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My job offered 4 months of of paternity leave with pay. And an optional 2 extra months off without pay. So you could think of it as 6 months at 2/3rds pay. It d

My job offered 4 months of of paternity leave with pay. And an optional 2 extra months off without pay. So you could think of it as 6 months at 2/3rds pay. It didn’t have to be taken at one time either. There was a small restriction that you had to start the leave within 1 year of the baby’s first birthday. The company also offered it for people adopting, so it applied for all people regardless of gender or lifestyle. You could only apply for it 3 times though. So no having 10 kids to escape working. :P I took two months off when our baby was first born. Then I took 4 months off when the baby was about 9 months so we could spend New Years in Japan with my wife’s mother. While abroad on leave the pandemic hit, flights we canceled and we got stranded. Upon returning everyone was working remote so we stayed in Japan for about a year. I’m so grateful for that time. We spent the mornings watching morning kids shows, paying with grandma, going to the park, etc. My daughter speaks Japanese as a first languages and has advanced in so many ways because of that time off. I’ve heard stories of very senior people being pressured to take less time. The logic being: If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? My advice from those people was the company puts it there for a reason, take your time, you earned it, everyone is jealous.

barbazoo 5y ago
I was graciously allowed to take 4 weeks paid right at birth and I'll take another 4 weeks paid when he's 1 year old. I'm already so looking forward to it. In the beginning it was all about figuring everything out and surviving together. The next one is hopefully going to be more of a bonding and getting to know each other opportunity. Again, super happy about that. And I feel grateful that that's what working in tech allows me.
dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
> The logic being: If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? Well, yes, I think that's the crux of it. If you work in a place you like then - if you're smart - you'll not only work well, but also make sure everybody knows you're an valuable asset and without you things could go awry. It kind of conflicts with your disappearing for a few months.
- andyferris 5y ago
  I don't think being valuable implies they can't get by without you. Not at all! It means that you are worth your salary and that they'd rather take you back after some leave than not have you at all or replace you with someone else. If things go awry when you leave it could mean there is a bus factor problem to be addressed.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
    It's a bit nuanced. There is a whole spectrum starting from Amazon warehouse workers who are easily replaceable (or, as we recently heard, will be replaced no matter what) to a guy who trenched himself so that he holds everybody hostage. I consider both extremes unethical because of power imbalance. In any case, it's in the best interest of the company to reduce the bus factor to zero, and by the same token, it's in the best interest of the employee to keep it above zero. You can understand how much it is above zero during salary negotiations, or when you say "I quit" and you are offered a raise. It's mainly because in order to replace you, the new employee needs to be trained and this takes time usually proportional to your experience. Now, in the case we're discussing (paternal leave), you don't just make a threat to leave, you actually just quit - you allow the company to test the scenario of working without you. So basically you lose some bargaining power. I'm not saying this is how things should be, but similar thinking processes are going on in the heads of many people in management positions, especially recently, when you need to put some extra effort justifying your position.
    - pedrosorio 5y ago
      I believe you have it backwards regarding the bus factor. The company wants the bus factor to be as high as possible. From Wikipedia: “The "bus factor" is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel.” The issue here is you are treating employees as cogs that have to be “in the machine” for it to work (i.e. the value they provide is to keep the business running). Valuable employees don’t necessarily cause the business to stop working if they leave. They just continuously add value (individually, making people around them better, designing systems that provide advantages over the long term, etc.) when working that wouldn’t be created if they weren’t there.
johnny53169 5y ago
> If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? The truth is that you're never that important and eventually you'll go away from this place, so what is really important to you?
- monkeydust 5y ago
  Yes this. Most of us like to think we're special and hard to replace and some are harder than others to replace but we can all be replaced. Can the replacement do as good a job as you ? Who knows, could be same/better/worse and without access to the multiverse you will never know. As you say figure out what you care about the most and double down on that if you can.
- _huayra_ 5y ago
