Obviously those are extreme case. Companies are dealing with it all the time now, and it's pretty normal. They make it work.

But there's no real argument that it leads to some really awkward situations sometimes.

People here in Germany are on parental leave all the time. I was on parental leave two months as CTO. My cofounder was away almost a year as CRO. You just do what’s obvious: share responsibility, temporarily hire people and/or restructure and make it work. Is it annoying? Sure. Would I want it any other way? Hell, no.

I think it makes all the difference if kids are seen as a common investment into the future economy or as a personal luxury.

2 months is nothing. The later example is abit closer. In some of my examples above, we're talking nearly 3 years. That's a whole different level.

This is obviously true for startups and small restaurants, especially ones without gobs of VC funding.

Is the solution just to exclude companies that cannot get by without doing this? In other words, make sure certain kinds of startups and small businesses are not possible?

If you own in part the business, then imho you take as much or little parental leave as you want/can afford.

But you still hire a new accountant, and in this case, with parental leave, hiring someone to do the leaver's job leads to problems because unlike the dead accountant, they come back! This is the issue, that normally you fulfill a specialist role with another hire.

But this is true for literally everyone in the company, including the owner. It's a rare business that couldn't change ownership and still thrive under the right circumstances. In fact, there's a whole day of the week that has a nickname because people do this so often ("M&A Monday")

Your "someone with equivalent skills" condition is equivalent to the "under the right circumstances" condition.

So, I'm not sure I see how this is a response to:

> If the company is utterly reliant on a single person, that person is either an equity owner, or should be, and the owner is taking advantage of them.

* The Employment Insurance office pays for it. Yes, the person is going to be on leave, but you're not sitting there paying their salary. Hire a contractor while they're gone?

* If they're irreplaceable, yes you're SOL, but they get to make their own choices just as you did about basing your business's viability on one person that planned and had a kid.

Idealized US is "freedom, liberty, and pursuit of happiness."

Idealized Canada is "peace, order, and good government." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace,_order,_and_good_governm...)

I'm neither Canadian nor American, but I have been a permanent resident of Canada, and now live in US. The day-to-day differences are relatively minor in comparable geographic regions, but mainstream American and Canadian politics and political philosophy is fairly different.

It's not really saying anything to me that would make me think that the people in Canada on average value the collective over the individual in terms of how they personally behave and more importantly how they tell others to behave.

A phrase we often hear a lot is 'It's a free country'. Sometimes we say it as a justification that 'this is my preference / choice and regardless of what you think I do believe I have some justification in making it' and sometimes others use it to come to our defense to tell someone to back off and just let us be. That's individualism.

In contrast I've had thousands of conversations with Japanese people where they use the opposite kind of justification 'because I'm Japanese I must behave this way because this is how Japanese people behave' or someone instructing you to act/not act in a certain way because your behavior is expected to (roughly) line up with cultural norms and there is constant and heavy emphasis on this.

I can appreciate Canadian politics being different to that of the US. Indeed NZ and Australian politics differ both from each other and from that of Canada and the US. But I think we would all sooner blurt out 'it's a free country' than admonish ourselves for not behaving how everyone else behaves. That is to say there are some core philosophies that are held by all of us and then there are a bunch that differ.

Australians often like to claim New Zealanders have sexual relations with sheep when they engage in good old fashioned country bashing. I would hazard a guess that stunningly few New Zealanders have ever fucked a sheep, though I would assume a handful have and what's more I'd assume the same to be true of Australia too. But it's clearly not like the claim has any sort of merit as it applies to the general population.

I don't have deep experience with Canada, so I would be interested to be pointed in the direction of anything that would indicate that collectivism was more prevalent in Canada than Individualism.

I have a hard time buying it. I'm from NZ and I've always felt we are much closer to Canada than the US. I've also lived in Australia for a couple of years. Aus and NZ are completely similar along certain dimensions and really different along other ones. But I would venture to say that they're both heavy into Individualism. As is the States and from what I have seen of Canada I assumed I would feel quite at home there.

Comparing my experience with Japan over the last 10 years, which is heavily collectivist, I just can't bring myself to the conclusion that personality wise and the types of things that come out of Canadians mouths about how one should conduct oneself in society is closer to that of the Japanese than it is to that of Americans.

If a "simple" employee is so important that the companies shuts down when they are away, then that employee should be awarded with a true stake in the company and some voting power, not just a salary. Then they can decide for themselves how to deal with such vacations. In that sense I think it is perfectly reasonable to make the kind of businesses or startups from your last paragraph impossible.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/01/pr...

>We find that the average premature death of a million-dollar-earning owner causes an 82% decline in firm profits.

Granted, this is a slightly different question regarding owner/managers.

Small companies frequently lack that - for instance, your team members might share responsibility, but are you sure areas such as payroll, legal or facilities are as generously staffed?

It's in large companies' interests to get such rules instituted across the board, as it raises the costs to enter the market for a potential disruptor.

Hacker News - where everyone forgot what an actual startup is.

VC funded "startups" with millions in the bank should really be called something else entirely. Only in the past 20 years has that become the norm. Typically a startup is a self-funded enterprise with 1 or 2 key employees for the first few years.

During those actual startup phases you likely have a bus factor of 1 or you are likely not doing anything remotely interesting enough to warrant you starting a company. Once you get your VC funding and have 50 employees and a 1 year runway? You're not a startup any longer.

During those actual startup phases you likely have a bus factor of 1 or you are likely not doing anything remotely interesting

I’m sure you can appreciate why those two statements are not reconcilable. Stop gatekeeping.

In Canada

Other countries tend to have much stronger labor protections so the end result, surprisingly, is often that you're not really doing more work especially if the company is prepared. I just went through an example myself where my relatively small team had a senior developer take parental leave for a few months and the expectation wasn't for us to pick up the slack.

I know plenty of people with kids that have to travel for work. And they make it work.

FYI, retaliation over parental leave is a thing too. I have a friend who took 2 months parental leave. When he came back he was put on call for a year straight.