10 ms·

Why we offer parental leave

146 points by yurisagalov 12y ago

eduardordm 12y ago
This is certainly a move in the right direction and I'm glad a startup is caring about its employees like that. "What is your startup's parental leave policy?" In my country 6 months leaves (with full payment) are mandatory for mothers. Mothers also gain job stability soon as they get pregnant and cannot be fired due to their time off. I live in a 3rd world country and it really blows my mind developed countries allows such short leaves. In my company we give the mandatory 6 month leave, we also pay medical bills if there are any and 12 month health insurance for the baby (some employees choose their own insurance plans, some don't cover pregnancy). There is an option to give only a 4 month leave, but it's very expensive and most companies don't even consider that. I'm a father of one (and expecting the second). I think 6 months is not enough. Yes, paying salaries for employees on leave adds costs, but this is diluted in the company cost and there are tax breaks over it.
- yuncun 12y ago
  Can I ask what country you are from?
  - radicalbyte 12y ago
    Brazil, his LinkedIn is in his profile ;)
- yourapostasy 12y ago
  In the US, there are chicken-and-egg challenges all over the map that obstruct the adoption of such policies in small businesses. The big challenge is the out-of-control medical costs that pressure policy decisions elsewhere in the decision matrix. A typical natural birth procedure alone in the US, with the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) around $10K. If you go to C-section due to typical child birth complications (can happen to even the most well-prepared and assiduous couples), it triples and can easily hit $40K. If there are additional complications, it can easily hit $100K and rapidly go up from there depending upon the specific set of complications. If your startup has fewer than 50 participants in the company group health plan, even a completely normal natural child birth in one year will cause a rate rise the next year that is higher than it normally would be. On top of that, there are the costs of supporting parental leave: none of the expense is granted favorable tax treatment at the federal level (and not at the state level in my state). For businesses with very high revenue per employee like in the tech industry, these intersecting facts don't sink the feasibility if the business leadership makes a commitment from the outset and plans their budgeting with the commitment in mind. I'm glad that AeroFS is publicizing this, adding to the trend of similar family friendly policy stories out of other tech companies in recent years. But for small businesses in other sectors and even more marginal tech companies, these realities on the ground are just brutal on the odds of such policies making out of "gleam in the eye" stages. From a statecraft perspective, I'd be really interested in finding out if front-loading the expenses of encouraging family formation via tax breaks and incentives to mitigate the costs that employers currently bear, would compare favorably to the back-end costs (including externalities, where most of the back-end ramifications come from, starting with costs of monetary policy decisions partly made in reaction to a greying population) of dealing with an inverted population pyramid. That opens a whole other can of worms of whether or not an inverted population pyramid is desirable or not in the first place.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    > the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) On the topic of distorted costs, I nearly flipped out last night when I got the statement for my recent polysomnogram. The sticker price, if I walked in uninsured, would have been $8750. My insurance company is paying $616, and I am paying $15. I think it is abhorrent that the facility just ignores 93% of the sticker price just because I have insurance. I saw similar massive write-downs on my arm surgery. I imagine a C-section is the same.
    - JeremyMorgan 12y ago
      That "sticker price" isn't a real number. It's used so when uninsured people don't pay it, they can write it off.
    - pc86 12y ago
      Which becomes even more mind-boggling when, if your insurance declines it for whatever reason or there is a problem processing the insurance and it's not caught in time, you get a bill for $6,000 after a "discount." But typically by the time those letters arrive you've already got $1,500 in fees and charges.
      - ashark 12y ago
