are you?
How can someone "exploit maternity"? Maternity is not the same thing as being sick. Being sick is a transient personal thing while parenthood is a process that lasts through a lifetime.
People need sleep and eating. People are not machines. The fact that people are not required to work 24 hours a day recognizes this. People also need an occasional time off. This is recognized as well.
Family is a similar natural need, but with different temporal cycles. Any workplace that does not recognize the allowances required for family is not really in it for the long term.
Any coworkers that begrudge a maternity or paternity leave are themselves at fault, not the parent.
When they tell work that they need to stay home due to some "medical complications." while they hang-out with their coworker friends in evenings and show-off that they were exploiting the situation. Yes, people do that.
Family is the right priority. No doubt about that. In that case, such a person should say so to the employers. "I can't come to work for 7 more months because I prefer to take care of my baby. Please make appropriate plans." is very different from "My doctor said I shouldn't come to work for another few weeks. Continue paying me, and don't hire my replacement, because it's just a matter of few weeks." Especially if you then show-off to your coworkers in the evening how you were exploiting the situation. Who picks up that slack when the employer doesn't hire a replacement? Those same coworkers.
> Any coworkers that begrudge a maternity or paternity leave are themselves at fault, not the parent.
Oh come on! Nowhere did I say that her coworkers begrudge just because she took a maternity leave.
What is an employer to do? Never fire anyone in a protected class?
You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future.
You're defending a company that fired a woman who was 9 months pregnant.
I did not downvote your comment. I downvoted you as a person for your comment.
Imagine a man who was recently discovered he had cancer was fired.
That sucks.
But it doesn't make sense to automatically assume the cancer is why he was let go. Sure, maybe the employer is shitty, or maybe he was just a shitty employee.
We don't know if what she claims is accurate, true, or even if this company exists. Any comments made are in the context of her statements and assuming they are accurate. Obviously, if she is mistaken then consulting with a lawyer would help reveal that. Telling her to investigate a lawsuit is the correct course given the information we have, and I don't feel any need whatsoever to give the employer a benefit of the doubt. If they are in the clear, then that will be revealed if said employee's lawyer states she has no case.
Don't be a fuckhead? I can't honestly say I care about their "problems" in this situation.
I really don't see how you think that's the problem.
PS: The UNNAMED employer was really vilified here. Damn them!
This isn't hypothetical. This is actually happening.
The solution is to make them also think that people in these classes are equally likely to sue if not hired, and particularly likely to win if the employer is, in fact, discriminating against them in hiring.
I seems like it is much easier to prove discrimination existed when firing vs. discrimination when hiring.
I think that instead of being focused on enforcement and punishments, we should be focused on eliminating discrimination by changing perceptions.
I don't think those are mutually exclusive.
While not a the 'major' factor, it was a factor in reducing the size of the company and specializing rather than growing it and working on more generic product lines. by reducing the size of the company they were able to reduce the need to hire and plan for being sued at least once a year by someone in a protected class that decided that they had been discriminated against.
Based on conversations with him and others in similar positions this is not uncommon.
The employer hasn't been identified, and so can't be vilified. Sure, people responding to the characterization are responding to a one-sided characterization, but they are mostly providing recommendations of how the person providing that characterization should deal with it, based on the assumption that the characterization is accurate.
I'm not sure what problem you suppose this is going to "make worse".
Discrimination.
This doesn't help fix discrimination at all, it makes it worse.
If they are more likely to sue when they receive an adverse employment outcome (firing) why wouldn't they be more likely to sue when they receive an adverse employment outcome (not being hired), and, if the employer is actually discriminating, as you suggest, in hiring (but would be doing "nothing wrong" in firing), wouldn't the hiring discrimination pose a bigger risk than not discriminating, since they face the lawsuit risk with either adverse action, but a greater risk of losing the lawsuit in the situation where the facts will actually bear out that they are discriminating based on legally-prohibited criteria?
FWIW, in Brazil it's illegal for an employer to fire a pregnant woman.
Adding anecdotal evidence using a throwaway for obvious reasons (some minor details changed for the same):
A long time ago in a location far, far away, I was hired into a mid-size (300 employees), relatively successful, few-years-old B2B startup (growing, starting to become profitable) to sort out major issues with a department that happened to be my specialty.
I rapidly figured out the problems stemmed from the top: the head of the department was a woman with an MBA who was utterly incompetent at her job, and who had been there for about a year and a half to build it. I came to this conclusion in various ways.
