This is great. It sends the message that no matter who you are, prioritizing family over business is an option, especially when a newborn has arrived.
I'm also willing to bet that it's good for business. An employee with better relationships at home is more likely to be productive at work in the long term.
Yeah, if he had waned to make money he had plenty of opportunities before Facebook even went public. He has a vision and he is executing it in all his power, never worrying about how much he earns.
This reminds of something Vij Rajarajan(big boss in MSFT) told about - "I have realized almost everything in life is a paradox. If you want to grow in your current role you might think you have to not help out others and worry only about your job but in reality you grow by helping out others".
I think this also applies to Mark Zuckeberg - if he had wanted to make money the company would not have grown so much. He focused on the vision and now he has made money.
What? He waited waited until he had enough people hooked, and then, and only then did he go public.
He gently pricked our arms with ads. When he didn't get much flack; he went hog wild.
This dude is all about the money. Mark didn't want to make a little money--he wanted it all.
Hell, he tried to weasel the original founder's fathers money out of FB. Why--because he wanted the money. Oh, the foreign dude didn't were a hoodie, and a tee shirt to the office?
Exactly what is Mark's vision? It's money. I thought I got him wrong when I heard Internet.org was going to set up as a California nonprofit, but found out that was just rumor. It's not even a Delaware nonprofit. It's for profit! He'll always have complete control.
Personally, I think FB is one of the worst/dictatorial things to happen to the Internet. Will it go away--maybe in certain demographic markets, like the Bay Area. I don't run into people anymore asking me to "FB them.", and when I do go on there a lot of people I know only activate on the weekends. Will the rest of the world ever dislike FB--who knows? They still like disco.
I've hero worshiped very few tech founders. Maybe it's just me, but I always seem to see there worst traights? Maybe because I was screwed over once?
As to all his philanthropic work--it has tax benefits. People lionionize Bill Gates too. I don't get it? We were forced into buying his operating system. It's our money in that nonprofit him, and his wife play God with.
Microsoft, by charging OEMs for a license regardless of whether you bought a computer with Windows or not. It took a consent decree to stop the process.
I don't care much about Facebook's success, but I'm curious about one thing you said here...the "activate on weekends" part. Is this a type of social behaviour in and of itself for Bay Area tech people? You're not talking about logging out of Facebook, I think you mean deleting your account for one-week periods and reactivating it only on the weekend, right?
Work - life balance also means not going overboard on the slacking side too. Plenty of IPO millionaires "retire" and find themselves bored silly after their world trips.
Unlike Microsoft was to Bill Gates, Facebook seems to embody Mark's lifelong ideologies (connecting everyone in the world). He has often said he doesn't see himself doing anything with his life other than building the future of Facebook, just in a different form if Facebook hadn't taken off. On the other hand Gates just hit the lottery on one of the projects he worked on related to a field he was good at, when what he seems to really care about is more grassroots philanthropy work.
If he could take two months off he could probably take a few years off, but he would probably just be itching to go back to work on FB the whole time.
> On the other hand Gates just hit the lottery on one of the projects he worked on related to a field he was good at
Won the lottery, not really. Bill Gates was a harsh businessman who relentlessly fought to kill off competition by all means possible - it was not by mistake that Microsoft became what it is.
And, I'd dare say that it has very little correlation with how "good" he/they were at all. Most Microsoft software was utter crap till recent history compared to the existing alternatives - the fact that they managed to secure the market and third party developers was much more relevant than anything else.
Microsoft software was not 'utter crap'. Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus. IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won. Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day.
Don't get me wrong. Microsoft software was crap, it's just that the competition was even worse. The quality of modern software is much improved.
>Word won by virtue of being better than WordPerfect. Excel won by being better than lotus
Excel and Word won by virtue of being bundled and thus cheaper than buying Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect separately.
>IE 5 was a better browser than Netscape 4, though in that case its superiority was not why it won
No, because the battle was won by IE 4, by being part of Windows 95.
>Even in the windows vs mac contest windows XP was a much better OS than the contemporary Mac OS, and arguably the best desktop OS of its day.
I don't think that Windows XP (august 2001) was better than Mac OS X (march 2001), Be OS (march 1998) or Linux distributions that were current at that time. But it doesn't matter because at that point Microsoft had complete domination of the PC market, something they got from a deal with IBM.
What Bill Gates was good at was identifying threats early and crushing them before they got too big.
Bundling Excel and Word (and more) into a single MS Office product was a masterstroke that definitely helped them, but you can't claim that was some sort of evil monopolistic genius. They developed an integrated suite and that turned out to have value.
IE 4 vs Netscape 4 was a lot more complicated. They were technically fairly equal but Microsoft did everything it could to kill off Netscape, including many dirty tactics.
Windows XP was dramatically better than the first MacOS X iterations in almost every way except visuals. OS X had awesome graphics but the Mac hardware could hardly cope and it was dog, dog slow. It also had ~no apps and users frequently had to run productivity software in the Classic emulator.
Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them.
BeOS had some interesting technical choices but its primary selling point was super-smooth multi tasking, which came at the cost of requiring app developers to all be expert at writing multi-threaded software, as the Be APIs practically required apps to be largely thread-safe. It turned out that requiring all your app developers to be in the upper percentiles of skill meant that you didn't get many apps and those that did exist were often unstable.
For all its faults and Tellytubby like UI, Windows XP had built on a legacy of slavish devotion to app and hardware compatibility, it hadn't jumped too far ahead of what the hardware was capable of, it was very developer friendly and it didn't have bizarre technical quirks caused by endless techno-ideological wars over packaging file formats and the like. That made it pretty successful.
>Bundling Excel and Word (and more) into a single MS Office product was a masterstroke that definitely helped them, but you can't claim that was some sort of evil monopolistic genius
But I didn't
>Desktop Linux was a joke at that time and has never caught up. Basic things like "how can I install this program" or "why does my sound not work" were FAQs for Linux users in 2001, and arguably the community never really overcame its internal political issues to solve them.
Are we really going to rehash 15 years old arguments? It's a lot easier to give a smooth hardware support experience to the user when you do it for them, if you had to install windows from scratch back then it would have been different.
Windows XP was successful for the same reasons Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95 were successful, backwards compatibility and you got it preinstalled on every computer.
> it didn't have bizarre technical quirks caused by endless techno-ideological wars over packaging file formats and the like.
..by means of not having packaging file formats available at all, in true spirit of Microsoft. Hell people couldn't open zip archives on out-of-the-box XP.
Windows was plain not ready for desktop in 2001, but you use what you have to use.
I come from the AmigaOS world in the first place, and AmigaOS was leagues ahead of Windows prior to Windows XP, years before - it was multitask, it had datatypes, Arexx scripting language and so on. It was not perfect (lacked memory protection) but nevertheless it was better than Windows 3.1 at the time.
As for third parties software, you had better software on non-Windows machines (Photoshop for example used to be a Mac exclusive), not everything was widely better in a Microsoft environment.
Amiga as a platform was proprietary end-to-end. One supplier of hardware, operating system, and even some applications. It's like IBM could have been if Microsoft was in-house to them. Had AmigaOS been cross-platform, things might have developed differently.
I personally disagree about Netscape 4 versus IE 5, and I can remember both.
You assertion about XP being better than Mac OS X, however, is hilarious. If that's true, why did XP die, and why was Mac OS X so radically more secure than Windows for the last 15 years running? Why was it more stable? Why did it work better? Why did it have a shockingly better UI?
Never heard about the Windows NT operating system series?
