WOW I am shocked you remember! I wrote a book in parallel to the videos for science education in kindergarten. However, after almost a year of making the videos without an income o r a significant grow in my audience, I unfortunately stopped!
I loved doing them, I miss them and I am happy I tried it out but reality is, that I need a way to have an income!
But I am so happy you remembered the videos + experiements. The hot/cold water mixing experiment is super fun!I received lots of photographs from parents whose kids did it, and loved it:)
Is your CV available? (Or a short version. Do you have a High School degree? An University degree? Which area? Some work experience before the children?)
My regular advice in life is to read whatever patio11 wrote about your problem. I'm not sure what applies. Do we have a @patio11 signal?
Thanks for the links + advice, I will be following them to read everything refering there. Interesting to see many aspects of the same issue.
I have degrees in Computer Science (BSc), and Neuroscience (MSc) with two years of being a researcher at the University at the Machine learning + Neuroscience department (hybrid). In parallel to my studies, I also started my own company for luxury wedding & events planning. My company was very successful and it was my only income stream for five years. I sold my company shortly after becoming a mother.
Career wise, I am looking for a role that utilizes my analytical and technical skills but at the same time, it connects me with people online and in-person. I love content creation (social media, blogging, video creations and more).Not sure what the suitable role is.
* If you are looking for a technical job, write some technical articles. (Don't expect to make money from them. Only some fun if you are lucky some karma.)
* Also a few small contribution to Open Source may help to learn the current tools.
* I'm not sure if something like https://www.kaggle.com/ helps to get hired, but you may get an update in the tools and also have a few recent technical anecdotes.
* There is people that work as social media manager. I'm not sure if that what you are looking for, and perhaps something tha mix some SWE will get a better pay.
You might have a better chance at short term contract positions that could get a bit of recent experience, or a contract-to-hire type of position. Anyway best of luck to you. I admire your grit and determination.
Thank you so much for your advice - I am sure I will eventually find the right oportunity:) I will be exploring these options as well. they might give me the push I need for my CV to be more recent and "desirable".
Wishing you the best of luck. My wife is working through the same challenge, but has a good prospect at the moment we are hoping goes through. I’m sure if you stick with it you’ll make it, even though it’s a shame it’s this way in the first place.
Love the positive can-do attitude :) I trust that you'll land a great position, you've got the chutzpah and grit for sure! And since you were recently dealing with toddlers as your primary occupation, I assume your soft skills have gotten an excellent workout ;P
some large companies, (i've seen ads from facebook, although i'm sure there are others), have "returnship" programs for people in this exact situation.
I strongly disagree with "I remained flat" statement. I mean, you were taking care of your children, weren't you? If you do it right (imho, if you even just try to do it right), it's the biggest accomplishment one can do.
I understand how frustrating it must be to stay professionally flat compared to your peers. We absolutely should celebrate people taking their time off to literally raise the next humans, instead we're turning them down because they spent 5~6 years off the industry. How is this not counterproductive for humanity as a whole?
It is really not compensated if you look at the financial side. The cost of raising a child plus the lost income because of parenting plus the fact that 'you remain flat' is way higher than months or even a year extra pay.
It is worth it though for most people (because of the extra happiness) so I'm not saying that we should necessarily compensate it further, just that financially it's not compensated for.
You're right that it's not the case that "someone else" pays the whole bill. But why should they?
It's a personal choice to have children, and it's impossible to be a parent X hours a day and also spend those same X hours "in the lab".
Just like it's not possible to spend all your time in the lab and also be a (present) parent.
The limited time for everything that can be done in a lifetime is not about "fairness", and nobody owes you to be able to do all things in life, even if it were possible, which it isn't.
That's making purchase decisions on my behalf. Which is what taxes is in general, of course.
But this is the most subsidized one of all (even in the US), and people do it whether it's subsidized or not.
You could say that they are getting "paid in love".
If it's already worth it for them, why should they be paid twice?
Most of the benefits you list may be better off with fewer kids with the same government support.
I definitely think we should invest in schools and such, to make the best people we can. But I'm sick of parents complaining that children affects their economy or has opportunity cost.
Parents don't deserve a handout. Children do, however, deserve a good education.
Literally everything in in life has opportunity cost. Nobody owes removing that cost for anyone else.
If you spend all your money on partying nobody owes you the cost of nice clothes.
I think my counter is that being a parent honestly seems thankless.
It feels like you and I agree that maybe kids aren't for our lives and yet we're pretending its just a wildly rewarding activity like watching movies and not a situation of basically being worried or having to pay for or care for another human for the rest of your natural life.
Even for two people who (I am assuming) do not have kids that feels kind of insincere.
We know its not like watching a movie, or riding a bike or even going to the gym unless the gym costs you ~250k while simultaneously acting like the rude jerk I did when I was a teen.
> I think my counter is that being a parent honestly seems thankless.
I hear that the smile on your child's face is infinite reward.
> We know its not like watching a movie, or riding a bike or even going to the gym unless the gym costs you ~250k while simultaneously acting like the rude jerk I did when I was a teen.
Yet, like I said, people do it gladly. They do it even knowing about the way it affects the woman's body, knowing about the sleep depravation, knowing about the terrible two's, knowing about the "you're stupid and I hate you" teens.
If it were as simple as "this activity costs 250k and is a rude jerk" then nobody would do it. Yet they say it's so worth it.[1]
So if it's so worth it for you, then do it. But I don't want to hear about how you're the victim of your own choice. Everyone is. I'll never be a fighter pilot, nor an astronaut.[2]
Pilot and astronaut is the road not taken, for me.
If someone chooses to have a baby and stay home for 5 years, then that's about 11% of their working life not spent improving their career. You'll never have those 11% again, and I won't pretend you walked two roads at the same time. Because nobody can.
And those 11% are placed in a critical point. If someone took age 60-65 off, then that won't affect their career as much.
If someone leaves university at 25, has a baby and takes five years off, then they are now 30 with zero work experience.
That's not fairness, that's physics.
[1] Though one guy I know said he used to not be able to comprehend why anyone would not want children. Now after he's had children he understands. He would absolutely do it again, but at least he understands people who don't want them.
[2] not a real one, anyway. Maybe if prices go down a lot in my lifetime I'll be able to take a lap, but that's it.
People are slowing having kids. To the point of societal wide concern. Its possible that there is a frustration obscuring your view on the topic.
Multiple countries in GDP leadership positions are incentivizing having and raising children because women who are able to
- exercise bodily autonomy
- pursue an education
- and generally have rights, though in no country are they equal
choose to have less kids.
IMHO they choose to have less kids because its clear the current set-up is a raw deal for women at best. Not having enough kids to replace the current working generation is an issue in: the US, the UK, Italy, Spain, and a number of other countries. This greying of a population is a massive concern and also one of the reasons that some have pushed and bet on robotics. To replace human workers.
Separately, its mostly women, if not exclusively women, bearing the consequences of the action of you know. propagating the species. Its absolutely mind-boggling when you think about the fact that propagation is a requirement of our continued existence and only half the species pays a massive tax
I'm all for equal cost for a couple who choose to have a child.
At the same time you can't mandate it. And there's no denying that statistically women choose family more, when choice is given to them.
I know several couples where the wife is essentially asking to retire (in their thirties), to be home with the children and video games, and that the man should continue working for them. Even if it jeopardizes their shared FIRE plans.
If they do that, who is actually paying the tax? Financially the wife for sure. Life quality the husband for sure.
As for replacement, the population age pyramid is not sustainable. It relies not on stability, but growth. The greying of population is inevitable (compared to the classic pyramid) thanks to medical advances and the fact that exponential growth has to stop, mathematically. We can choose starvation, war, plague, or reduced births.
Parenthood is vital to society and it's very much in the interest of countries with declining birthrates to promote it. It is currently subsidized but not nearly enough to make it a rational choice for individuals from a purely economic perspective. If we want to stabilize declining birthrates, we will need to increase subsidies by a lot.
Totally depends on the state of society and what the needs are, China had the opposite policy for over 30 years to achieve a declining birth rate. It's not true that more children = better. It's only an issue somehow for pyramid schemes of the welfare system.
Political will for transferring wealth from certain portions of the population to others can change quickly. Also, the pension amount likely will not keep up with real inflation, as is the case today.
The population pyramid is not sustainable. The exponential function just will not allow for the combination of age pyramid and our increasingly effective health care keeping us alive to all become parents.
I'm not advocating for growth. I'm advocating for stability. The population pyramid is already over for us. Shrinking is now the default. We need more parents simply to stop the future shrinking.
I know some advocate shrinking for sustainability reasons, but a policy of shrinking is a policy of irrelevance. Other cultures with a growth mindset will continue growing and ruin your sustainability plans.
Let's have abundance instead of austerity. Instead of intentionally reducing the population for sustainability, we can make the current population sustainable with technology. We don't need to stop population growth. It's already stopping. We now need to stop population shrinkage to reach a stable equilibrium.
Others in this thread have, in so many words, said that being a parent should be paid by tax payers as a full time job.
It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers.
So that lessens abundance, creating a poorer world.
It's like the conversation about UBI. If it's actually U and (as often stated by proponents) enough for a middle class lifestyle I would quit today. No way I'd be a sucker paying taxes to support government funded FIRE, without doing it myself.
And so would most of the population.
On a small scale I've soon this in friends' relationships. "Can I stay home with kids and video games, and you just support us?".
> It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers.
I think you should examine this statement a little more. If the time of economically successful people is too valuable to "waste" on childcare, what you are saying is that either economically successful people should not have children (with the obvious corollary being that only economically unsuccessful people should have children), or economically successful people should not spend time raising their children (meaning they should foist their children into the care of economically unsuccessful people instead). I hope you can see the clear issue with the former, and while the latter is pretty much status quo it has big issues as well.
If the children of doctors and lawyers do better when their parents care for them instead of other people, and become doctors and lawyers too, then society didn't lose after all. Childcare is an investment in the future, not pure waste to be avoided.
I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child. But I do think that parenthood deserves to be subsidized, and more than it is now, even for economically successful people, up to the point where the fertility rate stabilizes at the replacement rate.
> I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child
But we pretty much are already.
First with paid parental leave (sometimes over 400 days) and then forever after that, by pretending that this is not a gap in work experience and therefore calling anything short of bumping salary and seniority in line with people who were working as "discrimination".
Like people who are away for a year, and come back promoted.
And that's not even mentioning how much of the slack coworkers he to pick up from a parent needing to leave at 3pm every day from now on. We're all meant to pretend they work just as hard, and deserve to be paid just as much.
(Not every parent offloads work like this onto their coworkers, but a lot of them do. So it's a huge cost statistically not paid by the person who made the choice)
LOL sorry, not even close. But it doesn't matter whether we are or not, not in the slightest. What matters is whether we're subsidizing enough to stabilize the fertility rate. Which we're empirically not.
