Zuckerberg To Take 2 Months Paternity Leave To Give His Kid a Better Outcome (techcrunch.com)

theodp writes: TechCrunch reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will take two months off from Facebook for paternity leave. Why? "Studies show that when working parents take time to be with their newborns, outcomes are better for the children and families," Zuckerberg explained in a FB post on Friday. "At Facebook we offer our U.S. employees up to 4 months of paid maternity or paternity leave which they can take throughout the year." No word on why the child will only get 50% of that time — maybe that's what the gains chart suggested as a good tradeoff — or if expectant parents who apply to send their children to Zuckerberg's new Primary School, which aims to "help children from underserved communities reach their full potential," will be expected to make a similar commitment.

Comments

What I'd like to know

[rsilvergun]

is how many contractors FB hires. When companies have super sweet benefits like this they usually use contractor positions to get out of giving them company wide. I can't think of a single major company I haven't seen this done at :(...

Re:Why is this news?

[rmdingler]

If they can afford it, yes. How many can these days?

I got my ass handed to me for missing half a day for the unanticipated and rather sudden onset labor of my firstborn, so.... certainly not all of us.

GP may be from a nation with scandinavian-like healthcare.

Re:Though spoiled is a likely side effect...

[alvinrod]

Which does raise an interesting point as to whether or not the effect is due to spending additional time with children or is merely a byproduct of the fact that those who can take time off to spend with their children are far more likely to be wealthy, which is more responsible for the outcome.

In looking for a study to back those assertions up, I immediately found an article from earlier this year reporting on a recent study which reported the opposite results, i.e., that time spent with children didn't matter. I haven't read through it yet, but here's a link to the study in question. (PDF Warning)

I'm all for workers getting maternity or paternity leave if they want to spend time with their newborns, but we shouldn't delude ourselves into why we're doing it.

Poor billionaire

[nospam007]

I got 12 months in Luxembourg, like everybody else.

Re: And people on slashdot give a shit, why?

[Solandri]

I hardly consider Zuckerberg a positive role model. But he's been a heckuva lot better than other people who've been in his position (Rockefeller, Morgan, Gates, etc).

• - Once he had his billions, he had the opportunity to select any gold-digging trophy wife. Instead, he married his pre-fortune girlfriend.
• - He wasn't arrogant, and understood when he was in over his head, and hired outside experts to advise him or do the job for him.
• - Facebook has more or less actually been competing with challengers, not playing shenanigans with standards or formats to create an unlevel playing field. That hasn't been true for their instant messaging, but their core service has pretty succeeded because it provided what people wanted and reached critical mass first, not because they crippled up and coming competitors.
• - He's been changing himself to follow the market (learning Chinese), not trying to change the market to follow his desires (biggest gripe I had with Jobs).
• - Those billions of people he screwed over agreed to allow him to sell their personal information to the highest bidder. If you dislike that FB does this, then you need to convince those people to stop agreeing to stuff like this. If you don't do that, even if Zuckerberg and FB vanished overnight, it would just mean a different company and different CEO would rise up to provide a social media service which did the exact same thing. This is not like Standard Oil or Windows, where you had to use their products if you wanted to survive in the modern world, so you were forced to pay their price. FB's market penetration is only a bit over 50% in the U.S., nothing like the 90+% those monopolies held/hold.
• - More than likely, you also probably look down on all those people who willingly give up their personal information as plebs.

C!=C

[ShanghaiBill]

I believe this is a case of correlation rather than causation. Taking paternity leave is likely to be correlated with being a good dad, but it seems unlikely that it is the paternity leave itself that causes that. Newborns crave human contact. But until the are about 6 months old, they don't really care who that human is. Besides, for the first 2 months, they spend 20+ hours a day sleeping.

When my kids were born I arranged to work from home 2 days per week, and wrote code while the kid was sleeping. We saved money on daycare, and I treasure the memories of spending time with the babies, but I doubt if my kids are really doing any better because if it.

What a bunch of B.S.

[RogueWarrior65]

For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, fathers never took time off when their kids were born. One can also make the case that the fathers of the "Greatest Generation" (both the parents and the children of that generation) never took time off and yet they were the greatest generation. By the same token, one can make the case that this current crop of breeders are total pu$$ies.

Re:And people on slashdot give a shit, why?

[Mass Overkiller]

Or when you come back to work after an approved vacation your boss approaches you and tells you that a customer complained about you, and that you're fired. Even though in the industry I work in, customer complaints, while taken seriously, are a frequent event. Everyone complains about something, and to get fired for it is rare, and in some shops, illegal under contract.