WinNT series:
WinNT 3.5 (1988-1994, based on VMS a bit on OS/2 designs) -> WinNT 4 -> Win2000 -> WinXP (August 24th 2001) -> WinVista -> Win7 -> Win8x -> Win10 (2015) [exluding all service packs]
MacOS X:
NeXTSTEP (1987-1989, based on Unix) -> OPENSTEP -> Rhapsody (1997) -> Mac OS X Server 1.0 -> Mac OS X Public Beta -> Mac OS X 10.0 (March 24th 2001, this is the first MacOS X you know) -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3 -> 10.4 -> 10.5 -> 10.6 -> 10.7 -> 10.8 -> 10.9 -> 10.10 -> 10.11 (= El Capitan, 2015)
Netscape crashed way more often than IE. That's what got me to switch.
OS X was a worse platform because it didn't support much software - games in particular. XP was extremely solid, coming after ME in the consumer space (I had switched to W2K after 98, I took until SP2 before I switched).
So no, I don't agree with you. Even today, I think Windows is a better gaming platform and Linux a much better dev platform - OS X is insufficiently similar to Linux to work well when Linux is used in production.
I think GP's point was _why_ they were building what they were building. Gate's was just doing work in his field, whereas Zuckerberg was working towards his ideology. Gate's didn't have the strong sentiment towards his business that Zuckerberg did/does.
Well ZuckerBerg is still in his early 30s, it's probably too early to say that he will stay at Facebook forever. People change with age as well, no matter what he may be thinking about currently.
You can just as easily say it was the other way around: Bill Gates' was programming and using computers (even quasi-professionally) from the time he was a young child in 1960s. His stated vision was always a 'computer on every desk' going back to a time when people only read about computers in magazines, and he happily and dedicatedly helped accomplish that. So effectively, the US Government convicted him of being a monopolist.
I can't read Zuck's mind or heart and he's clearly passionate about Facebook, but 'connecting everyone in the world' has always struck me as a kind of post-hoc mission statement made once they were already dominant (& the world already well connected) and more vitally, wanted to start making FB a lot less private by default to keep boosting & posting site engagement metrics.
When they started FB, wasn't it basically an unauthorized interactive hack/mashup of the student directory of sorts? It all kinds of fits a pattern, doesn't it? It seems very opportunistic and a lot less like a grand vision, to me. That isn't to diminish the technical, business, and cultural accomplishment that is Facebook or Mark's contributions to it or leadership. I think it is great that he's taking this leave too. His child is his next startup and that's a great thing and a great example.
Mark Zuckerberg hit the lottery by fucking over the people who hired him, too; his careless ethics allowing him to "win the lottery." Not going to say more about this because the rabbit hole goes pretty deep when I've tried to get into discussion about this on fairness and the way people try to justify it is remarkable.
The W brothers? Well finding a dev is a big problem for non-technical cofounders too. Also, I've already had my competitor trying to hire me for a small project and make me sign a non-competing agreement while claiming there was no problem. At that level of competiton, you can't be that naive.
My take on it is, why keep playing a game when you've already won, and the only way from here is down? I can't imagine running a website can keep feeling meaningful for more than a few years.
As for parental leave, your kid is only a baby for a remarkably short time, two months is nothing. I was able to take two weeks off for each of my kids, and combining a full time job with small children can be very stressful. You never have enough time for the kids, and at the same time you never have enough time to keep up with your job.
I had a sorta different reaction. I thought, it'd be amazing if everyone at Facebook had the option to take two months off for paternity leave and prioritize family over business without worrying about losing their job or good favor with their supervisor.
I'm not sure of the specifics but I believe you only get one set of leave a year. I wouldn't recommend having multiple girlfriends and babies (and, to be honest, if you did this going back to work would seem like a much better option).
I think that's wrong. A few months leave is far more affordable and desirable over replacing a valuable employee or having a very unhappy and burned out employee forced to return to work. Not to mention the positive benefits that policies like this have on recruiting.
Yes this is normal. I work at Twitter and new fathers taking multi-month paternity is very common. Lots of friends at Google and believe it's the same there.
I had a different one: Two months? If that guy hasn't built his business up to the point where he can take a sabbatical and do right by his family, then there's no hope for the rest of us.
Most large companies in Silicon Valley give men between four and eight weeks of paternity leave, which you can take any time you want (not just right after the baby is born).
Do you have a sense (even anecdata) of how common it is to take advantage of that? Do people feel comfortable taking the full period for leave?
I don't know what it would mean if they didn't, though. I think many successful people have trouble believing that their work will be done well in their absence.
Doesn't facebook gives dads four months leave? the message here could be hey, taking the full leave might make you look like lazy, the boss only took two months.
In Mark’s case, a long contiguous departure puts a lot on Sheryl Sandberg’s shoulders; she recently lost her husband and has children of her own, so that might not be ideal.
Internally, Mark’s work ethic is… known to be high, and less a model than the many other employees who become parents. Because employees tend to be Facebook-friends with everyone they know internally, you see a lot of baby-photo pictures: that has far more impact on your perception of what is explicitly told to be the right thing for the company, i.e. take all the time you need with your baby.
DOES it put a "lot on her shoulders"? Does it really? At a company as large as Facebook, is there ever really so much riding on any particular person in management? I doubt it.
I’m not familiar enough with the higher management, but yes, there are many incredible people to support both. I suspect that when it comes to dealing with parties like high-level political players, or being the public face of the company, they are unique. I'm noticing Lori Goler's name more in the press; that could be an effort to avoid that.
Chris Cox, Boz, Shrep and Jay Parish are all people I wish people knew more about (outside of Hacker News; any regular here not knowing them is a clearly at a loss).
IMHO a billionaire taking a two-month leave will not inspire a majority of the top 50 employers to allow their male workforce to take 2-months off. YMMV
This is probably going to get me voted down, but maybe...just maybe...you shouldn't be having kids if the only job you can get is McDonalds or Yum! Brands (i.e., Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, etc.).
If you choose to have a child when your resources are that limited, your non-paternity leave is going to be among the least of the child's problems.
I suppose it depends on what kind of society you want to live in. Is a family something that should only be available to those who can afford it? Should we compare having children with buying a new pair of shoes or having a car? Or is it something that we want everyone in society to have available to them: for example like quality healthcare or legal assistance?
I'm not trying to pose a rhetorical question. I think this is literally a choice that societies have to make. On one extreme, society does not have to cater to anyone. We could collect no taxes and have no shared services. We could have no rules about how companies should interact with their employees or society at large. At the other extreme we could make everything a shared service and have society dictate how people get access to things.
Of course neither of these extremes is desirable for most people. We have to decide where to draw the line and what we think is good for our society. Your comment seems to imply that the choice in this case is obvious: if you can't afford children you shouldn't have them. However, I think you can imagine the suffering that could impose upon people who have little chance of being able to support a family by their own means.
Is a child a luxury like new shoes? Or is something that we want everyone (regardless of class or wealth) to be able to have (understanding that society will have to foot the bill)?
Even though I have couched the question in a slightly loaded way, you might be surprised that I am personally torn by this issue and can see huge drawbacks for both approaches.
>I'm not trying to pose a rhetorical question. I think this is literally a choice that societies have to make.
It would be nice if we could actually make that choice. Better still, it would be nice if we had a whole lot of societies which made different choices and people were free to move between them, so we could individually make a choice.
Instead though we've got a lowest-common-denominator society.
You would be a bad role model to your kids. They'll grow up thinking that having no retirement, no savings, possibly carrying debt and living paycheck to paycheck is normal.
They too might have kids right out of high school and skip going to college - because that's what their parents did. This is how you get generational poverty.
Ha ha! You probably should have been voted down, but OK, let's take a look at your idea.
You are saying 1 out of 4 American workers shouldn't have kids[1].
If everybody followed your advice, a lot of pretty influential people wouldn't have been born: Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, Larry Ellison (OK maybe that works in your argument's favor). Jay Z. Abraham Lincoln. Barack Obama.