  A colleague of mine died suddenly. This guy was a tech lead at my tiny satellite office for a major tech company. Within DAYS they already had an internal/external job posting to fill his position up. I mean I know it's just business, but I realized that I was replacable that day.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    A colleague of mine changed job recently. He was tech lead and had been working on the project for years and we other were quite new. It was obvious things would get harder from now on so half of us bailed, i.e. the three programmers with more then 6 month on the project, and the project collapsed. I mean with enough skill and money the experienced of us and he was replaceable. But not at the current budget. Maybe not even on twice the budget. 'Irreplaceable' is ofent with an implied 'at reasonable cost in a reasonable time'.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    I think that it's an important lesson to internalize both about yourself and also your coworkers. My place has a saying that literally translates to something like "there's a full graveyard with irreplaceable people" - and that's how it is; no matter how hard is to replace someone, eventually they will (have to) be replaced anyway.
onion2k 5y ago
If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? If you can leave your job in a state that means the next 6 months are problem-free then you are amazing. You've obviously planned ahead, documented things, and foreseen potential problems that you've mitigated ahead of time. Any company would be crazy to lose you. If you leave your job in a state where the problems are fixable then you're pretty good. You haven't foreseen things or left good enough plans, and maybe there's issues with documentation and strategy, but things were in a good state that others can recover from. That's more than most companies ask for. If you leave your job and everything falls apart then there are issues somewhere. You, or people you rely on, are basically winging it, and the company doesn't see that as a problem.
- raspyberr 5y ago
  >If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? I would spin that arguement against the business rather than against people. It's clearly a business-PoV argument. If your business stops functioning after losing a small percentage of employees then it's a poorly planned businesses. It has poor redundancy measures and should fail.
  - dusted 5y ago
    This. I'm on a rather long paternity leave as of now, and I really hope everything runs as if I'd never left when I get back, otherwise, the bus factor is too low.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    It also means that the normal day to day operation of the business must have a lot of overhead to have that kind of redundancy though. Redundancy is never free.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >Redundancy is never free. This. Austria has generous parental leave policies but the effect of that is that as a woman in your late twenties or early thirties, you will have a hard time changing jobs in highly skilled positions as the employer will expect you'll get pregnant soon and will need to find a temporary replacement for you which is impossible as no highly skilled worker wants to be on a fixed short term contract for the same pay, so many employers who can't or don't want to eat the cost of redundancy will prioritize hiring males instead and spread your workload while you're on leave to the remaining workers, causing them to be overworked for that period. That's the hidden cost.
rkachowski 5y ago
Oh wow, I was also in Japan in February 2020 when the pandemic hit, but being stranded didn't even enter my mind as a possibility. How did you adapt initially?
- wirthjason 5y ago
  I loved it! I lived in Japan before so it wasn’t a struggle. Tokyo summers are brutal though! What was your experience? Do you live there or was it just a visit? I thought Japan handled the pandemic much more reasonable than what my friends reported in the US. Initially I was worried about the density of Tokyo but mask wearing was already high. Everyone used hand sanitizer, socially distanced, etc. Tokyo never went on full lock down, it was just very limited so we got to do things I don’t think we would have done otherwise. Eg. we went to Tokyo Disney / Disney Sea a couple times and at 20-50% capacity it was like having the place to yourself.
alias_neo 5y ago
When my daughter was born, I was entitled to 2 weeks. I had saved 2 weeks of holiday so I could take a total of 4 weeks, but wasn't allowed to do so, because the company couldn't function without me for that long. Two, four weeks, or whatever it is really isn't enough time, your partner needs support and you have a new child to look after. Like you, the pandemic left us spending the first year+ at home with our daughter and it has been a benefit to each of us.
- wirthjason 5y ago
  Sorry to hear you couldn’t take it off. Do you feel that the company couldn’t function without you?
- bregma 5y ago
  We call this the "lottery rule" or, when management are not around, the "bus rule". If the company can not function without a single employee, they also need to ban employees from buying lottery tickets. Or walking on streets patrolled by homicidal buses (is there any other kind when it comes to key employees?). Bad management is a sign they are going to experience running the company without key employees sooner rather than later.
  - artpi 5y ago
    I thought its a bus count factor - how many employees have to be in a bus accident for the company to suffer a fatal blow. Have never heard about the lottery one but that sounds like a nice positive spin!
  - xkcd-sucks 5y ago
    Interesting, at my place it's the other way around: Suggesting someone might be unwillingly killed by chance is fine ("bus rule "), but suggesting someone could find the job materially useless ("lottery rule") or get fed up ("fuck-it rule") is gauche
- __turbobrew__ 5y ago