The reduction isn't because of lack of subsidies, but simply a change in needs and wants.
People no longer want to have 4-5 kids, no matter if you 10x the paid time off or double the subsidies. This too empirically.
And no, actually. Your "LOL" aside, we actually are. Anyone who takes time off for child raising gets a bump literally forever.
So yes, actually.
I'm not saying fully compensated, obviously.
But people do it or don't do it based on if they want, not the money (given a basic level of comp, which we are waaaay beyond).
To increase birth rates we have to start paying people who DON'T want to have children, to do it.
Like wow, how much would you have to pay people who would only do it for money? One million in cash just day one?
Just the physical toll for the parent is huge.
And statistically rate of happiness goes down during thirties for people who have children.
And then on top of that your idea is to have people who don't want children raise them? I'm not betting on this improving quality of life for the child, if the child is just a paycheck.
So we really want people who have children no actually want to, too.
The point appears to be that a year of compensation is pitiful even if one considers the 18y effort part time.
Having young kids I think it's more like full time parenting, on top of any regular day job. Unless you can find a spouse willing to do all the kid work, which is like non-stop 12-16h days until all are in school.
Heaven forbid your SO wants to homeschool and expects you to do at least 40% of parenting, with your day job.
And one gives up so much time and energy being a parent, unless you're wealthy enough to outsource large chunks of the work. (Daycare in the US is 10-25K per year.)
The whole point is that being a parent is compensated in a way that no other choice is.
Parents take on a significant burden. They are compensated for it. There is no choice I can make as a non-parent that will provide me with similar compensation.
Can you define what compensation you see as so exclusive to parenting?
If just this financial support provided by some governments then consider you could take on a very low pay job with a nonprofit and get similar 'compensation'. Albeit spread across the length of that career instead of front loaded as paternity leave/credits.
Parental leave is exclusive to parenting. See the original comment:
> Some countries give more than a year paid parental leave
You yourself are making my point by saying “similar compensation” “albeit spread across the length of a career.” There is nothing for non-parents that is equivalent to parental leave.
Thanks for clarifying your perspective. Honestly it just seems very narrow and pedantic since even non-parents benefit from efforts to blunt the incredible costs of parenting. It leads to quality of life improvements, even if modest, for families. Non-parents themselves, and all their friends, love interests, and family have to come from parents somehow. If society does nothing to help then more parents will choose to have fewer, or no, children.
And these leave benefits are just so miniscule compared to the effort and finances required for each child. So why complain about missing them?
Yes. If my parents didn’t have me the world would be better off (not any kind of downer, just a fact that I take more from the world than I give — like nearly everybody) and I wouldn’t know the difference because I wouldn’t exist.
The issue that I'm having with this, is that child care is still relatively unqualified work, so how can it ever be highly compensated?
Parents who are highly educated doctors, pilots etc argue that they should be able to stay at home for 1-2 years with almost full salary, which the tax payers should subsidise, and at the same time they also pay an uneducated 16 year old 10 bucks an hour to babysit when they go to the movies?
And you have 1 educated child care professional easily caring for 10 small children, and making a very modest salary.
I don't really think it's fair to call parenthood a "personal choice". It's not a complete necessity like food and water, but it's also not a complete personal choice like getting a tattoo. The majority of humans are going to be parents. All living humans come from a long unbroken line of parents. It's more fundamental than a simple personal choice.
Parenthood must be an entirely personal choice. Otherwise the implication is that "society" or government have the right to regulate bodily autonomy, force people to have children, outlaw abortion or homosexuality as "threats to society," engage in eugenics, etc.
Most would consider the implications of that to be highly immoral.
> Most would consider the implications of that to be highly immoral.
I think it's already immoral how society punishes people for being childless when it's a natural thing and can be 100% caused by characteristics that you are born with and have no control over.
I guess it depends on where you live, but it is so much less expensive to be childless in the US. Monetary aid provided by the government does not cover the costs, let alone make it profitable.
And government aid is not just for unfortunate events, it's used to promote desired behavior. That's why there are subsidies for companies developing green energy and EVs, for farmers growing certain crops, for animal feed (very frustrating as someone who always has to pay more for veggie burgers), and many other things. Clearly, though, the US doesn't value parenthood very much because the monetary incentives simply are not enough. I guess when you know your replacement rates are kept afloat by immigration, you don't care much if your citizens have kids.
It's funny that you say being social is easier, because what I see is the opposite. Being a parent isn't a panacea for socialization. It can be very isolating when your childless friends can drop whatever they are doing to go have a good time (so they don't bother to make plans, they just go) while you have to secure a babysitter just to get a quiet dinner. Your friends have to accommodate you, and many will not.
As someone who is currently childless with both new parent friends and not-so-new parent friends, it's very clear to see how much simpler it is for the ones of us who don't have kids have to be social or follow their own interests.
I feel in no way compelled by any law or incentive to have children and am in fact dreading the day my wife is serious about having them, because I have seen first hand what it does to your bank account and your personal life.
> It can be very isolating when your childless friends can drop whatever they are doing to go have a good time
Yeah parents can't have as much spontaneous fun, but they don't have to deal with unhealthy loneliness of being alone on thanksgiving, christmas, vacations etc. Society is organised for the family unit, and there are no options for single people.
Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.
All living humans come from a long unbroken chain of natural selection and rejection of bad genes and reproduction of only the fittest to enable adaption to a changing environment.
If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection and create survival of the unfittest where every bad gene will reproduce endlessly.
Not having children is just as "natural" as having children, it all depends of how your particular set of characteristics do in the current environment and foreseeable future.
Huh? It has to work out that or the human race dies out. I guess you could have a few couples who have a lot of kids instead, but developed societies are really adverse to that.
It is “natural” in the sense that we wouldn’t be here to talk about it if it wasn’t the case.
> Huh? It has to work out that or the human race dies out. I guess you could have a few couples who have a lot of kids instead, but developed societies are really adverse to that.
Obviously the human race somehow made it until we created developed societies. I think you are confusing survival of the human race with survival of our current pension system.
Who knows if it's really better or worse to suddenly allow everyone to reproduce?
For sure it's not "natural", and as far as I can see it would actually reverse evolution to regression instead.
And it seems like we can't really stop it anyway with how many men today are becoming outsiders in society because they get rejected to reproduce.
It’s natural only in the sense of a selection bias: we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t so. Men aren’t the limiting resource here, but if women start having less than 2.1 kids on average, we eventually just disappear. This is just math, not related to economics, morality, or ideology.
Yeah that's the point, so there really is no need for every man to have children, should it be the norm I'm wondering. Can we get rid of this natural selection, and should we? I don't know. Why is it so self-evident that every person should have children? Clearly it's not natural. It's just another artificial "equality" of a social welfare state.
If monogamy is valuable, and I think it is, then most men should be parents as well. I can’t imagine a world with a few guys fathering most of the kids, that seems like it would cause lots of problems.
You can still be monogamous if some women have more children, not every woman needs to have 2 children to achieve that average. A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.
The whole idea that child bearing should be perfectly and equally distributed across the whole population is a construct of the social welfare state, enabled by subsidies, and is just an artificial form of equality like any other. As such I think it should be examined and debated like everything else, and not taken for granted as self-evident or "natural".
> A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.
The median is close to the average in kids per women in the developed world. Having four kids is harsh on many women’s bodies; eg my grandma had 8 kids, but she died in her late 50s. While no doubt some couples will want to go for four kids or more, I don’t think it’s ethical to encourage it over a more standard 2 something for most couples.
> Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.
This is an incredibly bold statement. Most people like having sex, and in a natural state (sans birth control, online dating, internet porn, etc) there are going to be a lot of pregnancies. The idea that tax credits, welfare or parental leave is what is driving this situation is ridiculous. This feels more like a dog whistle about the welfare state, but even if you take away those "subsidies", people ain't gonna stop having kids, that's just not how the majority of young people of child-bearing age think.
> Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.
Lower education and religion is probably the biggest cause for these higher birth rates. In the victorian era, people would simply not get married if they didn't have the means to raise children, and they would be childless, and there was nothing strange about that. To give subsidies for everyone to have children comes from the post ww2 politics.
I think the biggest cause is actually high rates of child mortality. Humans have more children when there is a higher chance those children might not survive.
> If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection
Using your own logic: if natural selection is that fragile, then it should evolve or die. We're not called to uphold it in any way; our own selfish genes inevitably predispose us not to worry about an evolutionary mechanism that does not directly affect us or our children.
It is absolutely not! We live in Germany which has good options compared to other countries and it is still not enough.
My wife earns 5000€+ in her job. Guess what, you can earn a maximum of 1800€ during parental leave. It gets even better, now that she takes a few hours less because somebody needs to take care of our child, kid number 2 will even be compensated with less (1400€). How is this fair?
This is without the missed opportunities to get a higher position.
Women are less likely to be employed because of the fear that they might leave for a year or 2.
What needs to happen is that the compensation is higher AND that men are forced to take an equal time of. If the woman takes a year the man has todo the same. Otherwise equality will be very difficult to archive.
Well, if I were going to argue the case I would probably start with the impossibility of any man ever getting that opportunity. Of course, whether those figures are enough or given out in the right way to the right people at the right time, all of those details can be argued over, but if you're going to start with fairness as your argument you'd better address the elephant in the room first.
> AND that men are forced to take an equal time of
Why is it right that anyone is forced to do anything so that your political views are enacted?
Yeah, I'm constantly surprised that nobody every says this. With women entering the work force, now the family as a whole needs to work almost twice as much, as before when women were house wives. That's a pretty hefty price to pay for everyone, to save those women who were unlucky to have a cruel or unfair husband. I don't know if it's possible to say if it's "worth it" or not, but this independence sure does not come for free.
In particular, my wife like working and having her personal projects. I like to spends part of my time with my children. So we both work and we both take care of the children. We are lucky to have jobs that allow this.
Sure it's going to work out for some people, but I still think the obvious downside of increased working hours in total is very significant and almost never mentioned. If you raise the working day from 8 to 12 hours, just because you find some guy who likes it, maybe doesn't mean it should be accepted as a perfect idea with no downside.
> It's just more communism and less freedom. Everyone has to make a big sacrifice for the unfortunate few. Corporal punishment to deal with the problem of some cruel husbands.
Not sure if you think you're being philosophical or you know this is nonsense, but it is.
How does women entering the work force (from your previous post) equal less freedom? Less freedom for whom? Certainly not women. Since you equate more communism with less freedom, I will assume you agree that money provides freedom, if women can only work as unpaid housewives, they have no freedom. It has nothing to do with their husband, cruel, unfair, or otherwise. This may be surprising, but not all women want kids or marriage, or may want them but also find great joy in working accomplishments - many just did not have those options in any safe stable way until recently. (historicity speaking)
That's not less freedom, it's more, for both women and men (not as much stigma or pressure for not being the 'provider' when they may not want to be) - it does lessen some power and control males have historicity had over society and others. And that can be threatening for those who enjoy limiting others freedoms and controlling them.