I wouldn't be here, either; my dad was a short-order fry cook when I was born. He worked a second job as a night janitor at PG&E when I was young.
So yeah, you'd better think long and hard about the financial aspects of having kids, but that actually applies whether you flip burgers at Mickey D's for minimum wage or flip bits at Facebook for a $150k annual salary.
Even if the financial aspects are hard, that actually isn't the hardest part of raising kids, even for poor people. And growing up poor isn't nearly as hard on kids as is growing up with bad parents.
If you want kids, the only reason you shouldn't have them is if you aren't up to the task of raising them -- for whatever reason.
That reason could certainly be financial; I'm not sure that I myself would have chosen to have kids if I was a short-order fry cook, instead of a highly-paid tech worker who is married to another one.
But I know plenty of low-income people who are awesome parents and whose examples I strive to live up to with my own kids.
I have seen that most of kids who have struggled in their childhood because of say low income from their parents or bad family have a kind of a fighting spirit. Most of the people who you see achieve greatness either say in sports or in engineering come from really poor and troubled backgrounds. Now compare that to the upper middle class and the rich whose kids have been given all the resources and you don't see much of them at the top. Even if you see them it would be because their parents would have set up artificial constraints on their resources which they would have to fight to get it.
So finally it all depends on parenting and the values they instil on their kids which require no money. It just needs some thinking and common sense which is available to both the rich and the poor.
You have a massive survivor bias in your example of greatness in sports.
The odds of achieving greatness in sports is very low. If you come from a rich background, and want to maximize your chances of having a well-paying career, you do not go into sports. You go into law, or medicine, or banking, etc. Sure, the top players get paid well, but then look at what, say, minor league players get.
But if you come from a poor family, then sports is one of the ways to get out of poverty, because even if you can't go pro, there's still the chance of college athlete funding or becoming a coach for a school.
>But if you come from a poor family, then sports is one of the ways to get out of poverty, because even if you can't go pro, there's still the chance of college athlete funding or becoming a coach for a school.
This is true. In India for example engineering and medicine are the ways to get out of poverty. Hence there is an over representation.
Do you have some statistical evidence to support the claim that people from low income and bad families are overrepresented in the higher echelons of sports of engineering? I strongly suspect quite the opposite is true. It is not sufficient to view a few examples - after all, a huge portion of the population comes from 'really poor and troubled backgrounds'.
No I don't. It is just an observation. Now in for e.g. India there are a lot of people going into engineering or medicine as a way out of poverty. So you are right but now it is the profession through which to get out of poverty and there will be a lot of people from poor and troubled families in it.
The logical extension of this argument is that everyone on earth should be forced to have as many children as possible all the time, because - gasp - think of all the wonderful human beings that we're missing out on. In fact, all those women of childbearing age you see walking around without a baby in their womb are guilty of a certain kind of murder. Strap them down and get to work!
The parent claims that we need the bottom quartile of earners to have children otherwise we would lose out on socially valuable humans (list of examples provided). This is a variation on the argument raised by anti-abortionists that goes along the lines of "how do you know you're not killing the next Mozart?" or "what if your parents aborted you?" It's drek for two reasons:
1) You can't know what the world would like if person XYZ hadn't been born. It's pure science fiction. Somebody else would probably have invented the iPhone, or figured out relativity, etc. Or they wouldn't have. There's no reasonable argument to be made here. The world would be different in ways that cannot be predicted.
2) It implies that you are withholding from your fellow man by failing to reproduce more more more, because each could be the next potential Jobs, Rowling, etc.
I also think it's a little bit ugly to point at the conclusions of difficult lives and say "hey, what a good thing that was!" Maya Angelou wrote beautiful poetry, does that mean we should congratulate slavery and racism? I'd happily live in a world without Jay Z's music if it means kids don't have to grow up in housing projects with single mothers abandoned by their fathers and 12 year olds aren't shooting their brothers over stolen jewelry.
Nobody else here is talking about what you are talking about. It isn't logically connected to what I said.
I used the familiar names just because they are familiar, not for any reason of those people being more or less valuable to society. (Sorry if my joke about Larry Ellison made it seem otherwise.)
Most of us are familiar enough with those folks' stories that we can surmise that they were happy that their parents didn't follow Turing_Machine's theory, and therefore, that they were born.
We could also presume that for most of them at least, the parents were also likely to be glad they had them, too.
Thus, the two stakeholders referenced in Turing_Machine's post would probably disagree with him in those cases (and, I am trying to imply, countless thousands of other cases).
I certainly did not propose that we should judge whether or not people should breed based on their usefulness to society. That road leads straight to Adolf Hitler.
BOOM! I think we can cite Godwin now and close this branch of the thread.
Steve Jobs, the child of two Ivy League students? That would in no way qualify under "you shouldn't be having kids if the only job you can get is McDonalds or Yum! Brands".
Jobs's birth parents were 23-year-old grad students at the University of Wisconsin, not a population known for being rolling in dough. They decided they were too young to marry and have kids.
Job's biological father came from a wealthy background. He and Job's mother met at University of Wisconsin (not from the US, but pretty sure that isn't Ivy League). The mother was working as a TA, so she wasn't wealthy.
OK, I misremembered. University of Wisconsin is not Ivy League. But I stand by the point; working as a TA doesn't make you wealthy, but it does mean you can get a better job than working at McDonald's.
"Then there would be fewer people" is not the strongest argument, as overpopulation and unsustainable resource use are the largest problems currently faced by humanity.
Steve Jobs was raised by parents wealthy enough to send him to Reed College. His biological parents were grad students who (I believe) later became professors (or at least his father did). None of those people were working McDonald's jobs with no prospects for anything better.
Barack Obama? You're citing Barack OBAMA? That would be the same Barack Obama who was raised by his banker grandparents, sent to a fancy private school (current tuition: $22,000/year), then through Columbia and Harvard?
Yep. McDonald's all the way, there, dude.
In any case, citing people who overcame poverty does not refute the overall point. In fact, the only reason we tell stories about these people is because they are rare exceptions. I mean, Stevie Wonder is a great musician who happens to be blind. That doesn't mean we should intentionally make more people blind in the hope of producing more Stevie Wonders. Neither should we encourage people living in poverty to have children that they cannot afford.
This and moralizing about the smoking and drinking of the lower classes sound reasonable, but they're basically non-starters. You don't stop having basic human desires when you're poor. And as long as people are having sex, some of them are going to have kids.
I'm not "moralizing" about anything. Effective birth control is readily available. I have no interest whatsoever in policing other people's sex lives.
I'm just saying that if you work at McDonald's, you probably can't afford to have a child.
Yes, there will be accidents, people who fall on hard times, etc., and I actually have no problem with social programs aimed at helping those people out.
But that's not what the OP wants. He wants McDonald's to bear the burden of providing paternity leave for those people.
After all, they make a nice profit from those people.
Maybe it's better to value people well enough for them to be people, and part of that is forming a family.
Or, maybe McDees isn't on the hook. Fair enough. Then let's make sure those programs actually work and that people can make use of them without all the angst surrounding the use of said programs.
One or the other. I don't care much. But I do care a great deal about the idea of some people being denied the standing and basic dignity of being ordinary people when they are working and adding value to the society they live in.
Facebook bears the burden for the exact same reason that it provides free food, bikes around the campus, pretty lawns, a barbershop, etc... because it wants to retain fickle employees. It's not a moral statement.
"If a worker today is employed full time for a full 52-week year at a minimum wage job today, she or he is making $15,080. [...] The average age for these [76 million] workers is 36 years old and they have been in the labor force for an average of 17 years. Only 6 percent of the workers who would benefit from this minimum wage increase are teenagers; i.e., 94 percent are adults."