        The typical billing experience for anything non-trivial in US hospitals is batshit crazy. One visit can generate three or four bills from different people and institutions. Some of these bills they'll tell you to ignore if you call about them because insurance is covering all or part of it, but they sent the bill before that was sorted out, for god knows what reason. Don't worry, you'll get more, corrected (hopefully? maybe?) bills later. Then explanation of benefits letters arrive, which look sort of like bills but aren't. Almost certainly, at least one of the billing people and/or the insurance folks screwed something up and you'll get to spend most of a day on hold with insurance and a hospital or test processing company or whatever sorting it out. If you miss anything in this mountain of mostly-useless paperwork you may find late notices in your mailbox a month or two later. Now you get to try to figure out whether the charges on those late notices were legit, or whether they're the result of some seemingly-alway-incompetent hospital billing department's error. While racing against the date on which it goes to collections, and while fees and such accrue. By four months out you finally, maybe, know what your total costs were/are, after hours of dealing with it and filling half a filing cabinet drawer with documents. Now, consider that most procedures will include several visits generating a similar number of bills in the months leading up to it. You'll being bombarded with this garbage non-stop for months on either side of the Main Event. You'll also have some follow up appointments and/or tests. Fun! Basically everyone involved either doesn't care about doing their job correctly or is actively trying to steal your money. Half the time they don't know WTF is going on. You or your loved ones get to deal with that while you're sick or recovering. We call this health care. Some people prefer to pay a premium for this "service" instead of having single-payer or a national healthcare service because... that would make us less free? That's how bad it is with insurance. Without is, I'm sure, much worse, though probably less complicated.
yawz 12y ago
Nice to see parents in the US might start to enjoy one of the standard benefits in most (probably all) European countries. Being a father, I cannot even imagine leaving my 6-week old baby in a day care, which seems to be the thing parents have to do in the US if both are working. Also, I think gender equality is an important one on many aspects: - Bonding with the child(ren) should not only a motherly privilege. - The mother's career may be more important to concentrate on. - The father may be interested in doing his share. - I'm not certain but from the point of view of the child(ren) there can be advantages to have both parents involved the same way. Ideally I'd like to see certain amount of time allocated to the "family" that can be used/divided by the parents as they see fit.
clbrook 12y ago
As a mother of an almost 6 year old and a software developer pre and post child, this type of policy is forward thinking and likely appreciated by many employees. I'm trying to think of an argument against such a policy and can't think of one. From the sounds of it, companies will be financially ahead with such policies, at least as it averages out over time?
- sokoloff 12y ago
  Let me help you try to think of an argument against it. (Note that I am not necessarily MAKING this argument.) Suppose you're running a startup and you have 12 employee-months worth of runway left before you'll need to show a concrete proof point to close the next round of funding or, preferably, get to cash-flow breakeven/Ramen-profitable. Your product is inherently labor-centric. Your employees/team-mates are your best and only hope to produce the product. In that situation, would you rather be using your last 12 person-months of runway paying your employees to work on the product or paying them to not work on the product and instead raise their own infant child? Would your company be materially less likely to succeed if one of your employees had a new child and took 15-30% of the remaining runway while providing no benefit to the product? Probably. What's the mechanism by which a company would be financially ahead with such policies? Would you personally be willing to work for less pay in order to work at such a company? I can agree that employees who use such policies might be much more likely to stay, but I wonder if employees who carry the load while the new parent is on leave (but their position not filled, so all the burden falls to the rest of the team) might be less loyal? I'm a parent of 2; my wife took the statutory maximum FMLA leave with each of them; her employer had a generally generous paid leave policy, and I'm not anti-kid by any means. I am anti-regulation in general though... These policies may be breakeven or profitable in the long-run; I don't know. I do know they present a period of unprofitability in the short-term. And when they are gender-specific or even primary-provider-specific, they can manifest themselves as hiring biases against those people most likely to use the policy.
  - vacri 12y ago
    What's the mechanism by which a company would be financially ahead with such policies? Drawing from a deeper talent pool; building a more loyal workforce; improving morale. All of which help your existing hours be more effective and the latter two mean staff are more likely to do extra work.
option 12y ago
It really is a shame that US is the only "developed" country in the world without paid parental leave. It is also obvious that no gender equality in workplace can be achieved until both mothers and fathers have access to adequate and equal parental leave. Luckily, some tech companies start to care and offer some time off to both mothers and fathers. Well done AeroFS!
- sigzero 12y ago
  It's a benefit of working for that company. Awesome. That should not be forced on every company.
