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Restarting my career after motherhood

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Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#141

During the industrial revolution, a lot of propaganda and manipulation techniques were used to get women into wage slavery. While it is a good option to have women who can help out, it is not a necessity.

Women worked also before industrial revolution. For example there is a looooong serie about cloth production by the Romans https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t... Most of that work was done by women, and [spoiler alert] he estimates that it was like 8 hours per day. HN discussions https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#142
post #8

The software industry is like an abusive partner. Always desperate to hire STEM talent, but not you. Knowing a large number of people with similar experiences my recommendation is to start up something. Some very limited and targeted application or service is usually possible. If nothing else it is great practice that will improve skills. The amount of work required to get a job in the software industry is often far…

I don't see any indication in this article that she's in the software or STEM industry. Glancing over the rest of her articles don't give this indication at all, nor does her feeling that she's lacking knowledge of "markets, technologies and trends". If she were a software engineer, I'd have all sorts of advice on how to develop the skills to re-enter the job market.

from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31632463

> I have degrees in Computer Science (BSc), and Neuroscience (MSc) with two years of being a researcher at the University at the Machine learning + Neuroscience department (hybrid). [...]

but take a look at the whole comment. I'm not sure she is looking for a SWE position.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#143
post #63
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really think it's fair to call parenthood a "personal choice". It's not a complete necessity like food and water, but it's also not a complete personal choice like getting a tattoo. The majority of humans are going to be parents. All living humans come from a long unbroken line of parents. It's more fundamental than a simple personal choice.

> The majority of humans are going to be parents. Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce. All living humans come from a long unbroken chain of natural selection and rejection of bad genes and reproduction of only the fittest to enable adaption to a changing environment. If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection and c…

> If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection

Using your own logic: if natural selection is that fragile, then it should evolve or die. We're not called to uphold it in any way; our own selfish genes inevitably predispose us not to worry about an evolutionary mechanism that does not directly affect us or our children.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of capitalism’s exploited externalities (no economic value placed on the labor of raising children)

I know. Why should anyone have kids! The ROI of children is vastly lower than most other endeavors in life. Start a company, not a family.

Who is going to push your wheelchair?

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#145
If you take a different path, you should remember that many such a choice was made and it's usually irreversible. And then you must also use the consequences of that decision to direct your "return" - strictly you can never really return "status quo ante". There's an opportunity cost you've already committed to and taken. You close a door but a window opens - but you NEVER have all the same choices ever again. This strictly happens even without having children just you don't notice the gap caused by opportunity cost as much.

And that's perfectly OK. BUT if you think it is a reversible choice, then you are the cause any trouble that results.

Instead think outside the box instead because you must.

I'm guy who's rarely taken the "safe path" of a career. For example, my father worked for the same company for 40 years; I've never worked in the same job for more than 5 years. And the range of jobs I've had covers a wide range of industries despite always being technical.

I've had to do the above "contextual reset" over and over again. It's both a pain in the ass and a joy at the same time. The latter mostly because it means everything must be "new" again; the former because you are forced out of your comfort zone as your prior job defined it.

Each time I changed jobs, the change was big enough that I destroyed my chanceso to ever "follow the original career continuity path".

I could never "recover" status quo ante by simply going back to any one of those jobs expecting nothing had changed nor expecting I should be caught up with anyone else who didn't take a diversion. You can't go back. But you can find a new direction with new strengths and weaknesses that never would have been possible if you'd never left. It's time to get creative.

Honestly it's a WONDERFUL opportunity that this kind of career diversion creates. You need to reset your context in planning next moves. But you've made an irreversible decisions. Having children is one of those. Doing what I have done is much the same.

BTW I learned early in my career that resumes/CVs are low effort and low effectiveness.

I stopped using them as my primary job search tool except to "seal the deal with HR bureaucracy" after I'm already "hired" back in my 20s (I turn 60 this year). I NEVER "lead" a job search with a resume; I lead with network building and one-on-one campaigns to find the job I WANT at the company I'VE DECIDED TO WORK AT.

