Let me answer this with a counter-question. If you're pregnant and somehow hiding it really well, do you think it makes sense for you to job-hunting six weeks before you're due to give birth?
Literally the only reason to tell a prospective employer about your pregnancy status is to enable them to unlawfully discriminate against you based on that status.
You are, obviously, completely correct on the point that you raise. However, I am sold on those sort of laws on the basis that employers are discriminating on irrelevant dimensions, like race and gender.
An employee expecting, or indeed planning, to take a X months leave Y months after joining, with X > Y, isn't an irrelevant dimension. Especially if parental leave is paid, but I don't know if that is how the US handles leave.
An employee literally cannot be a high quality, productive worker if they are not working. Employers should not be forced to ignore relevant factors when hiring. That isn't fair on them.
While we're at it, why shouldn't any prospective employee with a health condition that might require extensive time off be required to disclose that? And, since people aren't often the best judge of their health conditions and the impositions they'll make on future employers, perhaps it'd be better if we all just disclosed our complete medical records along with our job applications.
Well, philosophically, at some point yes. There should be some level of personal responsibility not to sign up for a job that you don't intend to do. I don't think being required to provide detailed medical records is reasonable, a good faith, optimistic best-case is enough for me.
And while you might see pregnancy as equivalent to having a medical condition there are actually a number of fairly important differences. For example, in the modern era, pregnancy is more controllable than illness. Quite a number of people enthusiastically plan on it. Those aspects, intent and control, are important for determining who should bear the cost. The cost should not settle on an unwitting employer looking for a new hire.
I have a health condition which causes me to be suddenly absent for a week at a time 1-4 times a year. I absolutely disclose this to any prospective employer because I don’t want them to grumble when it happens.
It points to the state sponsored solution. If a single employer is supposed to carry the burden then they will obviously want to hire young healthy men above anyone else.
Fortunately this is exactly how it's implemented in most European countries: if the employee is not working the employer doesn't pay. The (usually state run) insurer does.
Requiring businesses to pay for someone taking time to care of their children is patently stupid and unjust and there is fully justified pushback against such laws.
"Employers should not be forced to ignore relevant factors when hiring."
But they are - that's the law. The same legal system that allows the corporation to exist at all and earn money in this environment requires them to ignore the fact that someone may be going on maternal leave and not discriminate based on it.
We the voters have decided that this is more important than the profits of any company, and in the end the voters (i.e. mostly employees) get to decide the rules of society, not the companies.
Let's try a re-frame. This isn't necessarily how I'd prefer to argue, but it might be a more productive way to explain the point to some people.
In the United States, there are many people who are in the reserve of the military, or in the National Guard. They often need to take some amount of time away from work for regular training and refresher sessions with the rest of their unit, in order to stay ready for wartime or domestic-emergency (since they also play a large role in responses to natural disasters) duty.
As a society, we've decided this is important enough to our future security to make it illegal to discriminate in hiring against someone who has obligations as a member of the reserves or National Guard, illegal to fire them for taking time away from work to fulfill those obligations, and illegal to force them to use their ordinary vacation time to cover that time away. And even if a reservist or Guard is called to extended active service, they have the right to return to their previous employer so long as that service does not exceed five years.
We've made that choice because, for each individual employer, the temptation is strong to let some other sucker hold a spot for a Guard or reservist, and not waste any of your business' money on them. Which is a tragedy of the commons situation.
Children are similarly an issue of security for our society. There is significantly less point to building things today, if nobody will be around tomorrow. So we, as a society, have also decided that employers cannot discriminate on the basis of choosing to have children.
You seem to have a problem with the second of these. Do you also have a problem with the first? If so, how do you find a consistent position that reaches those two different conclusions?
If society agrees your employee is doing something more important than work, fine, but then society should compensate you rather than demanding you take it in the shorts (and all the ugly incentives that creates).
If you disagree that this is a useful thing, you can move to a society which shares your views.
If your attitude is purely one of "don't use any of my money to do this", well, a government-run compensation system would be tax-funded and would use... some of your money. In fact, it would probably just be implemented similarly to employer payroll taxes, so it would mean you'd get to pay into it even if you somehow manage never to have an employee who has a child. Then you could complain about paying into a system that's not paying back out to you!
Or you could just learn to deal with the price of living in a civilized society, and accept that while this may be one specific benefit you'll never take advantage of, there are plenty of benefits you do get to take advantage of, that perhaps others don't, and that they pay into them regardless.
(and that's without considering that hiring and onboarding replacement employees is expensive, too, if your policy is to fire/not hire people who choose to have children, so please be sure to consider that as one of your costs)
That's what I'm arguing for, the burden should fall fairly across all taxpayers rather than solely upon the hapless employers who ignored the massive incentives to discriminate against soldiers and parents.
