Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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