> My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked so hard to build.
> That, I think, is the primary tension: not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between individual and collective ambitions. Both the state and the family ask us to make sacrifices for something bigger than ourselves — and this, perhaps, is why they have historically fought each other for mindshare. What tech offers is the opposite: a chance to realize a vision that is entirely one's own. Tech worships individual talent, and it's a unique thrill to live and work among peers who don't shy away from greatness. But it also means that tech has to work harder than other industries to demonstrate that starting a family doesn't require giving up these ambitions.
I'm the breadwinner in my family, and my husband is a SAHD. I have a 2yo and I'm 6 months pregnant with our second. Stereotypically, having a kid made me care less about professional ambitions — but I don't care zero. And as the breadwinner, earning money, ideally more money every couple years or so, is a high priority. God, the pressure to keep up. It's hard to balance with being a present mom.
I live in the SF Bay Area and being able to attend events and network in person has been a huge boon to my career. Being "in the scene" pays off. I can't really do that anymore, not without losing time with my kid, and I'm just not willing to make the sacrifice. Traveling to conferences, etc., is even more off the table. Don't even talk to me about commuting. But I know these lifestyle changes will have repercussions next time I need to find a job.
To secure jobs with the kind of flexibility I require as a mom, I need to be a high performer, an impressive candidate with plenty of connections. Being a mom makes it harder — more expensive, let's say — to be that kind of exceptional worker bee. Oy vey!
I am super happy that work is becoming more accepting of, and that you have found success with, family obligations. I, too, have benefitted greatly from generous parental leave policies and pro-family culture and no those things don’t even come close to fully leveling the playing field. Still, I think we often overlook that this generosity must be subsidized by society. And I don’t mean that as a negative… I think that raising the next generation is by and large the most important thing society should be doing. But still, I suspect there will always be rewards for those who dedicate themselves exclusively to their career. And it will always be harder for those that value family to compete.
It makes me wish that we could figure out how to formally subsidize both parents for those first 3-5 years of their children's lives so that everyone could feel empowered to raise their kids in their most formative years without the stress of work and figuring out how to afford childcare. Imagine a society where having children didn't cost anything, where new parents could take on debt that got erased when their kids entered primary school (or some other milestone). At least I’d hope there would be fewer instances of people obsessing over a career because they were told they should “have it all”. I’ve come to understand that my values shift as I move through phases of life and I think socially we could do a better job elevating people who choose to raise families rather than denigrating them for not having a picturesque power career at the same time.
Silicon valley isn’t family-excluding in my experience, it’s just not family oriented either. What makes a disruptive tactical technology squad capable of upsetting incumbents and capturing billions is not usually “a bunch of parents juggling potty training their 2yr old while feeding their newborn”.
> That, I think, is the primary tension: not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between individual and collective ambitions.
I guess I don't see much difference? It would be hard to describe a family as anything other than an individual ambition in this country. The state certainly provides very little support to most people.
This in effect seems like a long-winded way of blaming people for wanting a family in the first place.
Edit: mod-limited so responding here: Sure that part I get, but isn't this also trivially a "family vs state" matter in addition to an "individual vs collective" manner? I don't get what is gained by ignoring the former interpretation.
Starting a family means giving up a lot of personal autonomy for the sake of a collective. A small one, compared to a company or a government, but a collective nonetheless.
Sure. But to characterize your own struggle as "you vs the family" as opposed to "the family vs the state" (edit: or "you vs the state") is... incalculably alien
I’m always taken aback when people in power denigrate remote and flexible work, as if it’s lazy or incompatible with an organization succeeding. If you want people to have families and lean into them, they need this work arrangement. Remote and flexible work has been shown to be very beneficial to parents and working mothers specifically. Several other countries protect this as a worker right. There’s over $120B in remote first or highly remote compatible enterprises. But you still have the bros, from Silicon Valley to Jamie Dimon in finance, dragging people back in for the performance art. I hope the right people get into positions of power soon, who understand economic success and worker well-being go hand in hand.
It shouldn’t taboo to say “I’m here to do good work, but then I’m going home; my job is not who I am, but merely a means to a reasonable amount of economic and professional success.” We have to enable people do their best work with reasonable accommodations.
Remote and flexible are nice, but not what is needed. What is needed is consistency and not too many hours. You have to be expected to not work or party late because you will be with the family. You have to be expected to work the same first shift schedule - that is the kids are in school or in child care when you are working (child care for young kids is expensive enough that one parent staying home until the kids are school aged looks really good, so support for going back to work after that is useful).
There needs to be one parent with flexibility, but it doesn't matter which. Just so that when a kid is sick at least one parent able to not go into the office. Most people reading this will have a job that can be done okay from home between cleaning vomit up and so it makes sense for us to get that flexibility. However there are a lot of jobs that must be in person (you can't work an assembly line from home)
We don’t have to agree on the remote and flexible part, but I agree with reduced hours and am an aggressive advocate of the 4 day week (8x4 @ 100% pay).
Honestly, I do think there are advantages to in-person work, in terms of team cohesion, serendipity, etc. That said, 1) I don't care, the advantages to me of remote work vastly outweigh the advantages of working on an irl team, 2) many organizations don't set up their irl work environment to effectively maximize the benefits. But I get why employers would prefer it.
There is a huge element of hubris at play. Founders are highly competitive and high achieving people, who imagine their teams to be like leading NFL football teams where there is no room for members who are not absolutely dedicated. Working a 40-hour work week is not compatible with that. As a result perhaps these kind of companies are self selecting, and it's rare to find a leader who is willing to say the equivalent of, "hey, you know, it's OK to be a loser team and not work 100 hour weeks"
A lot of dysfunctional management behavior ive seen can be chalked up to simple projection by either the founder or management.
They want you to feel invested enough to work 60 or 80 hour weeks coz they do. They want you to feel the need to be in the office putting in face time coz thats how they feel.
Not every founder or CEO is egocentric enough to want a bunch of mini-mes orbiting around them but a lot of them are.
This feels to me a little like, "I'm disappointed that person over there is so great at the piano. They practice 10hrs a day. I don't have time. But, I feel I should be considered just as good as them even though I can't put in the effort they are. I should be paid the same. They give concerts 4 nights a week but I have family obligations and can't do that. Venues should figure out a way to let me do once a month and promoters should figure out a way to make me famous even though my output is much less than that other piano player"
Do I think parents should have secure jobs? Yes.
Do I think people that choose family over job should get all the benefits of someone who chooses job over family? No.
It arguably seems inconceivable for it to be any other way. I wanna be good at math but I don't want spend time doing math. I want to be good at ballet but I don't want to spend time doing ballet. I want to be good at my job but I don't want the spend time doing my job.
I'm not saying anyone should be expected to work extra hours or not get family support. I'm only saying that different people have different priorities. Some it's family. What they get out of that is being good at family. For others it's job, what they get out of that is being good at job. Job often include meeting people at industry events outside of 9-5 M-F hours just like being good at anything requires doing more of it than others.
That seems like bland fact, not a judgement to me. I'm sympathetic that a hard choice has to be made.
If you choose a life centered around career and ambition, especially in a large corporate or government sector -- you are not pro-family. That's ok.
Everyone looks at the happy people around them, and think that they can have it all, but have no idea what actually happens or doesn't. Reality is, you can't woo investors or yak at conferences on 3 continents and be meaningfully fully engaged with your kids. You try your best and make it work. If that family focused lifestyle is what you want, that's fine. But you're unlikely to be a high-flyer in a company that demands blood.
End of the day, you need to know youself, and figure out what you actually want and why. Most people keep moving to avoid doing that. Life put me in a place where I lost agency and had to make a choice, and while the circumstances sucked, I made the right choice.
> If that family focused lifestyle is what you want, that's fine. But you're unlikely to be a high-flyer in a company that demands blood.
I’m not sure I agree, though it probably depends on what our definitions of a “family focused lifestyle” are.
The most high-flying executives you can name from the Valley to the Street… I would bet that most have a family they would describe as being meaningfully engaged with.
There’s a certain niche of the Valley that takes pride in being busy to the detriment of everything else in their life, but they don’t represent career success, they represent dysfunction.
If you want a family life and a phenomenal career… you’re not playing golf every weekend, nor are you meeting your friends for beers after work at 5:30 on a Friday. You’re spending Saturday mornings with your kids, and you probably have a supportive partner helping around the house (or hired help).
So in that sense, you can’t “have it all,” but you can make choices that prioritize both work and family.
There’s always a sacrifice. In most cases, that means somebody is usually either not working or working light.
I’d agree that workaholics represent dysfunction, but the problem is that they drag down those around them.
A key thing is that the place matters. You don’t have to work for a particular company to have a great career. You need to know what you want to be in the place that is right to you.
>The most high-flying executives you can name from the Valley to the Street… I would bet that most have a family they would describe as being meaningfully engaged with.
They can describe all they want, but they have the same 24 hours a day as we all have (even if they're tweaked out of their mind like a certain one that cannot be mentioned in HN without a deluge of downvotes). If they're the archetypical high-performer working crazy hours, they are not spending that time with their family.