First, her work was abysmal when I looked at it, and demonstrated complete ignorance of the technical field she was supposed to work in - she had an MBA and her attitude was "I don't need to learn anything technical because it's my underlings' job", but her underlings had about the same technical skills. Her lack of output adversely impacted fundraising for the C round, which strained the company finances and caused management to hire me in desperation.
Second, every single stakeholder I talked to in the company - from heads of departments to junior staff - thought she was abysmally incompetent and her work was severely lacking. In some cases, the frustration was so strong as to border on the personal. I talked to over 40 people and could not find a single champion of her work. It was clear that the company expected me not just to fix her problems but to make a good case to get rid of her as well.
A month into the project, I realized management was very evasive whenever I tried to bring evidence to the case to be made to replace her. I learnt through the grapevine that she had gotten the management team into a room and announced her pregnancy ("hey guys, I have some really good personal news to share with you!" - yes, she was that transparent). The news spread gradually throughout the company, and as it did, an eerie silence replaced the comments as stakeholders resigned themselves to their fate.
I left the project unable to effect the change I had been hired to do (she refused to use any of my work and blocked anybody else from using it), and she was still employed there two years later.
For what it's worth, I've seen plenty more evidence of bias in the other direction, including an employee I had personally hired for her exceptional skill who was later fired - I am about 80% certain - because my replacement as team lead didn't like working with women (he argued budget cuts but she was the only one fired in a team of 30). But thought I'd throw this story in as an example from the other side.
You really did your best to create a strawman and beat the crap out of it here. If you are saying things like "You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future." to discourage a woman from considering a lawsuit when she got fired over maternity leave than YOU are the problem, plain and simple.
My ex-wife was "let go" from a national home improvement chain when she was 8 months pregnant with my daughter and suffering a difficult pregnancy. It was obviously a move to simply save money by the scumbag management and put my ex-wife and my unborn daughters health in pretty serious jeopardy.
It was a comedy-of-errors (without the humor, of course) for the management, and they broke so many laws the lawyer we eventually retained told us it was the most open and shut case he had ever seen.
My ex eventually settled for a decent settlement 18 months later, although I basically begged her to take it trial and make as much noise as possible about it to put pressure on the corporation to never do it to anyone else.
In the end, of course, it was her decision and she took the money and moved on.
IMO, you have every right to be jaded, and hope you do what you feel is right for you to do.
The other way is to look for patterns over a longer period of time and maybe say "look all 10 last employees who were let go were women who got pregnant, there is something here".
But unfortunately if they are not too stupid they would use convenient double-speak euphemisms between themselves. Like say they'd call it "restructuring". Or due to "culture fit". Or just "business reasons". They could be winking to each other when saying that but you'd really need of the people in charge to turn on others and testify.
I forget the details...its been 13 years...but that was one of the more open-and-shut points our attorney used to easily force a settlement.
You do know there are federal employment laws that make it illegal to fire women just for being pregnant, don't you?
Also, there was no documented reason why they were firing her...her work record was spotless and in fact, she was the new store trainer for her position due to her hard work and skill.
One of the more egregious things I remember was the manager actually called her and told her, while she was in the hospital no less, that they would rehire her after my daughter was born, even thought they just cancelled her insurance and left us both in a huge financial bind and put her health and her baby's health is serious risk.
Do you really think that women should be fired and have their health insurance cancelled for no reason besides being pregnant?
If so, that is truly disgusting.
My wife was let go from her position for being pregnant and although it took 2.5 years - she won a case against them and got a big settlement.
Many of the typical settlements (depending on the size of the company) are in the several hundreds of thousands range. Google typical settlements for this...
I've noticed that many health-care related professionals, such as dental hygienists and registered nurses, have median pay that is close to or exceeds the median pay for software developers [1], and that well paid professionals such as dermatologists or radiologists often earn vastly more. These fields also offer what I'd describe as career flexibility.
As a software developer, I can almost always go off and have a cup of coffee when I please. So in that sense, yes, it is "flexible." But one very attractive quality of being a dental hygienist is that you can step back from the field for a few years, work part time (or not at all), and re-enter a few years later. My cousin is a radiologist, and she worked half time while she had kids (collecting a much higher salary than the typical full time developer). I also know an emergency room physician who was able to scale back while she had small kids without badly compromising her career progress.
Add in open offices, back visibility, a dave n busters vibe, mass layoffs involving work visas and "knowledge transfer", frequent allegations of sexism and discrimination, an insistence that you locate to a place where the median 3br house is well over a million… and now, as it appears, a situation where you they don't want you if you have kids.
At this point, why do we keep acting like there's some mystery why people with choice (i.e., whose professional options aren't limited by the visa process) are avoiding this field? Why does President Obama nod gravely as he stands next to tech CEOs talking about severe shortages of tech workers at press releases?
