Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

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> If I am looking for 3rd programmer in my 2 person small company I will not risk hiring a young woman

Ignoring the fact that this kind of discrimination is flat out illegal, you are forgetting to consider that the Canadian policy allows males to take parental leave as well, so the excuse for the discrimination isn't even logically consistent.

Personally, having lead teams of people ranging from experienced professionals to interns still in school, I find it extremely hard to imagine a small business that is such a special snowflake that "getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost". I could get interns to be productive in a day or two. In many fields of work, such as early education, there are standardized accreditations so an employer can basically just pick and choose from a pool of qualified individuals who will be ready-to-work on day 1.

As the other poster said, standard fare in parental leaves is to hire a contractor for a 1 year contract. By the end of the year, worst case is your business grew 0%, you get your full-time employee back and it's business as usual. A more realistic scenario is your business grew by some amount that now allows you to hire the temp person full time.

>you are forgetting to consider that the Canadian policy allows males to take parental leave as well, so the excuse for the discrimination isn't even logically consistent.

But they are much less likely to take this parental leave.

>Personally, having lead teams of people ranging from experienced professionals to interns still in school, I find it extremely hard to imagine a small business that is such a special snowflake that "getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost".

Well, everyone else doesn't get to always run wildly successful small businesses. Most small businesses fail. I imagine that if you yank out a significant portion of their workforce that they'll be even more likely to fail.

>By the end of the year, worst case is your business grew 0%, you get your full-time employee back and it's business as usual.

Aka your small business shuts its doors, because the market has moved on and you couldn't keep up. Half the businesses fail within the first 5 years. Only a third of businesses survive 10 years.

> But they are much less likely to take this parental leave

If you want to talk about likelihoods, consider that in most companies, the chance that an employee of any gender will leave for a random reason is much higher than someone of any gender taking parental leave. Trying to skirt the law to "optimize" for least parental leaves is kinda like sending a memo to your employees telling them to always run red lights and jaywalk to get to work faster. It's one of those "not even wrong" kinds of things.

> Most small businesses fail

This is a non sequitur. Businesses fail for all sorts of reasons. Your restaurant staff ghosting you, not enough clients, spending stupidly after raising money, etc. If your business fails due to a parental leave of all things, let me tell you, you were probably severely delusional about its viability to begin with.

> Aka your small business shuts its doors

I believe I mentioned a fitting example where this could not be farther from the truth (early education)

But none of the things you mentioned are different between men and women. Parental leave is simply a risk factor on top of what you mentioned.

>If your business fails due to a parental leave of all things, let me tell you, you were probably severely delusional about its viability to begin with.

Let's take an extreme case: a 1 person business. If I, the business owner, take parental leave then my business is pretty much guaranteed to fail. The rate gets lower the more employees and capital you have, because you can mitigate the risk, but many businesses are susceptible to this risk, because they simply don't have the resources to mitigate it. That doesn't really tell you much about the viability of the business. It says much more about the resources the business had available. Not everyone is born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

I actually have a friend who runs a restaurant with her husband. It's an _extremely low margins_ business with brutally long hours. She got pregnant and eventually took time off (she went back to China for a few months to get her parents to help with the baby). When she came back a few months later, surprise surprise, the business was still there. Did they have worries? Sure, stress from wait staff turnover, an air conditioner that was too expensive to fix, chairs. But leaving for an extended period of time to decompress from work stress was something her husband supported despite the temp long distance relationship and the extra burden on himself because he knew that would help them cope better in the long term.

Let's be honest, anyone can come up with ridiculous hypothetical situations where "obviously" parental leave is the only evil in the world and must be banished. But at the end of the day, they're just that: hypotheticals with no basis in reality. I've seen businesses succeed and fail and I've seen parental leaves in these businesses. Parental leaves are simply not as deciding of a factor as one might like to fantasize, and anyone who wants to argue against them might want to look at the silver spoons in their own mouths before casting stones at others.

Restaurants aren't exactly businesses where people become difficult to replace. Imagine you had a company that was trying to start a video service and the expert on ffmpeg goes on parental leave half way through. Good luck replacing somebody like that if you're not in a tech hotspot.