You can try to make yourself feel superior as much as you want, but yes: high performers often do both. They work hard and spend quality time with family.
I’m not going to psychologically diagnose someone here, but I have a feeling a lot of this inferiority complex comes from feeling insecure about lack of achievement in one’s career. So people cope by saying, “well I may not have a chart-topping career, but at least I spend time with my family, unlike that guy!”
When the reality is… yes, ambitious high flyers often have just as stable and living family lives as anyone else.
That's a lot of assumptions for someone supposedly not wanting to hand out psychological diagnoses based on a single comment on a online forum. I can online imagine the theses that would come out if you _were_ trying!
You can ad hominem all you want, but my central point remains: everyone has the same allotment of time. If you are spending it on something, that necessarily means you are not spending it on other things. That's just a fact and doesn't have moral judgements attached.
We do all have the same amount of time. But where there's inequality is in the productive (business and social/family) integral during that time.
Most people are likely at best using 25% of their 24h towards something high value. Say, 4 of their 8-9 working hours, and 1 in the morning and 3 after work are "good family time". The rest, their body and mind are in a low power state for efficiency or recovery.
Where the super-performers likely have an advantage is in a biological superiority that results in them needing less recovery time (perhaps life damages them on a cellular level less) and they have more energy-efficient or high-throughput caloric systems to be able to do more hours of high-impact work in the day.
We are learning more and more about mitochondrial differences between people. If you could do 8 hours of high-focus work every day, be super in-tune with people for 4 hours afterwards, and only need 4 hours of sleep to be completely recovered, you'd acheive a lot more over a year, or 10 years, than your peers.
This is completely un-controversial when talking about something like Pro Basketball: it's self-evident. But people don't want to acknowledge it may be a factor in programming or business leadership.
If you look at the hot up-and-coming companies in the AI rush era you'll notice that the median age is pretty low, and the working hours are nuts, borderline deathmarch-like. Everybody's trying to stay in the race, and for many it's worth it. How many jobs will give their staff a $1.5M bonus on a whim?
There's no way any of these people can sanely start and maintain a family without a spouse at home full time. Which maybe you can afford on those salaries, maybe. Being on single income in the Bay with kids can get tricky.
I bailed out of my OpenAI loop for this reason. I collected enough signal that it would not be a place I could succeed while prioritizing my one-year-old.
Glad to see this pop-up. For whatever it's worth I was born in the Sunset (SF) and love the city in spite of all it's problems. My parents were forced out when I got a school on Treasure Island for my 1st grade lottery pick. Went back to SF for college, east coast for grad school where I met my wife from Milwaukee. We have a 5 year old now and I would love to move back to SF and raise my son there. But no matter how many different ways I try to analyze it I just can't come close to justifying the move as beneficial for him or for our marriage. I'd have to work a more intense job to make enough to afford even a quarter of the space we have now. And without knowing our lottery pick in advance I'd have to budget in private school for at least twice the price we're paying for our current STEM-focused private option.
I don't have any personal aversion to working more to pay for more expensive options but the tradeoff of time keeping my relationship with my kid and my marriage healthy is hard to ignore and seems like a really concrete deal-breaker.
We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento where my extended family is from. We thought it might be temporary before getting pulled back to the bay for work or schools maybe but the culture here has just been so positive and conducive to family. The public and private schools are excellent with dozens of options, everything is bikable and green, there are literally more museums and restaurants than we can keep up with and the parks / sports options for kids are amazing. And it's swarming with healthy young working / middle class families about half of which are bay area expats. The city obviously has some known issues but I'm continually grateful with the amount of new development going up in every direction and the overall feeling of being a culture / city that supports young cool people having families.
Anyway I'm just surprised and disappointed at how hard it is to justify moving to SF right now as a native who loves it there. Even as someone working in tech / AI with a strong desire to go back. If you have a family, it just seems impossible to make SF make sense right now. I could be missing something of course.
Curious what other SF or Sac tech parents have to say about all this. So much of this has had to be hypothetical on my end because I know so few parents with young kids in SF...
We've got a 5 month old here in San Francisco, and will attempt child #2 some time in the next year. The lottery system doesn't bother me as much about school as the fact that it seems to lack academic rigour. As for the prices, it's obvious that the relentless work of SF natives has had its effect: few can live here but the wealthy. They have been very good at achieving this effect, and the population is now at a median age higher than 40.
In time, those arriving here from elsewhere will remedy it, but the war SF natives wage on families will take a lot of work for the rest of us to fight.
Congratulations on #2! (and #1) You're right I think, I share the belief that the new arrivals will remedy the city council / zoning / housing stagnation issues one new development at a time. I'll miss what the Sunset was but a few new condos along 19th etc will make it feel a lot modern.
Thank you! Not yet there on #2. She's in cold storage for the moment :)
SF is fortunate as a city that it draws people from across the world. It's possible that with that it can stem the stagnation. One day perhaps you will find it worth your while to return!
I'm sure this won't change your situation, but the SFUSD lottery system has changed significantly since you were a kid, with the most recent big change being in 2010. Since then, 80% of families end up getting one of their top three school choices (all of which can be near home). Not a guarantee, but not bad either.
There's a new system that they've been working on since 2020, but implementation keeps getting delayed. The new system is zone-based, so instead of choosing from any of the district's schools, each family gets to choose from a smaller set in a geographic region near their home. That should in theory make it so pretty much every kid gets to go to school fairly close to home.
The racial integration goals of the original lottery system were well-meaning, but IMO frankly disastrous in its outcomes for many families, like yours.
I don't have kids, but several of my friends do. Some have moved out of the city once their kids have reached school age, but others have made it work. Unfortunately I expect they've had to spend a decent amount of money to make it work, though, more than they would've if they'd moved out of the city like many others do. And most (all?) of my friends with kids who have kept them in SFUSD (rather than going private) have moved out to the Sunset; the schools on the eastern side of the city still rank much lower from a student performance perspective.
If I do have kids, I would love to raise them in SF, and would very much prefer they get a public-school education, as I did (NJ/MD; I'm an east-coast transplant). But I definitely see that this can be challenging, to put it mildly.
> We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento
Hope you're keeping cool during the heat wave! I just drove through Sac on my way back to SF from Truckee this weekend, and my eyes widened when I saw my car reporting the outside temp at 108F. Looks like it's "only" 87F there now, but still!
Money spent on an employee to allow them to better raise a family is money not spent on a shareholder return that allows a retiree to swing on and off the course at a golf-centered retirement village in Florida.
Until you get a diversification in who holds most corporate shares (they're usually held by retirement and pension funds) you're going to see more of the same.
I can’t see a way around it without more government incentive to combat the drift of gerontocratic capitalism. Children aren’t valuable anymore in the access to cheap labor sense because our economy has scaled beyond the phase where that’s a competitive x factor.
Whether we created organically, or capitalism lead us into, a worldview where both parents are better off as good reliable corporate wage slaves, we’re at the point where dual incomes are expected which puts a lot of strain on any family wanting to actually raise their kids, which not too long ago was the default expectation.
I am sure diversification of assets will help, but I don’t see 40 yr old “we’re over populating the earth” and “parents don’t know what they’re doing they aren’t suited to raising children” types having much shareholder empathy for an economy that takes a haircut to support 30 hour work weeks and 6 month paid parental leave.
The feasibility of having children has to be supported by society and systems that work against it have to be kept in check.
Silicon Valley is pro-money and nothing else. The don't be evil rhetoric worked well to get a foot in the door but as soon as there was ever any choice between values and cash, greenbacks won. Hell, the entire industry is trying its damnedest to get rid of bodies in favour of chips. That should tell you how many fucks they give about breadwinners.
Things like ping pong tables, free beer - those are bad for family life. They encourage you to stay at the office for more than your 40 hours - of course in many places the idea of a 40 hour week seems like a joke. If you want to encourage family life you need to encourage going home and not thinking about work at all.
My company has a branch office near LA. I asked someone there once why they don't move just a few hours north to the Bay - they could easially double their salary. There was no interest in that though - the LA office you arrive to work sometime around 9 or 9:30, take a lunch break, and if you if you are not clearly preparing to leave at 6pm they remind you to turn the lights off when you leave. (that is you are allowed to work later if you want but it is expected that you won't) That is worth far more than the extra money that they could make and so we have a lot of people who have been in that office for 20 years.
> Things like ping pong tables, free beer - those are bad for family life.
Is it that clear cut? It may be problematic for a family unit if a member is regularly engaging in those activities instead of being with family. However, at the same time, many a family have been established with activities like playing ping pong and drinking beer.
There is a difference between how you meet your future spouse and how you live after you have a family.
though even then work is the worst place to meet someone even though it often happens (and often works). Your company doesn't hire for the values you demand to share as a family. If your company has problems you both are in the same worry at the same time. And your company is very limitied as to the number of people you could meet.
> There is a difference between how you meet your future spouse and how you live after you have a family.
Of course, but family doesn't exist in a vacuum.
> If your company has problems you both are in the same worry at the same time.
Someone once said: "There is a difference between how you meet your future spouse and how you live after you have a family." Meeting at the same company does not imply that you will forever both work at the same company.