> How does women entering the work force (from your previous post) equal less freedom? Less freedom for whom? Certainly not women.
Less freedom for those who happen to like traditional gender roles, now they are forced to work more and adapt to more "modern" gender roles. Otherwise they will lose out massively because the single earner has so much lower salary now.
Less freedom because an almost doubled amount of total working hours for a family. Free time = freedom.
Less freedom for childless people because they have much lower salaries now because of the larger supply of workforce (which is somewhat compensated by subsidies to people with children). Now they compete against couples with double income on everything on the market.
A single childless person would previously have the same buying power as a single breadwinner, now they have half.
Less freedom because this creates a much higher pressure and financial incentives for people to have children and to have modern gender roles, and anything else is discouraged.
> if women can only work as unpaid housewives, they have no freedom.
Well, are you more free if you trade free time for working hours? You are literally only more free to slave more.
This freedom only manifests in the case when you want/need to leave your husband.
> Less freedom for those who happen to like traditional gender roles, now they are forced to work more and adapt to more "modern" gender roles. Otherwise they will lose out massively because the single earner has so much lower salary now
That's an equivocation. There is the freedom that comes from choice (what is not disallowed) and there is the freedom that comes from available choices. For example, homosexuals being able to marry is not the same kind of freedom as if I had a million dollars I'd be able to do what I want.
Those who prefer traditional gender roles can still have them, they just need to compete to afford it, as they did before, or to cut their cloth.
Harrison Bergeron distopia is a different topic in my opinion.
I agree with you that it might be impossible to enforce such a law without having the downsides you mentioned. However I would very much like being able to take 6 months of parental leave without being called lazy. This goes both ways.
You're saying it's "absolutely not" compensated, and then you enumerating just some of the ways it's compensated?
I'm confused.
I didn't say it was fully compensated. Of course it's not.
But why should you have children, and expect "someone else" to pay for everything?
Nothing else in life works like that.
But yes, I've heard of the German child benefits, and tax rules for married couples, that are not optimal for an equal and fair society.
You say the compensation is "not enough". What would be? That "someone else" pays for the entire cost of your child? Why stop there? Why not demand salary from the government for choosing to raise a child?
If I live in a country with public health care, and I choose to become morbidly obese, smoke cigarettes, excessively drink alcohol, develop diabetes, get limbs amputated, and go on disability because I can’t work, I’m expecting the government to foot the bill to keep me alive.
There are many choices people make that they expect others to pay for.
What a strange perspective to take. A "subsidized personal choice," as if there is some higher economic power that we are in service of, and those who decide to dedicate a third of our adult existence to the next generation are making some luxurious lifestyle choice.
Not at all. Poor people successfully raise kids every day. And I want schools to get more of my tax money, if for no other reason than that I want to be in a world of smarter people.
(And there are other reasons, that are more important)
But it is a life choice. Other ones are to become an artist. But barely anyone says that anyone who chooses to be an artist (bad or not) deserves for "someone else" to foot the bill for their life.
Or maybe you'd be happier we me saying that yes, in the same way that you must be this net worthy to collect fancy cars. Makes it easier, sure. But nobody owes paying for your choices.
To do the work of fulfilling our most fundamental evolutionary urge, and perpetuate the future of humanity is a “lifestyle choice” isomorphic to “choosing to be an artist” or “collecting fancy cars”?
You may feel that having kids is an optional luxury; the evidence suggests this is not a majority perspective.
??? What is it then? Your duty you owe to society? If that would be the case and people would do all this sacrifices just for society and this wouldn't be a deeply ingrained wish to replicate, put oneself into the next generation and have to do a lot with self-realization, then our societies would be much better.
But fact is our world is overpopulated, it would.be better if we'd size down, and we have superegoistic societies in general. (But who would push our wheel chairs if we all wouldn't be so superaltruistic and raise children? Simple answer is there still would be enough, because people want children, even if it is a lot of sacrifice. I fully agree that it costs a lot and is a huge sacrifice, still its a free personal (if you so want lifestyle) choice that most won't regret.. or do you?
Driving a car is by far the most subsidized personal choice in the United States. It’s not even close.
As for subsidizing parenthood and children: the more the better. I don’t have kids, but as a human person I have an interest in the next generation of people being happy, healthy, well adjusted and well educated. And that of course begins with creating an environment in which the parents of those children can be successful.
I have seen what women go through to bring children into the world and feed them, and a year’s parental leave does not come close to making up for the toll it takes on their body not to mention the myriad risks of complications like perineum tearing, separation in abs, death, and maybe even having to care for a special needs child.
The question isn’t whether it makes up for it. It’s whether there’s any other life choice that leads to similar compensation (regardless of whether that compensation is “worth it.”)
>Parenthood is by far the most subsidized personal choice in the universe.
The amount spent on keeping shipping lanes protected, the world "stable", and older people having access to medical care are, in the US, subsidized more I believe.
Really we should allow parents to sell their children into slavery, that would be a means of maximizing short-term return on investment for parents who can't afford to provide food, education and clothing to their children. Remember, the free market is the ultimate selector for maximum efficiency, and to quote Milton Friedman, 'corruption is government interference into market efficiencies in the form of regulation'. Friedman got a Nobel (*swedish bank) Prize in Economics, so he must be right.
Now, I wonder if I have to add the /sarcasm tag or not... source:
After reading the article, I don't see what's horrendous about it. Yes, having children has a market effect and is even a market unto itself. There's rarely any controversy to think in terms of the financial costs and legal obligations (or lack thereof) when discussing abortions, adoptions, disinheritance, estrangement, etc. All of these actions are connected by a single thread: Generally speaking, no person is owed anything for merely existing.
Instead of my supposing or assuming, I'd rather you speak for your own position. Pretending to be a different person may be a fun exercise, but it doesn't get me any closer to understanding that person's motives or thoughts as they are.
The point behind the exercise is specifically to avoid an oppositional dialogue. It is a way to flex the muscles of empathy and authentically arguing an opposing position is one way to get there. Supposing and assuming is 100% the point. It's a shortcut to the frontiers of one's knowledge.
I think you are right. The fact is, social democratic societies deeply need children. Who will take care of you and run businesses when we are old? Tech cannot solve everything ; we need actual humans deal with the future! No, the Ipad IOS.32 with AI will not do that.
I live in an aging society with 'free' healthcare, where most of the resources are consumed by unhealthy people with chronic conditions (read : boomers with diabetes). A lot of large scale social programs (which I like) are built on the assumption that most of the people inside it are healthy and will not need serious care for a long time (read: full of young people).
I think that raising children produces a lot of social benefits, that unfair social expectations puts a lot of pressure on women, and we should put a LOT of value on the labor required to raise healthy and stable children.
> If you do it right (imho, if you even just try to do it right), it's the biggest accomplishment one can do.
Family ambitions and personal ambitions are two separate things (although for some people, typically women, they do match).
Personally speaking, I do have parental and professional goals, and I don't think of any of the two as neither superior nor compensating respect to the other.
> they spent 5~6 years off the industry
It doesn't need to be like this (I have firsthand experience as parent). In a balanced family, two parents can be have full professional and familiar lives at the same time (although it's challenging). Of course on the first year or so there's a physical need for the child(ren) to stay with the mother.
Based on the description of the article, the wife and the husband deliberately chose extreme positions - the wife as fully involved stay at home mother, and the father as all-time worker:
> I took care of everything, so my husband could focus on work, which was super important as we were a one-income family
I sympathize with the difficulty of finding a job, but there are more balanced (in terms of gender roles) structures that benefit all the parties. Most importantly:
> I wanted to devote a few years of my life to raising them. I wanted to see their first smile, their first step, their first fall, and I was privileged and lucky enough to be able to do it.
One definitely doesn't need to stay 24/7 with the children to be a fully present parent, and
> my husband could focus on work, which was super important as we were a one-income family.
one doesn't need to offload the children to the partner, in order to achieve professional success, unless there's some workaholism involved; this is also not a great way to start the relationship with the children.
It doesn’t need to be like this, but that’s what her family chose. One model isn’t superior over the other. It would be great if tech companies supported both family styles, just like they tout their other family-friendly benefits.
I agree that people can do what they want. But I can't help but wish people did not do this.
I don't think anyone honestly believes that children are not better off by having more balanced input from both parents where possible. And the more people that do this (where the working parent is a workaholic) the more difficult it makes things for working parents who want to have a more balanced home life.
This is similar to the modern issue of dual income families. In the area where I live, homes are very expensive. The majority of home owners here could simply not afford a home without both parents working.
Which means if there weren't so many dual income families, homes would simply have to become cheaper here. The fact that many families here are dual income puts financial pressure on everyone else to do the same.
> Based on the description of the article, the wife and the husband deliberately chose extreme positions - the wife as fully involved stay at home mother, and the father as all-time worker:
Maybe you didn't mean it like this... but I find the use of the word "extreme" here in this context somewhat discomforting. Perhaps I'm an old-fashioned 35-year old, but her reasons for wanting to stay home don't come off as extreme to me.
I understood it as both of them taking the far ends of the spectrum of work/parenting balance (one fully parenting, one fully working) rather than a "less extreme" scenario where both take more balanced roles in working/parenting. I didn't see it as an evaluation of the choice in lifestyle.
8-10 hours per day, plus another 1-3 hours for commute. Baby wakes up at 6:30, takes a bath and gets sleepy at 18:30 - so 12 hours of interactive time (not counting night-time feeding and crying) - and these 12 hours closely correspond to the fully-working parent's work and commute hours.
There are MANY couples for whom a balanced approach is financially and emotionally suboptimal.
If spouse A has earning potential of $300k/yr, and spouse B has earning potential of $50k/yr, and child care costs $40k/yr, it's absolute batshit insanity to take a "balanced approach" and A. lose money on a net-of-taxes basis whilst B. seeing your children less.
One doesn't need to work 24/7 in order to reach their career potential (300k/yr is not the CEO type of position); even in a slightly longer than full time position, there's enough time to take a share of the parental tasks (and stay with the child(ren) in general) to allow the other partner to work at least part time. Working fulltime also doesn't imply to work in a single stretch from morning to evening.
Those who don't find the time do be a parent because of work (again, excluding particular jobs) are either workaholics, or uninterested parents, or both; it's not about finance.
To be noted that from approximately the second year onwards (so, I'm excluding approximately the first two), children spend significant hours (whole morning and small part of the afternoon, depending on the parents' choice) in children care. Especially in a family where the mother works part time, the difference from a stay-at-home mom, in terms of time spent with the children, is little (or none).
