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Restarting my career after motherhood

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Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#231

Post by thrwy_meta »

mmcnl wrote: post #177
pavel_lishin wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is at always the mothers who choose to be stay-at-home mothers, and very rarely fathers Because on average, fathers tend to make more than mothers. That's not the only calculation, but it's a big one.

Why don't the father and mother both work less? I.e. 4 days (32 hours) instead of 5 days (40 hours). As long as this is not common practice, combined with expensive or inaccessible daycare, women will always face more difficulties in their career. There's no biological justification for this, instead it's entirely the result of cultural conventions and political decisions. I think we should recognize this, because if…

>>>There's no biological justification for this

Do you have children? I'm father to a 16-month old. The first few months especially, our daughter would not go to sleep unless my wife held her. No amount of compassion on my part could overcome the ingrained link a newborn has with its mother.

You are basically arguing that new mothers can have their babies ripped from their arms while they get shackled to their cubicle, and that this will have no negative impacts on the child's development......all in the pursuit of "equality"? This strikes me as....misguided.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#232

Post by susan100 »

maxk42 wrote: 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…

How many interviews did you have? I've been taking a break from work for the past few months but will need to start looking again soon.

A few years ago a friend of mine did over 100 *interviews* before finding a job. She presented a talk about her experience https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzz5AaCWMps and blogged about it as well https://medium.com/codebuddies/my-adventures-in-job-searchin...

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#233

Post by [deleted] »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #185
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…

I’ve been doing this stuff for over 30 years and I don’t think technology has appreciably changed in 30 years, it’s just refinements of the same old stuff over and over again with slightly different focuses depending on what has recently improved. The paradigm shifts are usually just caused by some bottleneck in the architecture getting a significant improvement allowing stuff that everyone knew could be possible to…

[deleted]

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#234

Post by el_jay »

knorker wrote: post #213
el_jay wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose if we followed OP’s logic to its conclusion, we’d find that when it comes to parenthood: you must be this net worthy to ride.

Not at all. Poor people successfully raise kids every day. And I want schools to get more of my tax money, if for no other reason than that I want to be in a world of smarter people. (And there are other reasons, that are more important) But it is a life choice. Other ones are to become an artist. But barely anyone says that anyone who chooses to be an artist (bad or not) deserves for "someone else" to foot the bill…

To do the work of fulfilling our most fundamental evolutionary urge, and perpetuate the future of humanity is a “lifestyle choice” isomorphic to “choosing to be an artist” or “collecting fancy cars”?

You may feel that having kids is an optional luxury; the evidence suggests this is not a majority perspective.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#235

Post by skrbjc »

knorker wrote: post #207
razemio wrote: 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…

You're saying it's "absolutely not" compensated, and then you enumerating just some of the ways it's compensated? I'm confused. I didn't say it was fully compensated. Of course it's not. But why should you have children, and expect "someone else" to pay for everything? Nothing else in life works like that. But yes, I've heard of the German child benefits, and tax rules for married couples, that are not optimal for an…

If I live in a country with public health care, and I choose to become morbidly obese, smoke cigarettes, excessively drink alcohol, develop diabetes, get limbs amputated, and go on disability because I can’t work, I’m expecting the government to foot the bill to keep me alive.

There are many choices people make that they expect others to pay for.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#236

Post by dchftcs »

remram wrote: post #74
mritchie712 wrote: post #10

your response to rejection tells me you'll be perfectly fine. Any company would be lucky to have you. The first thing we list in our "requirements" for hiring is "grit" and you clearly have an abundance.

Putting grit in your job requirements is a huge red flag. Putting it as the top is really concerning. Working for a company shouldn't require grit. > grit, n: firmness of mind or spirit, unyielding courage in the face of hardship or danger What hardship or danger are employees subjected to, in your company? If this an excuse to blame burnout on employees' lack of fortitude? What systems are missing from your organiza…

Grit is required for many roles in competitive businesses. Commonly, it stands for never giving up.

Hardship could include not being able complete a project due to reasons in or out of your control, but grit makes you not give up. Many sales jobs are like this. Many engineering and science jobs are like this.