If someone is literally critical to your business, they need to have equity or some other mechanism to align incentives or you risk unaligned incentives torpedoing your business. This is the case with any business, regardless of parental leave laws.

> Imagine you had a company that was trying to start a video service and the expert on ffmpeg goes on parental leave half way through

Typically you get like 3-6 months notice on a parental leave, so you've got plenty of time to find a contractor/consultant, compared to the standard 2 week notice from the much more likely scenario of your expert quitting for greener pastures. If you have such high risk riding on a single employee, you're probably the one to blame: why aren't _you_ (or an equity partner) the expert? Do you not have anything else whatsoever that could be done in the meantime if core development halted/slowed for 6 months? Do you realize an ffmpeg expert can earn twice as much just about anywhere other than your yet-to-be-profitable startup and gets recruiter spam from big tech companies on linkedin every month? Can you even afford benefits and severance for a full time employee in the first place? etc.

Blaming a hypothetical business failure on a parental leave is really just finding a scapegoat for one's inability to take responsibility for their own failings.

Being in a tech hotspot is irrelevant. I've worked remotely for people in Boulder with a coworker living in Vermont. Again, if you want to run a high tech business from rural Wisconsin with no remote workers, that's on you, and has nothing to do with parental leaves.

> Imagine you had a company that was trying to start a video service and the expert on ffmpeg goes on parental leave half way through. Good luck replacing somebody like that if you're not in a tech hotspot.

I don't know anything about ffmpeg and I am confident I can not only learn it but train someone in it in two months. Bad employers hire people for their current skills, and are caught unprepared when people leave for any reason (including realizing they're a bad employer). Good employers hire people with the expectation of training them and letting them grow into new roles. Bad employers rely on the brains of individuals. Good employers document their processes, enforce knowledge-sharing procedures (code reviews and runbooks and support rotations, in tech), and otherwise proactively mitigate business risk.

Imagine you had a company that was trying to start a video service and the expert on ffmpeg goes on parental leave half way through.

How is that different than that person getting hired by Google half way through? Other than the fact that with parental leave you generally get 4-6 month warning that it's coming and with someone change jobs you might not even get 4-6 weeks. Also at least in my experience people on parental leave will answer the phone/email if its important.

> Imagine you had a company that was trying to start a video service and the expert on ffmpeg goes on parental leave half way through.

Imagine you had that same company and your expert was hit by a bus and instantly killed. Don't run your business with a single point of failure.

> But none of the things you mentioned are different between men and women.

That's exactly the point: none of the serious risk factors are strongly correlated with gender. (And you're forgetting the argument that young men are slightly more likely to be able to find another competitive job than young women because people like you are more willing to hire them, therefore men are at slightly higher risk of leaving.)

If you want to construct an argument in the service of the conclusion "I don't want to hire young women" you certainly can, but please admit that's what you're doing.

I work as a programmer in Canada. In the past 10 years of my career, exactly one employee has taken the full parental leave at my workplace (a woman), and several male employees have taken parental leaves from 5 weeks to 4 months. In addition, two male employees were out on sick leave for sport-related injuries that they essentially caused themselves during the practice of their hobby, each for several months. All sports and accident related injuries are more common in men than women because women are more careful. Some common injuries can permanently damage the brain (unlike pregnancies). I really don't think women are more at risk than men of taking leave as programmers in Canada -- for different occupations it is different, for example in female dominated orgs there's usually a "culture" around motherhood and taking time off etc and it's almost a status symbol so people do it more. Not so in programming.

Of course they are less likely to go on leave — they work for a guy who doesn’t hire women in non-disposable roles, because his family will starve if a female professional gets pregnant.

Presumably the female custodians and admins just get purged.

Small business doesn't have "custodians and admins". It has a few people every one of them absolutely crucial for survival. Have you ever started a company without outside funding? Usually you have some savings, maybe for a few months and a lot of hope. Someone quitting in the middle of that to take care of the child means you won't make it.

So will someone quitting to get a different job, being hit by a bus, etc.

