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  • Hey tech lead here and welcome back to coffee time with their hose.

  • The ex Google tack lied, and I thought that this would be a relevant topic because number one we've been discussing women recently on my channel.

  • And also recently there was this memo that has gone viral within Google about a pregnant woman, and then she felt discrimination, retaliation, not getting enough support, and her performance ready began to drop.

  • And then she thought like, Well, she's just not going to be able to go back.

  • But this does not really come as a surprise to me intact.

  • If you've been working in tech for a while, this sort of thing happens a lot where women and sometimes men as well there would be going full speed ahead with their career.

  • And then they will hit a wall and drop off.

  • This happened over at Facebook as well last year, where there was another woman, Eliza Kunar, who was a data scientist, and she says her that she has started that Facebook.

  • She was five months pregnant, raising two boys, so she's gonna have three kids, and she knew that it would be very difficult for her to continue working there, and eventually she also just dropped out of the whole workforce.

  • Not every time news like this makes the rounds.

  • People get all surprised, but it's actually how it this is the way it's done.

  • In fact, if you take a look at what Sheryl Sandberg, who is a women's rights activist, over our Facebook, if we take a look at what she says, this is exactly the plan.

  • Everyone who's been through this and I'm here to tell you once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back because it's hard to leave that kid at home before you leave.

  • Stay in.

  • Keep your foot on the gas pedal until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child and then make your decisions.

  • Don't make decisions too far in advance, so there's not many good solutions, right?

  • The only solution at this point is the dash, your career as fast forward as you can and see if you can get into a row that gives you enough power flexibility or if that role is just too good that you can't leave it behind, and then you end up having to choose between your career or your family.

  • Or maybe simply you'll be up to our turn, your spouse and then force your spouse to be the one who's going to be staying at home.

  • Whether that be a stay at home, Mom was their home then.

  • But if you're not able to break that barrier that threshold, then yeah, you're going to hit a wall.

  • You'll be going full force into it like a tree.

  • And so that's what we're seeing happened to allow these people so over at the state of working parents in tech.

  • And this applies to women, I meant, is that you'll be hitting a wall at full force.

  • And there's not many people who are planning other ways around this now.

  • Generally, Furman, they may have just been more socially conditioned to understand that maybe they won't be the one seen their Children all the time for women.

  • If you plan to work, then you just need to understand that the rules may need to be reversed.

  • Here.

  • You're going to be the one who is not going to see your Children so much.

  • But the general idea is that you cannot have it all all the time.

  • You've said there's no such thing as work life balance.

  • Why?

  • Why is there no work?

  • Life balance?

  • You can have it all.

  • I feel like I do, but you can't have it all at the same time.

  • That's right.

  • We're connected all the time.

  • We expect our workers, our colleagues, at work to always be available.

  • Work has changed and made it more intense, and parenting has changed and become more intense.

  • And maybe you could do trade offs, right?

  • You can watch your kids.

  • Sometimes you can do your career sometimes.

  • I don't know if that's optimal toe.

  • Now, if you've ever played a role playing game, then you'll know that one of the most optimal formations is when you have, like a warrior and a priest.

  • The warrior is out fighting people, and the priest is healing, and together they make a great team.

  • Sometimes, though, you'll be in the game lobby where nobody wants to play the priest and everybody wants to play the warrior.

  • It's always so difficult to get people toe play the support to play the healing classes, and usually people would just say we're not going to start the game At that point, somebody has to play the priest because that is just not going to be a winning combination holding a gun with you, John.

  • You make fast that in terms of optimization and efficiency and maybe most optimal to think of yourself as half of a team.

  • Not, of course, some people can do a class and you can also switch roles back and forth.

  • But usually do.

  • A classing like that may not be as powerful as if you had just like one warrior who is just really strong.

  • And you think about that.

  • You can take a look at some hard working guys out there like a very vain you attract.

  • He is totally obsessed about his work, and he doesn't spend too much time with his family.

  • So for somebody like that who is very successful, if you're gonna be a billionaire, you need to realize that most people don't do anything besides work every single day of their twenties and thirties.

  • All of them, it's the price you have to pay if you want it at the level that I wanted at and by the way.

  • I advise nobody toe wanted at that level.

  • Then he's going to need a partner who is more focused on family, right and together they make a grand team.

  • But for a workaholic like him, if you were to marry, also another workaholic and both people are essentially warriors here, then you don't have enough people taking care of the family.

  • And then at that point, you need to think about what?

  • What are your values in life, right?

  • Do you value financial success?

  • Do you choose career over family?

  • And you know, some people do right.

  • Some people don't value family much.

  • Some people value drugs, and you can value whatever you really want to go for here.

  • But for many people, I would say that they value family over anything else.

  • Right over career, over a financial success, you need to deploy serious, serious self awareness and figure out who you are.

  • So what is the best team combination for a family?

  • Well, I think that depends on the type of spouse you're looking for.

  • For example, let's say there's a guy who is highly attracted to very powerful, financially successful, career oriented women.

