
Why we offer parental leave - yurisagalov
https://www.aerofs.com/blog/parental-leave-at-aerofs/
======
geebee
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
It shouldn't even be a perk, it should be standard and law.

~~~
wyager
Why? It may be nice, but why should employers be forced to subsidize
reproduction?

~~~
jacquesm
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-
availa...](http://worldpolicyforum.org/global-maps/is-paid-leave-available-
for-mothers-of-infants/)

~~~
vonmoltke
I agree fully on the gender gap and non-discrimination issues. I'm going to
disagree somewhat on the benefit of encouraging reproduction past a certain
point.

There is a limit to the number of people this planet can sustain. There is a
limit to the size our societies can grow to before they start fundamentally
changing, and not for the better. Those issues should be considered before
making policy decisions that reduce the burdens of reproduction beyond the
replacement rate. In my opinion, couples should have support in the form of
parental leaves, daycare, and such for the first two children. After that, you
are on your own.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, that's a good point but I don't think it is 'encouraging reproduction' so
much as that is is making sure that there is some balance.

Society has entered a coffin corner where we need to increase the numbers to
sustain the previous generation, obviously that isn't going to be a long term
viable strategy and some very clear headed thinking will be required to see
_if_ we can still work our way out of that. But that's a different issue
altogether than the one at heart of the debate here. Not entirely unrelated,
but unrelated enough to be seen as a separate item.

~~~
vonmoltke
Yeah, I was wavering on whether to even make the point because it does start
down a path that branches away from leave policies. I think it is useful to
keep those concerns in mind when discussing them, though.

~~~
jacquesm
Point taken, it's a problem and a very serious one and one that we will likely
have to face in the relatively near future.

------
eduardordm
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.

~~~
yourapostasy
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
> 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.

~~~
pc86
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
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.

~~~
pc86
I had my gallbladder removed in 2009, and was lucky in that at the time I had
what is still the best insurance I've ever had. The sticker price of the
procedure was approximately $50k (ER visit + admission + emergency surgery the
following morning), of which I paid less than 1%. But the amount I did pay was
split between the hospital (at least two separate bills), the surgeon (who was
a contractor for the hospital and billed separately), and my insurance (who
paid something in full but two months later decided I actually owed them $20
for it). This is not counting the $100 ER copay which was refunded to me 90
days after I was admitted (ER copays are typically waived if you're actually
admitted to the hospital for non-US folks).

I was barely out of college at the time so had my parents look over everything
and it was as far as we could tell correct. But still a mountain of paperwork,
and I did miss a legitimate bill and end up paying a $30 late fee on a < $100
bill, which was frustrating.

So yeah. A mess, basically :)

~~~
DanBC
In England we're currently having a crisis in A&E units with unprecedented
volumes of patient ("winter crush"[1]) and a shortage of nurses. Targets are
being missed. 95% of people who turn up at A&E must be seen and treated, or
admitted into a ward, within 4 hours. At present only about 92% of patients
meet that target. At its worst only about 89% of patients met the target.

The trip to A&E would cost you your petrol money or cab fair. The treatment in
A&E, and the hospital is free at the point of delivery[2]. The hospital might
send you home with a month of medication which would again be free atpod. A
regular prescription would cost £8.05 per item per month although there are
many exemptions and many people don't have to pay for meds.

If you wanted to pay for your hospital visit you can. You get your own room
and a free telly, maybe a bit more nursing and a few more HCAs. (In the NHS
beds you possibly have a telly that you pay to use.)

The weird thing is that we get all this while we spend less per capita on
healthcare than the US government. Free healthcare is _cheaper_ than the US
system. And you don't need to get rid of private provision either - so anyone
who wants to pay at the point of delivery can.

[1] more people attend A&E in summer. But the people who attend in winter tend
to be iller and to need a hospital admission.

[2] see how I nearly avoided "it's not free you pay for it in tax" comments

------
yawz
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.

------
digitalchaos
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
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
> 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
You are being incredibly hostile throughout this thread.

~~~
jacquesm
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?

~~~
jasonkester
The second paragraph explains the first. I imagine that's why somebody
downvoted your reply.

Repeating though, in case it wasn't clear: When your boss says "Yeah, we're
going to need you to come in on Saturday... yeah, we lost some people this
week, and now we're gonna have to sorta play catch-up. And yeah, we're going
to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too". That's a request. It's
something you can (and should) say "No" to.

It's entirely possible that there may be ramifications for standing up for
yourself in the face of silly demands from management. But there's absolute
certainty of bad things happening if you don't. (Namely, the terrible thing
you've just been asked to do, as well as dozens of repeat performances now
that you've declared yourself as somebody who can be walked over.)

The best course is always to remain professional, stand up for yourself, and
ensure that you remain on equal footing with your employer. If they do choose
to fire you for working the hours you agreed to work when they hired you,
there are worse things than being a skilled developer in the single best
market for talent in history.

~~~
jacquesm
Right. But the whole point is that if you have just been handed a newborn then
your option to 'walk out' is simply non-existent and so any principled stance
would have to be postponed until the breadwinner is out of the danger zone.
The employer here seems to be engaging in some kind of revenge tactic, as
though the leave was to be made up for rather than something that left the
balance between employer/employee and employee/co-workers in tact.

So I don't see this as a request at all, a request is something that you
practically can say yes to, which doesn't appear to be the case here and does
not come in the form of an order.

~~~
jasonkester
Again, saying no to a request to sacrifice all your nights and weekends for a
month is not the same as quitting your job. It's certainly not a fireable
offence.

They do indeed have places where an employer can reasonably ask an employee to
sacrifice his entire life for the company. Those places are nearly all called
"Japan", and the employer/employee relationship is very different to that in
the USA.

Try enslaving your workers here (or firing them for refusing to be enslaved),
and you face an unpleasant lawsuit.

------
husted
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.

------
option
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!

~~~
vidarh
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.

~~~
Marazan
Parents can share leave in the UK, if the mother takes 9 months, say, then the
father can take the remaining 3 (on top of the 2 weeks statutory)

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

------
clbrook
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
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.

~~~
kchoudhu
Why is my family less important than your product? This kind of micro
thinking, writ large, is how we end up with busted policy at a macro level.

~~~
pc86
The other side of that coin: Why should a business owner give you 30% of their
runway to raise your child when it could be used to achieve market fit and
reach profitability? What if it takes that last 30% to do so?

~~~
kchoudhu
Ah yes, the ticking time bomb. In this one hyperspecific scenario (startups
with a limited runway|ticking nuclear bomb), this policy of (giving parental
leave|not having access to torture) could prove to be bad because (the startup
could fail|a nuclear bomb could destroy us all). Therefore, we should abandon
(paid parental leave|our policy against torture) in the general case.

If the cost of carrying an employee -- not a cofounder! -- for three months
(how much is that? 50K? 60K?) is going to kill the startup, you a) probably
shouldn't have hired the person to begin with and b) don't have much of an
startup to begin with.

It's continually amazing to me how, in a capital environment awash with cheap
funds and outrageous valuations, this kind of cheapness pervades everyone's
thought processes. Stop thinking like broke college students, and start
thinking like the people of substantial affairs you claim to be.

------
djb_hackernews
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.

------
jasonkester
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.

------
mooreds
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-n...](http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/its-not-okay-to-not-have-
a-parental-leave-policy) ).

------
tomaskafka
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.

------
LarryLarryLarry
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.

------
manachar
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.

------
Alex3917
Why should salary while on parental leave be determined by salary while
working?

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

------
timjahn
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.