The software industry is like an abusive partner. Always desperate to hire STEM talent, but not you. Knowing a large number of people with similar experiences my recommendation is to start up something. Some very limited and targeted application or service is usually possible. If nothing else it is great practice that will improve skills. The amount of work required to get a job in the software industry is often far larger than the amount of work it takes to make a modest profit from applying yourself directly.
I don't see any indication in this article that she's in the software or STEM industry. Glancing over the rest of her articles don't give this indication at all, nor does her feeling that she's lacking knowledge of "markets, technologies and trends".
If she were a software engineer, I'd have all sorts of advice on how to develop the skills to re-enter the job market.
> I have degrees in Computer Science (BSc), and Neuroscience (MSc) with two years of being a researcher at the University at the Machine learning + Neuroscience department (hybrid). [...]
but take a look at the whole comment. I'm not sure she is looking for a SWE position.
That's my take on it as well - it feels like on every hiring-related thread people aren't actually looking to hire, they're looking for reasons not to hire, which they will obviously find (or make up) given how subjective the process is.
your response to rejection tells me you'll be perfectly fine. Any company would be lucky to have you. The first thing we list in our "requirements" for hiring is "grit" and you clearly have an abundance.
Putting grit in your job requirements is a huge red flag. Putting it as the top is really concerning. Working for a company shouldn't require grit.
> grit, n: firmness of mind or spirit, unyielding courage in the face of hardship or danger
What hardship or danger are employees subjected to, in your company? If this an excuse to blame burnout on employees' lack of fortitude? What systems are missing from your organization that make goals reliant on individuals' courage?
Grit is required for many roles in competitive businesses. Commonly, it stands for never giving up.
Hardship could include not being able complete a project due to reasons in or out of your control, but grit makes you not give up. Many sales jobs are like this. Many engineering and science jobs are like this.
Otherwise, grit could be doing a tough thankless job day after day without quitting. Such as cleaning up sewage. People without grit could quit even if they get paid a 500k to do that job.
You seem to have the idea that all jobs should be cushy and predictable. But some jobs are harder than others, and you personally benefit from people doing these hard jobs.
A good company would compensate employees for taking calculated risks and don't demand excessive exposure to danger or other bad conditions
The main question, then, would be whether the people doing those jobs are properly compensated for it. Personally I don't think that's generally the case, because companies tend to pay too much to white collar workers like you who demand everything to be easy and say simply asking for "grit" is a red flag. Soldiers must be exposed to danger, and grit is a requirement for being a good soldier, and personally I think they're not treated well enough.
My friend just made this same journey, returning to the workforce after being a SAHM for a bunch of years.
One thing she did which probably helped was publish YouTube videos about tech topics. She'd just pick a topic, research it, and make a training video on it. She also started using twitter a lot and having conversations with prolific tweeters in her area of expertise.
Basically she upped her public profile and got noticed.
> However, being a stay-at-home mum came at the cost of my career
I wish anyone in this position nothing but the best, but this should come as no surprise.
It reminds me of a comedy bit where a guy asks "so when you were in school, you studied, hung out with friends, got a girlfriend, and so on -- yeah? -- if you'd been on the computer every waking hour like i was then you wouldn't be standing here today like an idiot".
It's a joke, but the truth is that there are only 24h in the day, and nobody can "have it all". There's always a road less traveled, even if you traveled the best road for you.
Preference for all public-sector jobs (not just federal, but I think all fifty states give some forms of veterans preference, and a handful give “absolute preference” where a minimally-qualified veteran must be hired over a non-veteran regardless of qualifications.) But even where its not absolute preference, it often is a very strong preference (e.g., California on open civil service exams typically limits hiring to the top 3 ranks on the resulting hiring list, with each rank being 5 points of exam score on a 100-point, before preference points, scale. Veterans get 10 extra points, or 15 if they have a qualifying degree of disability.)
Whoa - posting like this will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
I respect the family tragedy you're referring to, but it deserves better than this. The community does also. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I could see this incentivizing someone to have a baby solely to get a boost on their applications, which I suppose is what you want. But it shouldn't be as big a boost as serving active duty in a war. I wonder how much of a boost the zero-point preference from https://www.fedshirevets.gov/job-seekers/veterans/veterans-p... would add? It doesn't add to your application score, but it counts as a tiebreaker between people with the same score.
One thing to remember is that while you might not feel as qualified for as many positions as you wish, in the end you only need one. And since you have a demonstrated willingness and ability to forgo maximum income in pursuit of higher ideals, I suspect many mission oriented organizations would be thrilled to have you for roles they might not even have bothered to post on the assumption they couldn’t compete for talent given their budget
Getting rejections is not a slap to the face. In many areas it's a normal expectation to be rejected a lot.
If you are only getting rejections, you may try either lowering your expectations or getting some relevant skills to beef up your offering on the market.
the reason you’re rejected is because you can’t dedicate all your life to work because you also have to focus on raising a child
you are not at fault of course, but many companies think of you as their resource and won’t allow that (ever wondered why the department is called “Human Resources”?)
I'm proud that my employer has a specific program to help folks who have taken a break in their careers rejoin the workforce. While we are currently mostly only hiring production engineers, the author and others in this situation should check out Meta's return-to-work program: https://www.metacareers.com/facebook-life/return-to-work/
Interesting, I didn't know Meta was doing that, thanks for linking it. I might try that in a few months. I'm not ready to return to work yet - I'm not a parent but out of work for other reasons.
> So far, I got rejected from over twenty job opportunities.
That's nothing. I've been continuously employed for over 20 years. I just got a job a few weeks ago after two months of unemployment. I kept a record of every application and in the end there were more than 130 of them. I ended up with several offers and got a great job but I had far more than 20 rejections for every offer I received and I consider that a very good result for the outcome I had and wouldn't refer to it as "a slap in the face".
Yeah, agree here. Even with a stream of continuous employment, nobody gets a job by submitting CV's to websites. You have to have a network.
Best advice I would give to anyone taking a break from work is to stay in touch with your old coworkers-take them out to lunch occasionally, stop by the office and bring cookies, etc.
Yes, I have gotten nearly every one of my jobs by applying through a website. If you're applying for roles that are a reasonable fit, you have a decent chance of getting a response.
Exactly... I was waiting for the happy ending and then I realized she has only been at the hunt for two weeks. Her spirit is great but you can tell that the ego needs to be worked on if she thought landing the perfect fit would happen so quickly after being out of the workforce for five years. I know people with glowing resumes that still take six months or more to get recruited into a role.
In my other reply I mentioned I never lead job searches with resumes.
It was exactly this kind of situation combined with how I actually got my job that led to this.
In that situation, I'd sent out >100 resumes and got back 100 rejections. I still keep them all because I never wanted to forget the fundamental Epic Fail of looking for work that way.
The thing that crystalized the lesson:
1. I ended up "networking" into a job interview - 15 minutes after I got an offer to start immediately
2. The company I ended up working for (Intel) sent a rejection letter also - to my original resume application - 6 weeks after I'd started working there!!
I then got my next job use the same networking technique to get time in front of the hiring manager, and similarly I had a job within 15-30 minutes of interviewing.
This contrasted with having spent time on resumes, postage (pre-Web) and actively corralling status from each company.
Basically it's question of statistics: which will work more efficiently:
1. A random lottery-odds resume campaign where the resume has nearly no differentiating information to distinguish you from anyone else where the judge of that process doesn't have a STEM degree and is likely overworked and marginally paid above minimum wage
2. A 6-degrees of separation path (no more than 6 hops in a social network) via carefully selected people who likely have STEM training who each have an investment if they pass you through yet have far more knowledge about your qualification because they've talked to you as part of the network building.
The math is pretty damn obvious and trivial. Lottery odds with a faceless bureaucracy or pretty good odds if you are half good with a small set of people who can judge your worth on your merits.
I've used the latter for 40 years and its never failed. Any failures of mismatched jobs were 100% on me (biotech is a weird duck compared to computers or semiconductors).
If you take N years off from a career, you should expect ahead of time to become a less compelling candidate to hire for highly skilled work. 1) your skills are assumed rustier and 2) you have fewer years left in your career so you have less room for promotion to executive levels (big companies need to be thinking about hiring their CEO 20 years from now). If you don’t want this to happen to your career, 1) get better at something that can be objectively measured or 2) don’t take N years off from your career.
3) make your career about something more than climbing up an imaginary ladder that largely exists to motivate you into giving more while getting less and less in return.
I don't think the author is looking for life advice from you. "Being a stay-at-home mum was my choice." She doesn't appear to be kicking herself for becoming a mother. Whether she "expected" this or not, whether it was a "surprise", is not particularly relevant. That's not the issue, it's a red herring. She made her choice, willingly, and now she's looking to restart her career. It feels like some commenters are looking more to be judgmental than helpful.
The survival of humanity itself depends on people having and raising children. But then we turn around and act like it's some kind of personal mistake, a poor choice for which someone deserves social punishment, as opposed to a natural part of life. Why is a gap in someone's résumé viewed as abnormal rather than expected? If anyone deserves to be lectured, it's the employers who are "surprised" that résumé gaps occur and "expect" candidates to have no gaps.
Sure, treat having children as the norm, I have kids, I love it. But I expect to be leapfrogged in my career by people who passed on a family and chose the career grinding lifestyle, and that's in fact what happened. But I'm not going to make a surprised Pikachu face about it.
The article author did not expect to get her old job back. Nor did she expect to come back at the exact same level as before. "I started my career hunting by applying to many junior positions."
She's just looking for a job in her field. So you're arguing against a straw man. Or straw woman.
good luck - I really feel for you and know others who have struggled with similar job search frustrations...
I lost a position over a year ago and found myself scrambling for a new role as an older person in tech. I thought of a few things that might help.
In my case I was trying to move into medical tech software infra role in NYC. I needed to find ways of talking to people in the target field in a low pressure way - I got an invite to https://lunchclub.com/ and started having chats with people who worked in tech with a medical focus. I met someone who worked for the CDC and another person who was a nurse who developed a new kind of injection needle, etc
I could ask them lots of questions about their work and get comfort in talking about related topics. It helped in my case as it helped me relax - I am not extroverted and I needed to develop fluidity in this way. I am not recommending lunchclub over any other such service - it is the one I used. I would guess there are more option in this space... In my case I found a job in a nonmedical field but the company is a pretty amazing fit and I feel lucky. I feel like the ability to relax in the interview process really helped.
Another thing I thought about with your post is - consider not applying for junior positions - the ugly language in the response letter you got is telling you that I think. It requires bravery and squelching the 'impostor syndrome' feelings but you are not a junior employee. You have life experience. Look for employers that seem to signal that they will hire based upon your aptitude rather than "x years in such a position".
Another question - are you contacting companies directly? YMMV but I get much better interactions with internal recruiters than head hunters. Try targetting companies even if they don't list exactly the job you are looking for.