Does the company have a paid leave policy? Does said policy restrict when this paid leave can be taken in respect to hiring date? If people follow company policy, then why are you complaining again?
Companies aren't required to make maternity leave available to new hires immediately, or to pay for it. They simply aren't allowed to make employment decisions based on pregnancy status or plans.
I literally just did this — my wife is 9 months pregnant and I told them during the interview and was assured that my taking leave right away wouldn’t be a problem.
Because they are not wretched at risk analysis. They have at least a child’s understanding that humans are not machines, and there is a high variability in week to week performance, but overall the humans are a net gain.
Basically the same reasons you don’t invest in the 100% returns every year “investment opportunity”
Well... not really. In the sense that shareholders can sue a corporation they own if the management is not acting in their best interest while society cannot, a corporations main purpose is to provide profit to shareholders
Laws are precisely how society imposes its concerns on corporations. The concept of a corporation only exists in the first place because society decided such a thing was useful. The purpose of corporations is whatever society decides it is.
FUCK yes. Kids cost money. Jobs are how you get money. And I say this as someone who hired a woman who then told us she would give birth in two months, and we were fine.
What you seem to be saying is that instead of looking for a job, pregnant women should rob a bank? Honestly, I have no idea what point you are trying to make.
The logic of: "Babies are expensive, therefor I cannot stay unemployed for 6 months before I find a job" seems completely sound and reasonable to me. Where is that logic lacking? What practical alternative would you propose?
You may be trying to make a point, but you're not succeeding. A sarcastic guess: robbing banks makes money, and having a job makes money so having a job is logically equivalent to robbing banks and therefore being employed is bad.
My team has hired more than one person that immediately went on leave. We literally paid them for months before they started. We did this knowingly, and I cite this with other candidates as a concrete example of how well we treat our employees.
Guess what, in our industry the people that are planning to have kids are also very likely to be senior and experienced. They're hard to recruit. Consider leave as part of the cost of hiring good people.
If you're not doing things like this, you're not actually competing for top talent.
Fraud is intentionally misrepresenting information in order to affect how the other party would act to cause a financial gain/loss. It is illegal for the other party to change how they act based on information about a pregnancy, therefore there is no legally admissible injury to the company. Legally, you're probably in about the same situation as a drug dealer accusing someone of stealing some of his goods - if you can prove that they actually caused you damages (ie: that you had a stash of drugs, or that you would deliberately not hire a candidate because they were pregnant), you're worse off than before.
They mainly hire people to replace others that quit/retired or to fill a new position created to support a team with a steadily growing workload. New hires are subject to a 3 month probation period during which both parties can end the contract at will. More than 80% of all positions are long term.
I would hope that someone looking for a long term employment at a company would be honest and upfront with something like a planned 1-year vacation. My only gripe with the parent poster is that they are hiding(rightfully so) this so close before their planned leave and thus do not appear serious about a long term employment at that company.
I sure hope you are not involved with hiring at your company because your perspective on this is a great way to get sued into oblivion.
It's actually in your best interest as the hiring company to not find out if the person is pregnant or expecting to have a child. Let's say that you decided not to hire someone for a set of reasons unrelated to pregnancy, but along the way you asked the candidate if they were planning to get pregnant. Good luck proving that you didn't make the hiring decision on the basis of knowing they would take leave. Which of course is illegal under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. This is why most companies make it a policy that you can not ask these kinds of questions so as not to taint the interview (even though technically it's not illegal to ask the questions, it's just illegal to use them as a basis for your decision).
As a candidate you might actually be acting more in the interest of the company to not tell them you are going to be having a child so as not to put them in that position? I honestly haven't thought through it that much so I could be convinced of a different opinion.
If you're planning to continue working after having a child, I think you should go about your career as if the pregnancy wasn't happening and just take the leave as appropriate. If that means you work 6 weeks before leave, so be it. You'll be back after leave to continue on.
What would the company do if instead of getting pregnant you got hit by a bus one day? I had to take 2 months of medical leave on 2 weeks notice when I got deathly ill, that was way less notice than a pregnancy. The startup I was at had only 12 people and they handled it. I'm unconvinced by all these arguments that it's too much of a hardship for companies to deal with their employees having a life.
1 year vacation? ROFL. In America 3 months of paid maternity leave is a good dead. Also, in America both parties can end a job at will at any time. Also also, referring to parental leave as "vacation" is pretty weird.
If you knew you had to take time off in two months to recover from a scheduled medical operation, would you rather spend the next two months earning a salary or surviving on your savings?