  • Then, naturally, the guy.

  • And if he values family, he's going to want to be more of a nurturing role, right?

  • If he, too, is very highly powered and successful and focused on business and he's a workaholic, that combination is just not going to be that great for family.

  • You're going to want a baby sitter or grandparents to be around to help out with that, and that's okay, right?

  • You just need to be prepared for that, like, and a better analogy here.

  • Maybe to imagine working in tech as being like an astronaut, right?

  • Should both working parents be astronauts and then the Children are left behind?

  • Because working in tech is kind of like that.

  • You need massive amounts of time.

  • You don't have much time to spend that home, and you're essentially gone most of the day.

  • And there's not many good solutions here.

  • You pick one person either the man or the woman to beat the astronaut, and you have the other person be the family person at home, and both roads are to be highly respected here.

  • Either that were, you know, you can have people alternate and search off or something like that, but that could come at the cost of becoming the greatest astronaut on the planet or the universe.

  • And you can see by the way, show Sandberg phrases it.

  • This is hard.

  • I feel guilty.

  • Sometimes I know women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce, that don't feel that sometimes.

  • So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone.

  • You need to make some choice and choosing family over career.

  • Maybe the choice for many people, in fact.

  • But the idea is that if you choose career over family, then there should not be discrimination, which is absolutely true.

  • You know, having a world in which the gender roles are reversed, maybe have a stay at home father, and then the mother is working.

  • That should be entirely acceptable now.

  • Unfortunately, in the tech industry, there's not that many good solutions.

  • I think the best we've got here is like three or four months parental leave, which is not enough by any means, like having raised the kid myself.

  • I've seen how much work it is.

  • It's a ton of work.

  • It's like a second full time job.

  • So I think you need to understand that it may be best in your interest to kind of budget for that and allocate in your mind that you're going to have to pick up a second full time job.

  • The other thing is that four months is just not enough is like by that time, the kid is still very small and still needs a whole ton of support from their parents.

  • Many kids will be nursing until the age of two, and many doctors will recommend that you don't pump your milk.

  • If you don't have to write, just give it directly.

  • That's going to be the best and the most natural way.

  • So one consideration is part time work.

  • We're just funny, like I went to the dentist the other day and my dentist was pregnant.

  • And still she's able to come in half the week and then just realized at that point that being the dentist is a great career for people who are family oriented because they're able to set flexible schedules and just come in every other day, right, they can have that flexibility in tech.

  • There's no part time work, Generally speaking, right, you're either on the project or you're out.

  • You know, there's also the idea of remote work, which, unfortunately ironically, in tech, many companies do not offer that faint cos Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix.

  • They don't offer remote work while remote work and help with some flexibility.

  • The biggest constraint here is time a child just requires massive amounts of time and remote work won't buy you that.

  • It just means you'll be working at home with a screaming baby.

  • You won't be able to concentrate so much if we take a look at some other countries, like Japan or European countries.

  • I know that some of them will offer, like up to a year in leave paid.

  • Actually, you know, I think the problem is that people really need, like, 2 to 3 years of leave.

  • Ideally, in my mind that would be sufficient.

  • Which is why it's interesting to me that if you're highly successful and you're highly family oriented, then you're going to want to come up with some sort of plan where one that the parents will be staying home at all times and you need to pick the proper spouse or partner for this right?

  • If you pick somebody who is highly ambitious and career or into it and who does not want to stay at home, then you need to find someone else where you need to change yourself or just come up with a prepared plan for that.

  • It's funny that if you take a look of some countries like Japan, many of the women, they're they're fine with the idea of being staying home mothers.

  • And when you go walk around the streets on week days, you just see women all over the place shopping with their kids, and then the men go off and work.

  • And that's actually one way to go about it, right?

  • Not saying this right.

  • It could be completely backwards.

  • And then another solution.

  • Where Jeff Thing would be absolutely great is a return to work plan where someone can say they're going to go on maternity or paternity leave, leave for as much as 2 to 3 years, and then if there is some guaranteed way to be able to come back and pick up where you left off, that would allow people to go off, do what they need to do, manage their family, take care of that and then come back when their kids are sufficiently raised overall.

  • The point of this video, though, is that I think it would be great for both women and men to be working happily in tech.

  • Some of the best engineers I've worked with have been women, and I think that the gender ratios you know, there's just not 50 50 women and men.

  • It would be great to see that happen.

  • What's going to be tough, especially for women who may have been socially conditioned to dream about when they bean?

  • They're raising their own Children, hanging out with them, teaching them to read doing the activities with them that maybe an expectation set by society that the current tech industry is not able to fulfill.

  • So that go.

  • For me, it's a topic that I wanted to raise a little bit more awareness about.

  • I will be linking to both of the women's memos who worked at Google and Facebook, who had to just suddenly quit at the height of their careers.

  • If you like the video, give the video like and subscribe, really appreciate that, and I'll see you next time.

Hey tech lead here and welcome back to coffee time with their hose.

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