  If the company can't function without you for 4 weeks you should ask for a $300000 bonus for not taking paternity leave. Otherwise you could leave and the company would cease to exist.
jusssi 5y ago
> If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? If the work you're doing is important to the employer in any way, they need to have a backup plan on how to get that work done anyway. Because employees also switch jobs, get sick etc. Simulating a situation where an important worker becomes unavailable for an extended period of time is probably even a good exercise from organization point of view.
- vidarh 5y ago
  It's a reason why employers should encourage regular reasonably long holidays.as well. Stress testing failure modes in situations where you can plan ahead and can buy your way out of a crisis is better than finding out in circumstances where you can't.
roenxi 5y ago
If you're using paternity leave because "you've earned it", why should you get special leave? Just use annual leave! You've earned that too, and it leaves you on equal footing with everyone else without getting special brownie points for being a lucky husband. At the end of the day, this is unfair. People who have - in this case up to 3 - kids get a structural advantage. We're in an era where not only do we expect a lot of people not to have kids, the ones who aren't having them are in some sense making a sacrifice of some very precious moments for the ones who are. This is an expression of the same old arguments against maternity leave as well - at the end of the day, this is making private choices a problem for the company and (to some extent) the people working at the company. The effects of this sort of thing can already be seen in the differences between men and women's pay & career opportunities - it is a substantial handicap! We should be winding back on this sort of thing, not encouraging it. People should earn their living and take time off at their own expense. EDIT And, having thought about it a bit, it might favour wealthy workers. You end up with situations where effectively the janitor's wage has to go down to cover for the risk the software engineer has kids.
- vianneychevalie 5y ago
  I respect your opinion but on a nation-by-nation basis we benefit from having kids (although it could be discussed on a worldwide basis), and we benefit from having well-educated kids that are cared for by their parents. It is a cost for people who don’t have kids, but a net gain for everyone. A bit like healthcare. People who chose not to smoke benefit from paying taxes used to heal smokers, although a cigarette brings a lot less joy and benefit than kids. It is my opinion and I’m politically strongly against demographic shrinking.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Go with a cash handout provided by the government. It is better than paternity leave. If there was a choice between a cash handout + keep on working vs. paternity leave a significant number of meant would prefer the cash handout. The basic "this is the deal you get" for men is if they work hard for it & finance the operation then they get a happy & loving family. There are men who'd prefer the time & men who undervalue the time. But there are a lot of men who correctly identify that hard work, maximising their career outcomes and earning as much money as they can is the best way to help their family and this scheme disadvantages them. If people want unpaid time off I'm all for it. But paid vacation is not justified.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ElViajero 5y ago
> are you really that important? This is a very self-centered view of the universe. No, you are not important nor you need to be. I do my job, if I leave someone else is going to be hired to do it. That is how it works. If you are "important" then you should be receiving a share of the profits, not a salary. A salary just means that you can be replaced, no matter how high it is. I guess that it is a cultural thing, that many people have been convinced to work extra hours, to not take vacations, to slave away their lives for a sense of "self importance". I get a fantastic salary, I enjoy my work, but I am not important. It is difficult to replace me, it took 2 years to get another person in my position. But, if I tomorrow leave, the company will manage. I bring value, but I am not the center of the universe. I bring value, but I am not irreplaceable. I bring value, but I have to take (by law) vacations and the company will continue running without me. All jobs in a company bring value and the employees needs to be respected for that. It does not matter if you have a low-paid low-skilled job, you are still being paid because you bring value and you should be respected for it. And you should be able to go on vacations, because the goal of all this capitalist thing is to make our lives better, to be slaves we do not need capitalism. If in your society low-paid low-skill workers cannot take vacations, then you are failing at bringing well-being, health, and meaning to the members of your society. And for what? To produce another plastic shit that will be polluting the ocean in one month? To show more ads to people that cannot afford to buy more shit? I guess that this is a difference in society values. But for me the question "are you really important" should be answered as "yes, because I have friends, family, children, hobbies, etc." and what you produce is only a small part of that value.
ashtonkem 5y ago
I also point out that any of us will be replaced fairly quickly if we were to drop dead suddenly too; but for whatever reason this logic only ever crops up when people are thinking about taking more time off rather than less.

