Absolutely. If they quit, of course you go through the long candidate search process and hire a replacement.

If they get sick, many companies are on a timer. Specialist work backs up, projects get delayed, extensions are filed, and so on. If a sickness was expected to last a month or a year, I would expect non-trivial problems to arise.

If you absolutely need one for the business to function you need more than one person knowing how to do the job. Maybe not as good as the first guy but beeing so dependant on one person can put a company out of business.

I thought that was basic knowledge espcially in tech.

This is simply not a norm in American business. Most companies have numerous team members that have no redundancy or fail-over. For instance: a mid-sized startup hires its first GC --- it is certainly not a norm for that company to hire two lawyers in case one needs to take leave, and also not the case that the rest of the team can simply pick up the slack.

Outsource it to a contractor / lawyers office or whatever you did before?

As in my other response, you have months to prepare a solution.

I'm not getting involved with the broader debate, I'm just saying that the idea that you're meant to have redundancy for all your staff is not a norm.

A company that needs a GC as an employee is no longer a startup

In tech, you do not commonly hire people in pairs. If you need a DBA you hire one. If he quits or dies you hire another one. If he leaves for a year, what do you do?

>he quits or dies you hire another one.

And in the weeks/months until you found one ?

It's not like babies appear over night, you have months to prepare.

As has been quite clearly stated elsewhere, hiring a dba who wants a gig for 6-12 months rather than an indefinite gig is either much harder or much more expensive than hiring a dba on the indefinite plan. Same reason consultants get paid a lot more; the person you hire knows they're going to be job searching shortly.

There's often specialist work than can be delayed or performed more slowly by other team members. I'm not sure how that's relevant.

At some point (less than 52 weeks) if a $CxO gets sick, then you start investing in an alternative solution.

I'm all for parental leave, but the parent account poses a great question - how do you financially account for it? Vacation leave is easy - you allocate days and everyone gets them.

Even with governments paying for parental leave up to the cap, and often with Canadian companies in the talent war offering to "top-up" to X% (e.g. 80% of normal pay), it means that on average Canadian companies may not be as financially competitive compared to international companies operating in labour markets that do not need to offer as much parental leave (e.g. USA).

It's a choice that Canadians (and other countries) have made based on the value Canada places on work-life balance that are simply different from other countries around the world that don't have similar policies. There's definitely a trade-off (societal value vs. economic firm competitiveness).