> And your company is very limitied as to the number of people you could meet.
How many spouses are you planning on having, exactly? Most people are satisfied with one.
> you need to encourage going home and not thinking about work at all
Why would any company encourage that? The only use that business had with people having family was that having family put workers at a disadvantage, pressed them against the wall, forced them to suffer through even more exploitation than they would if they were childless. Make them existentially fear even trying to look for other opportunities. And give them a place to escape the burden of care of their children.
I used to tell my employees to go home / not work late, because working longer hours doesn’t produce more output. You may get an initial uptick in output, but then it falls away as people get burned out/sick of work. Long hours also equals higher turnover of staff, which is expensive in many ways.
There’s nothing good over the long term that comes from long hours. It’s bad for morale and it’s bad for the business.
Respect your employees, consider their needs and you’ll have a more committed workforce with higher retention and higher quality output.
Jurisdictions vary, but around here that isn't a desirable quality. There is much more legal exposure if you have employees who have been around for a long time.
I considered it a benefit. It meant I could hire fewer people. I had good, motivated people, with institutional knowledge. When you’re a small/medium sized business with limited funds this is much more desirable. It costs less to keep fewer people employed and you can be much more agile.
Firing people who needed firing was never a problem and it didn’t tend to be people who’d been there for a long time that I wanted to fire.
High turnover of staff has outsized costs: loss of institutional knowledge, loss of momentum on key projects, time taken onboarding/training, recruitment fees, etc. it’s to be avoided imho.
Many companies encourage employees to go home and relax or engage in other rewarding activities; it can be very beneficial for the employer. For one thing, it encourages people to separate their work lives and home lives, which can decrease stress (often encouraging productivity and increasing tenure), as well as encouraging people to treat their office as somewhere to focus on work (to the exclusion of distractions). Additionally, in many fields it can be helpful to get a fresh perspective on your work every day, rather than getting tunnel-vision, which can happen from having your 'head down' all the time.
It’s uncommon in startups and companies focused on high-growth (such as the FAANGs). Older, smaller, and more stable companies tend to have more of this orientation, but it usually comes with significantly lower compensation.
I personally have less than 40 hours of week of good code in me. I've tried programming more than that many times, and I can do it for a few days but then I burn out and and less productive. So by encouraging me to not think about work outside of work hours they get more out of me when I'm at work.
Exactly which is why this article is so useless and misunderstands capitalism and does not know economic law. Corporations can never be family friendly becasue it is antagonistic to profit and therefor in direct violation to shareholders rights.
See Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919)
“A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.“
EDITING TO ADD: Down voting this comment is typical the sociopathic world we are living in where you cannot even show the truth of the law lest it affect sociopathic sensibilities. If one person would explain why my comment, which is just a fact, deserves to be downvoted I would appreciate the conversation.
There is much more to Dodge v. Ford Motor Company than meets the eye. Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule protects many decisions that deviate from this standard.
Courts accordingly treat Dodge v. Ford as a dead letter. (In the past three decades the Delaware courts have cited the case only once, and then on controlling shareholders' duties to minority shareholders). Nevertheless, legal scholars continue to teach and cite it. This Essay suggests that Dodge v. Ford has achieved a privileged position in the legal canon not because it accurately captures the law - it does not - or because it provides good normative guidance - it does not - but because it serves professors' need for a simple answer to the question, What do corporations do? Simplicity is not a virtue when it leads to misunderstanding, however. Law professors should mend their collective ways, and stop teaching Dodge v. Ford as anything more than an example of how courts can go astray.
> Corporations can never be family friendly becasue it is antagonistic to profit and therefor in direct violation to shareholders rights.
This can be false (can, not is!). When good employees demand family live then the company that gives it to them can get those good employees. There are good employees who are willing to settle for less money if the company allows for a good family life and so the company makes more money. (hint you won't find many of them in the Bay area, but if you can expand your reach to other cities they are not uncommon)
But this is an ethical call, not a legal one. And the law will always over rule ethics.
We need to change the laws to make corporations "family friendly" like mandatory 4 week vacations, better family leave compensation, and Medicare for All. Corporations are essentially sociopaths and have to be forced to have emapthy.
> We need to change the laws to make corporations "family friendly"
If the will was there, we could also simply exert that as a condition on employment. You don't really need laws when you can just do what the law is going to have you do anyway.
The problem is that the will isn't there. Only around half of the population are in what this thread seems to consider a family, so you are fighting against the wants of the other half who find their family-less situation, where they don't have the same "family friendly" concerns to worry about, to be a business advantage. That means it is hard to exert as a condition of employment and for the same reason hard to turn it into law.
I suspect that it would be possible to mobilize the bloc of families as a more unified group than singles, which would influence the policy and law making calculus
> which would influence the policy and law making calculus
Along with negotiations in the workplace. But this is all hypothetical. It could theoretically be done, but it is unlikely it will be done. Even amongst families, there isn't a whole lot of desire to do it. Don't let comments on the internet fool you. Talk is cheap.
Corporations don’t need to have empathy to make deals with the benefits you mention, they just need counter-parties which prioritize those terms. Medicare has little to do with corporations (which usually don’t like having to spend time and money on health insurance), and many/most would be happy to be relieved of the obligation. With respect to more vacation time, we’ve reached the current equilibrium because government has enacted standards which encourage ‘anchoring’, and most people prefer extra wages over vacation. Much like with airline seats, the companies are giving people what they want.
Sociopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy. Regardless, the only way to make a deal stick is to ensure it is beneficial to all parties.
Healthcare definitely impacts workers, but the only reason for widespread employer-provided healthcare in the USA is the tax exemption. This is not an employer-driven phenomenon.
I am talking about revealed preferences; it’s not a real preference if you are not willing to give something up for it. Extra vacation time comes at a cost in productivity and availability, which aren’t free, so your friends want their employers to give them something for nothing.
> so your friends want their employers to give them something for nothing.
The presented alternative (written by you, oddly enough) was extra wages without vacation. His friends aren't wanting something for nothing. He asserts that they are willing to give up the apparent extra wages coming their way in exchange for vacation.
More vacation for the same pay can be interpreted at least three ways:
- Same annual income for fewer days worked. This is increased daily pay
- Same daily pay for fewer days worked. This is actually increased daily compensation, because of how vacation pay accrual works (you’d have to be accruing at a higher rate).
- Same daily pay with fewer days worked, and same number of paid vacation days, along with additional unpaid vacation days. This one is the only interpretation which does not come with increased compensation per unit of work.
Two of these financially benefit the employee, and none of the three benefit the employer.
What alternative are you considering where the friends are actually giving the employer anything?
> More vacation for the same pay can be interpreted at least three ways:
If you read it in complete isolation, fine. But it wasn't written in isolation. It was clearly written alongside a hypothetical offer of extra wages as per the context of discussion. Accepting the extra wages would not equate to the same pay. That would be higher pay by any reasonable interpretation.
> What alternative are you considering where the friends are actually giving the employer anything?
If you really need it mechanically spelled out, imagine you are paid $x, accept an additional $y (the extra wages), then give $y back to the employer in exchange for vacation. $y is what is given to the employer. In actuality you would skip some steps because they are pointless in practice, but the outcome is the same.
I think family is a worthwhile value, and I like remote work, but I become skeptical with this politicization around family. Often it’s a code word for Christian, hetero, cisgender, divesting women of economic power, and/or censorship. None of these should be forced on people, but often is, under the aegis of family.
I trust it even less coming from these people. Boyle presents family is essentially anti-authoritarian, and praises Marc Andreesson’s supposed opposition to authoritarianism, despite Andreeson’s well-documented support for oligarchy.
What we’re actually seeing here from Boyle is more likely increased convergence between the tech oligarchs and the Christian Right.
> My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked so hard to build.
I mean...When you spend your entire life up to that point focused on personal development and skillsets (all that studying, exams, interviews!), it feels like a "downgrade", or at least a significant pivot, when you become a parent. And most tech workers grew up in an academic-focused environment with few opportunities to learn parenting skills. There were no lessons growing up about basics of childcare or household management!
The only way Silicon Valley will become pro-family is if they are dragged kicking and screaming by the organized force of their workers. I'm not particularly optimistic.
The left used to think that Big Tech was their natural friend and ally too. It's funny to see that the blood from that particular knife in the back hasn't even dried yet and the right is already rhapsodizing about how great it is that tech is their ally now. No it's not: you are the current useful idiots, and you too will be thrown under the bus the second you've outlived your value to capital.
The funny thing about the highly political is that they're always the ones betrayed. No amount of "Fuck off, techies!" is supposed to have an effect. Puke on a tech bus, protest donations to charity (it's not nearly enough, and you shouldn't have your name on it!), allege racism and this and that. But one "message received" and it's this terrible betrayal.
Haha, these people are always being "betrayed" by people who are having their "mask-off moment" who were just "playing them for fools" and they never stop to think it's their behaviour. It's like all those girls who post online that they "hate drama" but for some reason their life is a complete shitshow.
Decentralize. The US is a fucking giant place. Why all companies need to be on the same half a dozen places?