Otherwise, grit could be doing a tough thankless job day after day without quitting. Such as cleaning up sewage. People without grit could quit even if they get paid a 500k to do that job.

You seem to have the idea that all jobs should be cushy and predictable. But some jobs are harder than others, and you personally benefit from people doing these hard jobs.

A good company would compensate employees for taking calculated risks and don't demand excessive exposure to danger or other bad conditions

The main question, then, would be whether the people doing those jobs are properly compensated for it. Personally I don't think that's generally the case, because companies tend to pay too much to white collar workers like you who demand everything to be easy and say simply asking for "grit" is a red flag. Soldiers must be exposed to danger, and grit is a requirement for being a good soldier, and personally I think they're not treated well enough.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#237

Post by jseban »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #216
jseban wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Men aren’t the limiting resource here Yeah that's the point, so there really is no need for every man to have children, should it be the norm I'm wondering. Can we get rid of this natural selection, and should we? I don't know. Why is it so self-evident that every person should have children? Clearly it's not natural. It's just another artificial "equality" of a social welfare state.

If monogamy is valuable, and I think it is, then most men should be parents as well. I can’t imagine a world with a few guys fathering most of the kids, that seems like it would cause lots of problems.

You can still be monogamous if some women have more children, not every woman needs to have 2 children to achieve that average. A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.

The whole idea that child bearing should be perfectly and equally distributed across the whole population is a construct of the social welfare state, enabled by subsidies, and is just an artificial form of equality like any other. As such I think it should be examined and debated like everything else, and not taken for granted as self-evident or "natural".

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#238

Post by jseban »

FastEatSlow wrote: post #203
lotsofpulp wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Painful for who? Maybe asset owners and the few deciles below them who live a decent life due to globally cheap labor. For the young and poor who only have their labor to sell, the situation would seem pretty decent.

Old people need a pension, which is paid by the workers through taxes.

People can just have higher salaries and save for themselves for their pension, just like any other expense they have in life.

There is no practical need for this to be centrally managed, other than you can't trust people to be responsible and plan for the future.

People already manage a big part of the pension savings by themselves.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#239

Post by spoonjim »

lapcat wrote: post #103
spoonjim wrote: post #57

If you take N years off from a career, you should expect ahead of time to become a less compelling candidate to hire for highly skilled work. 1) your skills are assumed rustier and 2) you have fewer years left in your career so you have less room for promotion to executive levels (big companies need to be thinking about hiring their CEO 20 years from now). If you don’t want this to happen to your career, 1) get bette…

> 2) don’t take N years off from your career. I don't think the author is looking for life advice from you. "Being a stay-at-home mum was my choice." She doesn't appear to be kicking herself for becoming a mother. Whether she "expected" this or not, whether it was a "surprise", is not particularly relevant. That's not the issue, it's a red herring. She made her choice, willingly, and now she's looking to restart her…

Sure, treat having children as the norm, I have kids, I love it. But I expect to be leapfrogged in my career by people who passed on a family and chose the career grinding lifestyle, and that's in fact what happened. But I'm not going to make a surprised Pikachu face about it.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#240

Post by brigandish »

jseban wrote: post #168
random-human wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> How does women entering the work force (from your previous post) equal less freedom? Less freedom for whom? Certainly not women. Less freedom for those who happen to like traditional gender roles, now they are forced to work more and adapt to more "modern" gender roles. Otherwise they will lose out massively because the single earner has so much lower salary now. Less freedom because an almost doubled amount of tot…

> Less freedom for those who happen to like traditional gender roles, now they are forced to work more and adapt to more "modern" gender roles. Otherwise they will lose out massively because the single earner has so much lower salary now

That's an equivocation. There is the freedom that comes from choice (what is not disallowed) and there is the freedom that comes from available choices. For example, homosexuals being able to marry is not the same kind of freedom as if I had a million dollars I'd be able to do what I want.

Those who prefer traditional gender roles can still have them, they just need to compete to afford it, as they did before, or to cut their cloth.

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