  - ashark 12y ago
    Why not?
    - LanceH 12y ago
      It drives up the cost of employment and will eliminate marginal companies which otherwise might exist.
      - PeterisP 12y ago
        We the people have the right to choose if we'd rather prefer a few more marginal companies or better conditions for our babies.
- vidarh 12y ago
  While that may be so, the UK is not that much better. There's a statutory right for 12 months for the mother and two weeks for the father, but this is the statutory maternity pay rules: > SMP for eligible employees can be paid for up to 39 weeks, usually as follows: > the first 6 weeks - 90% of their average weekly earnings (AWE) before tax > the remaining 33 weeks - £138.18 or 90% of their AWE (whichever is lower) That adds up to less than 30% of median income for the latter 33 weeks of the 39 weeks statutory maternity pay.
jasonkester 12y ago
I took a bunch of time off (unpaid) after our first kid, and it was definitely helpful. For the second one though, I took a different tack. I just dropped down to 4 day weeks. It was actually easy enough to do. I'd already been gone entirely for a few weeks, then I came back most of the way to full time, then... I just never ramped back up the rest of the way. (I bill by the hour, so there was never a salary discussion to muddy the waters). That was over a year ago. I'm healthier now than I was then (partly from that extra day of chasing kids around, partly because with 3 day weekends all the time you find extra time in the mix for things like mountain biking). And I seem to be just as productive since I come in to each week with a nice clear mind, without having to have crammed and entire weekend worth of activity into just 2 days. I toy with the idea of dropping down to 3 day weeks.
geebee 12y ago
I'm very glad to see this post, and to see that these issues are gaining in importance and visibility. It's not because I plan to use parental leave. I already have two kids. And it's not only because I'm glad to see these policies help other people out, though of course that's part of it. It's that this sort of "perk", rather than foosball tables, beer fridays, and vintage video game machines, give me hope that the industry is outgrowing its insular, "young people are just smarter" culture. That maybe employers are actually interested in sustained careers that will experience the ebb and flow of life, rather than just a period of extended adolescence. Parental leave policies do imply long term thinking.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  It shouldn't even be a perk, it should be standard and law.
  - wyager 12y ago
    Why? It may be nice, but why should employers be forced to subsidize reproduction?
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Because it is one of those things that help close the gender gap, and besides without reproduction where will those companies get the next generation of workers and who will help pay for the pensions of those that work today. Almost every developed country has done the math and has realized that having children is part of having a society and that paid leave for people that have children is on balance a good thing. Ditto anti-discriminatory hiring laws and laws that state that it is illegal to ask a woman directly or indirectly whether or not she plans to have children during the hiring process. Here is a nice map illustrating the various times available per country: http://worldpolicyforum.org/global-maps/is-paid-leave-available-for-mothers-of-infants/ http://worldpolicyforum.org/global-maps/is-paid-leave-availa...
      - vonmoltke 12y ago
digitalchaos 12y ago
I wish my company did this when I had a kid. They gave me 2 weeks paid leave. Then I took 6 weeks semi-paid leave from the state. aaaaaand when I returned I was notified that since I "missed" a few weeks of on-call rotation during my leave that I was basically on-call for every day for the next month to "make up" for it. That was pretty awesome considering the production environment would break at least once every day between midnight and 6am. It made taking care of an 8 week old who needed feeding every few hours at night even easier.
- jasonkester 12y ago
  Keep in mind that they didn't "tell" you that you'd be on call every night. They asked, and you said OK. The fact that they didn't include a question mark at the end of the sentence doesn't change the fact. The correct answer is still "No, Of course not." It's then up to them to decide whether it's worth firing you for giving the sensible answer to their silly request.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > Keep in mind that they didn't "tell" you that you'd be on call every night. They asked, and you said OK. Am I missing something or were you involved somehow?
    - pc86 12y ago
      You are being incredibly hostile throughout this thread.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        You make no sense at all. I simply asked a question prompted by this bit: "Keep in mind that they didn't "tell" you that you'd be on call every night. They asked, and you said OK." GGP did not suggest in any way that there was a dialogue, he simply said that he was told that he had the bad shift and that was that. So either JasonKester knows more than is apparent from the comment or I don't understand where he got that knowledge, it's not as if walking out was on the list of viable options for the GGP. Please indicate why you think I'm hostile, or is asking questions the new hostility?