barbazoo 5y ago

I was graciously allowed to take 4 weeks paid right at birth and I'll take another 4 weeks paid when he's 1 year old. I'm already so looking forward to it. In the beginning it was all about figuring everything out and surviving together. The next one is hopefully going to be more of a bonding and getting to know each other opportunity. Again, super happy about that. And I feel grateful that that's what working in tech allows me.

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago

> The logic being: If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? Well, yes, I think that's the crux of it. If you work in a place you like then - if you're smart - you'll not only work well, but also make sure everybody knows you're an valuable asset and without you things could go awry. It kind of conflicts with your disappearing for a few months.

andyferris 5y ago
I don't think being valuable implies they can't get by without you. Not at all! It means that you are worth your salary and that they'd rather take you back after some leave than not have you at all or replace you with someone else. If things go awry when you leave it could mean there is a bus factor problem to be addressed.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
  It's a bit nuanced. There is a whole spectrum starting from Amazon warehouse workers who are easily replaceable (or, as we recently heard, will be replaced no matter what) to a guy who trenched himself so that he holds everybody hostage. I consider both extremes unethical because of power imbalance. In any case, it's in the best interest of the company to reduce the bus factor to zero, and by the same token, it's in the best interest of the employee to keep it above zero. You can understand how much it is above zero during salary negotiations, or when you say "I quit" and you are offered a raise. It's mainly because in order to replace you, the new employee needs to be trained and this takes time usually proportional to your experience. Now, in the case we're discussing (paternal leave), you don't just make a threat to leave, you actually just quit - you allow the company to test the scenario of working without you. So basically you lose some bargaining power. I'm not saying this is how things should be, but similar thinking processes are going on in the heads of many people in management positions, especially recently, when you need to put some extra effort justifying your position.
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    I believe you have it backwards regarding the bus factor. The company wants the bus factor to be as high as possible. From Wikipedia: “The "bus factor" is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel.” The issue here is you are treating employees as cogs that have to be “in the machine” for it to work (i.e. the value they provide is to keep the business running). Valuable employees don’t necessarily cause the business to stop working if they leave. They just continuously add value (individually, making people around them better, designing systems that provide advantages over the long term, etc.) when working that wouldn’t be created if they weren’t there.

johnny53169 5y ago

> If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? The truth is that you're never that important and eventually you'll go away from this place, so what is really important to you?

monkeydust 5y ago
Yes this. Most of us like to think we're special and hard to replace and some are harder than others to replace but we can all be replaced. Can the replacement do as good a job as you ? Who knows, could be same/better/worse and without access to the multiverse you will never know. As you say figure out what you care about the most and double down on that if you can.
_huayra_ 5y ago
A colleague of mine died suddenly. This guy was a tech lead at my tiny satellite office for a major tech company. Within DAYS they already had an internal/external job posting to fill his position up. I mean I know it's just business, but I realized that I was replacable that day.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  A colleague of mine changed job recently. He was tech lead and had been working on the project for years and we other were quite new. It was obvious things would get harder from now on so half of us bailed, i.e. the three programmers with more then 6 month on the project, and the project collapsed. I mean with enough skill and money the experienced of us and he was replaceable. But not at the current budget. Maybe not even on twice the budget. 'Irreplaceable' is ofent with an implied 'at reasonable cost in a reasonable time'.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  I think that it's an important lesson to internalize both about yourself and also your coworkers. My place has a saying that literally translates to something like "there's a full graveyard with irreplaceable people" - and that's how it is; no matter how hard is to replace someone, eventually they will (have to) be replaced anyway.