[1] check out US News Best Jobs, which provides a summary of BLS data on median salary by region. In San Francisco, dental hygienists earn $112,970, software developers $114,400, and registered$127,670. Physicians and lawyers, of course earn considerably more.
The reason most software jobs pay less than most radiology jobs is because developing your radiology skills doesn't come with a potential billion dollar upside, so people aren't willing to do it on unsustainable terms.
It is kind of refreshing to see how the nursing industry hires and treats its professionals compared to software, though. No "10x ninja" BS just to get hired as a rank-and-file employee. Hourly pay, as well as unions, prevents anything comparable to the long hours and hero stunts that are rewarded at tech companies.
There are days where I do think it'd be nice to have the flexibility that they have, but then I remember that I could never do that job. Just like software engineering, nursing has attributes that make it only desirable to certain people. Patient is actively refusing care, shouting racial slurs at you, trying to assault you, etc? They still need to be cared for. It's still your job to take care of them.
At a guess, because the people who make that choice are generally not in a position to consider those factors or know about them firsthand. You have to be careful, or you'll wind up concluding that wet streets cause rain.
Dermatology and radiology are some of the most competitive medical specialties in the world. Most doctors are neither dermatologists nor radiologists, and frankly if you did a truly detailed cost benefit analysis I'm not so sure the numbers would be so clear cut for the average doctor. As a very hard-working programmer, at age 25 I was making $120k base salary far away from Silicon Valley -- my friends in medicine were neck deep in coursework still with an income of approximately -$50k/year and another ~4 years on average before they'd match what I was making already.
And I assure you that not every physician is able to just "scale back". Yes, some can, but that's not the norm. Plenty of ER doctors work nights for decades. My best friend growing up is a resident physician right now and works 80 hour weeks. I haven't even talked to him for a year because he's so busy.
I certainly didn't intend to compare radiologists and dermatologists to median software developers. I bring these fields up as a reminder that career flexibility exists at a level that is considerably more elite than dental hygienist. In short, if you are a very ambitious and academically talented person, there are high earning and high prestige professions that will still yield considerable career flexibility .
I also think you may be selling "developer" a little short here. Part of the problem here is that "radiologist", "registered nurse", and "dental hygienist" all mean something very standardized and specific. Software developer, on the other hand, means very little. It can range from someone who just finished reading a book on php and myql (or didn't read it but claims to have) to someone with a PhD who is doing mathematically intense programming on genomics (though I suppose that person would probably have a different title).
A lot of jobs I'm interested in these days say "MS required, PhD preferred." These grad degrees require majoring in a STEM field, degrees that even at the undergrad level have a very high attrition rate, perhaps even higher than pre-med coursework (which doesn't honestly require the same difficulty in math). To get into a top school, you need to score at the top percentiles on standardized tests. In spite of this, elite PhD programs typically have an attrition rate between 35%-50% attrition rate (engineering is best, pure science is worst). MD programs at elite schools, by contrast, have vanishingly low attrition rates (UCSF, for instance, is below 0.5%). No joke, attrition rates at elite PhD programs are between 75 and 100 times higher than elite med schools. Of course, as people have pointed out to me in the past, it's not apples-to-apples. If you can even realistically apply to a PhD program in CS, you probably can already work in industry for a fine salary. If you leave with an MS, as I did, you have a valuable degree. MD tends to be more all-or-nothing, and (as you have reasonably pointed out), highly selective residencies in lucrative fields are hardly guaranteed.
It will never be apples-to-apples when comparing fields. But considering that when you go by pay, your typical programmer is between dental hygienist and registered nurse (in San Francisco), we should probably recognize that we need to compare outcomes for a comparable educational path. But I wouldn't say that becoming a radiologist or other medical specialist is so much harder than getting a PhD that the comparison is useless. Especially if we're going to take seriously the talk among silicon valley CEOs and congress about a critical shortage of PhDs in STEM fields.
Overall, I'd say that the career stability, pay, and flexibility of health care fields may win out over tech at a high level as well as a low one.
This doesn't mean there are no good reasons to want to be a programmer, but I do think it's relevant when the US president stands next to tech CEOs at press conferences and agrees that there is a shortage of STEM workers.
He just finished grad school and is now a nurse anesthesias making more than he did before and working roughly the same.
Whether or not the trend keeps up it is hard to know.
If you were to implement a license to practice software engineer (thereby eliminating many jobs at the bottom performed by people who wouldn't be able to earn a license, how much would the median income for software engineers go up?