I had a similar issue: I unexpectedly became a single father and ended up just doing that full time for seven years (well I did work for about 15 months in the middle but had to give that up). I understand what she’s talking about.
There were many differences for me though. For one I had a rich network (she doesn’t mention this) so when, a couple of years ago, my gf urged me to get a job I ended up with a lot of recruiter calls. But TBH they couldn’t grok my bg and I’m not really a big company guy.
Also I already had multi-year gaps in my work history so this wasn’t an existential issue for me as it might be for most people.
Third, I’m male and the biases in business are different. Not just in business: a father traveling with a kid is offered all sorts of help and accommodation while a woman with kids is largely invisible. I could write a whole book on this! But on the business side I wasn’t asked the kinds of family questions that I hear women are asked. In fact “I had to become a full time parent” is usually received with sympathy rather than as a sign of unseriousness.
In the end I did what I usually do which is start a company. My co founder is a widow, and also a former software developer, and she struggled* more like the author of this piece. The idiots who didn’t hire her really missed out!
My gf’s path involved an unexpected hack: she took only a few years off when her kids were small but she and her then husband needed the income so she started working for a tiny consulting boutique, initially part time. That let her slowly transition into consulting on her own.
* Disclaimer: we have never discussed this directly though: this comes through when we talk about hiring.
As a current full time dad, I get the total opposite feeling. My wife's employer bends over backwards to accommodate her financially and with various options to continue her work how and if she pleases with seemingly no end to their support while I was pushed to return to work at 6 weeks. When I left to become full time (my wife returned to her job with a promotion and raise), it wasn't because I wanted to but because my employer doesn't recognize men as parents. So my career stopped in its tracks. Now, years later, applying for the same job as before, even with my old employer, there's no acknowledgement of my effort, no raises, no promotions, and least of all no compassion for my desire to work part time, remotely for the flexibility I need to handle a kid. Worse, they think I took a 'break'.
I don't know where you're meeting these accommodating people, I just get stared at like I'm doing something wrong when I travel with my child. God forbid I want to use the change table in the woman's washroom because there's none in the men's. I just change my kid on the grass outside, trying to ignore the looks and comments like, "Moms day off?"
All those parents who are forced to work but always wanted to stay back and provide best care for their kids but couldn't do so.. feeling a gut punch.
Parents who chose career path and gets the slap in the face moments every time they realized that they could have spent more time with the kids instead of the work.
The philosophy I try to follow (which I borrowed from someone else) is: sometimes eat the cake, sometimes have it. Meaning if I’m trying to develop my career for a promotion or new job, I’ll adjust the priorities to achieve that, I.e. spend enough time with the kid, sacrifice me-time, sometimes a bit of sleep, etc. And once I achieve it, then “cool off” a bit, meaning spend all my spare time with the kid, finish work at 5, don’t hesitate to take PTO, etc.
Yeah but you've got to learn to let things go. I'm temporarily single parenting with a full time job and it doesn't have to be that hard. Like kiddo usually eats microwaved meat & vegetables plus a pasta/rice that I cook twice a week. Is that worse than a cooked from scratch meal? Everyone will say yes, but he's getting the macronutrients and vitamins he needs so what difference does it make? Kind of applies to everything. Some days he doesn't get a bath, the house gets wild, I put a movie on because I'm tired of his shit and so on. But I'm 80-90% of ideal but that's enough for 99%+ of the benefits.
I've seen reflections of OP in a lot of parents in my life. They fall into two categories:
Type As that direct this sort of extreme level of effort to anything they do.
Anxiety/OCD that just can't let that little bit of benefit go combined with satisfying their complusion of controlling everything.
A long time ago, when I had only one child I made a joke to one of my coworkers that had twins. It was something like that child care was O(N), so she had the double of problems.
Now I have two small children (and a big one), and now I'm convinced that it's at least O(N^2). [In my case O(5) not O(9), because the old one is old enough.]
It's not really about the amount of work needed to parent. It's more about letting go until the amount of work matches your capacity plus some time for other things.
For the people in my life that sound similar to the OP they do the reverse. They add parenting work until their capacity is full. If you gave them and extra 3 hours in the day they'd still be just as busy.
To the author: what exactly are you looking for? As in, what type of job, position, desired amount of work per week, etc? There are people here that may be able to help.
Thank you so much for reading my blog and for asking all these questions. I am very grateful for everyone's interest + support!
I do not have specific requirements. I am flexible in terms of hours/week etc.
I am looking on entering a career that utilizes my strong Computer Science + Analytical skills and a career that allows me to develop/ use my content creation skills/ passion, networking, events, communication, digital marketing etc. I am not sure what is the right role for me.
So far, I look into content creator jobs, digital marketing/sales, business advocacy, and more!
I am eager to learn and grow, so I would be incredibly happy with trainee/ internships/ apprenticeships/ return to work programs!!!
Again thank you so much for asking me, it's so supportitive!
You are welcome. Given that this blog is on HN I would think about amending your article with some of these details too. Let people know. There will be some that want to help.
Exactly. Consider adding a link to your LinkedIn profile or your CV on your Medium post so folks that are looking to help (referrals, hiring managers, recruiters) can review your skills and experience.
As for Upwork, this is optimized for people in low cost-of-living countries. I wouldn't take rejection there to be anything.
Here's what you do: you lie by omission. By this I mean you imply you went to college during or after any experience you have. Do not specify when you graduated. Don't specify what years you went to college. They can't really ask because that risks age discrimination.
Put work experience first then college afterwards. This gives the impression of chronological order without saying that's the case.
You can even leave off work experience you don't think is relevant or will help you, particularly for entry-level positions. If you're concerned you're competing with new grads then come across as a new grad with some experience.
> However, being a stay-at-home mum came at the cost of my career.
To generalize, doing anything for 5-6 years will come at the cost of your career. This isn't specific to raising children.
> So far, I got rejected from over twenty job opportunities.
That's all? I am in the middle of a job search, I am gainfully employed, I just got a raise and a new bonus structure, and yes I have been "rejected" by well over 100 positions, I have been a finalist in at least 3 or 4 (maybe 5) and 1 offer was rescinded at the last moment for reason unrelated to me/my qualifications.
There was a time in my life when I was in a similar situation returning to my professional career after a 5-year sabbatical in a different field and as an entrepreneur, so I know the pain of convincing prospective employers to hire me.
We don't like it, but it's a numbers game. Period. 20 is not a meaningful number. 4,000 is.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadI remember this about mixing hot and cold water https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGpKH0Sobcs I knew the effect before, but I thought it was not so fast.
I loved doing them, I miss them and I am happy I tried it out but reality is, that I need a way to have an income!
But I am so happy you remembered the videos + experiements. The hot/cold water mixing experiment is super fun!I received lots of photographs from parents whose kids did it, and loved it:)
My regular advice in life is to read whatever patio11 wrote about your problem. I'm not sure what applies. Do we have a @patio11 signal?
Perhaps
* https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3170766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303181 and a few more https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
* https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/17/ramit-sethi-and-patrick... NH discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533498
I have degrees in Computer Science (BSc), and Neuroscience (MSc) with two years of being a researcher at the University at the Machine learning + Neuroscience department (hybrid). In parallel to my studies, I also started my own company for luxury wedding & events planning. My company was very successful and it was my only income stream for five years. I sold my company shortly after becoming a mother.
Career wise, I am looking for a role that utilizes my analytical and technical skills but at the same time, it connects me with people online and in-person. I love content creation (social media, blogging, video creations and more).Not sure what the suitable role is.
* Add a small Bio section to your blog, and perhaps an explanation of the work you are looking for in the article. LinkedIn?
* Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring and post in the correct thread if it's still open.
* If you are looking for a technical job, write some technical articles. (Don't expect to make money from them. Only some fun if you are lucky some karma.)
* Also a few small contribution to Open Source may help to learn the current tools.
* I'm not sure if something like https://www.kaggle.com/ helps to get hired, but you may get an update in the tools and also have a few recent technical anecdotes.
* There is people that work as social media manager. I'm not sure if that what you are looking for, and perhaps something tha mix some SWE will get a better pay.
Out of curiosity what kind of work do you do?
edit: see https://www.springboard.com/blog/career-advice/amazon-facebo...
If anyone is aware of additional companies, mind adding them to the thread?
I understand how frustrating it must be to stay professionally flat compared to your peers. We absolutely should celebrate people taking their time off to literally raise the next humans, instead we're turning them down because they spent 5~6 years off the industry. How is this not counterproductive for humanity as a whole?
Let's not pretend it's not.
Some countries give more than a year paid parental leave, in what can only be described as vote purchasing.
Parenthood is compensated.
It is worth it though for most people (because of the extra happiness) so I'm not saying that we should necessarily compensate it further, just that financially it's not compensated for.
It's a personal choice to have children, and it's impossible to be a parent X hours a day and also spend those same X hours "in the lab".
Just like it's not possible to spend all your time in the lab and also be a (present) parent.
The limited time for everything that can be done in a lifetime is not about "fairness", and nobody owes you to be able to do all things in life, even if it were possible, which it isn't.
- pay taxes
- make good governance choices
- buy the products you may be making
- make the products you might be selling
- make the products you consume
the list goes on...
But this is the most subsidized one of all (even in the US), and people do it whether it's subsidized or not.
You could say that they are getting "paid in love".
If it's already worth it for them, why should they be paid twice?
Most of the benefits you list may be better off with fewer kids with the same government support.
I definitely think we should invest in schools and such, to make the best people we can. But I'm sick of parents complaining that children affects their economy or has opportunity cost.
Parents don't deserve a handout. Children do, however, deserve a good education.
Literally everything in in life has opportunity cost. Nobody owes removing that cost for anyone else.
If you spend all your money on partying nobody owes you the cost of nice clothes.
I am not a parent but when's the last time you called a parent of yours and paid them with that love? I 100% have not done so recently.
Parents aren't getting a handout, we're ensuring the continuation of our society and so many forces are attempting to shape it actively.
What's the point of paying you for it, if the act actually is its own reward?
It feels like you and I agree that maybe kids aren't for our lives and yet we're pretending its just a wildly rewarding activity like watching movies and not a situation of basically being worried or having to pay for or care for another human for the rest of your natural life.
Even for two people who (I am assuming) do not have kids that feels kind of insincere.
We know its not like watching a movie, or riding a bike or even going to the gym unless the gym costs you ~250k while simultaneously acting like the rude jerk I did when I was a teen.
I hear that the smile on your child's face is infinite reward.
> We know its not like watching a movie, or riding a bike or even going to the gym unless the gym costs you ~250k while simultaneously acting like the rude jerk I did when I was a teen.
Yet, like I said, people do it gladly. They do it even knowing about the way it affects the woman's body, knowing about the sleep depravation, knowing about the terrible two's, knowing about the "you're stupid and I hate you" teens.