318M people in the US, 188M above the age of 30. Around 38% of adults (30+) are working for minimum wage and any prospect of having a family would put them below the federal poverty line.
Do we really believe in an environment where 38% of adults shouldn't be afforded the ability to spend time with their child, something every other major-industrialized nation guarantees as a human right?
McDonalds should bear the burden -- I think the $5B in profits last year should allow for a little human decency.
How we value people has a very serious impact on our economics. We wonder about tepid demand? This is one cause of that tepid demand. When people are valued low enough for them to require help to exist and do basic things, they really can't participate in the same economy that desires strong growth year over year.
Not to mention that sex is free (well, generally) so it's an even easier and more available option than drugs or alcohol to distract yourself from crushing poverty.
Forgive me if I've misunderstood, but are you saying having children and a family is a privilege that should be exclusive to wealthy people?
EDIT: I think I have a different opinion on this. I say if a human being in a wealthy nation like USA is only capable of a job that pays minimum wage, this is a problem with the system, and not with the individual. If we just discounted all people for where they have ended up, we will never be curious enough to explore how they got there and how to prevent it in the future.
This argument proves too much. A minimum-wage US worker in 2015 has a higher standard of living than the vast majority of all human parents who have ever lived, or even the majority of parents currently living on Earth. Are you saying that almost all human reproduction so far has been a mistake?
The longer answer is that life doesn't always pan out the way you expect it to and, well, shit happens. Rather than worry about what you think someone should have done, let's focus on the fact that it already happened and how do we make the best of the situation.
That's a fair comment. However, it's countered by the fact that an awful lot of people are going to be doing basic labors. The basic labors need to get done, and someone is going to be doing them too.
Given that, it's it realistic for very large fractions of us simply not having kids?
Does not seem that way to me.
Anecdotally, the janitor at my school as a kid was not a smart man. Not dumb, just not intellectual. But, he was a pretty great dad and his family did well. They didn't have much, but they turned out just fine. Some of his kids ended up moving up and out on to better things too. I've often thought about that dynamic.
We never know how this stuff turns out. I, myself, grew up in relative poverty. Not just lacking luxuries, but sometimes basic needs. Honestly, didn't do me any real harm, and I'm sure glad I'm here as are my peers and family.
To me, the problem is one of how we value people rather than their decision to start families. People always start families. This is primal. Inherent feature. We need families. Most of us do anyway. Some of us don't. But that doesn't align with the job / value problem.
We need the janitor. Somebody is going to do that work, and what basis is that for denying them basic human dignity? Or, maybe we don't really need the janitor? Ok, that means we do a lot more ourselves. Wouldn't some people make the case they are wasting their time having to do that stuff?
Of course! As they should, and that is precisely why we need to value the janitor. The labor isn't sexy, but it serves an important purpose, even if that purpose is to free some research scientists to cure cancer faster.
If somebody is working full time, maybe that needs to somehow be enough to live a modest life, and to me, that life includes a family. Maybe both parents work. That's OK.
Should we actually put weight behind that idea of waiting to have kids in a time of relative financial security, quite frankly, way too many of us won't be having kids! Worse, that means way too many of us are deemed unworthy somehow, and is that really the right thing to do?
If we're looking to figure out who should and should not be allowed to reproduce, I would start with the people who actually believe they're superior, and should be privileged by law in some way, just because they might have more money in their bank account.
Those are the kinds of traits (whether genetic or not) that we should be trying to expunge from the population.
That's not a rebuttal, it's a strawman combined with a personal attack.
I said nothing about disallowing anyone to reproduce. I just said if only rich people reproduced we could eliminate most human suffering. Learn to read.
Let's try this another way. Even though we apparently are on completely opposite sides of the spectrum here I'm going to go into this with an open mind and assume at the end of this short conversation I'm going to come out the other end learning something new. I'll lay out what I'm thinking here, and please explain to me where I've misunderstood and please clarify so we can get to the root of what you're talking about.
First, I can't see how this is a strawman. Logically, in academia, perhaps you could argue this is a strawman because you technically didn't say the word "prevent", but in the "real world" I can't see how 50% of the entire world's population (or whatever percentage we're talking about here) would just agree with your hypothesis and say: "You know what, he's probably right. We, the poor people of the world are a burden on society and shouldn't be having children of our own. From this day forward we vow not to have children because we think this guy may be right, that it would truly end human suffering when it's all said and done". No. The only way this experiment would proceed is through a large-scale state-sponsored effort to prevent poor people from having children. Against their will. And not only this, but I'm almost positive that if this large-scale effort proceeded it would more than likely erupt into a civil (world?) war. Far from the original goal to "eliminate human suffering".
Second, I can't see how this is a personal attack. That is unless you do believe a person's self worth is measured by the size of their bank account. And if you do believe a person's self-worth is measured by the size of their bank account, it's no more a personal attack than the attack you've made on poor people by insinuating that they are the root cause of human suffering on this planet, simply because they have the audacity to have children of their own.
You seem to forget that capitalism only works when you have a captive group. In order for your life to be good, other people's lives have to be comparatively worse.
With that small of an educated population we could sit back, automate everything, and hardly have to compete for resources at all (especially not necessities like food and rent).
You sound very ignorant. I don't mean this in a cruel or insulting way; you just sound like someone who has no idea what that kind of automation entails, the hard work and sweat and physical and mental labor that has gotten us to the point where that automation is viable for a (comparatively) small number of things.
The working class quite literally feed you, clothe you, and keep you safe at night. Get out into the world, learn more about how things are created and whose shoulders you're standing on when you're seeing this golden future of yours.
There are plenty of things that we already know how to automate but don't do so purely because it's cheaper to pay someone desperate $8 an hour (or a fraction of that overseas) to do it manually instead.
Not to mention the per-capita increases in efficiency we would see if the population was small enough that we could get by farming only the most fertile ground, burning only the easiest-to-extract oil, etc.
> The working class quite literally feed you, clothe you, and keep you safe at night.
Yes, and I'm saying it's cruel of them (us? I'm rich by world standards but not American ones.) to continue to have children that are condemned to a life of the same sort of servitude (or worse, famine and disease).
The comment I was replying to said nothing about the environment, only individual wealth.
Also, it doesn't matter what economic system you're using, if your ratio of working people to non-working people decreases, your quality of life will also decrease.
Lastly, what I said doesn't require the population to grow, only to stay constant. If you want to reduce the population because it's somehow bad for the planet, you can do it gradually.
I think everyone who works the equivalent of full-time should be able to afford to have children. The fact is, not everyone is going to get out of these low wage jobs, and that doesn't mean they would be bad parents. Have we gone so far as a society towards judging the poor that we don't believe the are fit to reproduce?
If I am to take this to its logical conclusion, I guess there are entire nations, indeed probably most of the human population, who you think should just not reproduce.
If by "summary" you mean "lie about what I said", maybe.
"If I am to take this to its logical conclusion, I guess there are entire nations, indeed probably most of the human population, who you think should just not reproduce."
Yeah, pretty much. Why are you advocating that children be born into a life of misery?
There will always be poor people unless you make the concept of property disappear completely. In this world someone else has to become poor in your place so you can be rich.
Well.. such thinking can be generalized to simply saying: "You shouldn't be LIVING, if you are poor. Shoot yourself now because you cannot afford life and you are wasting resources of the rich on this planet with your sorry, poverty-stricken soul"
are you really saying having a minimum wage job should mean you don't have kids? Lets fix that first with basic income. Not to mention that kids are a way to government benefits and tax benefits, financial concerns are not the real issue here anyway. It is time off to care for babies. Hell, time off to be sick for a day. These jobs have the least responsibility but have the most rigid level of service.