onion2k 5y ago

If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? If you can leave your job in a state that means the next 6 months are problem-free then you are amazing. You've obviously planned ahead, documented things, and foreseen potential problems that you've mitigated ahead of time. Any company would be crazy to lose you. If you leave your job in a state where the problems are fixable then you're pretty good. You haven't foreseen things or left good enough plans, and maybe there's issues with documentation and strategy, but things were in a good state that others can recover from. That's more than most companies ask for. If you leave your job and everything falls apart then there are issues somewhere. You, or people you rely on, are basically winging it, and the company doesn't see that as a problem.

raspyberr 5y ago
>If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? I would spin that arguement against the business rather than against people. It's clearly a business-PoV argument. If your business stops functioning after losing a small percentage of employees then it's a poorly planned businesses. It has poor redundancy measures and should fail.
- dusted 5y ago
  This. I'm on a rather long paternity leave as of now, and I really hope everything runs as if I'd never left when I get back, otherwise, the bus factor is too low.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  It also means that the normal day to day operation of the business must have a lot of overhead to have that kind of redundancy though. Redundancy is never free.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >Redundancy is never free. This. Austria has generous parental leave policies but the effect of that is that as a woman in your late twenties or early thirties, you will have a hard time changing jobs in highly skilled positions as the employer will expect you'll get pregnant soon and will need to find a temporary replacement for you which is impossible as no highly skilled worker wants to be on a fixed short term contract for the same pay, so many employers who can't or don't want to eat the cost of redundancy will prioritize hiring males instead and spread your workload while you're on leave to the remaining workers, causing them to be overworked for that period. That's the hidden cost.

rkachowski 5y ago

Oh wow, I was also in Japan in February 2020 when the pandemic hit, but being stranded didn't even enter my mind as a possibility. How did you adapt initially?

wirthjason 5y ago
I loved it! I lived in Japan before so it wasn’t a struggle. Tokyo summers are brutal though! What was your experience? Do you live there or was it just a visit? I thought Japan handled the pandemic much more reasonable than what my friends reported in the US. Initially I was worried about the density of Tokyo but mask wearing was already high. Everyone used hand sanitizer, socially distanced, etc. Tokyo never went on full lock down, it was just very limited so we got to do things I don’t think we would have done otherwise. Eg. we went to Tokyo Disney / Disney Sea a couple times and at 20-50% capacity it was like having the place to yourself.

alias_neo 5y ago

When my daughter was born, I was entitled to 2 weeks. I had saved 2 weeks of holiday so I could take a total of 4 weeks, but wasn't allowed to do so, because the company couldn't function without me for that long. Two, four weeks, or whatever it is really isn't enough time, your partner needs support and you have a new child to look after. Like you, the pandemic left us spending the first year+ at home with our daughter and it has been a benefit to each of us.

wirthjason 5y ago
Sorry to hear you couldn’t take it off. Do you feel that the company couldn’t function without you?
bregma 5y ago
We call this the "lottery rule" or, when management are not around, the "bus rule". If the company can not function without a single employee, they also need to ban employees from buying lottery tickets. Or walking on streets patrolled by homicidal buses (is there any other kind when it comes to key employees?). Bad management is a sign they are going to experience running the company without key employees sooner rather than later.
- artpi 5y ago
  I thought its a bus count factor - how many employees have to be in a bus accident for the company to suffer a fatal blow. Have never heard about the lottery one but that sounds like a nice positive spin!
- xkcd-sucks 5y ago
  Interesting, at my place it's the other way around: Suggesting someone might be unwillingly killed by chance is fine ("bus rule "), but suggesting someone could find the job materially useless ("lottery rule") or get fed up ("fuck-it rule") is gauche
__turbobrew__ 5y ago
If the company can't function without you for 4 weeks you should ask for a $300000 bonus for not taking paternity leave. Otherwise you could leave and the company would cease to exist.