If it were as simple as "this activity costs 250k and is a rude jerk" then nobody would do it. Yet they say it's so worth it.[1]
So if it's so worth it for you, then do it. But I don't want to hear about how you're the victim of your own choice. Everyone is. I'll never be a fighter pilot, nor an astronaut.[2]
Pilot and astronaut is the road not taken, for me.
If someone chooses to have a baby and stay home for 5 years, then that's about 11% of their working life not spent improving their career. You'll never have those 11% again, and I won't pretend you walked two roads at the same time. Because nobody can.
And those 11% are placed in a critical point. If someone took age 60-65 off, then that won't affect their career as much.
If someone leaves university at 25, has a baby and takes five years off, then they are now 30 with zero work experience.
That's not fairness, that's physics.
[1] Though one guy I know said he used to not be able to comprehend why anyone would not want children. Now after he's had children he understands. He would absolutely do it again, but at least he understands people who don't want them.
[2] not a real one, anyway. Maybe if prices go down a lot in my lifetime I'll be able to take a lap, but that's it.
And it's also not personal in the sense that the government often takes an active role in raising and educating kids (wether you like it or not).
I just wish parents stop acting as victims of their own choices, and that they should bare no consequences.
And people won't stop having kids, subsidies or no subsidies. So that's a non-issue.
Birth rates are below replacement levels in most Western countries.
What we do know is what we used to have, the population pyramid, definitely won't work going forward, long term.
Multiple countries in GDP leadership positions are incentivizing having and raising children because women who are able to - exercise bodily autonomy - pursue an education - and generally have rights, though in no country are they equal choose to have less kids.
IMHO they choose to have less kids because its clear the current set-up is a raw deal for women at best. Not having enough kids to replace the current working generation is an issue in: the US, the UK, Italy, Spain, and a number of other countries. This greying of a population is a massive concern and also one of the reasons that some have pushed and bet on robotics. To replace human workers.
Separately, its mostly women, if not exclusively women, bearing the consequences of the action of you know. propagating the species. Its absolutely mind-boggling when you think about the fact that propagation is a requirement of our continued existence and only half the species pays a massive tax
At the same time you can't mandate it. And there's no denying that statistically women choose family more, when choice is given to them.
I know several couples where the wife is essentially asking to retire (in their thirties), to be home with the children and video games, and that the man should continue working for them. Even if it jeopardizes their shared FIRE plans.
If they do that, who is actually paying the tax? Financially the wife for sure. Life quality the husband for sure.
As for replacement, the population age pyramid is not sustainable. It relies not on stability, but growth. The greying of population is inevitable (compared to the classic pyramid) thanks to medical advances and the fact that exponential growth has to stop, mathematically. We can choose starvation, war, plague, or reduced births.
I hear this often and it's such an incorrect assumption. People had kids way before subsidies. Humans won't stop having kids if subsidies stop.
For the young and poor who only have their labor to sell, the situation would seem pretty decent.
There is no practical need for this to be centrally managed, other than you can't trust people to be responsible and plan for the future.
People already manage a big part of the pension savings by themselves.
Watch this talk: https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY
Tl;DW: we can not prevent the end of exponential population growth. We can only choose how it ends. By starvation, war, disease, or fewer births.
Pension systems have relied on growth for a long time, but it's just not mathematically possible is the long run.
I know some advocate shrinking for sustainability reasons, but a policy of shrinking is a policy of irrelevance. Other cultures with a growth mindset will continue growing and ruin your sustainability plans.
Let's have abundance instead of austerity. Instead of intentionally reducing the population for sustainability, we can make the current population sustainable with technology. We don't need to stop population growth. It's already stopping. We now need to stop population shrinkage to reach a stable equilibrium.
Others in this thread have, in so many words, said that being a parent should be paid by tax payers as a full time job.
It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers.
So that lessens abundance, creating a poorer world.
It's like the conversation about UBI. If it's actually U and (as often stated by proponents) enough for a middle class lifestyle I would quit today. No way I'd be a sucker paying taxes to support government funded FIRE, without doing it myself.
And so would most of the population.
On a small scale I've soon this in friends' relationships. "Can I stay home with kids and video games, and you just support us?".
I think you should examine this statement a little more. If the time of economically successful people is too valuable to "waste" on childcare, what you are saying is that either economically successful people should not have children (with the obvious corollary being that only economically unsuccessful people should have children), or economically successful people should not spend time raising their children (meaning they should foist their children into the care of economically unsuccessful people instead). I hope you can see the clear issue with the former, and while the latter is pretty much status quo it has big issues as well.
If the children of doctors and lawyers do better when their parents care for them instead of other people, and become doctors and lawyers too, then society didn't lose after all. Childcare is an investment in the future, not pure waste to be avoided.
I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child. But I do think that parenthood deserves to be subsidized, and more than it is now, even for economically successful people, up to the point where the fertility rate stabilizes at the replacement rate.
But we pretty much are already.
First with paid parental leave (sometimes over 400 days) and then forever after that, by pretending that this is not a gap in work experience and therefore calling anything short of bumping salary and seniority in line with people who were working as "discrimination".
Like people who are away for a year, and come back promoted.
And that's not even mentioning how much of the slack coworkers he to pick up from a parent needing to leave at 3pm every day from now on. We're all meant to pretend they work just as hard, and deserve to be paid just as much.
(Not every parent offloads work like this onto their coworkers, but a lot of them do. So it's a huge cost statistically not paid by the person who made the choice)
LOL sorry, not even close. But it doesn't matter whether we are or not, not in the slightest. What matters is whether we're subsidizing enough to stabilize the fertility rate. Which we're empirically not.
People no longer want to have 4-5 kids, no matter if you 10x the paid time off or double the subsidies. This too empirically.
And no, actually. Your "LOL" aside, we actually are. Anyone who takes time off for child raising gets a bump literally forever.
So yes, actually.
I'm not saying fully compensated, obviously.
But people do it or don't do it based on if they want, not the money (given a basic level of comp, which we are waaaay beyond).
To increase birth rates we have to start paying people who DON'T want to have children, to do it.
Like wow, how much would you have to pay people who would only do it for money? One million in cash just day one?
Just the physical toll for the parent is huge.
And statistically rate of happiness goes down during thirties for people who have children.
And then on top of that your idea is to have people who don't want children raise them? I'm not betting on this improving quality of life for the child, if the child is just a paycheck.
So we really want people who have children no actually want to, too.
Having young kids I think it's more like full time parenting, on top of any regular day job. Unless you can find a spouse willing to do all the kid work, which is like non-stop 12-16h days until all are in school.
Heaven forbid your SO wants to homeschool and expects you to do at least 40% of parenting, with your day job.
And one gives up so much time and energy being a parent, unless you're wealthy enough to outsource large chunks of the work. (Daycare in the US is 10-25K per year.)
The whole point is that being a parent is compensated in a way that no other choice is.
Parents take on a significant burden. They are compensated for it. There is no choice I can make as a non-parent that will provide me with similar compensation.
If just this financial support provided by some governments then consider you could take on a very low pay job with a nonprofit and get similar 'compensation'. Albeit spread across the length of that career instead of front loaded as paternity leave/credits.
> Some countries give more than a year paid parental leave
You yourself are making my point by saying “similar compensation” “albeit spread across the length of a career.” There is nothing for non-parents that is equivalent to parental leave.
And these leave benefits are just so miniscule compared to the effort and finances required for each child. So why complain about missing them?
> If society does nothing to help then more parents will choose to have fewer, or no, children.
Fewer people is our best option (it is still a terrible option, don't get me wrong) for mitigating the effects of climate change.
Your parents having you is a miniscule benefit to you?
Parents who are highly educated doctors, pilots etc argue that they should be able to stay at home for 1-2 years with almost full salary, which the tax payers should subsidise, and at the same time they also pay an uneducated 16 year old 10 bucks an hour to babysit when they go to the movies?
And you have 1 educated child care professional easily caring for 10 small children, and making a very modest salary.
It doesn't really add up.
That is my point.
Most would consider the implications of that to be highly immoral.
I think it's already immoral how society punishes people for being childless when it's a natural thing and can be 100% caused by characteristics that you are born with and have no control over.
And government aid is not just for unfortunate events, it's used to promote desired behavior. That's why there are subsidies for companies developing green energy and EVs, for farmers growing certain crops, for animal feed (very frustrating as someone who always has to pay more for veggie burgers), and many other things. Clearly, though, the US doesn't value parenthood very much because the monetary incentives simply are not enough. I guess when you know your replacement rates are kept afloat by immigration, you don't care much if your citizens have kids.
It's funny that you say being social is easier, because what I see is the opposite. Being a parent isn't a panacea for socialization. It can be very isolating when your childless friends can drop whatever they are doing to go have a good time (so they don't bother to make plans, they just go) while you have to secure a babysitter just to get a quiet dinner. Your friends have to accommodate you, and many will not.
As someone who is currently childless with both new parent friends and not-so-new parent friends, it's very clear to see how much simpler it is for the ones of us who don't have kids have to be social or follow their own interests.
I feel in no way compelled by any law or incentive to have children and am in fact dreading the day my wife is serious about having them, because I have seen first hand what it does to your bank account and your personal life.
Yeah parents can't have as much spontaneous fun, but they don't have to deal with unhealthy loneliness of being alone on thanksgiving, christmas, vacations etc. Society is organised for the family unit, and there are no options for single people.
Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.
All living humans come from a long unbroken chain of natural selection and rejection of bad genes and reproduction of only the fittest to enable adaption to a changing environment.
If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection and create survival of the unfittest where every bad gene will reproduce endlessly.
Not having children is just as "natural" as having children, it all depends of how your particular set of characteristics do in the current environment and foreseeable future.
It is “natural” in the sense that we wouldn’t be here to talk about it if it wasn’t the case.
Obviously the human race somehow made it until we created developed societies. I think you are confusing survival of the human race with survival of our current pension system.
Who knows if it's really better or worse to suddenly allow everyone to reproduce?
For sure it's not "natural", and as far as I can see it would actually reverse evolution to regression instead.
And it seems like we can't really stop it anyway with how many men today are becoming outsiders in society because they get rejected to reproduce.
Yeah that's the point, so there really is no need for every man to have children, should it be the norm I'm wondering. Can we get rid of this natural selection, and should we? I don't know. Why is it so self-evident that every person should have children? Clearly it's not natural. It's just another artificial "equality" of a social welfare state.
The whole idea that child bearing should be perfectly and equally distributed across the whole population is a construct of the social welfare state, enabled by subsidies, and is just an artificial form of equality like any other. As such I think it should be examined and debated like everything else, and not taken for granted as self-evident or "natural".