My current employer was CHOSEN to be an M&A target for my most recent startup. The person to "closed" our acquisition is someone I networked with 15 years before.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#146
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but you've got to learn to let things go. I'm temporarily single parenting with a full time job and it doesn't have to be that hard. Like kiddo usually eats microwaved meat & vegetables plus a pasta/rice that I cook twice a week. Is that worse than a cooked from scratch meal? Everyone will say yes, but he's getting the macronutrients and vitamins he needs so what difference does it make? Kind of applies to every…

How many kids? She has twins. A long time ago, when I had only one child I made a joke to one of my coworkers that had twins. It was something like that child care was O(N), so she had the double of problems. Now I have two small children (and a big one), and now I'm convinced that it's at least O(N^2). [In my case O(5) not O(9), because the old one is old enough.]

It's not really about the amount of work needed to parent. It's more about letting go until the amount of work matches your capacity plus some time for other things.

For the people in my life that sound similar to the OP they do the reverse. They add parenting work until their capacity is full. If you gave them and extra 3 hours in the day they'd still be just as busy.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#147
post #20
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parenthood is by far the most subsidized personal choice in the universe. Let's not pretend it's not. Some countries give more than a year paid parental leave, in what can only be described as vote purchasing. Parenthood is compensated.

It's hardly personal, society kinda collapse if people stop having kids. And it's also not personal in the sense that the government often takes an active role in raising and educating kids (wether you like it or not).

I do like it.

I just wish parents stop acting as victims of their own choices, and that they should bare no consequences.

And people won't stop having kids, subsidies or no subsidies. So that's a non-issue.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#148
post #54

> So far, I got rejected from over twenty job opportunities. That's nothing. I've been continuously employed for over 20 years. I just got a job a few weeks ago after two months of unemployment. I kept a record of every application and in the end there were more than 130 of them. I ended up with several offers and got a great job but I had far more than 20 rejections for every offer I received and I consider that a v…

In my other reply I mentioned I never lead job searches with resumes.

It was exactly this kind of situation combined with how I actually got my job that led to this.

In that situation, I'd sent out >100 resumes and got back 100 rejections. I still keep them all because I never wanted to forget the fundamental Epic Fail of looking for work that way.

The thing that crystalized the lesson:

1. I ended up "networking" into a job interview - 15 minutes after I got an offer to start immediately

2. The company I ended up working for (Intel) sent a rejection letter also - to my original resume application - 6 weeks after I'd started working there!!

I then got my next job use the same networking technique to get time in front of the hiring manager, and similarly I had a job within 15-30 minutes of interviewing.

This contrasted with having spent time on resumes, postage (pre-Web) and actively corralling status from each company.

Basically it's question of statistics: which will work more efficiently:

1. A random lottery-odds resume campaign where the resume has nearly no differentiating information to distinguish you from anyone else where the judge of that process doesn't have a STEM degree and is likely overworked and marginally paid above minimum wage

2. A 6-degrees of separation path (no more than 6 hops in a social network) via carefully selected people who likely have STEM training who each have an investment if they pass you through yet have far more knowledge about your qualification because they've talked to you as part of the network building.

The math is pretty damn obvious and trivial. Lottery odds with a faceless bureaucracy or pretty good odds if you are half good with a small set of people who can judge your worth on your merits.

I've used the latter for 40 years and its never failed. Any failures of mismatched jobs were 100% on me (biotech is a weird duck compared to computers or semiconductors).

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#149
post #64
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely not! We live in Germany which has good options compared to other countries and it is still not enough. My wife earns 5000€+ in her job. Guess what, you can earn a maximum of 1800€ during parental leave. It gets even better, now that she takes a few hours less because somebody needs to take care of our child, kid number 2 will even be compensated with less (1400€). How is this fair? This is without th…

Harrison Bergeron would approve, and I can only begin to imagine how this would be abused by vindictive spouses or exes to sabotage men's careers.

Harrison Bergeron distopia is a different topic in my opinion.

I agree with you that it might be impossible to enforce such a law without having the downsides you mentioned. However I would very much like being able to take 6 months of parental leave without being called lazy. This goes both ways.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#150
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of capitalism’s exploited externalities (no economic value placed on the labor of raising children)

Yet society pours HUGE amounts of money on it, because obviously it has huge value and the government pays boatloads for it. Do you really mean "no value"?

there's no living wage (or any wage) provided for it. sorry for imprecise words in my OP but I think you understand anyway
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