Come to the Midwest. Here's how we do it. First of all, you can't retire at 30 on an entry level engineer salary (poetic license taken). Second, there are no child care benefits.
Instead, parents with kids split things up. One parent (usually the one who was earning less anyway) dials down their career, perhaps by going part time. The other parent dials up, by competing for promotions. For instance, it's almost like clockwork that someone announces the birth of their first child, and shortly after that, they've become a project- or middle-manager, or they've gone to work somewhere else. A few years later, when their family life stabilizes, they might come back to engineering. That's what I did.
This is a known economic effect. More than half of workers will change jobs for higher pay shortly after their first kid is born. There was a study of unskilled single women in a poor neighborhood in Chicago. After adjusting for everything else, the ones with kids tended to work for higher pay, changed jobs more often, and worked further from home.
This is all pre-COVID of course, but is how things have worked for decades.
Is this a good thing? Well, it stratifies the career ladder quite noticeably. How do you make it so that people with kids aren't running the entire show? Likewise for society as a whole?
In my view, employer based child care benefits make about as much sense as employer based health care benefits.
I look at it like being in a different country. I mean, suppose you live in country X, and you know that salaries and benefits are higher in country Y. Still, only so many people can move from X to Y, for whatever reason. So you live your life as well as you can in your home country.
And at least you don't live in country Z. ;-)
At my age and skill set, I don't know if I'd be competitive for a job in one of the high-wage cities anyway. There may be some things that I can do cheaper, that make it attractive for my employer to keep me rather than moving my work elsewhere.
Also some minor issues with a while host of *isms and segregation that we don’t talk about. Oh and still trying to ban abortion because having children is a choice , but not really.
Instead, parents with kids split things up. One parent (usually the one who was earning less anyway) dials down their career, perhaps by going part time. The other parent dials up, by competing for promotions. For instance, it's almost like clockwork that someone announces the birth of their first child, and shortly after that, they've become a project- or middle-manager, or they've gone to work somewhere else. A few years later, when their family life stabilizes, they might come back to engineering. That's what I did.
This is a known economic effect. More than half of workers will change jobs for higher pay shortly after their first kid is born. There was a study of unskilled single women in a poor neighborhood in Chicago. After adjusting for everything else, the ones with kids tended to work for higher pay, changed jobs more often, and worked further from home.
This is all pre-COVID of course, but is how things have worked for decades.
Is this a good thing? Well, it stratifies the career ladder quite noticeably. How do you make it so that people with kids aren't running the entire show? Likewise for society as a whole?
In my view, employer based child care benefits make about as much sense as employer based health care benefits.