The median is close to the average in kids per women in the developed world. Having four kids is harsh on many women’s bodies; eg my grandma had 8 kids, but she died in her late 50s. While no doubt some couples will want to go for four kids or more, I don’t think it’s ethical to encourage it over a more standard 2 something for most couples.
This is an incredibly bold statement. Most people like having sex, and in a natural state (sans birth control, online dating, internet porn, etc) there are going to be a lot of pregnancies. The idea that tax credits, welfare or parental leave is what is driving this situation is ridiculous. This feels more like a dog whistle about the welfare state, but even if you take away those "subsidies", people ain't gonna stop having kids, that's just not how the majority of young people of child-bearing age think.
We balanced this out up until recently by sending men to war and other dangerous jobs that made them die before they had a chance to reproduce.
There is an enormous asymmetry between the sexes in our biology and that's the feature that drives natural selection and evolution.
The only reason why all people are able to reproduce are subsidies, otherwise natural selection would reject a lot.
Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.
Lower education and religion is probably the biggest cause for these higher birth rates. In the victorian era, people would simply not get married if they didn't have the means to raise children, and they would be childless, and there was nothing strange about that. To give subsidies for everyone to have children comes from the post ww2 politics.
Using your own logic: if natural selection is that fragile, then it should evolve or die. We're not called to uphold it in any way; our own selfish genes inevitably predispose us not to worry about an evolutionary mechanism that does not directly affect us or our children.
if you’re not looking to inherit while you’re young, you end up in a whole different social hierarchy
Well, if I were going to argue the case I would probably start with the impossibility of any man ever getting that opportunity. Of course, whether those figures are enough or given out in the right way to the right people at the right time, all of those details can be argued over, but if you're going to start with fairness as your argument you'd better address the elephant in the room first.
> AND that men are forced to take an equal time of
Why is it right that anyone is forced to do anything so that your political views are enacted?
let me give you an example
good equality: have more women enter workforce so the pool of candidates is bigger and the salaries (expenses) decrease
bad equality: pay for parental leave of both parents
What year is it again?
> That's a pretty hefty price to pay for everyone, to save those women who were unlucky to have a cruel or unfair husband.
Uh, I don't think that's the trade off here.
> I don't know if it's possible to say if it's "worth it" or not, but this independence sure does not come for free.
When one option is to go full Taliban, it's actually pretty easy to say if it's "worth it".
In particular, my wife like working and having her personal projects. I like to spends part of my time with my children. So we both work and we both take care of the children. We are lucky to have jobs that allow this.
Not sure if you think you're being philosophical or you know this is nonsense, but it is.
Way over the not even wrong line now.
How does women entering the work force (from your previous post) equal less freedom? Less freedom for whom? Certainly not women. Since you equate more communism with less freedom, I will assume you agree that money provides freedom, if women can only work as unpaid housewives, they have no freedom. It has nothing to do with their husband, cruel, unfair, or otherwise. This may be surprising, but not all women want kids or marriage, or may want them but also find great joy in working accomplishments - many just did not have those options in any safe stable way until recently. (historicity speaking)
That's not less freedom, it's more, for both women and men (not as much stigma or pressure for not being the 'provider' when they may not want to be) - it does lessen some power and control males have historicity had over society and others. And that can be threatening for those who enjoy limiting others freedoms and controlling them.
Less freedom for those who happen to like traditional gender roles, now they are forced to work more and adapt to more "modern" gender roles. Otherwise they will lose out massively because the single earner has so much lower salary now.
Less freedom because an almost doubled amount of total working hours for a family. Free time = freedom.
Less freedom for childless people because they have much lower salaries now because of the larger supply of workforce (which is somewhat compensated by subsidies to people with children). Now they compete against couples with double income on everything on the market.
A single childless person would previously have the same buying power as a single breadwinner, now they have half.
Less freedom because this creates a much higher pressure and financial incentives for people to have children and to have modern gender roles, and anything else is discouraged.
> if women can only work as unpaid housewives, they have no freedom.
Well, are you more free if you trade free time for working hours? You are literally only more free to slave more.
This freedom only manifests in the case when you want/need to leave your husband.
That's an equivocation. There is the freedom that comes from choice (what is not disallowed) and there is the freedom that comes from available choices. For example, homosexuals being able to marry is not the same kind of freedom as if I had a million dollars I'd be able to do what I want.
Those who prefer traditional gender roles can still have them, they just need to compete to afford it, as they did before, or to cut their cloth.
It makes perfect sense, and it would also be fair and benefit both single/childless people as well as people with children.
I agree with you that it might be impossible to enforce such a law without having the downsides you mentioned. However I would very much like being able to take 6 months of parental leave without being called lazy. This goes both ways.
I'm confused.
I didn't say it was fully compensated. Of course it's not.
But why should you have children, and expect "someone else" to pay for everything?
Nothing else in life works like that.
But yes, I've heard of the German child benefits, and tax rules for married couples, that are not optimal for an equal and fair society.
You say the compensation is "not enough". What would be? That "someone else" pays for the entire cost of your child? Why stop there? Why not demand salary from the government for choosing to raise a child?
There are many choices people make that they expect others to pay for.
I saw a study saying smokers are a net financial gain for society because of the huge savings on pension payments.
(And there are other reasons, that are more important)
But it is a life choice. Other ones are to become an artist. But barely anyone says that anyone who chooses to be an artist (bad or not) deserves for "someone else" to foot the bill for their life.
Or maybe you'd be happier we me saying that yes, in the same way that you must be this net worthy to collect fancy cars. Makes it easier, sure. But nobody owes paying for your choices.
You may feel that having kids is an optional luxury; the evidence suggests this is not a majority perspective.
Yet there's no right to sex, and rape is illegal.
But fact is our world is overpopulated, it would.be better if we'd size down, and we have superegoistic societies in general. (But who would push our wheel chairs if we all wouldn't be so superaltruistic and raise children? Simple answer is there still would be enough, because people want children, even if it is a lot of sacrifice. I fully agree that it costs a lot and is a huge sacrifice, still its a free personal (if you so want lifestyle) choice that most won't regret.. or do you?
As for subsidizing parenthood and children: the more the better. I don’t have kids, but as a human person I have an interest in the next generation of people being happy, healthy, well adjusted and well educated. And that of course begins with creating an environment in which the parents of those children can be successful.
So ROI is infinity, without comp.
It's finite with comp. And note that I'm not even saying the right level is zero.
The amount spent on keeping shipping lanes protected, the world "stable", and older people having access to medical care are, in the US, subsidized more I believe.
It's not my choice to need care when I get old.
Do you really mean "no value"?
Even though people do it anyway, and think the trade is worth it?
The ROI of children is vastly lower than most other endeavors in life. Start a company, not a family.
Seriously go outside, get some sunlight and touch grass.
It states in a blunt shocking way a truth that exists manifestly in many of our actions, but is never said in that way.
Now, I wonder if I have to add the /sarcasm tag or not... source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yhAOs94n8k
1. https://mises.org/library/children-and-rights
I live in an aging society with 'free' healthcare, where most of the resources are consumed by unhealthy people with chronic conditions (read : boomers with diabetes). A lot of large scale social programs (which I like) are built on the assumption that most of the people inside it are healthy and will not need serious care for a long time (read: full of young people).
I think that raising children produces a lot of social benefits, that unfair social expectations puts a lot of pressure on women, and we should put a LOT of value on the labor required to raise healthy and stable children.
Family ambitions and personal ambitions are two separate things (although for some people, typically women, they do match).
Personally speaking, I do have parental and professional goals, and I don't think of any of the two as neither superior nor compensating respect to the other.
> they spent 5~6 years off the industry
It doesn't need to be like this (I have firsthand experience as parent). In a balanced family, two parents can be have full professional and familiar lives at the same time (although it's challenging). Of course on the first year or so there's a physical need for the child(ren) to stay with the mother.
Based on the description of the article, the wife and the husband deliberately chose extreme positions - the wife as fully involved stay at home mother, and the father as all-time worker:
> I took care of everything, so my husband could focus on work, which was super important as we were a one-income family
I sympathize with the difficulty of finding a job, but there are more balanced (in terms of gender roles) structures that benefit all the parties. Most importantly:
> I wanted to devote a few years of my life to raising them. I wanted to see their first smile, their first step, their first fall, and I was privileged and lucky enough to be able to do it.
One definitely doesn't need to stay 24/7 with the children to be a fully present parent, and
> my husband could focus on work, which was super important as we were a one-income family.
one doesn't need to offload the children to the partner, in order to achieve professional success, unless there's some workaholism involved; this is also not a great way to start the relationship with the children.
I don't think anyone honestly believes that children are not better off by having more balanced input from both parents where possible. And the more people that do this (where the working parent is a workaholic) the more difficult it makes things for working parents who want to have a more balanced home life.
This is similar to the modern issue of dual income families. In the area where I live, homes are very expensive. The majority of home owners here could simply not afford a home without both parents working.
Which means if there weren't so many dual income families, homes would simply have to become cheaper here. The fact that many families here are dual income puts financial pressure on everyone else to do the same.
Maybe you didn't mean it like this... but I find the use of the word "extreme" here in this context somewhat discomforting. Perhaps I'm an old-fashioned 35-year old, but her reasons for wanting to stay home don't come off as extreme to me.
Fully working = 8-10 hours a day
Still leaves a lot of time for parenting- and doesn’t seem so extreme, I’d say it’s one of the most common division of family life in the world
I didn’t say parenting only takes 8-10 hours. That’s the time the working parent works
That still leaves time to parent when off-work
If spouse A has earning potential of $300k/yr, and spouse B has earning potential of $50k/yr, and child care costs $40k/yr, it's absolute batshit insanity to take a "balanced approach" and A. lose money on a net-of-taxes basis whilst B. seeing your children less.
Those who don't find the time do be a parent because of work (again, excluding particular jobs) are either workaholics, or uninterested parents, or both; it's not about finance.
To be noted that from approximately the second year onwards (so, I'm excluding approximately the first two), children spend significant hours (whole morning and small part of the afternoon, depending on the parents' choice) in children care. Especially in a family where the mother works part time, the difference from a stay-at-home mom, in terms of time spent with the children, is little (or none).
If she were a software engineer, I'd have all sorts of advice on how to develop the skills to re-enter the job market.
> I have degrees in Computer Science (BSc), and Neuroscience (MSc) with two years of being a researcher at the University at the Machine learning + Neuroscience department (hybrid). [...]
but take a look at the whole comment. I'm not sure she is looking for a SWE position.
> grit, n: firmness of mind or spirit, unyielding courage in the face of hardship or danger
What hardship or danger are employees subjected to, in your company? If this an excuse to blame burnout on employees' lack of fortitude? What systems are missing from your organization that make goals reliant on individuals' courage?
Hardship could include not being able complete a project due to reasons in or out of your control, but grit makes you not give up. Many sales jobs are like this. Many engineering and science jobs are like this.
