Someone else pointed out that they wouldn’t be able to survive off of 85% pay without finding gig/temp work. And I’ll admit, I’m in a fortunate enough position now that I didn’t put much thought into that 15% being detrimental. We’ll surely blow through most of our savings and that’ll hurt, but we’ll be alright.

With my first son I was working 2 jobs when he was born and we were already well behind on a lot of bills so the thought of leave didn’t ever begin to cross my mind. It does make me even more appreciative of the position we’re in now.

We are in a very fortunate situation. We’re not well off by any means but have saved pretty well. We paid off the car last year and started putting that extra money we were paying into a seperate account which turned into our backup account to bridge that 15% gap.

I’m also pretty close with the guy who owns the corner store around the block and can usually pickup a few night shifts a week there when I need to since it’s in a rough neighborhood and they haven’t been able to find a steady nightshift clerk for 5 years.

We’re very lucky that aspect.

That’s some assumption, I never said I agreed with them or was looking to take their advice or gain their approval. I said all of the things people are saying in here, I offended a few people who thought I was calling them bad dads which I never directly said, but that’s their short line to draw to their own conclusion.

I more so was looking for input on the concept of paternity leave from people outside my small work circle because I thought the overwhelming hate on it was wild and for a minute felt like I was some new age radical who had just discovered the concept of taking care of your family. I knew I wasn’t, but I don’t hear much about it where I’m at so I figured I’d ask the general community.

My wife’s a gig worker and does mostly weekends in summer so I usually get all of that time to be a parent on my own, and while I miss my wife a lot, I love being the sole parent. My son and I have such a different flow than him and my wife and it’s so interesting to see.

That first summer with our oldest was rough, he was only a few months old, I was working 2 jobs just so we could scrape by so he didn’t really know me yet, he screamed and screamed but eventually we got in a good groove and I found a spot on his back that if I rubbed put him right to sleep. That spot still works 3 years later

That’s what I thought. It really felt like I was in the twilight zone going through those conversations.

Oh I had never thought to not take my leave (or care for my teeth) because of what the people around me were saying. The only person whose opinion matters about this is my wife.

I’m just absolutely dumbfounded why people would be so against something that is just plain good for them and their family? I know that’s naive, I just can’t comprehend it.

Probably any other country where I could get a doctor to take a look at my heart condition without having to take out a loan against my house to pay for it.

That honestly wouldn’t suprise me at all, although I was almost never in the office so I didn’t know most of the people there outside of my small circle and a few higher ups. I do remember asking a friend who was in the office more if this person was legit and she said she’d never seen her but has gotten a lot of emails from her about “not working”.

To contrast my last company, they gave me a laptop that was absolute shit and would give me the blue screen on death a few times a day. I asked for a better one and they said no so I asked if I could just use my person laptop and they said sure. Then I started getting messages and calls constantly from someone I didn’t know asking why I wasn’t working (according to the tracking software on my company toaster).

They then wanted to install their software on my personal laptop, it told them they could try. Watching this lady try to open an exe file on my Debian system for an hour was classic. I tried explaining it to her from the beginning but to her I was a lazy ungrateful kid who was taking advantage of the company. She called IT in to help her who I was good friends with and he told here was already tracking software on there and opened up the syslog file and pointed out the timestamps. So I had to send her a file with timestamps at the end of each day, which I just wrote a script to generate instead of sending her my actual syslog.

In the end they made me go back to the shitty windows laptop and I kept getting calls about not working during the periods the laptop was crashing and taking 30 minutes to reboot. I also started getting calls from my boss about why projects weren’t being finished.

Sorry for the long reply, I can never be quick when I talk about that place. I still get skeeved out.

Software dev for a shipping logistics company. I make $80k with 100% paid decent enough health insurance for me and my family.

I could get paid a lot more, but this week I took a 4 hour lunch to go to the park and play soccer with my kid. I let my boss and coworker know and they both just said to have fun and say hi to the family for them. I do something like that at least 2 times and week and it’s not a problem.

Last week I went to the aquarium on a whim and my coworker decided that sounded fun and brought his kid too. You would have to pay me a lot more money than I’m worth to give up this kind of freedom.

I absolutely hate that I have a gas stove and water heater mainly for reason 2. It fills me with pure anxiety.

I know there’s a relatively small chance, but whenever we’re turning the corner and I see the house is still there it’s a huge relief. In the next year or two we should be able to put out the money to put in outlets and get rid of gas.

I do almost everything in my house but the 2 things I won’t touch are electric and gas.