My wife been searching for a job for quite some time (about a 2-3 years), during that time we've been trying to conceive a baby, but no luck, went through few eco sessions, still no dice. We decided to give up on idea of having a baby and just relax and live our lives. Then suddenly she gets a job offer she was dreaming about and one week later, guess what? She is pregnant. Now what would you tell your wife? Give up job you've been dreaming about?
I think it always makes sense to go looking for a job when you don't have one and you wish to be an independent adult and support yourself through employment.
But, obviously, we're not talking the same kind of "makes sense" here, are we?
Quit earlier. I stuck around in a screwed up project until I couldn't stand talking to anyone else involved, I would have been way better off if I'd committed to leaving about four months earlier than I did - when I could see that the fundamental requirements and plans were being faked for management, and everyone else was OK with that. By the time I did leave I was having actual nightmares about work.
I learned this lesson 9 years ago, then implemented it last year. Steady paychecks are nice, but plan so you don't need them to live month to month if you can swing it. Once the company turns sour and you're always angry, it's past time to move on to something fresher. I took a nice 3 month sabbatical and it was the best summer since college. Life is too short.
I definitely could have afforded to quit, but I kept on believing that I could fix it and I just had to explain things to the right people...eventually my manager delivered me a glowing written performance review while telling me in person that he wanted to put me on a PIP, and asked if I wanted to transfer to another team. Total mindfuck. If I hadn't had a solid reputation through the company and with her management chain already I'm sure he would have tried to fire me.
He founded a single start-up when he was 19 that failed in its mission and was bought for a paltry sum (for YC, anyway). Other than that his experience in life and business consists primarily of having been born into affluence and all the privilege and advantage that brings.
It's so very Bay Area for someone like him to be president of a VC firm. His pre-YC resume wouldn't get most people past the resume filter in almost any other company, including a number that YC fund.
And most of his comments about business are not all that useful. They're exactly the sort of comments I'd expect from someone blessed with great luck and above average intellect but too little experience.
He was also a successful angel investor and I think a scout for sequoia before YC. I think he was more successful at the angel investing thing than at his startup
Failure doesn't mean "bad eye problems", it means any result other than 20/20 vision. So you could have better sight than before, but still be a failed case.
Yea, I got a ton of warnings and had to straight up sign a paper saying I knew it could cause permanent damage. This makes me wonder if he just didn't pay any attention, or if he went to really dodgy surgeons.
Uber loses money, so at most you could argue that it is law breaking AND VC money. And without a lot of numbers on the cost of medallions, etc in each city it operates, you're actually just asserting your belief, not making an argument.
> Uber loses money, at most you could argue that it is law breaking AND VC money.
I don't follow the logic. Many companies have negative cash flow while they invest in growth. What is "it" in your sentence? If you're saying there are only two possible factors for the relatively low ride fares, I think you're forgetting the reduction of transaction costs.
Hailing a cab on the street is frustrating. Hailing a cab by phone call even more frustrating and uncertain. Decreasing the transaction cost increases demand, which encourages supply, which lowers cost, which ... Anyway, there's a new equilibrium price.
Uber has a low cost because they are not charging you enough to cover their own costs, they are making up the difference with VC money. Any factors that make the cost of providing an Uber lower than the cost of providing a taxi are unimportant because they are not pricing based on the cost. If they had to pay for taxi medallions they could still undercut existing taxis if they wanted to.
> not charging you enough to cover their own costs
Are you an Uber employee revealing private information? If not, it seems you're making a big assumption about the proportion of their expenses that are marketing and growth versus steady-state marginal cost.
Amazon didn't make profit for a while and everyone wondered if they could. Oh, it's a low margin business, they'll never be profitable, blah, blah. Turns out they can, in fact, make a bit of money. Maybe Uber and Lyft can, too. Delta can, even though flights are a commodity business.
wow, you're really attached to this narrative you have, to be so desperately reaching for a reason to discredit the impact of VC money on their operation. I think my previous comments have already said everything relevant about the breakdown of their marketing costs vs steady state marginal costs.
You've asserted that they're ignoring cost in their pricing, but have provided no evidence for it. Uber and Lyft have claimed to be profitable in their biggest markets. Doesn't that suggest they set prices above marginal cost?
Wow. They were apparently profitable for two minutes in 2016, might be what you're referring to? I haven't provided any evidence because I assumed you had access to the same real world information as I do, but if you don't have internet I can mail you some stuff.
No, I'm referring to the US market. They have never been profitable overall but for a very brief period in 2016 they claimed that the US operation was profitable.
How about in NYC? Profitable there? I believe they announced that they were.
In any case, even if they're not currently profitable, that may be because of capital expense, not operating costs. Until they go public, it's hard to know.