Conversely, if you eliminated licensing for dental hygienists and let each practice determine the criteria for hiring, how many people would be employed handling dental hygienist roles and responsibilities that you don't need licensing to perform? How much would increased employment by less qualified individuals bring down the median income?
Immediately I realized that I would be the only parent in the office (there was one other remote worker with kids) once my wife and I decided to have a child. And sure enough that's what happened. I actually lost my job there (for unrelated reasons) and it was an enormous relief to be out of that culture.
In addition to children, I am religious and have obligations to my church, which were frowned upon (tacitly) by my coworkers. Nobody said anything, but I was the only one leaving work at 3 on Good Friday and 5:30 every Wednesday so I could be at church.
In hindsight I can see what I couldn't see before - the article is right in suggesting that single, young people are unencumbered by obligations. But it misses the point that we choose what obligations to tie ourselves to around the age that most people are starting at these startups - I chose wife, children, church. They're choosing company, work, and technology. It's not that different in principle, but it's a huge behavioral difference.
> Reddit CEO Ellen Pao "has passed on hiring candidates who don’t embrace her priority of building a gender-balanced and multiracial team"[1]
Because of my religion, I avoid working from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday (the 7th day Sabbath). I do work if something went bad and people will be blocked because of me, but that's an exception.
I always try to come clear about this with any new team or manager, but I've never had a very understanding response from that. Mostly people will not say anything, but I can tell from their faces they're not happy about my strict non-availability at that time.
My current team has started doing deployments on Saturdays. That was imposed without anyone being consulted on it, which I found very disappointing. I wish religious considerations were taken into account in the workplace, but since so many people in tech are so removed from religious knowledge of any kind, they probably don't even know there are religions where working on a specific day of the week is not allowed.
The article is full of anecdote and false implications. So, "Yahoo told employees they could no longer work from home." If you are working from home because you're taking care of your children, I think it's fairly reasonable to expect that your attention is split and you won't be as productive. Much of it describes the work habits of top execs. I don't think that's representative of the industry as a whole, and probably aligns pretty well with work habits of top execs of other industries.
[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/susiearmitage/tech-companies-offer-w... [2] http://mashable.com/2012/08/09/google-employee-death-benefit...
I've experienced a bit of that. It's hard not to feel bad for going home at 5pm to be with your family when all the driven single 20-somethings around you will continue to work late into the night and produce a lot more than you.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, and I have to worry about working for a jerk like the younger version of myself.
The one thing I can say is that as a parent, it's good to work at a place where the management team is all from in-town, and most have kids. Almost all the managers at my current employer have young kids. This means that "office hours" are 10-5, with a ton of flexibility, and nobody bothers you until 9 at night. But the trade-off is that everyone is expected to be online until 1 or 2 in the morning if needed (after the kids go down) and be current on their email first thing in the morning before coming in to the office.
I feel very bad for the people who were laid off when pregnant.
I hope you understand that by doing so, you placed your interviewers in a very awkward position. It would be the same if you revealed to them your e.g. religion or sexual orientation, when they never asked. It smells like you were setting them up for a future lawsuit.
The reason every startup asks "so what do you like to do for fun" in interviews is that kind of "cultural" fishing. The OP is just flipping the game around.
More accurately, a company is not generally allowed to discriminate in hiring on those basis, and thus will generally have policy in place not to ask about those things. The law doesn't actually prohibit asking, it prohibits discrimination on those bases; but asking the question is something that can be used as evidence of intent to discriminate.
Of course, someone volunteering the information is substantially different than the company asking it.
The problem here is that familial status is legally protected, so by bringing it up it puts the interviewer in a tight spot. If I reject a candidate who states such things, then there may be lawsuit risk, and my superiors may not be sympathetic to the fact that I did not ask the candidate.
Unfortunately, I don't think theres a way out of this problem. Family friendliness is probably the most important culture question for anyone with a family. The only solution I can think of is to dig up information online from previous employees, but that is a crap-shoot for small companies.
Don't have kids so you can focus on what's important to Mark.
It very much carries a 'so they can work at making me rich' vibe to it.
But I believe the tide is turning, and companies that embrace this human right will be rewarded with higher quality employees. As entrepreneurs and leaders ourselves, we have the opportunity to set the culture we want. So I must congratulate and highlight how one YC startup, AeroFS, is standing up and making a difference:
"..AeroFS employees of any gender are eligible for: 10 weeks leave, paid at 100% of salary, 8 weeks additional leave, paid at 50% of salary, and *10 weeks additional unpaid leave—or more, if approved .." [1]
[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/12/among-38-nat... [1] https://www.aerofs.com/blog/parental-leave-at-aerofs/
I do not have kids, do not plan to have kids, so I'm not sure why I should pay for someone else's decisions to create life. Whenever someone goes on family leave, other people who were not involved with that decision have to pick up the slack.
