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Comment by akerl_ | Hacker News Reader

Why do we need this to be a hard line? Putting "having kids kills startups" on one side and "parents are the best founders" on the other seems to be at best an oversimplification and at worst outright detrimental to both groups. I'm pretty sure most everybody here knows somebody who got motivated after having kids (or any other major life event), as well as somebody who became less motivated in their own career after such an event.

I get that putting everybody into cute little boxes with solid walls separating them from the other groups makes things easier on our brains, but we'd probably be a lot better off if we tried to imagine others complexly, because that's the reality.

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Well, because right now as it stands the default is to be hostile to people with kids. And frankly, if our business culture needs to exploit childless 20 year olds then we're building a toxic, unsustainable environment.

I agree. But we aren't going to fix that by claiming the opposite case as fact. Culture isn't something that you can average: 2 polarized viewpoints do not balance each other out, they just lead to HN comment wars and accusations of bias by both "sides".

What polarization? This is pretty much black and white.

Either your business model requires the exploitation of cheap labour, or it doesn't and we're being crappy for no good reason.

Now, we can talk about say the specific ways in which we subsidize families that lead to bad urbanization patterns and that's acceptable - tho as a childless 20something I'm broadly OK with subsidizing families.

But I'm having a hard time imagining an alternate argument that doesn't end up being an apologia for abusive work relationships, but I'd be happy to hear another side to it.

I think we're perhaps having two different discussions. This article discusses whether or not being a parent prevents someone from also being a successful founder. It isn't a discussion of the larger and distinctly separate issue regarding how founders treat their own workforces.

The two polarized extremes I was referring to are the view cited by the article and the opposite it is attempting to dispute: "Being a parent makes you a more motivated founder" and "being a parent is a detriment to being a founder", respectively.

Yeah, but here's the other side of the coin: I've worked with parents (and shared a boss) who always dumped shitwork off onto the people w/o kids. Last second travel to customers, late nights, bugs that trigger support SLA requirements, emergency fixes, etc. And then, amazingly enough, proceed to whine that they don't get the same raises or promotions.

I agree our work environment is hostile to people's personal lives, but when parents use their kids as an excuse to get out of doing their share, instead of advocating for better work life balance for everyone, the reaction of the childless should be completely unsurprising.

Are you really going to make the case that people with children are more likely to dump work on people without children? Really?

Do you have any sort of actual evidence to support this? (Actual evidence, not anecdotal stories about how somebody with a kid made you do more work on a project once)

Can't speak for the previous poster, but my company has a strict policy - people with children get first consideration for time off. When there is inclement weather, they're the first sent home to take care of their children. When there is extra work to be done, the person with children is the first to be exempt from overtime.

So at my company there is a very strict policy about this, and it gets followed to a T.

Are you okay with this policy?

To be fair, family problems (kid is sick, picking up Junior from soccer practice) are much more likely to be excused absences than other lifestyle problems (I have a date the night before, chores are piling up, I have roommate issues).

I personally wouldn't call that 'dumping work', but parents with young kids do require more days off due to sickness, because you're off also on days when you're okay but your kids are sick.

Anecdotally, they also seem to get sick more (kindergartens as vectors for spreading flu? sleep-deprivation lowered immunity? just guessing), but the first part is obviously true.

It's all anecdotal because no sane company would allow stats on giving the pager to the single person because it won't disturb someone's kids.

I have worked at a place where I got the support pager on a holiday because I was single. I have also had to do support in the middle of the night because the person with children didn't answer because he set the volume low (so as not to disturb his wife) and didn't wake-up.

I just shared the actual evidence -- my experience of several years. Do you have a reading comprehension problem?

Yeah but you and I don't have extremely rigid schedules that, if interrupted, can throw us off kilter for a whole week.

I'm all for promoting healthier work/life balances (4 weeks vacation, anyone?), but it's not like it's mutually exclusive. I'm also friends with a guy with 3 kids and I've seen the chaos that erupts when their routines get screwed with.

I am broadly OK with subsidizing families. It's hard enough as it is? Suck it up, someone's gotta raise the new generation.

If you choose to have kids, you too will get to dump shit work. If you don't choose to have kids you will have 2-3x the disposable income, so it's kind of win-win.

Especially when its always the people without kids in group 1 and the people with kids in group 2.

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