manachar 12y ago
That's awesome that some companies are starting to be proactive about this. One further step would be to require parents to take this time off. There was a news report about how American employees didn't use much of their vacation time last year. In a competitive company people who take vacation or the full parental leave can be seen as not being passionate enough about the job. This can lead to an environment where nobody takes vacation and I imagine many will choose not to take parental leave.
fourier 12y ago
In most of the developed countries in the world parental leave is a country responsibility, not a company.
timjahn 12y ago
This needs to be standard across companies of all size and it needs to be a reasonable time, as it is at AeroFS. Kudos to them for doing something about it.
Alex3917 12y ago
Why should salary while on parental leave be determined by salary while working?
- frandroid 12y ago
  Because people engage in expenses according to their salaries (mortgage payments, rent), and should be able to maintain that during parental leave.
tomaskafka 12y ago
I get so sad every time when someone describes how things work in US. First 3 years are crucial in development of a child and it makes such a huge difference if the baby/child has an attention, love and contact with her parents 24/7 - or, if she spends day laying in an understaffed daycare with very little incentives to develop her. Just for comparison, my country (Czech Republic) provides: * 28 weeks of paid leave that start 6-8 weeks before expected birth date, with a payment roughly similar to average of mothers last year's net salary. * Birth itself is covered by state insurance. 2-4 years long maternal leave where (any) parent gets a fixed sum of cca 11 average monthly salaries (distributed over the maternal leave period). * During the above time, state also pays parent's health insurance. * Also, employer has to ensure that parent can return to his/her position as long as the leave is shorter than 3 years. You might think that this is expensive, but I see it as an investment in giving children healthy start full of attention and love, no matter their family's situation.
husted 12y ago
When we had our first, and thus far, only kid there were some complication that resulted in my GF had to be hospitalized. Then it got worse and she was moved to a hospital which specialized in her condition. I moved into the hospital and stayed there for about 2 weeks with her and eventually our newborn son. In the end she was out of her job for almost a year. Direct monetary cost to us? Zero. The downside is a high income tax so thanks to all my country men for helping us. Mom, dad and son are all doing great now.
djb_hackernews 12y ago
I don't see how there is even an argument against parental leave. Humanity isn't here to ensure the survival of the corporation. We allow corporations to exist. If we decide that family time and bonding with our children is important, which we should, then the corporations need to adjust. Fathers and mothers should get time measured in months to bond with their children after birth. It doesn't even need to be paid for by the company, we should just be using the unemployment benefits we've all already paid in to. It'll also help the job market as some positions may require temp workers to fill gaps. I'm honestly perplexed how anyone can be against mandatory parental leave and I'm a single guy without any children or any plan to have children in the near future. Someday most of us won't work, not in the sense we view work in this current day, so why fight the inevitable? We should embrace it and take steps to get it right that is fair and sustainable.
mooreds 12y ago
I worked for a small company when my wife had our children. I was the first employee to have a child while at the job. I was lucky enough to be senior enough to negotiate the parental leave that I needed. It was unpaid. My employer did not force me to take vacation time, which was kind of them. A month or two before I left, the COO created a parental leave policy, and I was glad to see it codified. This was a company with under 25 employees, but they could have benefited from this post (and this one, which the OP linked to: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/its-not-okay-to-not-have-a-parental-leave-policy http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/its-not-okay-to-n... ).
LarryLarryLarry 12y ago
As a parent with a few kids, I was very fortunate to be able to work with my employer and instead of x number of weeks off, we split the same quantity of hours to part time per day for double the amount of weeks. This worked out well for both me and the company. The company was able to continue projects with my input, and I did not feel like a stranger on my "return". Obviously for the first few days I was completely out, but after that I could handle dropping by the office a few hours each day.