Now, maybe if I could take paid (or unpaid) leave-of-my-discretion as an alternative, I'd be okay with it. Otherwise, it feels like federal level discrimination against unmarried, child-less, individuals.
I don't think I should pay into a system that I will never receive benefit from.
What do you propose the elderly living off of social security should do instead?
This belief does not seem to be well justified.
> either the age requirements will keep getting pushed back as people live longer
"Keep"? They've been pushed back once in the history of the program.
No choice in getting old, or ill, or injured. But people (Americans) sure have a choice in getting pregnant.
It's kind of weird that humanity has managed to procreate without extended, government-funded maternity leave up to this point, isn't it?
(I'd also like to mention this discussion is scoped to US Governmental legislation, NOT the debate over humanity's continued existence.)
My original point was that it's not shameful to not provide this entitlement. Somehow we managed to go completely off the rails into zero-population Armageddon.
I would also ask that you tone down the rhetoric, personal attacks, and broad generalizations for the sake of civility.
Effectively without supported maternal leave, men have a financial leverage over women. One might find this problematic or not, depending on political inclinations. Personally I prefer a society that attempts to balance out this leverage.
Like, I don't have to drink water, I can just eat meat and get my water from that. But it would be absurd to suggest that "drinking water is a choice" because there are alternatives that I could personally take.
This is a Hobson's Choice: a choice between one option. You could wrangle that kind of argument into justification for anything! Slavery: "You chose to be a slave because you didn't run away." Rape: "You chose to get raped because you didn't stay inside." Pregnancy: "You chose to get pregnant because nobody actively forced you to have a baby."
Never-mind any notion of practicality. Forget about the fact that these things literally need to happen. It's a choice because you don't agree with the politics.
Individuals choose whether or not to get pregnant when a man ejaculates inside a woman without protection. If you wish to do that, and bear the fetus to term, I do not wish to pay for your decision.
Individuals should bear the burden of their own decisions, not me.
Welfare is ultimately an insurance scheme and the idea of getting your money back is as silly as getting your money back on your car insurance because you never crashed it. You're human and on average you're ~50% female and will eventually have children. Maybe if you volunteer for a vivisection then you can have a lower premium, but you're a member of the group whether you like it or not.
There's really no way to know who will and won't have children, ask a man under 20 if they want kids and you'll probably get 50% "no". Yet some 98% of them will have children. Somebody who has had a vivisection can easily have it reversed and somebody who is infertile may yet be treated my some future medical technique. From an insurance perspective everybody "may" have children and so needs to pay into the insurance scheme.
People have a choice whether to procreate. I should either be allowed to participate in that choice, or be removed from the financial consequences.
While individuals do have a choice of whether to procreate (and it's not always a choice), society as a whole does not. Without procreation the economy and society would quickly collapse and the human race would eventually come to and end. So there's tremendous societal benefit to procreation and it should be supported by any government which society chooses to put in place. What you're suggesting would insentivize large numbers of people to not have any children, which is harmful to society and the wider economy. Indeed, without parents, you yourself would not exist.
A world in which you don't have to incur costs for others's children, is a world in which the benefits of those children should arguably be denied to you: no pension, lesser pay because you can't sell to children (or adults once those children are grown up), expensive services because you won't be allowed to use young cheap labor, no universities, larger tax and medical burdens as your own generation becomes older and more sickly, no hip young music or art, no interactions with people more than 25 years younger, no younger workers at your company as it grows, no technologies invented by or provided by those children in their adulthood, etc. Since you didn't contribute to raising the children, it's only fair that you don't get to reap the rewards, right?
The fact is that as a member of society and our economy, you derive a huge financial benefit from other's children which is inescapable. No man is an island.
I work at Trello, and the company has a similar philosophy in terms of treating people like humans who have responsibilities and interests that enrich them outside of work, which only benefits the work environment. A big draw to working at Trello, in addition to loving the product and team, is the fact that these policies exist.
I hope in the future- "perks" like paid parental leave will become something we laugh about as being painfully obvious. Who cares when work gets done as long as it gets done?
Treehouse link-http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/at-some-start-ups-friday... We're hiring at Trello!- http://trello.com/jobs
We make sacrifices to work in some areas of tech, and we get paid well to put work before most other priorities because that's what's needed in some (not all) tech jobs. If you want to put kids as a priority before work, that's fine. There are plenty of jobs in tech you can take, but don't expect the same positions as the lady who puts work above all else and consistently delivers when stuff's on fire. She's devoting more of her life to the company and deserves a better title and more pay.