This makes housing absurdly expensive, commutes become hellish nightmares, school choices few and terrible. All things not conductive to growing families.
> Why all companies need to be on the same half a dozen places?
Because that's where the customer places them. "If you build it, they will come" is for the movies. In reality, successful companies emerge where the people are already raring to go.
If you look hard enough you will likely find out that someone in Monowi, Nebraska also built something like Amazon, but it didn't go anywhere because, well, who wants to buy books from someone in Monowi, Nebraska?
You are welcome to start buying from, and encouraging others to as well, things from the guy in Monowi to break the cycle. He will be thrilled, I'm sure! But are you going to? No, probably not. Why bother when you can get the same thing from a guy in Seattle? Seattle no doubt sounds far more trustworthy, and certainly more impressive, than Monowi.
By the network of friends and acquaintances that alerts you as to the existence of the service telling you. Eventually as a service starts to take off with outsider growth location isn't paid attention to anymore, sure, but that only happens after something is well off the ground. The guy in Monowi will have already long given up and bankrupted by the time that is a possibility.
everyone wants access to the largest labour pool possible, to make hiring somewhat cheaper and faster. This means centralization at least among a sector (finance on the East Coast, tech on the West, etc).
if you move out to Illinois and other companies move to Kansas or Montana, how will you poach their workers? how will you fire and replace people easily? better to be concentrated for that.
Also, if you live in a small town how will you meet a girl (or guy - I'm just going with girl to make this easy but adjust to your situation) - there are only a handful and you may not get along with them. Even if you do meet that girl, there are only so many jobs in the small town - if you work for the same company if there is a downturn you may both lose your job at the same time. In a larger city it is more likely you won't work for the same company and thus if one loses a job you can just "tighten your belts" for a few months while looking for a job. The larger city also means more jobs, so if you lose your job and your girl doesn't you have a chance to find a new job without giving up the girl (or forcing her to quit and find a new job)
> if you live in a small town how will you meet a girl
Same way as everyone else...? But even if we assume, for the sake of discussion, that girls only exist in cities, you can, like, go to the city. It's not hard. They don't put impenetrable walls around them. In fact, thanks to the insane efficiency of the highway, you can more of often than not arrive at city destinations faster from small towns than you can being in another part of the city proper. Small town boy meeting big city girl is a tale as old as time.
Living in a small town can actually be quite advantageous if you want to bask in the amenities of the big city — especially if we're talking about all the "poorly designed" North American cities that prioritize transport from outside of the city to the detriment of the local population. You must be under the impression that if you live in a small town that you are permanently chained to your property?
> there are only so many jobs in the small town
But also only so many people, so in actuality you often find "more jobs than people". Curiously, people living in cities tend to not look for work beyond city limits, so you don't even have any added competition beyond the local population.
What small towns normally lack are the extreme outlier jobs like CEO of a F500 or professional sport player. If that is what you seek, you aren't going to find it in a small town. Ironically, though, those CEOs and professional sports starts quite often live in the small towns. I know because I live amongst many of them in my small town! Where you work and where you live are not one in the same.
> The larger city also means more jobs
But also more people competing for those jobs. Not only from the local city population itself, but also all the people in the small towns. Interestingly, while city people tend to never look outside of the city, small town people understand full well that they can work in the city and aren't afraid to look. As it turns out, as surprising as you may find it, they don't put walls around cities (anymore), nor are you chained to your small town property.
> Decentralize. The US is a fucking giant place. Why all companies need to be on the same half a dozen places?
Because most people (not all) in the U.S. associate location with status. If you're in the defacto location for innovation, people (foolishly) take you more seriously. That, and socially, people want to be able to say "we're based in SF" or "we're working with this team based in SF." Ego will always trump rational, practical thinking when big bucks are on the table.
It's all just hobgoblins of the mind, but the market isn't rational, so...we get a concentration of talent/companies because that's what the market responds to (whether or not it's a valid perspective).
Some of the absolute best people I've met live in places you've never even heard of—in fact, nearly all of the top people I've met.
Despite most people in SF dragging a duffle bag of credentials behind them, relatively few are truly technically or creatively impressive. The ones that lack competency beyond their resume rely on the status factor to keep their grift running.
Even without decentralizing more... Invest in making the areas better. Invest in transportation infrastructure so people can get around easier. Invest in more housing so people can afford housing near where they work. Invest in third places so people have places to be other than work and home. I don't know how bad homelessness or public disturbance is in SV, but work toward that (Actually, not just words).
Does anyone on this site pay attention to reality or do they just create a fiction in their head?
Every big tech company has tried to improve infrastructure. They've proposed free Internet, evaluated running train systems, redeveloping bridges etc. and the opposition is always the non-techies who oppose "company towns" and so on.
Hacker News just seems bizarre these days. It's full of people who say things no one familiar with the Bay Area (where YC is from) would say. Just completely divorced from reality.
> It's full of people who say things no one familiar with the Bay Area (where YC is from) would say.
Stands to reason. If you are familiar with the Bay Area, implying that you are there, what would you use HN for? You'd simply go outside and run into all the techies and the inane ideas they have to the fullest extent you can handle. Naturally it is going to attract those in flyover places that don't have any kind of meaningful tech scene connection otherwise.
Hmm, that's true. This place is more likely attractive to the ignorant poor. But eventually they dominate the conversation and it's the blind leading the blind. That's likely already happened. Good argument to stop using the site.
Splitting up dense social networks is really hard. People have been trying to re-create the Bay Area for a while and, professionally speaking if you work in many areas of technology, there's nothing quite it. It's a geographic Matthew effect.
I road trip frequently and it’s astonishing how much space there truly is.
Unfortunately our national attitude around population growth would need to change.
Adding on to existing cities in any direction other than “up” is frequently denigrated as “sprawl”.
New cities seem to be the sole purview of idealistic libertarian billionaires… which would be fine except they’re the only ones who even talk about it. Not that these ever get built.
Getting citizens and then the government comfortable with the idea of building nice new places would really help - in addition to all the heroics already being done in existing cities around zoning, transit, and housing regulations.
We don't even need new cities. We already have loads of previously-amazing cities in the US that are waiting to be rebirthed. We need more investment in what we have. Though with the push for suburbanization continuing unabated, this probably won't happen any time soon.
This is an interesting person to write this. Nadia Asparouhova is Delian A's wife. He runs Varda Space Industries and is a partner at Founder's Fund. FF content is generally charts and vibes kind of stuff.
It'll be interesting to see how Varda changes to enable this, and how FF advises their portfolio to act.
The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour - your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the store of your estranged being.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. However I will state that only religion offers any ability to save for after death - and not all of them do. If you want to save that is good, but get your religion in order (whatever that means - I don't want to open that discussion), then make sure your plan is to spend all the savings somehow. I don't care how you spend it, but enjoy life as best you can. I know some who lived a healthy active life to 104, and some who saved a lot of money for retirement but didn't live that long they were diagnosed with untreatable cancer the same month they retired). Pick your best balance between enjoying now and saving for the future.
"the less you are the more you have" is a very spiritual statement by Marx. Our current social focus is to acquire capital, and that is making all of us less. Less compassionate, less available, less human.
Conspicuously absent from TFA is the #1 thing they could do, which would be to stop requiring vaccines for school or workplace.
Possibly, Silicon Valley (and the larger California) has had more exodus of (and lack of inbound) families for this reason than most others IMHO.
Obviously, there are other factors too, and this is highly controversial (not to mention counter to the politically-correct/institutionally-endorsed position).
But to not mention this issue seems to miss something major. Or do we not talk about that?
You think one of the biggest issues for being pro-family is that Silicon Valley requires people to be vaccinated? You don't think it's a cost of living problem, but rather a policy disagreement?
Key quote:
> My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked so hard to build.
> That, I think, is the primary tension: not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between individual and collective ambitions. Both the state and the family ask us to make sacrifices for something bigger than ourselves — and this, perhaps, is why they have historically fought each other for mindshare. What tech offers is the opposite: a chance to realize a vision that is entirely one's own. Tech worships individual talent, and it's a unique thrill to live and work among peers who don't shy away from greatness. But it also means that tech has to work harder than other industries to demonstrate that starting a family doesn't require giving up these ambitions.
I'm the breadwinner in my family, and my husband is a SAHD. I have a 2yo and I'm 6 months pregnant with our second. Stereotypically, having a kid made me care less about professional ambitions — but I don't care zero. And as the breadwinner, earning money, ideally more money every couple years or so, is a high priority. God, the pressure to keep up. It's hard to balance with being a present mom.
I live in the SF Bay Area and being able to attend events and network in person has been a huge boon to my career. Being "in the scene" pays off. I can't really do that anymore, not without losing time with my kid, and I'm just not willing to make the sacrifice. Traveling to conferences, etc., is even more off the table. Don't even talk to me about commuting. But I know these lifestyle changes will have repercussions next time I need to find a job.
To secure jobs with the kind of flexibility I require as a mom, I need to be a high performer, an impressive candidate with plenty of connections. Being a mom makes it harder — more expensive, let's say — to be that kind of exceptional worker bee. Oy vey!