146 points by yurisagalov 12y ago

This is certainly a move in the right direction and I'm glad a startup is caring about its employees like that. "What is your startup's parental leave policy?" In my country 6 months leaves (with full payment) are mandatory for mothers. Mothers also gain job stability soon as they get pregnant and cannot be fired due to their time off. I live in a 3rd world country and it really blows my mind developed countries allows such short leaves. In my company we give the mandatory 6 month leave, we also pay medical bills if there are any and 12 month health insurance for the baby (some employees choose their own insurance plans, some don't cover pregnancy). There is an option to give only a 4 month leave, but it's very expensive and most companies don't even consider that. I'm a father of one (and expecting the second). I think 6 months is not enough. Yes, paying salaries for employees on leave adds costs, but this is diluted in the company cost and there are tax breaks over it.

yuncun 12y ago
Can I ask what country you are from?
- radicalbyte 12y ago
  Brazil, his LinkedIn is in his profile ;)
yourapostasy 12y ago
In the US, there are chicken-and-egg challenges all over the map that obstruct the adoption of such policies in small businesses. The big challenge is the out-of-control medical costs that pressure policy decisions elsewhere in the decision matrix. A typical natural birth procedure alone in the US, with the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) around $10K. If you go to C-section due to typical child birth complications (can happen to even the most well-prepared and assiduous couples), it triples and can easily hit $40K. If there are additional complications, it can easily hit $100K and rapidly go up from there depending upon the specific set of complications. If your startup has fewer than 50 participants in the company group health plan, even a completely normal natural child birth in one year will cause a rate rise the next year that is higher than it normally would be. On top of that, there are the costs of supporting parental leave: none of the expense is granted favorable tax treatment at the federal level (and not at the state level in my state). For businesses with very high revenue per employee like in the tech industry, these intersecting facts don't sink the feasibility if the business leadership makes a commitment from the outset and plans their budgeting with the commitment in mind. I'm glad that AeroFS is publicizing this, adding to the trend of similar family friendly policy stories out of other tech companies in recent years. But for small businesses in other sectors and even more marginal tech companies, these realities on the ground are just brutal on the odds of such policies making out of "gleam in the eye" stages. From a statecraft perspective, I'd be really interested in finding out if front-loading the expenses of encouraging family formation via tax breaks and incentives to mitigate the costs that employers currently bear, would compare favorably to the back-end costs (including externalities, where most of the back-end ramifications come from, starting with costs of monetary policy decisions partly made in reaction to a greying population) of dealing with an inverted population pyramid. That opens a whole other can of worms of whether or not an inverted population pyramid is desirable or not in the first place.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  > the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) On the topic of distorted costs, I nearly flipped out last night when I got the statement for my recent polysomnogram. The sticker price, if I walked in uninsured, would have been $8750. My insurance company is paying $616, and I am paying $15. I think it is abhorrent that the facility just ignores 93% of the sticker price just because I have insurance. I saw similar massive write-downs on my arm surgery. I imagine a C-section is the same.
  - JeremyMorgan 12y ago
    That "sticker price" isn't a real number. It's used so when uninsured people don't pay it, they can write it off.
  - pc86 12y ago
    Which becomes even more mind-boggling when, if your insurance declines it for whatever reason or there is a problem processing the insurance and it's not caught in time, you get a bill for $6,000 after a "discount." But typically by the time those letters arrive you've already got $1,500 in fees and charges.
    - ashark 12y ago
      The typical billing experience for anything non-trivial in US hospitals is batshit crazy. One visit can generate three or four bills from different people and institutions. Some of these bills they'll tell you to ignore if you call about them because insurance is covering all or part of it, but they sent the bill before that was sorted out, for god knows what reason. Don't worry, you'll get more, corrected (hopefully? maybe?) bills later. Then explanation of benefits letters arrive, which look sort of like bills but aren't. Almost certainly, at least one of the billing people and/or the insurance folks screwed something up and you'll get to spend most of a day on hold with insurance and a hospital or test processing company or whatever sorting it out. If you miss anything in this mountain of mostly-useless paperwork you may find late notices in your mailbox a month or two later. Now you get to try to figure out whether the charges on those late notices were legit, or whether they're the result of some seemingly-alway-incompetent hospital billing department's error. While racing against the date on which it goes to collections, and while fees and such accrue. By four months out you finally, maybe, know what your total costs were/are, after hours of dealing with it and filling half a filing cabinet drawer with documents. Now, consider that most procedures will include several visits generating a similar number of bills in the months leading up to it. You'll being bombarded with this garbage non-stop for months on either side of the Main Event. You'll also have some follow up appointments and/or tests. Fun! Basically everyone involved either doesn't care about doing their job correctly or is actively trying to steal your money. Half the time they don't know WTF is going on. You or your loved ones get to deal with that while you're sick or recovering. We call this health care. Some people prefer to pay a premium for this "service" instead of having single-payer or a national healthcare service because... that would make us less free? That's how bad it is with insurance. Without is, I'm sure, much worse, though probably less complicated.