"My experience is that a lot depends on your boss. I always got my work done quickly and thoroughly, but I've had bosses who made you sit in your chair even when there was nothing to do, I've had other bosses who were much more accommodating. It is about the culture of the department. My best job was in a very hard working engineering department, when we were on deadline we worked killer hours, but when things were slack, we went home. Everyone had kids, family outings were encouraged and our boss took us to lunch and treated us like humans. I worked my butt off for that boss. When I have had a boss who treats me like a child, I act like one. If you treat people with dignity and respect and give them time off when they need it, they will work harder."
>> He leaves work at 5:30 p.m. so that his employees will not feel obligated to stay.
Bret is pictured in his expensive home, standing in front of a gas range that was at least $10,000. He can afford to take it easy. He's already sacrificed and put in the 16 hour days.
Hours worked is a useless signal at best and a misleading signal at worst. (as an aside, I also believe the 40hr work week is a waste for both companies and employees)
Number of hours a superficial signal that it easy to imitate. People know that productive "hustlers", "gamechangers" "showrunners" get promoted. They tend to know who the hustlers are and thus they know that hustling often requires more than 8 productive hours a day of work. So they stay after hours despite diminishing returns and lower median throughput.
Once a large enough percentage of the imitators stay afterhours, now your average operational employee has to stay in order to conform to the perceived status quo.
So I agree with with the CEO leaving early as long as he enforces a culture that not only encourages people leaving at 5:30, but penalizes people who stay late. Then the hustlers will follow, and then the imitators will follow and the operational staff will feel comfortable to have their 40 hour work week.
You may login after hours to wind up your day's work (it is, in fact, expected), but you are to make damned sure nothing hits your subordinates' inboxes until 8:30AM the next day. If that means putting delays on your messages in Outlook, so be it.
Makes for a much more relaxed and productive team.
When the top guy leaves, that signals to the rank and file it's OK to leave. It tends to look bad when the rank and file leave before the boss. It's an extremely well understood social signal (whether you buy into that or not, doesn't matter. It's the signal).
So there is a strong understanding of this in aware managers - they will leave in the 4:30-5:30 bracket, so their employees don't feel compelled to work long hours.
I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley at tech companies for the last 17 years at many small and large high tech companies, including Apple. My wife also has been working in tech for longer than that, and she enjoys it. I have two young children. When I read these articles, I feel like I'm reading about another universe, as it is so vastly different than my experience. Of course, I can only offer my own anecdotes in response, but here are a few of mine:
- My wife interviewed at a small startup when she was pregnant with our first son. During the interviews, she informed them she was pregnant and wasn't sure how much time she wanted to take off after the baby was born. They were totally cool about it and said they'd be happy to have her for as long as they could. She ended up working there and loved it.
- I'm 40 years old. The people who work with me are a mix of ages. I've rarely been the oldest, and I certainly don't feel like I'm outnumbered by people much younger than me. I've interviewed at a number of companies with young founders, and never felt discriminated against. I still get pinged by plenty of recruiters, so I'm not seeing the ageism that is supposedly so rampant here. I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who are close to my age, and I'm not hearing these complaints from them either.
Honestly, I think this is sloppy journalism, designed to provoke an emotional reaction. I don't want to deny the very real problems in this industry that we should be working on, but I don't think articles like this are helping. If anything, they are scaring women and minorities away from the industry and making the diversity problem worse.
For example, after the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed, it led to a decrease in the employment of people with disabilities. If the employer has a higher likelihood of lawsuit in the event that the employee must be let go, they have to make damn sure they can't find someone else (who isn't disabled) to fill the position in the first place.
The existence of this sort of legislation actually exacerbates the employment problem for minorities and women in tech!
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/re...
I guess it really depends on the size of the company, and it's really something you have to kind of feel out for yourself. Naturally I haven't really had this problem with large companies, only small teams.
The Facebook hackathons used to start at like 6pm with the implicit expectation that one worked through the night (and weren't expected to work the next day), but these days they start during the day (the next one is 9:30am). There's still time to work all-night if that's your thing, though.
One thing I noticed at a previous hackathon was one of our engineering VPs showing their kids around. I've seen a few parents doing that - often their spouse will bring their kids to visit for dinner and to spend some time, sometimes they go back together, or the kids and spouse heading home for bedtime. Not sure if that's a "this is how I get through this horrible expectation people have of me" or "this is how I blend these two parts of my life that I value", but I'm hopeful it is the latter.
Yes, yes, and yes, it can mean all of those things and more.