I have. I put the company in the ground when we couldn’t resolve a dispute and left.

We had our first child at 32. (I took 5 months off as a director level manager when my wife went back to work.) When is a woman deemed safely in old maid status and ok to hire?

When I was in this position as a principal, our biggest threat was good junior tech staff being snatched up by big companies or being lured into a government gig with a great pension plan.

I get the risk/concern, but the Mad Men era attitude projects risk. As a guy, it would give me pause about working for the firm. On top of everything else, you’re missing out on fantastic talent.

This is an unrealistic description of reality.

Most small companies do not actually worry about growth, they worry about staying in business and small things matter.

I think the most blatant scenario involves a code-base where only one engineer knows where the skeletons are buried. Yes it's bad architecture, caused by sustained bad development choices, but it is RAMPANT in our industry. If said engineer gets hit by a bus, or goes on parental leave, the company is fucked. They deserve it, but they are still fucked and they are going to kick and scream whatever excuse they can think of to prevent these scenarios from being legislated into higher frequency.

Sure, and it's good for society for those companies to fail.

That's one thing that I think is missing in many argument about business policy. Many times someone says, with this policy passed, my business will be less productive and might even fail. And we're too scared to say out loud that that's a good thing.

Markets works best when there is accurate and open communication of information, and it's generally very difficult to know how a prospective employer really approaches technical debt (or the equivalent for other disciplines) and business risk. I want to work for the company that's willing to confront past mistakes and not drowning in them, and, if possible, the company that made fewer past mistakes in the first place. This company is also more likely to be successful at delivering the very benefits for which society recognizes companies at all (producing goods and services, creating reliable jobs, advancing the state of knowledge, etc.). So, all other things being equal, it's in society's interest for me to find this company accurately, and with a limited labor pool it is almost certainly in society's interest for there to just be one competent company tackling a problem than two companies, one of which is incompetent.

Businesses failing can hurt a lot of people. Thousands can be laid off, many of whom might not be in an industry where finding a replacement job is easy. Many organizations arguably exist solely to provide jobs regardless of their inefficiencies (in my view the TSA, and to some extent the US military).

Propping up a bad business that would otherwise fail has two harmful effects:

1. The failure is greater and more impactful if it can't be held off forever. It's a lot better for society for fifty people to be laid off than a thousand. (It's probably better for those fifty people, too: their friends are less likely to be laid off and can provide immediate support, there are probably more open jobs, there's only fifty people competing for them and not a thousand, there's less loss of confidence in the industry, etc.) So failing fast is important. Ideally, you'd fail fast enough that the incompetent founding team loses their jobs and nobody else does.

2. There's usually a limited market / mind share for businesses, and it is hard for new businesses to get traction. The demand for, say, fast food within a given town is fairly fixed - advertising can make more or fewer people interested in it, but certainly there won't ever be more demand than three meals per day per person, and probably it will never get even close to that. So there's a limited labor market for fast food makers in that town. If there's an incompetent company employing a hundred people, and we prop up those jobs, we're likely preventing a more competent company from starting which could hire those same people and provide them with stabler and possibly higher-paying jobs. Worse, if the incompetent company is insolvent because they made bad pricing decisions, that company is probably out-competing other companies with more stable financial situations and preventing them from gaining traction.

So, if you don't want thousands of people to be laid off, it's good for incompetent businesses to fail as quickly as possible.

(The TSA and the military are government organizations, not companies, so the analysis is pretty different. Providing jobs to people for the sake of providing jobs is not a bad thing for government to do; providing that money without making them work is an even better thing for government to do.)

The same developer gets tons of recruiting emails, people everywhere telling him to not stay in the same place for more then 2 years, his probably burned out of working with that horrible code base and would be attracted to work at a different place with a new project, with a new framework and language(and restart the cycle).

So if you are in SV and have 1 essential developer then prepare for him to leave he/ she would do it sooner then later.

Why would you avoid hiring her? It takes 9 months to deliver the baby, plenty of notice to find a replacement. If she just quit you have two weeks notice to find someone. In many ways someone going through that situation is most likely to return and stay long term adding additional value.

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