So you're suggesting that being poor is a genetic condition (and one that apparently should be perpetuated)? Because that sounds even more dehumanizing than suggesting that the poor consider their resources before choosing to have children.
No, I am suggesting that people born into poverty are much more likely to stay in poverty and people not born in poverty are much more likely to stay out of poverty. Poverty is generational, social conditions can be passed down from parent to child without being genetic.
I agree that having fewer people being born into poverty is a thing we should strive for, so I am not opposed to it like you claim I am. What I am opposed to is your method and reasoning for that method.
Your method is that poor people should not have kids due to their inability to easily provide for those kids. In not having kids, they bring less people into an impoverished social standing that is hard to break out of. By this reasoning, should people with less desirable traits (history of heart disease, cancer, etc) not have kids to help eradicate those traits? There is a chance their child will not have those specific traits or htey will take, like there is a chance that a child will move out of poverty.
Of course not, that's absurd.
Other than the self regulation of impoverished people to not have kids to help eradicate poverty, which is what you are describing, I would rather see social means to help those people escape poverty.
Are your fucking kidding me. I think people who focus less on capitalism and consumerism and more on raising kids should be the ones allowed to have kids. Not the who want to work all the time. Maybe then the world will right itself in a generation.
I woukd say 2 months was little, so I'm not really impressed given he could take longer. Not because he is the chwif, but since their policy permits it
Zuck could take the rest of his life off work. And when he's an old man he will wish that he had. But in the mean time the share holders can benefit from his keen.
He could have done that when he was 19 years old. Obviously....OBVIOUSLY.... Zuck, and Facebook, are what they are because he doesn't agree with your views on his life.
How do you know he wouldn't regret stopping work now when he's an old man? You have absolutely no idea. But we can take an educated guess by the motivations and choices he's shown in the past. Which were, to keep working and building his company. Because he probably enjoys it.
My grandfather grew up dirt poor. He built a small real estate business on his own, and continues to come to work every day and he's in his 90's. If he was forced to "take the rest of his life off" not just 20 years ago, but even now, he would without question be less happy as result. He enjoys working. Many people do. Especially those who are founders of businesses.
When people get old they don't have much in their life other than their family and work, and many workoholics have only their work, case in point Warren Buffet, that's not proof that they would rather not do anything else. Or would've lived their lives differently if they had the chance, and many of them might be too proud to admit it at this point considering that they will soon be gone. It's just that work is the only thing left that makes them feel useful, wanted, and provides some sense of purpose in their lives. They have been so busy in work they don't know what else to do... nor is their body and brain capable of doing much more than what it has done most of its life.
Many rich business people completely quit business and instead do philanthropy, case in point Bill Gates... Zuck's role model? Facebook is not something positive in the lens of history. It's just a big money maker. Maybe it will still be relevant in 20 years, but eventually it will be seen for what it is... as if it's not already. And all that will be left is the money, of which Zuck has more than enough to do much more worthwhile things with his life. Like perhaps philanthropy. Maybe he can really solve some problems before he dies in 40-50 or so years. Of which maybe the 10-20 next ones will be his prime.
This guy once gave at talk at my university where he said he regretted not doing a lot of things because he was working and now he was too old to do them because of his health.
He sounds like someone who would give a great talk. I can see that happening for sure. I've devoted my life to a lot less before realizing there was more out there. These people put so much time into their work there's little left for a broad life - unless you make some clear boundaries like Mark is doing now. Maybe this will be a one time thing and, as you suggest, he may regret not making more time for other areas of his life. Maybe he'll manage to carve out more time for himself.
I don't buy regret. From what I've read so far, people who worked too much regret not doing things with family, etc. and people who lived bog-standard GenPop family life regret that their life had no meaning. So I guess death is just one big paradox of choice.
I am jealous. My mega-large, hyphenated corporation only gives 40 hours. Which I have just had approved (today!) so that I could help care for my newborn son while my wife recovers from caesarian section. Doing this required multiple calls to a third party company that hypenated-corporation has subcontracted their leave and disability claims to, as well as about 30 pages worth of paperwork. I spent about half as much time coordinating all this as the amount of leave that I'll get.
My point is: even if Zuckerberg only takes half the time he gives to everyone else he's still being very generous to himself as compared to what happens in much of corporate America. I am willing to bet that going on leave like this is probably easier at Facebook, as well.
Wow. My wife had a section with our first, 2 months early, with some weeks in the NICU afterwards. I had absolutely no inkling that recovery would be so hard for my wife; I'd always heard "too posh to push" and thought she was getting the easy way out! It's a brutal surgery and she struggled to do basic things for weeks. Fortunately I worked for a small firm at the time, directly for the CEO, and whatever our HR policy was didn't matter as I was given essentially free reign to manage my time and work from home as needed. I was able to be largely absent for weeks, going to the office when she had help at home.
You have my heartfelt sympathy. 40hrs is pathetic, insulting, and the process for you to get it is frankly dehumanizing. Fortunately those scumbags will pale into insignificance as you get to know your son.
Thanks for the kind words. We only had 1 week in the NICU (our son arrived 1 month early due to some maternal complications). That week was hard enough. You also have my heartfelt sympathy. Hope your little fighter is doing well now.
Thanks, she's a vivacious and warm hearted three year old now, you'd never know she was a preemie. They catch up pretty fast. Hope your boy does well too.
Your comment touched a nerve: it was a dramatically emotional time, and I just got shivers thinking how I'd have felt having to do a day's paperwork just to get out of the office. I was very lucky.
FYI you can probably take 12 weeks unpaid leave, as guaranteed by FMLA. I'm guessing your employer would exercise the option to pay out vacation time concurrently. To take FMLA requires nothing more than telling your boss you need time off to take care of a newborn (or any other valid reason), so it's not too late. They can make you fill out paperwork but denying the leave if it's valid is illegal. You're guaranteed to have your job when you come back.
(Edit: note to others reading this who work at startups--employers with < 50 employees don't need to follow FMLA)
Kids cost money either way. You probably decided having kids would be worth it for you. What is 3 unpaid months - let's say 30000$? That is nothing compared to what you'll pay for your kid over time.
Kids cost a lot spread gradually over time, for the most part.
If your monthly expenses increase by ~$100-$400 a month at first, that's reasonably survivable for the majority of couples, and other increases can be planned for.
If your month income suddenly declines by $10000 a month as in your example, you're probably fucked.
Nice, if you have enough savings to do it. Please don't forget that not everyone is fortunate enough to have enough savings to be able to miss three months worth of paychecks. I did, until I bought a house, sold it, and bought another in the course of a year due to escaping from a horrible job.
I'm getting savings built back up again, and I can afford to miss a few paychecks now, but not at the 6 month level I had a couple of years back. I'll get there again.
> not everyone is fortunate enough to have enough savings to be able to miss three months worth of paychecks.
Then, sorry to be a bearer of bad news, if they could not afford or save up in advance for three months, how in the world are they going to pay for a child for 18 years?
Children in modern western nations are incredibly expensive. Often more expensive than a house. They are not a decision to be made lightly, and you shouldn't get pity for having them since its common knowledge how expensive they are.
Its probably one of the greatest critical failings of our society in modern terms to pressure people so highly to have kids they cannot afford - its not just bad on a macroeconomic level because it makes those parents dependent on the state, and on average results in poverty stricken kids who have had studies prove growing up poor has a direct and negative impact on intellect, but its bad for individuals because it will destroy otherwise healthy relationships if children are too expensive but they gave into short term peer pressure and got long term consequences.
How are they going to pay for a child for 18 years? For many, the answer is "they don't".
For the record I also agree with your last paragraph in full.
As for myself...