> The concept of "cultural fit" is so vague it can easily be used to mask actual discrimination
No kidding? Really? Wow, I hope no one else realizes this.
It means whatever they want it to mean. It is a general, hand-wavy no that you can't really question.
Our whole team is very relaxed and smiles a lot. We aren't going to hire someone who is cynical, tense, and overly opinionated and has different values than us. That's culture fit. Yes, that is discrimination. But not based on gender, sexual orientation, race, or age.
For instance: you are discriminating against people who don't know javascript if you are hiring for a job that requires javascript and don't hire people who don't know it.
Is that a bad thing? I dont' think so.
There are some things that we as a society have determined that it is not okay to discriminate based on. Here is a list of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
In colloquial American usage, "discrimination" in the context of hiring and employment refers exclusively to judging people by illegal or inappropriate factors.
>you are discriminating against people who don't know javascript if you are hiring for a job that requires javascript and don't hire people who don't know it.
This may be an appropriate statement for other English-speaking countries, but in the US, this is a statement that borders on sophistry.
You are discriminating ... if you are hiring for a job
that requires javascript and don't hire people
who don't know it. Is that a bad thing? I dont' think so.
Similarly, I recall an article from Matasano that said that some of their best candiates did not have prior experience with something that one might have expected to be a prerequisite: "Some of the best testers we've worked with didn't have a formal security background." [0].
If you only hire people who "know" $Language, what will you do if six months down the line you decide to rewrite in Clojure, or find that Haskell is the best way to move forward?
But, short term thinking.
Same is true of healthcare, and big law. There are plenty of industries that suffer from unfriendly family workplaces, not just the tech industry. I'd love to read an article that attempts to compare how family friendly different industries are for parents, but unfortunately only a large, costly survey can provide the non-subjective data readers can appreciate.
Considering the Zuckerberg comment, we have to realize that ageism in tech is not only wrong, it's not sustainable. We all age. As this article mentions, twentysomething grads will become thirtysomething parents. Building a tech culture that ignores this fact is ridiculous, but it's our current reality.
What we have to do is make sure that all of the older engineers who "age out of" the Valley move to the same place: could be Chicago, Boulder, Austin, maybe Portland or even Minneapolis. Probably not NYC (I'm fond of it, but it's too expensive to raise a family). Doesn't matter where so much as that the place exists. If any one urban area can capture 15% of the programmers who age out of the Valley, for a decade or two, it'll have more talent than that shithole and be able to out-compete it.
But the current hot topics are diversity and gender discrimination. No problem there, but I have noticed that even people who take those two issues very seriously implicitly blow off the ageism thing. I think people just do not want to acknowledge that they're going to get older too, I think they put it out of their minds.
I've literally had a conversation with someone who said he wanted to make sure we don't just hire a bunch of people like him (i.e., white males who went to the same college he did). Then a few minutes later he made a snide remark about "some old guy" (the old guy was an engineer he was unfamiliar with).
So, I am very pessimistic about the prospect of this issue getting any real attention.
Eh, what? Sure it is. As long as they can find new young people they can replace the older people. How do you think things got the way they are? The tech industry in Silicon Valley is far older than a single generation.
SF/Wall Street/ Hollywood/... all have their own problems, which is a side effect of their excellence. Yes, WS analysts work 100h/week, but that's how the industry works. The key is to work with, not against, it.
I wonder if this is for legal reasons (licensing, etc.) or because of the people that create such services. My wife's hypothesis is that since a lot of technology is created by single, young and not very social people, it doesn't even cross their mind at design time the fact that a couple (or a whole family) might want to share some of their contents while still keeping their own individual accounts.
Children are as necessary for the society as a body as is food and sleep for individual humans. I understand the individualism that drives peoples toward libertarian ideals but children are beyond market mechanisms. They are part of our humanity, the structure without any efforts towards economical or other goals are pointless.
A child is not like a new SUV or an expensive hobby. A healthy, happy child is a net plus for the society to which he or she is born, that benefit all in the long term.
Most fathers kept on working and mothers were back to work within a week to month of having a baby.
This practice of encouraging mothers to return to work so quickly seemed like a relic of some era of one wage earner families.
How can Europe and US be so different in this regard, when the demographic problems should be similar?
Why not leave work at 5:30 p.m. so that his kids will get to see him before bed?
But should startups be required to do the same? Is it discrimination if they don't? This is where it gets blurry.
Let's say me and a friend start working on something. Someone is being considered as a potential co-founder. During the vetting period, I learn that they are about to become a parent, and will need certain logistical allowances for the next 6-18 months. I decide to pass on this person - at this stage in the company (very early), everyone needs to be able to hustle long hours. I can't risk having a cofounder not put in the sweat. Dead weight kills startups. So to me passing seems fair.
