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Restarting my career after motherhood

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Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#151

Post by FunnyBadger »

aperson_hello wrote: post #90
russellendicott wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, agree here. Even with a stream of continuous employment, nobody gets a job by submitting CV's to websites. You have to have a network. Best advice I would give to anyone taking a break from work is to stay in touch with your old coworkers-take them out to lunch occasionally, stop by the office and bring cookies, etc.

It's possible. I've done it twice. But it takes hundreds of applications for every "yes"

Absolutely true!

Just like in programming, I'd rather write a hack program to replace that monotony. That hack program is networking. :-)

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#152

Post by gus_massa »

fraoulitsa wrote: post #92
gus_massa wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your CV available? (Or a short version. Do you have a High School degree? An University degree? Which area? Some work experience before the children?) My regular advice in life is to read whatever patio11 wrote about your problem. I'm not sure what applies. Do we have a @patio11 signal? Perhaps * https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317…

Thanks for the links + advice, I will be following them to read everything refering there. Interesting to see many aspects of the same issue. I have degrees in Computer Science (BSc), and Neuroscience (MSc) with two years of being a researcher at the University at the Machine learning + Neuroscience department (hybrid). In parallel to my studies, I also started my own company for luxury wedding & events planning. My…

Some ideas:

* Add a small Bio section to your blog, and perhaps an explanation of the work you are looking for in the article. LinkedIn?

* Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring and post in the correct thread if it's still open.

* If you are looking for a technical job, write some technical articles. (Don't expect to make money from them. Only some fun if you are lucky some karma.)

* Also a few small contribution to Open Source may help to learn the current tools.

* I'm not sure if something like https://www.kaggle.com/ helps to get hired, but you may get an update in the tools and also have a few recent technical anecdotes.

* There is people that work as social media manager. I'm not sure if that what you are looking for, and perhaps something tha mix some SWE will get a better pay.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#153

Post by paulcole »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #110
paulcole wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re not disagreeing that it’s compensated? What decision(s) can a non-parent make to get 1 year of compensation like parents get?

The point appears to be that a year of compensation is pitiful even if one considers the 18y effort part time. Having young kids I think it's more like full time parenting, on top of any regular day job. Unless you can find a spouse willing to do all the kid work, which is like non-stop 12-16h days until all are in school. Heaven forbid your SO wants to homeschool and expects you to do at least 40% of parenting, with…

Right, but that wasn’t the point being made. Regardless of the ROI, choosing to be a parent is something that’s compensated.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#154

Post by mschuster91 »

epx wrote: post #128

Never understood this employer fixation on unbroken careers. A career break may happen to anyone by infinite reasons beyond motherhood. Most people have such career-pausing or career-delaying events (health issues, depression, fatherhood , taking care of an elderly relative), most conceal it, motherhood just happens not to be concealable. And things don't change as fast. Not even in IT. And even if changed, legacy is…

> What people should understand, is that the economy turns because there are mothers, fathers, and kids.

The problem is that capitalism by nature cannot and will not account for this, at least not for publicly traded companies. Capitalism always ends up optimizing for the maximum amount of profit allowed by the law - and simple maths explain what is going on. When you have 10.000 employees, a turnover rate of 5% annually and a person that has been out of a continuous career for a year needs a month more time to get up to speed (to simplify, I assume they operate at 50% of the productivity during that time) than someone who is freshly hired from somewhere else, that is 500 person-months or (assuming 50k/year) ~1 million $ a year. Obviously the larger the company and the larger the salaries, the bigger the cost savings. And I didn't include the loss of productivity in the people who on-board the new hires either.

This is why employment and anti-discrimination laws and regulations matter: they level the playing field for everyone.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#155

Post by ir123 »

jseban wrote: post #77
ushakov wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

equality ends where it hurts the capital let me give you an example good equality: have more women enter workforce so the pool of candidates is bigger and the salaries (expenses) decrease bad equality: pay for parental leave of both parents

Yeah, I'm constantly surprised that nobody every says this. With women entering the work force, now the family as a whole needs to work almost twice as much, as before when women were house wives. That's a pretty hefty price to pay for everyone, to save those women who were unlucky to have a cruel or unfair husband. I don't know if it's possible to say if it's "worth it" or not, but this independence sure does not co…

why can't a new law be passed to reduce from 40 hour week to 20 hour week now that women are in workforce?

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#156

Post by JaimeThompson »

knorker wrote: post #14
spyremeown wrote: post #9

I strongly disagree with "I remained flat" statement. I mean, you were taking care of your children, weren't you? If you do it right (imho, if you even just try to do it right), it's the biggest accomplishment one can do. I understand how frustrating it must be to stay professionally flat compared to your peers. We absolutely should celebrate people taking their time off to literally raise the next humans, instead we…

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.

>Parenthood is by far the most subsidized personal choice in the universe.

The amount spent on keeping shipping lanes protected, the world "stable", and older people having access to medical care are, in the US, subsidized more I believe.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#157

Post by ir123 »

jseban wrote: post #140
gus_massa wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some women like working. In particular, my wife like working and having her personal projects. I like to spends part of my time with my children. So we both work and we both take care of the children. We are lucky to have jobs that allow this.

Sure it's going to work out for some people, but I still think the obvious downside of increased working hours in total is very significant and almost never mentioned. If you raise the working day from 8 to 12 hours, just because you find some guy who likes it, maybe doesn't mean it should be accepted as a perfect idea with no downside.

its almost as if there should be better labour laws

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#158

Post by random-human »

jseban wrote: post #123
magicalist wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With women entering the work force What year is it again? > That's a pretty hefty price to pay for everyone, to save those women who were unlucky to have a cruel or unfair husband. Uh, I don't think that's the trade off here. > I don't know if it's possible to say if it's "worth it" or not, but this independence sure does not come for free. When one option is to go full Taliban, it's actually pretty easy to say if…

[flagged]

> It's just more communism and less freedom.

How does women entering the work force (from your previous post) equal less freedom? Less freedom for whom? Certainly not women. Since you equate more communism with less freedom, I will assume you agree that money provides freedom, if women can only work as unpaid housewives, they have no freedom. It has nothing to do with their husband, cruel, unfair, or otherwise. This may be surprising, but not all women want kids or marriage, or may want them but also find great joy in working accomplishments - many just did not have those options in any safe stable way until recently. (historicity speaking)

That's not less freedom, it's more, for both women and men (not as much stigma or pressure for not being the 'provider' when they may not want to be) - it does lessen some power and control males have historicity had over society and others. And that can be threatening for those who enjoy limiting others freedoms and controlling them.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#159

Post by paulryanrogers »

paulcole wrote: post #153
paulryanrogers wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point appears to be that a year of compensation is pitiful even if one considers the 18y effort part time. Having young kids I think it's more like full time parenting, on top of any regular day job. Unless you can find a spouse willing to do all the kid work, which is like non-stop 12-16h days until all are in school. Heaven forbid your SO wants to homeschool and expects you to do at least 40% of parenting, with…

Right, but that wasn’t the point being made. Regardless of the ROI, choosing to be a parent is something that’s compensated.

Said another way, the compensation is pitiful.

And one gives up so much time and energy being a parent, unless you're wealthy enough to outsource large chunks of the work. (Daycare in the US is 10-25K per year.)

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#160

Post by zen_1 »

razemio wrote: post #149
zen_1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah the Harrison Bergeron example is definitely hyperbole
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