yawz 12y ago

Nice to see parents in the US might start to enjoy one of the standard benefits in most (probably all) European countries. Being a father, I cannot even imagine leaving my 6-week old baby in a day care, which seems to be the thing parents have to do in the US if both are working. Also, I think gender equality is an important one on many aspects: - Bonding with the child(ren) should not only a motherly privilege. - The mother's career may be more important to concentrate on. - The father may be interested in doing his share. - I'm not certain but from the point of view of the child(ren) there can be advantages to have both parents involved the same way. Ideally I'd like to see certain amount of time allocated to the "family" that can be used/divided by the parents as they see fit.

clbrook 12y ago

As a mother of an almost 6 year old and a software developer pre and post child, this type of policy is forward thinking and likely appreciated by many employees. I'm trying to think of an argument against such a policy and can't think of one. From the sounds of it, companies will be financially ahead with such policies, at least as it averages out over time?

sokoloff 12y ago
Let me help you try to think of an argument against it. (Note that I am not necessarily MAKING this argument.) Suppose you're running a startup and you have 12 employee-months worth of runway left before you'll need to show a concrete proof point to close the next round of funding or, preferably, get to cash-flow breakeven/Ramen-profitable. Your product is inherently labor-centric. Your employees/team-mates are your best and only hope to produce the product. In that situation, would you rather be using your last 12 person-months of runway paying your employees to work on the product or paying them to not work on the product and instead raise their own infant child? Would your company be materially less likely to succeed if one of your employees had a new child and took 15-30% of the remaining runway while providing no benefit to the product? Probably. What's the mechanism by which a company would be financially ahead with such policies? Would you personally be willing to work for less pay in order to work at such a company? I can agree that employees who use such policies might be much more likely to stay, but I wonder if employees who carry the load while the new parent is on leave (but their position not filled, so all the burden falls to the rest of the team) might be less loyal? I'm a parent of 2; my wife took the statutory maximum FMLA leave with each of them; her employer had a generally generous paid leave policy, and I'm not anti-kid by any means. I am anti-regulation in general though... These policies may be breakeven or profitable in the long-run; I don't know. I do know they present a period of unprofitability in the short-term. And when they are gender-specific or even primary-provider-specific, they can manifest themselves as hiring biases against those people most likely to use the policy.
- vacri 12y ago
  What's the mechanism by which a company would be financially ahead with such policies? Drawing from a deeper talent pool; building a more loyal workforce; improving morale. All of which help your existing hours be more effective and the latter two mean staff are more likely to do extra work.

option 12y ago

It really is a shame that US is the only "developed" country in the world without paid parental leave. It is also obvious that no gender equality in workplace can be achieved until both mothers and fathers have access to adequate and equal parental leave. Luckily, some tech companies start to care and offer some time off to both mothers and fathers. Well done AeroFS!