Keep in mind I didn't even mention if the company was incorporated; if it wasn't, surely you can't call this "discrimination" in a legal sense. Two guys just decided not to partner with a third person. If it was just incorporated yesterday and I make this decision, do things realistically change? The company is at pretty much the same point - 2 people who need more that can work long, hard hours.
But what if we're now 5 people and one key employee stops pulling their weight because of family obligations? I don't have the resources to support them in this manner, so I either have to let them go or keep on the dead weight. The first option reads like "discrimination", while the second seriously messes up my startup (imagine I could replace him with a similar skillset person).
And you could think of the same scenario at 10 people, 15, 30, 50, 100, etc.
As final food for thought,
> The American workplace has always prized people who prioritize work over family, and European countries have long had more generous policies for working parents. But in the last two decades, that gap has widened significantly. Other developed countries have expanded benefits like paid parental leave and child care, while the United States has not.
Yes, but who's leading the world in technological growth? Certainly I can't claim causation either way, but simple logic implies that more work means more growth and tech.
Scanning through the comments, it seems like the readership here would rather re-balance this in favor of more benefits and less work (thus meaning less growth and tech). Remember you don't get to have all of both.
So that's great and all, but are you justified in trying to impose this upon Silicon Valley? SV started like this because a bunch of people with the opposite opinions got together so they could work hard and drive progress as much as possible - sacrificing in the process. Should they leave, or should you? I suppose the answer is to vote for the political representatives that support your world view.
However, I'd argue that it'd be a bad thing, on a moral level, to enact policy against the SV hard work culture. I worry that too much lobbying will result in restricted options for employers and entrepreneurs which would ultimately drive progress down. I believe technological progress is a moral issue; we need our high-performers and hard-workers to cure diseases, combat food scarcity, create better hardware, etc. And we need a place where they can congregate.
Actually, China, Mongolia and India are leading the world in GDP per capita growth. If by "technological growth" you mean labor productivity growth, other countries with parental benefits, such as Denmark and Sweden, are doing fine. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDYGTH
It's not impossible to grow while supporting enjoyable lives for your citizens. In fact, as median wealth and median income increases, automation and broader technological advancement become more worthwhile.
The first group of countries are using existing technology to "catch up", so clearly their growth rate ought to be higher. This is "globalization" rather than "innovation". And as I mentioned, there are certainly other countries with great work-life balances that still enjoy high productivity. By the common sentiments I see in this thread, it seems that a lot of people would much prefer these places than Silicon Valley, and I encourage them to research further as in the link you posted.
That being said, here are some questions: where are the leading computer science researchers? Machine learning experts? Software entrepreneurs? Largest and most successful technology ventures whose market caps are greater than the GDP of a lot of countries?
While I can't prove it, I strongly suspect that you don't get world-changing technological innovation without living an unbalanced life.
Also, the USA is a very large market which is why a lot of pure software companies are headquartered there. Specialization is inherent in larger markets. A lot of other large vertically-aligned technology companies are headquartered around the world, such as Volkswagen, Samsung and Alibaba.
The lionization of specific billionaire entrepreneurs is more due to abnormally low tax rates (by Western standards) on extremely high incomes.
When it comes right down to what really matters, when you see through all the fancy "perks", what remains is a business culture that is not just immature, but downright conservative to the point of being reactionary.
I mean, what kind of 21st century Western company that employs highly educated middle class people doesn't facilitate parenthood?
Honest question, do you really believe this?
Ones that are in do-or-die mode. You know, facebook, amazon, google, etc? All these companies could be irrelevant 10 years from now and they know it.
It's war out there for these folks. Facilitating parenthood is the government's job, not the employer's. The employer who's out to create wants young and ambitious, managed by older and wiser.
Think of the NFL - the land of concussions and wrecked super-athletes. Who facilitates the strongest and most athletic to mindlessly hurt themselves in exchange for some drunk fans' entertainment? The culture we're living in :)
Sacrificing the young and the brave in the name of pretty shallow returns is quite common. All we're seeing is the mental athletes getting their social-life concussed. They oftentimes don't know what they're missing to be honest, they're not terribly social to begin with.
Besides, they can retire to a sane company anytime and build up their life outside of work - you can't say the same for somebody who almost made it to the NFL, screwed up his knee and is now working god knows where.
Just keep telling yourself that and everything will be okay.
For what it's worth, everybody working in the US health care, defense, energy, finance, and aerospace industries are doing just fine, thank you.
I'm not convinced... even the least hip of startups isn't this stupid.