I am super happy that work is becoming more accepting of, and that you have found success with, family obligations. I, too, have benefitted greatly from generous parental leave policies and pro-family culture and no those things don’t even come close to fully leveling the playing field. Still, I think we often overlook that this generosity must be subsidized by society. And I don’t mean that as a negative… I think that raising the next generation is by and large the most important thing society should be doing. But still, I suspect there will always be rewards for those who dedicate themselves exclusively to their career. And it will always be harder for those that value family to compete.
It makes me wish that we could figure out how to formally subsidize both parents for those first 3-5 years of their children's lives so that everyone could feel empowered to raise their kids in their most formative years without the stress of work and figuring out how to afford childcare. Imagine a society where having children didn't cost anything, where new parents could take on debt that got erased when their kids entered primary school (or some other milestone). At least I’d hope there would be fewer instances of people obsessing over a career because they were told they should “have it all”. I’ve come to understand that my values shift as I move through phases of life and I think socially we could do a better job elevating people who choose to raise families rather than denigrating them for not having a picturesque power career at the same time.
Silicon valley isn’t family-excluding in my experience, it’s just not family oriented either. What makes a disruptive tactical technology squad capable of upsetting incumbents and capturing billions is not usually “a bunch of parents juggling potty training their 2yr old while feeding their newborn”.
> That, I think, is the primary tension: not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between individual and collective ambitions.
I guess I don't see much difference? It would be hard to describe a family as anything other than an individual ambition in this country. The state certainly provides very little support to most people.
This in effect seems like a long-winded way of blaming people for wanting a family in the first place.
Edit: mod-limited so responding here: Sure that part I get, but isn't this also trivially a "family vs state" matter in addition to an "individual vs collective" manner? I don't get what is gained by ignoring the former interpretation.
Starting a family means giving up a lot of personal autonomy for the sake of a collective. A small one, compared to a company or a government, but a collective nonetheless.
Sure. But to characterize your own struggle as "you vs the family" as opposed to "the family vs the state" (edit: or "you vs the state") is... incalculably alien
I’m always taken aback when people in power denigrate remote and flexible work, as if it’s lazy or incompatible with an organization succeeding. If you want people to have families and lean into them, they need this work arrangement. Remote and flexible work has been shown to be very beneficial to parents and working mothers specifically. Several other countries protect this as a worker right. There’s over $120B in remote first or highly remote compatible enterprises. But you still have the bros, from Silicon Valley to Jamie Dimon in finance, dragging people back in for the performance art. I hope the right people get into positions of power soon, who understand economic success and worker well-being go hand in hand.
It shouldn’t taboo to say “I’m here to do good work, but then I’m going home; my job is not who I am, but merely a means to a reasonable amount of economic and professional success.” We have to enable people do their best work with reasonable accommodations.
Mothers are leaving the workforce, erasing pandemic gains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44894464 - August 2025
Remote and flexible are nice, but not what is needed. What is needed is consistency and not too many hours. You have to be expected to not work or party late because you will be with the family. You have to be expected to work the same first shift schedule - that is the kids are in school or in child care when you are working (child care for young kids is expensive enough that one parent staying home until the kids are school aged looks really good, so support for going back to work after that is useful).
There needs to be one parent with flexibility, but it doesn't matter which. Just so that when a kid is sick at least one parent able to not go into the office. Most people reading this will have a job that can be done okay from home between cleaning vomit up and so it makes sense for us to get that flexibility. However there are a lot of jobs that must be in person (you can't work an assembly line from home)
We don’t have to agree on the remote and flexible part, but I agree with reduced hours and am an aggressive advocate of the 4 day week (8x4 @ 100% pay).
Honestly, I do think there are advantages to in-person work, in terms of team cohesion, serendipity, etc. That said, 1) I don't care, the advantages to me of remote work vastly outweigh the advantages of working on an irl team, 2) many organizations don't set up their irl work environment to effectively maximize the benefits. But I get why employers would prefer it.
There is a huge element of hubris at play. Founders are highly competitive and high achieving people, who imagine their teams to be like leading NFL football teams where there is no room for members who are not absolutely dedicated. Working a 40-hour work week is not compatible with that. As a result perhaps these kind of companies are self selecting, and it's rare to find a leader who is willing to say the equivalent of, "hey, you know, it's OK to be a loser team and not work 100 hour weeks"
A lot of dysfunctional management behavior ive seen can be chalked up to simple projection by either the founder or management.
They want you to feel invested enough to work 60 or 80 hour weeks coz they do. They want you to feel the need to be in the office putting in face time coz thats how they feel.
Not every founder or CEO is egocentric enough to want a bunch of mini-mes orbiting around them but a lot of them are.
agreed, and they also miss the fundamental difference in compensation they're getting for those hours compared to regular workers.
This feels to me a little like, "I'm disappointed that person over there is so great at the piano. They practice 10hrs a day. I don't have time. But, I feel I should be considered just as good as them even though I can't put in the effort they are. I should be paid the same. They give concerts 4 nights a week but I have family obligations and can't do that. Venues should figure out a way to let me do once a month and promoters should figure out a way to make me famous even though my output is much less than that other piano player"
Do I think parents should have secure jobs? Yes.
Do I think people that choose family over job should get all the benefits of someone who chooses job over family? No.
It arguably seems inconceivable for it to be any other way. I wanna be good at math but I don't want spend time doing math. I want to be good at ballet but I don't want to spend time doing ballet. I want to be good at my job but I don't want the spend time doing my job.
I'm not saying anyone should be expected to work extra hours or not get family support. I'm only saying that different people have different priorities. Some it's family. What they get out of that is being good at family. For others it's job, what they get out of that is being good at job. Job often include meeting people at industry events outside of 9-5 M-F hours just like being good at anything requires doing more of it than others.
That seems like bland fact, not a judgement to me. I'm sympathetic that a hard choice has to be made.
If you choose a life centered around career and ambition, especially in a large corporate or government sector -- you are not pro-family. That's ok.
Everyone looks at the happy people around them, and think that they can have it all, but have no idea what actually happens or doesn't. Reality is, you can't woo investors or yak at conferences on 3 continents and be meaningfully fully engaged with your kids. You try your best and make it work. If that family focused lifestyle is what you want, that's fine. But you're unlikely to be a high-flyer in a company that demands blood.
End of the day, you need to know youself, and figure out what you actually want and why. Most people keep moving to avoid doing that. Life put me in a place where I lost agency and had to make a choice, and while the circumstances sucked, I made the right choice.
> If that family focused lifestyle is what you want, that's fine. But you're unlikely to be a high-flyer in a company that demands blood.
I’m not sure I agree, though it probably depends on what our definitions of a “family focused lifestyle” are.
The most high-flying executives you can name from the Valley to the Street… I would bet that most have a family they would describe as being meaningfully engaged with.
There’s a certain niche of the Valley that takes pride in being busy to the detriment of everything else in their life, but they don’t represent career success, they represent dysfunction.
If you want a family life and a phenomenal career… you’re not playing golf every weekend, nor are you meeting your friends for beers after work at 5:30 on a Friday. You’re spending Saturday mornings with your kids, and you probably have a supportive partner helping around the house (or hired help).
So in that sense, you can’t “have it all,” but you can make choices that prioritize both work and family.
There’s always a sacrifice. In most cases, that means somebody is usually either not working or working light.
I’d agree that workaholics represent dysfunction, but the problem is that they drag down those around them.
A key thing is that the place matters. You don’t have to work for a particular company to have a great career. You need to know what you want to be in the place that is right to you.
>The most high-flying executives you can name from the Valley to the Street… I would bet that most have a family they would describe as being meaningfully engaged with.
They can describe all they want, but they have the same 24 hours a day as we all have (even if they're tweaked out of their mind like a certain one that cannot be mentioned in HN without a deluge of downvotes). If they're the archetypical high-performer working crazy hours, they are not spending that time with their family.
You can try to make yourself feel superior as much as you want, but yes: high performers often do both. They work hard and spend quality time with family.
I’m not going to psychologically diagnose someone here, but I have a feeling a lot of this inferiority complex comes from feeling insecure about lack of achievement in one’s career. So people cope by saying, “well I may not have a chart-topping career, but at least I spend time with my family, unlike that guy!”
When the reality is… yes, ambitious high flyers often have just as stable and living family lives as anyone else.
Ask me how I know…
That's a lot of assumptions for someone supposedly not wanting to hand out psychological diagnoses based on a single comment on a online forum. I can online imagine the theses that would come out if you _were_ trying!
You can ad hominem all you want, but my central point remains: everyone has the same allotment of time. If you are spending it on something, that necessarily means you are not spending it on other things. That's just a fact and doesn't have moral judgements attached.
We do all have the same amount of time. But where there's inequality is in the productive (business and social/family) integral during that time.
Most people are likely at best using 25% of their 24h towards something high value. Say, 4 of their 8-9 working hours, and 1 in the morning and 3 after work are "good family time". The rest, their body and mind are in a low power state for efficiency or recovery.
