Paternity leave and on-call

It all started with this tweet.

Which you need to read (Medium.com). Some pull-quotes of interest:

My manager probably didn't realize that "How was your vacation" was the worst thing to ask me after I came back from paternity leave.

Patriarchy would have us believe that parenting is primarily the concern of the mother. Therefore paternity leave is a few extra days off for dad to chillax with his family and help mom out.

Beyond a recovery time from pregnancy, much of parental leave is learning to be a parent and adjusting to your new family and bonding with the baby. I can and did bond with the baby, but not as much as my female coworkers bonded with their babies.

I should also state, that I don't just want equality, I want a long time to bond with my child. Three months or more sounds nice. Not only can I learn to soothe him when he's upset, put him to sleep without worrying about being paged, but I can be around when he does the amazing things babies do in their first year: learning to sit, crawl, eat, stand and even walk.

At my current employer, I was shocked to learn that new dads get two weeks off.

Two.

At my previous startup, paternal leave was under the jurisdiction of the 'unlimited vacation' policy. Well...

Vacations are important. My friends would joke that the one way to actually be able to take vacations was to keep having children. Here the conflation was in jest, and also a caricature of the reality of vacations at startups.

We had a bit of a baby-boom while I was there. Dads were glared at if they showed up less than two weeks in and told to go home. After that, most of them worked part-time for a few weeks and slowly worked up to full time.

This article caused me to tweet...

The idea here is that IT managers who work for a company like mine with a really small amount of parental leave do have a bit of power to give Dad more time with the new kid: take them off of the call rota for a while. A better corporate policy is ideal, but it's a kind of local fix that just might help. Dad doesn't have to live to the pager and new-kid.

Interesting idea, but not a great one.

Which is a critique of the disaster-resilience of 3-person teams. I was on one, and we had to coordinate Summer Vacation Season to ensure we had two-person coverage for most of it, and if 1-person was unavoidable, keep it to a couple days at best. None of us had kids while I was there (the other two had teenagers, and I wasn't about to start), so we didn't get to live through a paternity-leave sized hole in coverage.

Which is the kind of team I'm on right now, and why I thought of the idea. We have enough people that a person sized hole, even a Sr. Engineer sized hole, can be filled for several to many weeks in the rotation.

That's the ideal route though, and touches on a very human point: if you're in a company where you always check mail or can expect pages off-hours, it doesn't matter if you're not in the official call-rotation. That's a company culture problem independent of the on-call rotation.

My idea can work, but it takes the right culture to pull off. Extended leave would be much better, and is the kind of thing we should be advocating for.

You should still read the article.