With my current resources, I could pay all household expenses for three months without being paid. And yes, I have the resources necessary to support my family. In short, I can afford to have this child. However, I choose not to take unpaid leave because, with a child, I have no way of knowing what unforseen expenses may arise (will he have a chronic condition that requires treatment that my insurance will only partially cover? Will my wife have a harder time than expected healing from her surgery and require me to take more time off from work?) I am trying, in my particular case, to protect that cushion of money and grow it as much as I possibly can.
I also know, far more than most people, just how serious of a decision having children is. Because of medical issues for both me and my wife, we had to have IVF to even conceive, and our first IVF baby died at 21 weeks gestation.
> how in the world are they going to pay for a child for 18 years?
How could you possibly infer that to be a problem via a plain reading or even an uncharitable reading? Having money in the bank account doesn't help your kids as much as having a house in the right neighborhood.
> Children in modern western nations are incredibly expensive.
You hear this all the time, it just doesn't gel with my experience. I'd love to know how the various headlines that say "OMG 250K to raise a child till 18" come to that figure.
Because, really, they don't seem to cost much at all. They eat less (and hopefully for free for at least the first 6 months), their clothes are smaller and cost less (though yes, they do need them more frequently). Depending on where you live (Aus ftw), public schooling can be good and free.
Sure, when they get old they might piss and moan and "Want" various luxuries but that's the key isn't it - needs vs want. And by the age they start "wanting", typically the answer is "get a job".
Guess what. If you want paid family leave as a benefit, you can choose between that and alternative benefits, like having a higher salary, not to mention (for young people that are likely to have a family) being hirable in the first place. It doesn't come for free.
No. It's not a false dichotomy. The compensation you can negotiate depends on how much work people expect to get out of you. Your price also depends on other people's willingness to take advantage of benefits that you're not interested in.
Young people in general are riskier hires than older people -- they have less of a history, they're more likely to change jobs or move -- having a paid leave policy increases that risk even more and makes it harder for some people to find jobs, especially the kind that involve up-front costs of learning on the job or training, and that have slim margins.
Edit: The flip side is that regulatory enaction of such policies can help protect you from the effects of stupid behavior by other people. For example, the prices of houses, and the wages people negotiate, are in part an artifact of the fact that most people are willing to spend too much of their own money, buying houses they can barely afford and generally living paycheck to paycheck. These people negotiate wages down while pushing prices of goods up, to the detriment of savers. Policies like mandatory retirement savings and parental leave can help insulate people that want to save for retirement and want to take time off when their child is born from these market effects.
Dunno if you've ever taken PFL, but I have twice. It's not all roses. Your first 1-2 weeks (depending on company policy) is unpaid, ie you have to take PTO/vacation. Then PFL pays 55% of your weekly salary, to a maximum of $1,104 -- essentially $52k. They dump it on some ghetto Bank of America debit card that you have to hook up to your bank account thru their 90s-fabulous website somehow...
Except for the 40 hours part, OP's was exactly my experience. BigCo contracts out to some awful 3rd party that can't get their paperwork straight.
I actually got notice that my leave was "approved" (as if they could disapprove?) AFTER I returned to work, that's how bad their process sucks.
Don't even get me started about straightening out the bill for health insurance -- yeah, you have to pay your employer's share while you're on leave! Surprise! (I guess this might vary from company to company).
Better than nothing I guess, but I think I'd rather have lower taxes and just take straight PTO.
Yes, that is a pragmatic answer to my issue...if I had different life circumstances. And I could -- my little niche of hypenated-corporation would love to send me to California on a permanent basis. Unfortunately, I have no desire to commute 2 hrs to/from Edwards AFB every day.
Out of curiosity, would this apply if you were say a lead actor in a movie? 6 week multi-million dollar production stall would in my mind be fair ground for not hiring an actor, but I take it that's illegal.
I imagine you have to be right. For the majority of employees a 6 week break is no big deal. But for some specialty industries you just can't hire people that plan on taking a 6 week break in the middle of production.
Just move! Great and completely realistic solution to the problem of what to do about paternity leave within my company when a kid is on the way. Brilliant! I wish I'd thought of that.
I've moved cross country almost every time I've moved and I've moved on average about every 18 months since 2005. Add in the sheer amount of stuff that tends to accumulate when you're married to someone obsessed with physical comforts like furniture, heirlooms, and kitsch and it's pretty much constant mental torture. It becomes extremely bothersome to move over time and constantly job-hopping looks pretty poor on one's resume over time as well. My life is a state where as I'm unpacking, I'm deciding what to unpack because I would have to move it again. Even if you're willing to move constantly though, what will your excuse be to your future employers over the next 30 years with such a peppered employment record? "I don't like the labor laws of any state I move to"? That'll be a pretty short interview.
I've had similar experiences. I've thought, "Oh, I know where to find such-and-such item", and gone to look for it in the garage, only to realize, "That's where I kept that item two houses ago" and have no idea where it is.
"Just move" isn't usually bad advice for a single person, but when you have a family, that's a whole different thing.
Oh God I don't want to move again. If I did it would be 5 times since 2011. I like my job otherwise.
Hyphenated company manages to avoid our state laws on covering infertility treatment by funding its own health plan, thereby taking advantage of a loophole in the state law. I can only believe that such a large company, in the state where it is incorporated, would find ways to put loopholes in any new laws.
FWIW, at Facebook you still have to deal with some ugly B2B system to report your leave. "Matrix e-systems". Apparently the nest of laws that cover leave is complicated enough that you basically have to hire someone to handle compliance. Everyone (male or female) gets 4 months though, which is quite nice and makes it worth navigating through this janky form-filling.
Here's my advice: don't work for them. You shouldn't tolerate such bullshit no matter how much they pay. This is your _wife and kid_ you're talking about. You will horribly regret prioritizing the unreasonable demands of your employer over their needs.
Instead of bitching on HN, get off your ass and find a better employer.
I am astounded by the arrogance of you thinking you know his life and situation better than he himself does. And so well that you feel entitled to lecture him in public.
I am astounded that you're astounded. Seems like common sense advice to me: put your family ahead of everything else. That's what I do, anyway. Once "everything else" starts to interfere, I make sure to change my circumstances to make sure that my family gets the attention it so richly deserves.
Did it ever occur to you, that, outside of this issue, I'm actually well compensated, well-treated, I work on a good team of motivated people, and I'm well-respected for what I do?
As I've said earlier, I have more leave to take than this because I have banked overtime that I can draw upon, and I have a fantastic boss who helped me make a plan to take the (paid) leave I need.
All that does not mean that I can't comment on a relevant experience I have that most likely reflects the experiences of many in corporate America.
With everything else set well, why would I disrupt my family again? I already moved in 2014 to escape an employer that was pretty much pure evil and really would have damaged my family and marriage. Don't you think, that having gone through that, I have learned how to protect my family?
In short, your public lecture, as the other commenter pointed out, does seem a bit arrogant to me.
Very surprised by the reactionary thinking I'm seeing about this.
Yes, it's such obvious common-sense advice that you presuming he has never heard it is arrogant. The problem is not the advice; it's you appointing yourself qualified to lecture somebody with little understanding of their situation.
It's advice that I acted upon in 2014, when I realized,as we were about to try for pregnancy #1, that my then-employer was untenable. No promotion potential, mandatory 20+ hours a week of unpaid overtime, lots of deployments (up to 6 months a year away from home), no commonality with engineering done anywhere else...I moved and got the job I have now with hyphenated-corporation. It's big and evil, sure, but my immediate management (up to 2 levels above me) treat me well and respect the work that I've done for them. So I am loyal to them, but not the corporation. It's the corporation that has these policies that I don't like, but my management worked with me to soften the blow as much as possible.
