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Starting Now At Netflix: Unlimited Maternity and Paternity Leave
vivaoporto writes: Netflix announced Tuesday that, during the first year after their child's birth or adoption, employees will be able to take off however long they feel they need to. They can return on a full- or part-time basis, and even take subsequent time off later in the year if needed. Netflix will "keep paying them normally." Time comments that Netflix's policy "deserves high marks for extending leave to fathers, as well as understanding that the entire first year after childbirth can be challenging for new parents".
There would be a greater potential for abuse if raising a kid was not so expensive. Also, consider that if you does not show up to work, you are less likely to get a raise, or a promotion.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
Smugness aside, it's a fair point. The Headline is absurd, and the first thing I thought on reading is that would mean you could have a kid and get free wages for the rest of your life, so the headline must be bullshit.
The word "unlimited" has lost all meaning. "Unlimited within X limits" is an oxymoron. "Any amount of leave within the first year" is not. "No further limits within X limits" is also a less misleading way of phrasing things.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
If it's so hard to do, why are we the only western country that doesn't provide any guaranteed paid maternity/paternity leave AT ALL? There are small companies in Europe, and if it's available for both men AND women then that mitigates the hiring bias you are concerned about. There is already some hiring bias against women based on the possibility that they may become pregnant; I don't think this would make that any worse. Pregnant women are also a protected class for the purposes of hiring/firing decisions.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
One thing about Netflix though, is that they readily fire low performers.
Something that used to be common place a few years ago, is now the exception more than the norm. Once someone is passed their 3 months, no one fires anybody in engineering anymore, instead attempting to coach people into place, even if they're making absurd salaries. (Giving the 10 bucks an hour clerk a chance, sure. Giving the underperforming 160k/year dude a chance after failing to meet expectations for 6 months...thats silly).
Anyway, since Netflix has a culture if firing those people, anyone who is left is probably worth trying to keep.
That kind of system is extremely prone to abuse. There are subtle (and not so subtle) ways to make sure that folks who are well liked get assignments that have higher chance of success with minimal effort vs folks that are disliked. I've got a friend in sales (not at my company) that deals with this kind of thing all the time. Certain sales team members who are popular with management get highly lucrative sales accounts that are virtually shoe-ins and make their numbers 5 times faster than everyone else. Coincidently, those are the sales team members that the all-male management wants beating their numbers so they win the company sponsered all-included trips to hawaii/carribean/etc which they also attend. I've never competed for a vacation package in my engineering career, but I've certainly seen favoratism regarding job assignments.
I think rather than rewarding people solely based on high performance, it's best to reward people for a bance of performance, work ethic, and risk taking. Any one of those individually isn't enough imho. Some of the greatest successes humanity has seen have come from people who failed over and over again until they got it right.
The reason many think generous (or even just minimal) maternity/paternity leave is a bad thing is that some folks are solely focused on businesses. The employees working for the businesses are viewed as cogs in the machine whose only purpose is to churn out more profits. Any time off means that the cogs aren't functioning during that time which could mean the overall machine might not churn out quite as much profits. This is, in their view, a bad thing so any time off for the cogs is viewed negatively.
This doesn't just extend to maternity/paternity leave, you see this attitude in companies where taking ANY time off is viewed as bad or where you can take time off but you'd better bring your laptop and phone with you so you can answer e-mails while on vacation. This also gets perverted into the "death march" at some software companies where the cogs... I mean employees are worked 80 hour days to get a product out. The management figures that if the cogs get burnt out from overuse, they can just ditch them and replace them with new ones. They might even be able to replace them for ones that will work for less money and complain less about being overworked.
Keep spinning, cogs. You've got a profit to generate!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I also suspect that if you actually tried to take that year of paid leave (especially if you're a father), they would suddenly find a way to fire you or cut your pay. Are we really supposed to believe that if some high-paid tech there has three kids in five years that they're going to let him take most of that 5 years off to sit at home and collect his same paycheck? Yeah, I'm sure.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Then I assume that you don't have a problem with unlimited data plans that aren't unlimited?
Unlimited LTE Data (up to 5GB)
Unlimited means *no* limits. Ever.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Infants still require far more attention from parents than toddlers do. Unless you have a unicorn baby, their sleep schedule for the first 3-6 months will be very sporadic which will restrict the parents' sleep. This sleep interruption is the primary difficult aspect of being a new parent. I recently saw a survey which asked what parents missed most about their pre-child life, and obviously it said not to say "sleep" since they didn't want the results to be unanimous.
Infants also require more attention since they are less able to self soothe and keep themselves entertained. They cannot be unsupervised unless asleep. If a two year old is given the same level of parental attention that an infant requires, the toddler would never break anything. They simply would never be left alone long enough to break anything.
My one year old may be running around now and causing havoc, but she is still far easier to handle now that she can actually play with her toys for 15 minutes in a row without needing me or my wife.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
This is exactly the point of doing the "unlimited" time off policies.
Sort of the same as "pay what you want" services or products.
Guilt is a powerful emotion.
The company can say they have "unlimited" x and employees feel proud to have "unlimited" x and people who abuse the system will be dealt with... all around win by simple exploitation of guilt...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Dear Douche,
Anybody working full time (or near full time) should be able to afford to live out of abject poverty without government assistance. What about the $4000+ an hour the CEO of said burger flippery makes? No outrage there, eh? Also, $15 an hour shouldn't be a benefit...more like a 'living wage'.
I fully support your eugenics program.
Ummm, what he was talking about isn't eugenics.
I've never seen an expectation of the parents to be financially responsible anywhere as being remotely called eugenics.
That would be more like family focused economic policy. Which sounds like something we'd see on the 700 Club.
He was implying that a person should have enough liquid assets on hand so that they do not need to be paid to take a leave of absence. He's suggesting that this program at Netflix would encourage riffraff to reproduce. He was indicating that those who are independently wealthy are somehow more worthy of passing on their genetic heritage. He wants to criminalize reproduction amongst the poor. That sounds like a eugenics program to me. He took it to a much greater extreme than "Hey you really should try to avoid having more children than you can afford."
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, (I'm actually a parent), but other than the general societal benefit of paternal/maternal leave, why should parents get it and NON parents not get similar compensation?
Where's the year off of paid leave for someone who wants to see Europe, for example? People CHOOSE to have kids, why should they get paid extra (in the form of paid leave) by companies for it?
In the end, it comes in the form of a net tax benefiting people who have kids, or more kids, on the people have fewer or no kids.
My paternity leave took the form of leave that everyone in my office gets, actually, the only additional protection/benefit I got over non-parents was legal protection from getting fired for using the leave. That seems like much less of an imposition on everyone else than actually being paid.
It seems more rational and fair to me, absent a national goal of having more kids, to just offer everyone "leave" and parents can use theirs for kid-rearing, and other people can go to Europe, or go work another job and double their income.
--PeterM