sigzero 12y ago
It's a benefit of working for that company. Awesome. That should not be forced on every company.
- ashark 12y ago
  Why not?
  - LanceH 12y ago
    It drives up the cost of employment and will eliminate marginal companies which otherwise might exist.
    - PeterisP 12y ago
      We the people have the right to choose if we'd rather prefer a few more marginal companies or better conditions for our babies.
vidarh 12y ago
While that may be so, the UK is not that much better. There's a statutory right for 12 months for the mother and two weeks for the father, but this is the statutory maternity pay rules: > SMP for eligible employees can be paid for up to 39 weeks, usually as follows: > the first 6 weeks - 90% of their average weekly earnings (AWE) before tax > the remaining 33 weeks - £138.18 or 90% of their AWE (whichever is lower) That adds up to less than 30% of median income for the latter 33 weeks of the 39 weeks statutory maternity pay.

jasonkester 12y ago

I took a bunch of time off (unpaid) after our first kid, and it was definitely helpful. For the second one though, I took a different tack. I just dropped down to 4 day weeks. It was actually easy enough to do. I'd already been gone entirely for a few weeks, then I came back most of the way to full time, then... I just never ramped back up the rest of the way. (I bill by the hour, so there was never a salary discussion to muddy the waters). That was over a year ago. I'm healthier now than I was then (partly from that extra day of chasing kids around, partly because with 3 day weekends all the time you find extra time in the mix for things like mountain biking). And I seem to be just as productive since I come in to each week with a nice clear mind, without having to have crammed and entire weekend worth of activity into just 2 days. I toy with the idea of dropping down to 3 day weeks.

geebee 12y ago

I'm very glad to see this post, and to see that these issues are gaining in importance and visibility. It's not because I plan to use parental leave. I already have two kids. And it's not only because I'm glad to see these policies help other people out, though of course that's part of it. It's that this sort of "perk", rather than foosball tables, beer fridays, and vintage video game machines, give me hope that the industry is outgrowing its insular, "young people are just smarter" culture. That maybe employers are actually interested in sustained careers that will experience the ebb and flow of life, rather than just a period of extended adolescence. Parental leave policies do imply long term thinking.

jacquesm 12y ago
It shouldn't even be a perk, it should be standard and law.
- wyager 12y ago
  Why? It may be nice, but why should employers be forced to subsidize reproduction?
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Because it is one of those things that help close the gender gap, and besides without reproduction where will those companies get the next generation of workers and who will help pay for the pensions of those that work today. Almost every developed country has done the math and has realized that having children is part of having a society and that paid leave for people that have children is on balance a good thing. Ditto anti-discriminatory hiring laws and laws that state that it is illegal to ask a woman directly or indirectly whether or not she plans to have children during the hiring process. Here is a nice map illustrating the various times available per country: http://worldpolicyforum.org/global-maps/is-paid-leave-available-for-mothers-of-infants/ http://worldpolicyforum.org/global-maps/is-paid-leave-availa...
    - vonmoltke 12y ago

digitalchaos 12y ago

I wish my company did this when I had a kid. They gave me 2 weeks paid leave. Then I took 6 weeks semi-paid leave from the state. aaaaaand when I returned I was notified that since I "missed" a few weeks of on-call rotation during my leave that I was basically on-call for every day for the next month to "make up" for it. That was pretty awesome considering the production environment would break at least once every day between midnight and 6am. It made taking care of an 8 week old who needed feeding every few hours at night even easier.

jasonkester 12y ago
Keep in mind that they didn't "tell" you that you'd be on call every night. They asked, and you said OK. The fact that they didn't include a question mark at the end of the sentence doesn't change the fact. The correct answer is still "No, Of course not." It's then up to them to decide whether it's worth firing you for giving the sensible answer to their silly request.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > Keep in mind that they didn't "tell" you that you'd be on call every night. They asked, and you said OK. Am I missing something or were you involved somehow?
  - pc86 12y ago
    You are being incredibly hostile throughout this thread.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      You make no sense at all. I simply asked a question prompted by this bit: "Keep in mind that they didn't "tell" you that you'd be on call every night. They asked, and you said OK." GGP did not suggest in any way that there was a dialogue, he simply said that he was told that he had the bad shift and that was that. So either JasonKester knows more than is apparent from the comment or I don't understand where he got that knowledge, it's not as if walking out was on the list of viable options for the GGP. Please indicate why you think I'm hostile, or is asking questions the new hostility?