Mistake #2 is being loyal. That's a surefire way to never get anywhere. For me it's a learned skill to be sure. I learned it when I saw that people whom management is afraid to lose are promoted ahead of everybody else. So I make sure my managers know that I re-evaluate my options about once a year. I'm also "well respected" and paid very well, but unless things are going spectacularly well for me, no one is under an impression that I'll stick around. I think it's fair. Those same people would fire my ass if they weren't getting good value out of me, so it follows that I should do the same and expect good value out of them.
In general I agree with you. Your overall logic is another factor in why I left my last job. But again, you don't know me, or my boss, so you are being rather presumptuous and I don't appreciate it.
The point is --- there was no real need to even mention this on an FB post! the CEO is also an employee and he could have done this more privately.
I hate it when top CEOs try to prove that love "work-life" balance when in reality once you reach the top, its always easy to do the "right thing" in any circumstance.
If she would have been pregnant when he just started FB, then would have taken more than 2 days off?
The point is --- there was no real need to even mention this on an FB post! the CEO is also an employee and he could have done this more privately.
He could have, but doing this publicly sets an example. There are a lot of companies where employees are officially allowed to take leave but in practice face disdain from their coworkers if they do; having the CEO publicly take such a leave helps to provide social license to everybody else in the company.
> the CEO is also an employee and he could have done this more privately
Nope. One, it is impossible for somebody of his prominence to take two months off work and not have it be noticed. And two, his point here isn't to take two months off. It's to signal to every one of his employees that it's ok.
One of my current boss's best habits is going home on time. And occasionally he'll go home early when he's worn down and unproductive, saying, "Man, I'm not getting anything useful done; I'm going to go home now." Not only is this a smart thing for anybody to do, but it's great in a boss because it gives everybody implicit permission to do the same when necessary.
I don't think what you're saying reflects reality. Anyone who is responsible for making payroll is experiencing a kind of pressure that most people will never know.
"United Continental Holdings Inc's (UAL.N) new chief executive has suffered a heart attack, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, barely a month after he took on the job of improving the airline's profitability and reputation."
Then quit and take a lower-stress job. Once you're at that point you can afford it (in fact most people in that position these days could just quit and reduce their living costs, maybe not even that). I think that's what GP was saying.
If company executives behave like workaholics, it raises the pressure on everyone in the company to also be workaholics. IMO they have a duty to demonstrate work-life balance.
Quite. Just like when the CEO of Yahoo banned working from home, and then had a fully equipped nursery built in the office next to her for the exclusive use of her kids and their full-time nanny.
It's great that he's taking two months, but count me with those who think he should take more. I took three months of maternity leave with my youngest, and honestly that last month was a really good deal for my employer. I used to say they were paying me to stay out of the codebase. I felt fine, and if I'd had to go back to work I could have, but between the sleep deprivation and the distractions of having a newborn around, I was pretty cognitively impaired. They'd probably still be finding bugs in the code I wrote that month.
I have a couple of friends who became parents and decided to take it in chunks rather than a full 4 months. They had a bit of support from in laws, so as a manager he came back after 1 month to ship a release, then wife and husband would alternate so there would be always one parent at home full time while the other worked.
The fact this is front page news on multiple outlets , and a pile of cynical comments here, underscores how weird America is with attitudes around "paid insurance benefits", whether healthcare, vacation, and parental leave.
Unlimited vacation policies are intended to make people act more like Canada or Europe where 4-6 weeks paid vacation is common. Most civilized countries have employer benefits plans that cover most of your salary as a parent for 12-16 weeks, and by the government (up to ~$50k annually) for 52 weeks shared between parents.
Mark is doing what most Dads do, and it's a good example.
Ugh. I'm not trying to be super negative, but he's setting a bad precedent by taking half the amount of allowed leave. "We offer 4 months, but Zuck only took 2. Wanna be like Zuck?" He should take the full 4 months and show everyone that it's OK.
This is like the unspoken mantra of "unlimited vacation" really being only 2 - 2.5 weeks.
At Google it was pretty common for new fathers to take half of the allotted leave at the baby's birth and then save up the remaining half to use for emergencies, vacations, or milestones over the next year. (You could bank paternity leave for up to 1 year at the time; it may be more now, since IIUC Google increased paternity leave from 6 weeks to 6 months around when I left.) So for example, if your wife needed to go to a conference or had a heavy workload at her job, you could take leave to cover the baby. Or if you wanted to take the kid to visit grandparents/great-grandparents, you could use up paternity leave instead of vacation time.
I'm actually splitting mine up right now, but I told everyone up front the dates and the plan. I doubt this is what Zuck will do, unless it's under pressure from backlash.
As I understand it, the maternity/paternity leave at Facebook can be taken at any time. He could return to work after the initial 2 months, and later take more time off, up to a total of 4 months.
It must be tough being the CEO of facebook. This is his own company which I'm sure he loves running and wants to continue to do so. But he's in a situation where the social and political climate basically dictates that he take paternity leave. The same climate also dictates that if he takes any less than the full amount, he's sending a message that the whole four months is a gesture of goodwill and you should only take half of that. If he takes an entire four months, he probably gets criticized for being lazy and for not making the board their money. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.
So can you (or me), or all the lucky ones above a certain threshold. We all have the same time! Which is the biggest leveler. Our only handcuffs are our own making, say after you have FU money[1]. (e.g. having a million dollars net worth is not safe enough. Got to be at least 10s of million dollar networth. And this would keep changing. )
That kind of thinking can lead to a culture where people don't want to take vacation because it means they are less "busy" than others and by implication, less important.
It becomes a badge of honor to let unused vacation expire at the end of the year because you just didn't have time to take it.
Facebook has hundreds of mid and upper level managers. I doubt that Zuckerberg is that involved in the intricacies of everything. After all, that's why you hire and delegate to managers in the first place.
What this really means is, no acquisitions for Facebook once leave starts (except maybe the ones he's already greenlit). At the CEO level, you focus on direction, strategy, and top-level execution of said direction and strategy. You're not designing and doing grunt work. If anyone can step back from a large corporation and watch things keep on humming along, it's the CEO.
> This is like the unspoken mantra of "unlimited vacation" really being only 2 - 2.5 weeks.
I think it depends on your company and management chain. When I worked at Netflix I took more vacation than every before. I'm not even sure how much, since it was untracked, but definitely more than 4 weeks a year.
Our management made sure to set a good example by taking plenty of vacation.
Netflix is the exception, not the rule. Take a poll of what "unlimited vacation" means to most companies with the policy, and you'll see 2-3 weeks being the overwhelming response.
I tried to google my way through verifying your statement, but didn't get very far. The number of companies offering "unlimited" or "discretionary" leave is very small. LinkedIn is the only other company I could find that I'd even heard of. I could find no statistics length of vacation for any of the companies I found.
Kickstarter removed it's "unlimited vacation" policy because it found that employees were not taking enough vacation. This seems to be a strong statement from the company that they want to encourage vacation taking.
I can find no evidence that most companies with "unlimited vacation" policies are trying to limit the amount of vacation for its employees. It would be great if you could furnish it, as I'm interested in this topic.
California requires employers to cash out unused vacation days to employees when they leave the company [0]. Therefore instead of giving a certain number of days, some sketchy companies have an "unlimited vacation" policy, so they can claim to offer great benefits, when they're really just trying to save money. The norm at these sketchy companies is definitely no more than 2-3 weeks vacation in practice.
Correct. Since employees don't accrue vacation hours, companies are not required to carry the equivalent pay on their balance sheet as a liability. It varies state by state, but California (where most startups are currently located) does convert this liability to an employee cash out upon leaving the company.
Unlimited vacation means no accrual so no balance sheet hit. It's a sketchy way to save money while effectively hinting that you're not supposed to take vacation. At first, people took unlimited vacation at face value. Now, the industry largely knows that it is industry speak for "2-3 weeks vacation but up to manager discretion."