Otherwise, grit could be doing a tough thankless job day after day without quitting. Such as cleaning up sewage. People without grit could quit even if they get paid a 500k to do that job.
You seem to have the idea that all jobs should be cushy and predictable. But some jobs are harder than others, and you personally benefit from people doing these hard jobs.
A good company would compensate employees for taking calculated risks and don't demand excessive exposure to danger or other bad conditions
The main question, then, would be whether the people doing those jobs are properly compensated for it. Personally I don't think that's generally the case, because companies tend to pay too much to white collar workers like you who demand everything to be easy and say simply asking for "grit" is a red flag. Soldiers must be exposed to danger, and grit is a requirement for being a good soldier, and personally I think they're not treated well enough.
One thing she did which probably helped was publish YouTube videos about tech topics. She'd just pick a topic, research it, and make a training video on it. She also started using twitter a lot and having conversations with prolific tweeters in her area of expertise.
Basically she upped her public profile and got noticed.
I wish anyone in this position nothing but the best, but this should come as no surprise.
It reminds me of a comedy bit where a guy asks "so when you were in school, you studied, hung out with friends, got a girlfriend, and so on -- yeah? -- if you'd been on the computer every waking hour like i was then you wouldn't be standing here today like an idiot".
It's a joke, but the truth is that there are only 24h in the day, and nobody can "have it all". There's always a road less traveled, even if you traveled the best road for you.
Preference for all public-sector jobs (not just federal, but I think all fifty states give some forms of veterans preference, and a handful give “absolute preference” where a minimally-qualified veteran must be hired over a non-veteran regardless of qualifications.) But even where its not absolute preference, it often is a very strong preference (e.g., California on open civil service exams typically limits hiring to the top 3 ranks on the resulting hiring list, with each rank being 5 points of exam score on a 100-point, before preference points, scale. Veterans get 10 extra points, or 15 if they have a qualifying degree of disability.)
I respect the family tragedy you're referring to, but it deserves better than this. The community does also. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If you are only getting rejections, you may try either lowering your expectations or getting some relevant skills to beef up your offering on the market.
you are not at fault of course, but many companies think of you as their resource and won’t allow that (ever wondered why the department is called “Human Resources”?)
That's nothing. I've been continuously employed for over 20 years. I just got a job a few weeks ago after two months of unemployment. I kept a record of every application and in the end there were more than 130 of them. I ended up with several offers and got a great job but I had far more than 20 rejections for every offer I received and I consider that a very good result for the outcome I had and wouldn't refer to it as "a slap in the face".
Best advice I would give to anyone taking a break from work is to stay in touch with your old coworkers-take them out to lunch occasionally, stop by the office and bring cookies, etc.
Just like in programming, I'd rather write a hack program to replace that monotony. That hack program is networking. :-)
I disagree. I've only gotten jobs through submitting CVs to websites. I've received over a dozen offers and had 6 jobs through this method.
It does actually work. It gets better the better your resume gets. I've never used a referral to get a job offer even once.
It was exactly this kind of situation combined with how I actually got my job that led to this.
In that situation, I'd sent out >100 resumes and got back 100 rejections. I still keep them all because I never wanted to forget the fundamental Epic Fail of looking for work that way.
The thing that crystalized the lesson:
1. I ended up "networking" into a job interview - 15 minutes after I got an offer to start immediately
2. The company I ended up working for (Intel) sent a rejection letter also - to my original resume application - 6 weeks after I'd started working there!!
I then got my next job use the same networking technique to get time in front of the hiring manager, and similarly I had a job within 15-30 minutes of interviewing.
This contrasted with having spent time on resumes, postage (pre-Web) and actively corralling status from each company.
Basically it's question of statistics: which will work more efficiently:
1. A random lottery-odds resume campaign where the resume has nearly no differentiating information to distinguish you from anyone else where the judge of that process doesn't have a STEM degree and is likely overworked and marginally paid above minimum wage
2. A 6-degrees of separation path (no more than 6 hops in a social network) via carefully selected people who likely have STEM training who each have an investment if they pass you through yet have far more knowledge about your qualification because they've talked to you as part of the network building.
The math is pretty damn obvious and trivial. Lottery odds with a faceless bureaucracy or pretty good odds if you are half good with a small set of people who can judge your worth on your merits.
I've used the latter for 40 years and its never failed. Any failures of mismatched jobs were 100% on me (biotech is a weird duck compared to computers or semiconductors).
A few years ago a friend of mine did over 100 *interviews* before finding a job. She presented a talk about her experience https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzz5AaCWMps and blogged about it as well https://medium.com/codebuddies/my-adventures-in-job-searchin...
YMMV, of course!
I don't think the author is looking for life advice from you. "Being a stay-at-home mum was my choice." She doesn't appear to be kicking herself for becoming a mother. Whether she "expected" this or not, whether it was a "surprise", is not particularly relevant. That's not the issue, it's a red herring. She made her choice, willingly, and now she's looking to restart her career. It feels like some commenters are looking more to be judgmental than helpful.
The survival of humanity itself depends on people having and raising children. But then we turn around and act like it's some kind of personal mistake, a poor choice for which someone deserves social punishment, as opposed to a natural part of life. Why is a gap in someone's résumé viewed as abnormal rather than expected? If anyone deserves to be lectured, it's the employers who are "surprised" that résumé gaps occur and "expect" candidates to have no gaps.
She's just looking for a job in her field. So you're arguing against a straw man. Or straw woman.
She's really just started applying to jobs.
Also on upwork you need to get in some experience before you can apply for decent paying jobs which means wetting for peanuts on a few small jobs.
I lost a position over a year ago and found myself scrambling for a new role as an older person in tech. I thought of a few things that might help.
In my case I was trying to move into medical tech software infra role in NYC. I needed to find ways of talking to people in the target field in a low pressure way - I got an invite to https://lunchclub.com/ and started having chats with people who worked in tech with a medical focus. I met someone who worked for the CDC and another person who was a nurse who developed a new kind of injection needle, etc
I could ask them lots of questions about their work and get comfort in talking about related topics. It helped in my case as it helped me relax - I am not extroverted and I needed to develop fluidity in this way. I am not recommending lunchclub over any other such service - it is the one I used. I would guess there are more option in this space... In my case I found a job in a nonmedical field but the company is a pretty amazing fit and I feel lucky. I feel like the ability to relax in the interview process really helped.
Another thing I thought about with your post is - consider not applying for junior positions - the ugly language in the response letter you got is telling you that I think. It requires bravery and squelching the 'impostor syndrome' feelings but you are not a junior employee. You have life experience. Look for employers that seem to signal that they will hire based upon your aptitude rather than "x years in such a position".
Another question - are you contacting companies directly? YMMV but I get much better interactions with internal recruiters than head hunters. Try targetting companies even if they don't list exactly the job you are looking for.
Very best of luck
There were many differences for me though. For one I had a rich network (she doesn’t mention this) so when, a couple of years ago, my gf urged me to get a job I ended up with a lot of recruiter calls. But TBH they couldn’t grok my bg and I’m not really a big company guy.
Also I already had multi-year gaps in my work history so this wasn’t an existential issue for me as it might be for most people.
Third, I’m male and the biases in business are different. Not just in business: a father traveling with a kid is offered all sorts of help and accommodation while a woman with kids is largely invisible. I could write a whole book on this! But on the business side I wasn’t asked the kinds of family questions that I hear women are asked. In fact “I had to become a full time parent” is usually received with sympathy rather than as a sign of unseriousness.
In the end I did what I usually do which is start a company. My co founder is a widow, and also a former software developer, and she struggled* more like the author of this piece. The idiots who didn’t hire her really missed out!
My gf’s path involved an unexpected hack: she took only a few years off when her kids were small but she and her then husband needed the income so she started working for a tiny consulting boutique, initially part time. That let her slowly transition into consulting on her own.
* Disclaimer: we have never discussed this directly though: this comes through when we talk about hiring.
I don't know where you're meeting these accommodating people, I just get stared at like I'm doing something wrong when I travel with my child. God forbid I want to use the change table in the woman's washroom because there's none in the men's. I just change my kid on the grass outside, trying to ignore the looks and comments like, "Moms day off?"
All those parents who are forced to work but always wanted to stay back and provide best care for their kids but couldn't do so.. feeling a gut punch.
Parents who chose career path and gets the slap in the face moments every time they realized that they could have spent more time with the kids instead of the work.
Is it possible to eat the cake and have it too?
I've seen reflections of OP in a lot of parents in my life. They fall into two categories:
Type As that direct this sort of extreme level of effort to anything they do.
Anxiety/OCD that just can't let that little bit of benefit go combined with satisfying their complusion of controlling everything.
A long time ago, when I had only one child I made a joke to one of my coworkers that had twins. It was something like that child care was O(N), so she had the double of problems.
Now I have two small children (and a big one), and now I'm convinced that it's at least O(N^2). [In my case O(5) not O(9), because the old one is old enough.]
For the people in my life that sound similar to the OP they do the reverse. They add parenting work until their capacity is full. If you gave them and extra 3 hours in the day they'd still be just as busy.
I do not have specific requirements. I am flexible in terms of hours/week etc.
I am looking on entering a career that utilizes my strong Computer Science + Analytical skills and a career that allows me to develop/ use my content creation skills/ passion, networking, events, communication, digital marketing etc. I am not sure what is the right role for me.
So far, I look into content creator jobs, digital marketing/sales, business advocacy, and more!
I am eager to learn and grow, so I would be incredibly happy with trainee/ internships/ apprenticeships/ return to work programs!!!
Again thank you so much for asking me, it's so supportitive!
Software dev seems an easy choice from a computer science background.
Here's what you do: you lie by omission. By this I mean you imply you went to college during or after any experience you have. Do not specify when you graduated. Don't specify what years you went to college. They can't really ask because that risks age discrimination.
Put work experience first then college afterwards. This gives the impression of chronological order without saying that's the case.
You can even leave off work experience you don't think is relevant or will help you, particularly for entry-level positions. If you're concerned you're competing with new grads then come across as a new grad with some experience.
> However, being a stay-at-home mum came at the cost of my career.
To generalize, doing anything for 5-6 years will come at the cost of your career. This isn't specific to raising children.
That's all? I am in the middle of a job search, I am gainfully employed, I just got a raise and a new bonus structure, and yes I have been "rejected" by well over 100 positions, I have been a finalist in at least 3 or 4 (maybe 5) and 1 offer was rescinded at the last moment for reason unrelated to me/my qualifications.
There was a time in my life when I was in a similar situation returning to my professional career after a 5-year sabbatical in a different field and as an entrepreneur, so I know the pain of convincing prospective employers to hire me.
We don't like it, but it's a numbers game. Period. 20 is not a meaningful number. 4,000 is.