manachar 12y ago

That's awesome that some companies are starting to be proactive about this. One further step would be to require parents to take this time off. There was a news report about how American employees didn't use much of their vacation time last year. In a competitive company people who take vacation or the full parental leave can be seen as not being passionate enough about the job. This can lead to an environment where nobody takes vacation and I imagine many will choose not to take parental leave.

fourier 12y ago

In most of the developed countries in the world parental leave is a country responsibility, not a company.

timjahn 12y ago

This needs to be standard across companies of all size and it needs to be a reasonable time, as it is at AeroFS. Kudos to them for doing something about it.

Alex3917 12y ago

Why should salary while on parental leave be determined by salary while working?

frandroid 12y ago
Because people engage in expenses according to their salaries (mortgage payments, rent), and should be able to maintain that during parental leave.

tomaskafka 12y ago

I get so sad every time when someone describes how things work in US. First 3 years are crucial in development of a child and it makes such a huge difference if the baby/child has an attention, love and contact with her parents 24/7 - or, if she spends day laying in an understaffed daycare with very little incentives to develop her. Just for comparison, my country (Czech Republic) provides: * 28 weeks of paid leave that start 6-8 weeks before expected birth date, with a payment roughly similar to average of mothers last year's net salary. * Birth itself is covered by state insurance. 2-4 years long maternal leave where (any) parent gets a fixed sum of cca 11 average monthly salaries (distributed over the maternal leave period). * During the above time, state also pays parent's health insurance. * Also, employer has to ensure that parent can return to his/her position as long as the leave is shorter than 3 years. You might think that this is expensive, but I see it as an investment in giving children healthy start full of attention and love, no matter their family's situation.

husted 12y ago

When we had our first, and thus far, only kid there were some complication that resulted in my GF had to be hospitalized. Then it got worse and she was moved to a hospital which specialized in her condition. I moved into the hospital and stayed there for about 2 weeks with her and eventually our newborn son. In the end she was out of her job for almost a year. Direct monetary cost to us? Zero. The downside is a high income tax so thanks to all my country men for helping us. Mom, dad and son are all doing great now.

djb_hackernews 12y ago

I don't see how there is even an argument against parental leave. Humanity isn't here to ensure the survival of the corporation. We allow corporations to exist. If we decide that family time and bonding with our children is important, which we should, then the corporations need to adjust. Fathers and mothers should get time measured in months to bond with their children after birth. It doesn't even need to be paid for by the company, we should just be using the unemployment benefits we've all already paid in to. It'll also help the job market as some positions may require temp workers to fill gaps. I'm honestly perplexed how anyone can be against mandatory parental leave and I'm a single guy without any children or any plan to have children in the near future. Someday most of us won't work, not in the sense we view work in this current day, so why fight the inevitable? We should embrace it and take steps to get it right that is fair and sustainable.

mooreds 12y ago

I worked for a small company when my wife had our children. I was the first employee to have a child while at the job. I was lucky enough to be senior enough to negotiate the parental leave that I needed. It was unpaid. My employer did not force me to take vacation time, which was kind of them. A month or two before I left, the COO created a parental leave policy, and I was glad to see it codified. This was a company with under 25 employees, but they could have benefited from this post (and this one, which the OP linked to: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/its-not-okay-to-not-have-a-parental-leave-policy http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/its-not-okay-to-n... ).

LarryLarryLarry 12y ago

As a parent with a few kids, I was very fortunate to be able to work with my employer and instead of x number of weeks off, we split the same quantity of hours to part time per day for double the amount of weeks. This worked out well for both me and the company. The company was able to continue projects with my input, and I did not feel like a stranger on my "return". Obviously for the first few days I was completely out, but after that I could handle dropping by the office a few hours each day.