Where the super-performers likely have an advantage is in a biological superiority that results in them needing less recovery time (perhaps life damages them on a cellular level less) and they have more energy-efficient or high-throughput caloric systems to be able to do more hours of high-impact work in the day.
We are learning more and more about mitochondrial differences between people. If you could do 8 hours of high-focus work every day, be super in-tune with people for 4 hours afterwards, and only need 4 hours of sleep to be completely recovered, you'd acheive a lot more over a year, or 10 years, than your peers.
This is completely un-controversial when talking about something like Pro Basketball: it's self-evident. But people don't want to acknowledge it may be a factor in programming or business leadership.
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Remote friendly is a life changer to young parents… and we saw what happened to that fairly quickly
Didn't the COVID lockdowns lead to a small baby boom for first-time parents?
My neighborhood is a positive data point.
If you look at the hot up-and-coming companies in the AI rush era you'll notice that the median age is pretty low, and the working hours are nuts, borderline deathmarch-like. Everybody's trying to stay in the race, and for many it's worth it. How many jobs will give their staff a $1.5M bonus on a whim?
There's no way any of these people can sanely start and maintain a family without a spouse at home full time. Which maybe you can afford on those salaries, maybe. Being on single income in the Bay with kids can get tricky.
I bailed out of my OpenAI loop for this reason. I collected enough signal that it would not be a place I could succeed while prioritizing my one-year-old.
Glad to see this pop-up. For whatever it's worth I was born in the Sunset (SF) and love the city in spite of all it's problems. My parents were forced out when I got a school on Treasure Island for my 1st grade lottery pick. Went back to SF for college, east coast for grad school where I met my wife from Milwaukee. We have a 5 year old now and I would love to move back to SF and raise my son there. But no matter how many different ways I try to analyze it I just can't come close to justifying the move as beneficial for him or for our marriage. I'd have to work a more intense job to make enough to afford even a quarter of the space we have now. And without knowing our lottery pick in advance I'd have to budget in private school for at least twice the price we're paying for our current STEM-focused private option.
I don't have any personal aversion to working more to pay for more expensive options but the tradeoff of time keeping my relationship with my kid and my marriage healthy is hard to ignore and seems like a really concrete deal-breaker.
We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento where my extended family is from. We thought it might be temporary before getting pulled back to the bay for work or schools maybe but the culture here has just been so positive and conducive to family. The public and private schools are excellent with dozens of options, everything is bikable and green, there are literally more museums and restaurants than we can keep up with and the parks / sports options for kids are amazing. And it's swarming with healthy young working / middle class families about half of which are bay area expats. The city obviously has some known issues but I'm continually grateful with the amount of new development going up in every direction and the overall feeling of being a culture / city that supports young cool people having families.
Anyway I'm just surprised and disappointed at how hard it is to justify moving to SF right now as a native who loves it there. Even as someone working in tech / AI with a strong desire to go back. If you have a family, it just seems impossible to make SF make sense right now. I could be missing something of course.
Curious what other SF or Sac tech parents have to say about all this. So much of this has had to be hypothetical on my end because I know so few parents with young kids in SF...
We've got a 5 month old here in San Francisco, and will attempt child #2 some time in the next year. The lottery system doesn't bother me as much about school as the fact that it seems to lack academic rigour. As for the prices, it's obvious that the relentless work of SF natives has had its effect: few can live here but the wealthy. They have been very good at achieving this effect, and the population is now at a median age higher than 40.
In time, those arriving here from elsewhere will remedy it, but the war SF natives wage on families will take a lot of work for the rest of us to fight.
Congratulations on #2! (and #1) You're right I think, I share the belief that the new arrivals will remedy the city council / zoning / housing stagnation issues one new development at a time. I'll miss what the Sunset was but a few new condos along 19th etc will make it feel a lot modern.
Thank you! Not yet there on #2. She's in cold storage for the moment :)
SF is fortunate as a city that it draws people from across the world. It's possible that with that it can stem the stagnation. One day perhaps you will find it worth your while to return!
I'm sure this won't change your situation, but the SFUSD lottery system has changed significantly since you were a kid, with the most recent big change being in 2010. Since then, 80% of families end up getting one of their top three school choices (all of which can be near home). Not a guarantee, but not bad either.
There's a new system that they've been working on since 2020, but implementation keeps getting delayed. The new system is zone-based, so instead of choosing from any of the district's schools, each family gets to choose from a smaller set in a geographic region near their home. That should in theory make it so pretty much every kid gets to go to school fairly close to home.
The racial integration goals of the original lottery system were well-meaning, but IMO frankly disastrous in its outcomes for many families, like yours.
I don't have kids, but several of my friends do. Some have moved out of the city once their kids have reached school age, but others have made it work. Unfortunately I expect they've had to spend a decent amount of money to make it work, though, more than they would've if they'd moved out of the city like many others do. And most (all?) of my friends with kids who have kept them in SFUSD (rather than going private) have moved out to the Sunset; the schools on the eastern side of the city still rank much lower from a student performance perspective.
If I do have kids, I would love to raise them in SF, and would very much prefer they get a public-school education, as I did (NJ/MD; I'm an east-coast transplant). But I definitely see that this can be challenging, to put it mildly.
> We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento
Hope you're keeping cool during the heat wave! I just drove through Sac on my way back to SF from Truckee this weekend, and my eyes widened when I saw my car reporting the outside temp at 108F. Looks like it's "only" 87F there now, but still!
Money spent on an employee to allow them to better raise a family is money not spent on a shareholder return that allows a retiree to swing on and off the course at a golf-centered retirement village in Florida.
Until you get a diversification in who holds most corporate shares (they're usually held by retirement and pension funds) you're going to see more of the same.
I can’t see a way around it without more government incentive to combat the drift of gerontocratic capitalism. Children aren’t valuable anymore in the access to cheap labor sense because our economy has scaled beyond the phase where that’s a competitive x factor.
Whether we created organically, or capitalism lead us into, a worldview where both parents are better off as good reliable corporate wage slaves, we’re at the point where dual incomes are expected which puts a lot of strain on any family wanting to actually raise their kids, which not too long ago was the default expectation.
I am sure diversification of assets will help, but I don’t see 40 yr old “we’re over populating the earth” and “parents don’t know what they’re doing they aren’t suited to raising children” types having much shareholder empathy for an economy that takes a haircut to support 30 hour work weeks and 6 month paid parental leave.
The feasibility of having children has to be supported by society and systems that work against it have to be kept in check.
Silicon Valley is pro-money and nothing else. The don't be evil rhetoric worked well to get a foot in the door but as soon as there was ever any choice between values and cash, greenbacks won. Hell, the entire industry is trying its damnedest to get rid of bodies in favour of chips. That should tell you how many fucks they give about breadwinners.
Things like ping pong tables, free beer - those are bad for family life. They encourage you to stay at the office for more than your 40 hours - of course in many places the idea of a 40 hour week seems like a joke. If you want to encourage family life you need to encourage going home and not thinking about work at all.
My company has a branch office near LA. I asked someone there once why they don't move just a few hours north to the Bay - they could easially double their salary. There was no interest in that though - the LA office you arrive to work sometime around 9 or 9:30, take a lunch break, and if you if you are not clearly preparing to leave at 6pm they remind you to turn the lights off when you leave. (that is you are allowed to work later if you want but it is expected that you won't) That is worth far more than the extra money that they could make and so we have a lot of people who have been in that office for 20 years.
> Things like ping pong tables, free beer - those are bad for family life.
Is it that clear cut? It may be problematic for a family unit if a member is regularly engaging in those activities instead of being with family. However, at the same time, many a family have been established with activities like playing ping pong and drinking beer.
There is a difference between how you meet your future spouse and how you live after you have a family.
though even then work is the worst place to meet someone even though it often happens (and often works). Your company doesn't hire for the values you demand to share as a family. If your company has problems you both are in the same worry at the same time. And your company is very limitied as to the number of people you could meet.
> There is a difference between how you meet your future spouse and how you live after you have a family.
Of course, but family doesn't exist in a vacuum.
> If your company has problems you both are in the same worry at the same time.
Someone once said: "There is a difference between how you meet your future spouse and how you live after you have a family." Meeting at the same company does not imply that you will forever both work at the same company.
> And your company is very limitied as to the number of people you could meet.
How many spouses are you planning on having, exactly? Most people are satisfied with one.
That's how I met my wife, and now we've got a family :)
So there's an existence proof here.
> you need to encourage going home and not thinking about work at all
Why would any company encourage that? The only use that business had with people having family was that having family put workers at a disadvantage, pressed them against the wall, forced them to suffer through even more exploitation than they would if they were childless. Make them existentially fear even trying to look for other opportunities. And give them a place to escape the burden of care of their children.
> Why would any company encourage that?
I used to tell my employees to go home / not work late, because working longer hours doesn’t produce more output. You may get an initial uptick in output, but then it falls away as people get burned out/sick of work. Long hours also equals higher turnover of staff, which is expensive in many ways.
There’s nothing good over the long term that comes from long hours. It’s bad for morale and it’s bad for the business.
Respect your employees, consider their needs and you’ll have a more committed workforce with higher retention and higher quality output.