>Now, the industry largely knows that it is industry speak for "2-3 weeks vacation but up to manager discretion."
Funny, because neither company I've worked for has that unspoken policy. You should come in and dictate the actual culture to us since you know it so well. I don't need to tell you the companies of course, since you're already well acquainted with them obviously.
The point of unlimited is that it's not limited by HR, its negotiated with your manager. 4 to 6 weeks is common. More, it depends on your circumstances.
Have you ever worked for a large company? It's unlimited by policy rather than by hewing to minimum government standards or gain-weeks-by-seniority as has been the case for 80 years. That's the point. There's no confusion here except to be pedantic.
Worked at such companies for the last 15 years or so. Took a full month of paid leave when my son was born. The same company now has a 3 month parental leave.
Or how about just taking a full year off. The guy is worth billions and basically never has to work again. He is also not the Steve Jobs of FB either. It's not like he massively contributes on a day to day level. What's the point of being so rich if you can't spend some time with your kid and wife.
Not really? Maybe I'm a bit pushy, but I think that people should take all of the time allotted for them to take care of their kids, bond with their kids, and support their partner. If he is banking it for later, great, if not, the work you're doing on social media is not more important than your child.
Considering his wealth, Zuckerberg could leave the company and dedicate his life to his child. In that light, is the 4 vs 2 months really relevant? Aren't both choices failing to uphold the principle you've stated?
I think working sets a good example for your child. When you have a newborn, your partner is recovering, etc. all of the extra help is really important -- add on top of that the countless studies that show how important bonding is for fathers in the first few months. It's not really quite a fair comparison.
Future dads out there, look into this. My wife and I split the year of unemployment-insurance-covered leave (half your salary if your salary is mediocre, and that's the cap) here in Canada and it was the best decision of my life. I got 7 months of full time dad duty in and it changed me.
My company and her school both offered a modest top-up on the government's parental leave benefit, so splitting the year meant we got to double-dip our employee benefits.
So it's not just good family building, it's also good financial sense. It's also the best way to fight the pay gap - an employer wonders which of his female employees will vanish for a year or so. This way, everybody leaves for 6 months or so.
That's basically the same model as here in Sweden. And i agree the biggest win is for the pay gap for women. Employers don't really discriminate as either sex could disappear soon. Employers don't take a big pay hit either, as it's social insurance that pays while you're off.
Both. There are max 50 weeks of EI paid - biological mothers get 15 weeks of pay, then the remaining 35 weeks of the pay in the first parental year is shared between parents (even for adoptions).
So, Mom & Dad could both take 15 weeks off (15 x 2), and Mom or Dad takes the remaining 20 off. There are many combinations.
Of course, EI only pays $50k a year max, so many employers will offer benefits packages that match 75-80% of your salary for up to 16 weeks (maternal and/or paternal leave).
I have experienced a change in mindset regarding vacations, when I was an employee of a large corp vs now that I am entrepreneur.
Earlier when I was an employee I used to look forward to weekends/holidays/vacations. Not so now. The idea of being away from work for months is unthinkable for me. Local radio on Monday morning has an RJ invariably commenting on Monday-morning-blues. Luckily, I can't relate to that feeling anymore.
Not trying to paint ultra-rosy picture of being a business owner. It does have ups and downs, and it being a roller-coaster ride is well documented by many.
But whatever stage (highs/lows) you may be in. Typically, its hard to keep yourself away from work. Maximum duration of a vacation, I have taken in past 8-9 years, is around a week, and the median is typically 3-4 days.
At the same time, I do understand responsibility towards family. So if somebody needs to do it, I appreciate that, and definitely see myself also doing, but obviously don't wish for it.
I can't believe that in the US, paternity/maternity leave is something that is left for 'the market to decide'. I was hoping for Marissa Mayer to lead and set the example for maternity leave... but she took two weeks... I couldn't really believe it, I was pretty disappointed. In my eyes what she did, sent a pretty sad message for women, her employees, and other companies.
I think Mark taking two weeks off, is an example, for everyone. His employees (male, female, etc) and other companies. Hey, maybe even the Government can learn from this.
Excellent! Good for Mark, and better for the world. The average privacy invasion perpetrated by megacorps will hopefully be falling slightly over the next two months.
It's a very personal choice for everyone, as Mark points out. That said, I believe the first 2 months are not always the most interesting for a father, nor when the most helpful. First 2 weeks sure!
After that, if you stay home doing emails, maybe you should go back to work for real, and keep some time for later in the year...
Whatever you say about Zuck, this is a nice post. Down to earth, real, warm. I also can't help but appreciate the non-prevalence of designer stuff and furniture everywhere in the photo, despite his net worth. Thanks Zuck. You've nicely wrong-footed all the "robot" charges. My your family and child be happy, healthy, and fulfilled.
I think it's the right thing to do. If you don't take everything he does upside down, this can't possibly be bad. I believe he chose the number wisely without making it too short, which would send a message across taking a full leave is not such a good idea, or making it too long only reminding everyone that he is the one.
It's nice that he is setting a good example but what's really impressive about this is that he has managed to get fb into a state where him taking two months off is actually possible. How many other large company CEOs could do that without a lot of things going wrong?
Former Facebook employee here. I was never as impressed with Mark as many I've spoken with, but this is really impressive. I also hope it shows how Sheryl should be a CEO somewhere ASAP.
to all the down voters: I would like to know the reason (I thought I followed the guidelines)
and for the record (again), I really live in Africa
the main reason this story qualified as a "news" in the first place is because he's (Mark) is pretty important/influential & with that, normal people like me have questions for them - that's all I did, asked an interesting question (especially from my pov)
The fact that a headline such as "Mark Zuckerberg Will Take Two Months Off from Facebook for Paternity Leave" [half what FB gives anyway] receives more than 200 points on HN means that something is really wrong on that other side of the Atlantic. -/bitchy-rant.
About 17% of Americans live in states with family/paternity leave. Zuckerberg's state of California being the first at 6 weeks leave.
It's not that progressive. You'll find more and more states passing family leave laws in the next decade (though I would much prefer something at the federal level besides unpaid job protection).
It's probably more, but I just added up the populations of CA, WA, and NJ. I know RI has it, but it's population is pretty small. That said, these programs are funded from employee paid disability/unemployment programs. It's not a huge reach for other states to implement similar programs. They just need to be pushed to do so (by we the people).
This 3 years seems to be not directly comparable, because it's not all fully paid, and there are limits to how much pay you can get. Seems like it's ~$2k/month max. That's not very much--maybe that's why only "38 percent of dads [in Germany] of children under six chose to take parental leave at all". I guess they don't value their kids either?
Yes, and that's just one of the loopholes. It's a problem with the current crisis in Europe. They want a better life for free and are known to get many children.
Three years is all? It takes at least eighteen to raise a child. Shame on you for being proud of your country that doesn't care about children enough to see them raised properly. I have to laugh at you and your country for not valuing your kids. I'm ashamed for you.
This entire (arrogant) line of reasoning is ridiculous because it's completely based on an arbitrary cutoff point that you decide is good. What a crazy coincidence that the cutoff point happens to be the same amount of time the geographic region you happen to live in sets as their paternity leave.
I wonder if this is by choice. I can't imagine giving up control of something like Facebook for even two seconds.
Does he have to sell all his Facebook shares and buy them back at the end of his paternity leave? If not, the "paternity leave" is in-name-only, because he will still be the largest shareholder of Facebook.
You can bet Zuckerberg will still be running the show.
I'm also willing to bet that it's good for business. An employee with better relationships at home is more likely to be productive at work in the long term.