jusssi 5y ago

> If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? If the work you're doing is important to the employer in any way, they need to have a backup plan on how to get that work done anyway. Because employees also switch jobs, get sick etc. Simulating a situation where an important worker becomes unavailable for an extended period of time is probably even a good exercise from organization point of view.

vidarh 5y ago
It's a reason why employers should encourage regular reasonably long holidays.as well. Stress testing failure modes in situations where you can plan ahead and can buy your way out of a crisis is better than finding out in circumstances where you can't.

roenxi 5y ago

If you're using paternity leave because "you've earned it", why should you get special leave? Just use annual leave! You've earned that too, and it leaves you on equal footing with everyone else without getting special brownie points for being a lucky husband. At the end of the day, this is unfair. People who have - in this case up to 3 - kids get a structural advantage. We're in an era where not only do we expect a lot of people not to have kids, the ones who aren't having them are in some sense making a sacrifice of some very precious moments for the ones who are. This is an expression of the same old arguments against maternity leave as well - at the end of the day, this is making private choices a problem for the company and (to some extent) the people working at the company. The effects of this sort of thing can already be seen in the differences between men and women's pay & career opportunities - it is a substantial handicap! We should be winding back on this sort of thing, not encouraging it. People should earn their living and take time off at their own expense. EDIT And, having thought about it a bit, it might favour wealthy workers. You end up with situations where effectively the janitor's wage has to go down to cover for the risk the software engineer has kids.

vianneychevalie 5y ago
I respect your opinion but on a nation-by-nation basis we benefit from having kids (although it could be discussed on a worldwide basis), and we benefit from having well-educated kids that are cared for by their parents. It is a cost for people who don’t have kids, but a net gain for everyone. A bit like healthcare. People who chose not to smoke benefit from paying taxes used to heal smokers, although a cigarette brings a lot less joy and benefit than kids. It is my opinion and I’m politically strongly against demographic shrinking.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Go with a cash handout provided by the government. It is better than paternity leave. If there was a choice between a cash handout + keep on working vs. paternity leave a significant number of meant would prefer the cash handout. The basic "this is the deal you get" for men is if they work hard for it & finance the operation then they get a happy & loving family. There are men who'd prefer the time & men who undervalue the time. But there are a lot of men who correctly identify that hard work, maximising their career outcomes and earning as much money as they can is the best way to help their family and this scheme disadvantages them. If people want unpaid time off I'm all for it. But paid vacation is not justified.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ElViajero 5y ago

> are you really that important? This is a very self-centered view of the universe. No, you are not important nor you need to be. I do my job, if I leave someone else is going to be hired to do it. That is how it works. If you are "important" then you should be receiving a share of the profits, not a salary. A salary just means that you can be replaced, no matter how high it is. I guess that it is a cultural thing, that many people have been convinced to work extra hours, to not take vacations, to slave away their lives for a sense of "self importance". I get a fantastic salary, I enjoy my work, but I am not important. It is difficult to replace me, it took 2 years to get another person in my position. But, if I tomorrow leave, the company will manage. I bring value, but I am not the center of the universe. I bring value, but I am not irreplaceable. I bring value, but I have to take (by law) vacations and the company will continue running without me. All jobs in a company bring value and the employees needs to be respected for that. It does not matter if you have a low-paid low-skilled job, you are still being paid because you bring value and you should be respected for it. And you should be able to go on vacations, because the goal of all this capitalist thing is to make our lives better, to be slaves we do not need capitalism. If in your society low-paid low-skill workers cannot take vacations, then you are failing at bringing well-being, health, and meaning to the members of your society. And for what? To produce another plastic shit that will be polluting the ocean in one month? To show more ads to people that cannot afford to buy more shit? I guess that this is a difference in society values. But for me the question "are you really important" should be answered as "yes, because I have friends, family, children, hobbies, etc." and what you produce is only a small part of that value.

ashtonkem 5y ago

I also point out that any of us will be replaced fairly quickly if we were to drop dead suddenly too; but for whatever reason this logic only ever crops up when people are thinking about taking more time off rather than less.