> and higher retention.
Jurisdictions vary, but around here that isn't a desirable quality. There is much more legal exposure if you have employees who have been around for a long time.
I considered it a benefit. It meant I could hire fewer people. I had good, motivated people, with institutional knowledge. When you’re a small/medium sized business with limited funds this is much more desirable. It costs less to keep fewer people employed and you can be much more agile.
Firing people who needed firing was never a problem and it didn’t tend to be people who’d been there for a long time that I wanted to fire.
High turnover of staff has outsized costs: loss of institutional knowledge, loss of momentum on key projects, time taken onboarding/training, recruitment fees, etc. it’s to be avoided imho.
> High turnover of staff has outsized costs
Of course, and one has to measure the tradeoffs, but in many cases those costs are cheap insurance.
But, again, jurisdictions vary.
Many companies encourage employees to go home and relax or engage in other rewarding activities; it can be very beneficial for the employer. For one thing, it encourages people to separate their work lives and home lives, which can decrease stress (often encouraging productivity and increasing tenure), as well as encouraging people to treat their office as somewhere to focus on work (to the exclusion of distractions). Additionally, in many fields it can be helpful to get a fresh perspective on your work every day, rather than getting tunnel-vision, which can happen from having your 'head down' all the time.
It sounds good and ostensibly makes sense, and many companies claim they do these things, just like many companies claim to have unlimited PTO.
How many actually sincerely follow through on these claims?
I've yet to encounter a single one.
It’s uncommon in startups and companies focused on high-growth (such as the FAANGs). Older, smaller, and more stable companies tend to have more of this orientation, but it usually comes with significantly lower compensation.
I've been fortunate in that the last few companies I've worked for kept up their end of this bargain
I personally have less than 40 hours of week of good code in me. I've tried programming more than that many times, and I can do it for a few days but then I burn out and and less productive. So by encouraging me to not think about work outside of work hours they get more out of me when I'm at work.
> And give them a place to escape the burden of care of their children
this mindset is the problem, if raising children is a burden to escape... what is life exactly?
>Why would any company encourage that?
Exactly which is why this article is so useless and misunderstands capitalism and does not know economic law. Corporations can never be family friendly becasue it is antagonistic to profit and therefor in direct violation to shareholders rights.
See Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919)
“A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.“
EDITING TO ADD: Down voting this comment is typical the sociopathic world we are living in where you cannot even show the truth of the law lest it affect sociopathic sensibilities. If one person would explain why my comment, which is just a fact, deserves to be downvoted I would appreciate the conversation.
In response to the 1919 case. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1070284
Quote
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744This is only an opinion by both, and Henderson is someone who worked for Brett Kavanaugh and the federal Society.
https://fedsoc.org/contributors/todd-henderson
And again, Stout is only making an argument here, but the case is still the law. And she is actually against shareholder primacy.
I don't believe the law spells out Corporations must act only for the profit of stockholders.
If you look at Delaware's code for Corporations, it doesn't spell out the duties of a corporate officer. https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc04/index.html
Legal cases said their duties are as follows. And "profit at all costs" is not one of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule
In one case, fiduciary duty is actually defined as: good faith, loyalty, or due care.> Corporations can never be family friendly becasue it is antagonistic to profit and therefor in direct violation to shareholders rights.
This can be false (can, not is!). When good employees demand family live then the company that gives it to them can get those good employees. There are good employees who are willing to settle for less money if the company allows for a good family life and so the company makes more money. (hint you won't find many of them in the Bay area, but if you can expand your reach to other cities they are not uncommon)
But this is an ethical call, not a legal one. And the law will always over rule ethics.
We need to change the laws to make corporations "family friendly" like mandatory 4 week vacations, better family leave compensation, and Medicare for All. Corporations are essentially sociopaths and have to be forced to have emapthy.
> We need to change the laws to make corporations "family friendly"
If the will was there, we could also simply exert that as a condition on employment. You don't really need laws when you can just do what the law is going to have you do anyway.
The problem is that the will isn't there. Only around half of the population are in what this thread seems to consider a family, so you are fighting against the wants of the other half who find their family-less situation, where they don't have the same "family friendly" concerns to worry about, to be a business advantage. That means it is hard to exert as a condition of employment and for the same reason hard to turn it into law.
I suspect that it would be possible to mobilize the bloc of families as a more unified group than singles, which would influence the policy and law making calculus
> as a more unified group
A union, if you will...
> which would influence the policy and law making calculus
Along with negotiations in the workplace. But this is all hypothetical. It could theoretically be done, but it is unlikely it will be done. Even amongst families, there isn't a whole lot of desire to do it. Don't let comments on the internet fool you. Talk is cheap.
Corporations don’t need to have empathy to make deals with the benefits you mention, they just need counter-parties which prioritize those terms. Medicare has little to do with corporations (which usually don’t like having to spend time and money on health insurance), and many/most would be happy to be relieved of the obligation. With respect to more vacation time, we’ve reached the current equilibrium because government has enacted standards which encourage ‘anchoring’, and most people prefer extra wages over vacation. Much like with airline seats, the companies are giving people what they want.
> Corporations don’t need to have empathy to make deals with the benefits you mention
No, they will only do these family friendly things if it benefits them. That is what a sociopath does.
> Medicare has little to do with corporations
It has everything to do with the workers.
> most people prefer extra wages over vacation
Do you have statistics for this? Because all my friends want more time off with the same pay.
Sociopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy. Regardless, the only way to make a deal stick is to ensure it is beneficial to all parties.
Healthcare definitely impacts workers, but the only reason for widespread employer-provided healthcare in the USA is the tax exemption. This is not an employer-driven phenomenon.
I am talking about revealed preferences; it’s not a real preference if you are not willing to give something up for it. Extra vacation time comes at a cost in productivity and availability, which aren’t free, so your friends want their employers to give them something for nothing.
> so your friends want their employers to give them something for nothing.
The presented alternative (written by you, oddly enough) was extra wages without vacation. His friends aren't wanting something for nothing. He asserts that they are willing to give up the apparent extra wages coming their way in exchange for vacation.
More vacation for the same pay can be interpreted at least three ways:
- Same annual income for fewer days worked. This is increased daily pay
- Same daily pay for fewer days worked. This is actually increased daily compensation, because of how vacation pay accrual works (you’d have to be accruing at a higher rate).
- Same daily pay with fewer days worked, and same number of paid vacation days, along with additional unpaid vacation days. This one is the only interpretation which does not come with increased compensation per unit of work.
Two of these financially benefit the employee, and none of the three benefit the employer.
What alternative are you considering where the friends are actually giving the employer anything?
> More vacation for the same pay can be interpreted at least three ways:
If you read it in complete isolation, fine. But it wasn't written in isolation. It was clearly written alongside a hypothetical offer of extra wages as per the context of discussion. Accepting the extra wages would not equate to the same pay. That would be higher pay by any reasonable interpretation.
> What alternative are you considering where the friends are actually giving the employer anything?
If you really need it mechanically spelled out, imagine you are paid $x, accept an additional $y (the extra wages), then give $y back to the employer in exchange for vacation. $y is what is given to the employer. In actuality you would skip some steps because they are pointless in practice, but the outcome is the same.
I think family is a worthwhile value, and I like remote work, but I become skeptical with this politicization around family. Often it’s a code word for Christian, hetero, cisgender, divesting women of economic power, and/or censorship. None of these should be forced on people, but often is, under the aegis of family.
I trust it even less coming from these people. Boyle presents family is essentially anti-authoritarian, and praises Marc Andreesson’s supposed opposition to authoritarianism, despite Andreeson’s well-documented support for oligarchy.
What we’re actually seeing here from Boyle is more likely increased convergence between the tech oligarchs and the Christian Right.
> My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked so hard to build.
I mean...When you spend your entire life up to that point focused on personal development and skillsets (all that studying, exams, interviews!), it feels like a "downgrade", or at least a significant pivot, when you become a parent. And most tech workers grew up in an academic-focused environment with few opportunities to learn parenting skills. There were no lessons growing up about basics of childcare or household management!
It's not surprising to be reluctant.
It can’t. And it won’t.
Yes. There are families on the fringe that tries to make it work. But it’s an exception. Not a norm.
The only way Silicon Valley will become pro-family is if they are dragged kicking and screaming by the organized force of their workers. I'm not particularly optimistic.
When so called luminaries are calling 60 hour work weeks a good baseline, you're not pro-family.
There's no turn, this is just A16Z trying to adopt a more "family values" look for obvious reasons.
The left used to think that Big Tech was their natural friend and ally too. It's funny to see that the blood from that particular knife in the back hasn't even dried yet and the right is already rhapsodizing about how great it is that tech is their ally now. No it's not: you are the current useful idiots, and you too will be thrown under the bus the second you've outlived your value to capital.
The funny thing about the highly political is that they're always the ones betrayed. No amount of "Fuck off, techies!" is supposed to have an effect. Puke on a tech bus, protest donations to charity (it's not nearly enough, and you shouldn't have your name on it!), allege racism and this and that. But one "message received" and it's this terrible betrayal.
Haha, these people are always being "betrayed" by people who are having their "mask-off moment" who were just "playing them for fools" and they never stop to think it's their behaviour. It's like all those girls who post online that they "hate drama" but for some reason their life is a complete shitshow.
Decentralize. The US is a fucking giant place. Why all companies need to be on the same half a dozen places? This makes housing absurdly expensive, commutes become hellish nightmares, school choices few and terrible. All things not conductive to growing families.
> Why all companies need to be on the same half a dozen places?
Because that's where the customer places them. "If you build it, they will come" is for the movies. In reality, successful companies emerge where the people are already raring to go.
If you look hard enough you will likely find out that someone in Monowi, Nebraska also built something like Amazon, but it didn't go anywhere because, well, who wants to buy books from someone in Monowi, Nebraska?
You are welcome to start buying from, and encouraging others to as well, things from the guy in Monowi to break the cycle. He will be thrilled, I'm sure! But are you going to? No, probably not. Why bother when you can get the same thing from a guy in Seattle? Seattle no doubt sounds far more trustworthy, and certainly more impressive, than Monowi.
> who wants to buy books from someone in Monowi, Nebraska?
How would anyone know? Which web sites show postal addresses?
By the network of friends and acquaintances that alerts you as to the existence of the service telling you. Eventually as a service starts to take off with outsider growth location isn't paid attention to anymore, sure, but that only happens after something is well off the ground. The guy in Monowi will have already long given up and bankrupted by the time that is a possibility.
everyone wants access to the largest labour pool possible, to make hiring somewhat cheaper and faster. This means centralization at least among a sector (finance on the East Coast, tech on the West, etc).
if you move out to Illinois and other companies move to Kansas or Montana, how will you poach their workers? how will you fire and replace people easily? better to be concentrated for that.
Also, if you live in a small town how will you meet a girl (or guy - I'm just going with girl to make this easy but adjust to your situation) - there are only a handful and you may not get along with them. Even if you do meet that girl, there are only so many jobs in the small town - if you work for the same company if there is a downturn you may both lose your job at the same time. In a larger city it is more likely you won't work for the same company and thus if one loses a job you can just "tighten your belts" for a few months while looking for a job. The larger city also means more jobs, so if you lose your job and your girl doesn't you have a chance to find a new job without giving up the girl (or forcing her to quit and find a new job)
> if you live in a small town how will you meet a girl
Same way as everyone else...? But even if we assume, for the sake of discussion, that girls only exist in cities, you can, like, go to the city. It's not hard. They don't put impenetrable walls around them. In fact, thanks to the insane efficiency of the highway, you can more of often than not arrive at city destinations faster from small towns than you can being in another part of the city proper. Small town boy meeting big city girl is a tale as old as time.
Living in a small town can actually be quite advantageous if you want to bask in the amenities of the big city — especially if we're talking about all the "poorly designed" North American cities that prioritize transport from outside of the city to the detriment of the local population. You must be under the impression that if you live in a small town that you are permanently chained to your property?
> there are only so many jobs in the small town
But also only so many people, so in actuality you often find "more jobs than people". Curiously, people living in cities tend to not look for work beyond city limits, so you don't even have any added competition beyond the local population.
What small towns normally lack are the extreme outlier jobs like CEO of a F500 or professional sport player. If that is what you seek, you aren't going to find it in a small town. Ironically, though, those CEOs and professional sports starts quite often live in the small towns. I know because I live amongst many of them in my small town! Where you work and where you live are not one in the same.
> The larger city also means more jobs
But also more people competing for those jobs. Not only from the local city population itself, but also all the people in the small towns. Interestingly, while city people tend to never look outside of the city, small town people understand full well that they can work in the city and aren't afraid to look. As it turns out, as surprising as you may find it, they don't put walls around cities (anymore), nor are you chained to your small town property.
I don't usually see anyone argue you should move to the bay area for dating!
Any large city - the larger the more options, though some cities are better than others
> Decentralize. The US is a fucking giant place. Why all companies need to be on the same half a dozen places?
Because most people (not all) in the U.S. associate location with status. If you're in the defacto location for innovation, people (foolishly) take you more seriously. That, and socially, people want to be able to say "we're based in SF" or "we're working with this team based in SF." Ego will always trump rational, practical thinking when big bucks are on the table.
It's all just hobgoblins of the mind, but the market isn't rational, so...we get a concentration of talent/companies because that's what the market responds to (whether or not it's a valid perspective).
Some of the absolute best people I've met live in places you've never even heard of—in fact, nearly all of the top people I've met.
Despite most people in SF dragging a duffle bag of credentials behind them, relatively few are truly technically or creatively impressive. The ones that lack competency beyond their resume rely on the status factor to keep their grift running.
Even without decentralizing more... Invest in making the areas better. Invest in transportation infrastructure so people can get around easier. Invest in more housing so people can afford housing near where they work. Invest in third places so people have places to be other than work and home. I don't know how bad homelessness or public disturbance is in SV, but work toward that (Actually, not just words).
For once, stop worrying about maximizing profit.
Does anyone on this site pay attention to reality or do they just create a fiction in their head?
Every big tech company has tried to improve infrastructure. They've proposed free Internet, evaluated running train systems, redeveloping bridges etc. and the opposition is always the non-techies who oppose "company towns" and so on.
Hacker News just seems bizarre these days. It's full of people who say things no one familiar with the Bay Area (where YC is from) would say. Just completely divorced from reality.
> It's full of people who say things no one familiar with the Bay Area (where YC is from) would say.
Stands to reason. If you are familiar with the Bay Area, implying that you are there, what would you use HN for? You'd simply go outside and run into all the techies and the inane ideas they have to the fullest extent you can handle. Naturally it is going to attract those in flyover places that don't have any kind of meaningful tech scene connection otherwise.
Hmm, that's true. This place is more likely attractive to the ignorant poor. But eventually they dominate the conversation and it's the blind leading the blind. That's likely already happened. Good argument to stop using the site.
Splitting up dense social networks is really hard. People have been trying to re-create the Bay Area for a while and, professionally speaking if you work in many areas of technology, there's nothing quite it. It's a geographic Matthew effect.
I road trip frequently and it’s astonishing how much space there truly is.
Unfortunately our national attitude around population growth would need to change.
Adding on to existing cities in any direction other than “up” is frequently denigrated as “sprawl”.
New cities seem to be the sole purview of idealistic libertarian billionaires… which would be fine except they’re the only ones who even talk about it. Not that these ever get built.
Getting citizens and then the government comfortable with the idea of building nice new places would really help - in addition to all the heroics already being done in existing cities around zoning, transit, and housing regulations.
We don't even need new cities. We already have loads of previously-amazing cities in the US that are waiting to be rebirthed. We need more investment in what we have. Though with the push for suburbanization continuing unabated, this probably won't happen any time soon.
Capital abhors decentralization. Capital is about power and to "decentralize" that power means to weaken it. This is why capitalists hate co-ops.
This is an interesting person to write this. Nadia Asparouhova is Delian A's wife. He runs Varda Space Industries and is a partner at Founder's Fund. FF content is generally charts and vibes kind of stuff.
It'll be interesting to see how Varda changes to enable this, and how FF advises their portfolio to act.
A culture of greed is never good for children.
Next up:
Tech bros are actually traditional family men. Here's why
10 reasons why RTO mandates are pro-family
By not pretending your work culture and colleagues are "family".
This isn't Fast and Furious, ffs
The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour - your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the store of your estranged being.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. However I will state that only religion offers any ability to save for after death - and not all of them do. If you want to save that is good, but get your religion in order (whatever that means - I don't want to open that discussion), then make sure your plan is to spend all the savings somehow. I don't care how you spend it, but enjoy life as best you can. I know some who lived a healthy active life to 104, and some who saved a lot of money for retirement but didn't live that long they were diagnosed with untreatable cancer the same month they retired). Pick your best balance between enjoying now and saving for the future.
They're quoting Marx.
"the less you are the more you have" is a very spiritual statement by Marx. Our current social focus is to acquire capital, and that is making all of us less. Less compassionate, less available, less human.
Conspicuously absent from TFA is the #1 thing they could do, which would be to stop requiring vaccines for school or workplace.
Possibly, Silicon Valley (and the larger California) has had more exodus of (and lack of inbound) families for this reason than most others IMHO.
Obviously, there are other factors too, and this is highly controversial (not to mention counter to the politically-correct/institutionally-endorsed position).
But to not mention this issue seems to miss something major. Or do we not talk about that?
While anti-vax people / families obviously exist, are there really that many? Any substantiating data? (I am genuinely curious, though skeptical.)
SO SO SO MANY in the South
Like, SO FUCKING MANY
You think one of the biggest issues for being pro-family is that Silicon Valley requires people to be vaccinated? You don't think it's a cost of living problem, but rather a policy disagreement?
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If AI enables the personalization of apps for individuals, wouldn’t it also be good at doing so for families?
Maybe there is an opportunity to create vibe coded products that fit into the rhythm of a given family.
Collective emotion as a construct for a bigger family goal is an interesting optimization problem.
Mint for tracking your family’s mental and emotional health.