Microsoft Expands Its Parental Leave, Bolsters Paid Time Off And 401k Matching

This is so extremely weird for me. I'm currently on parental leave in Canada, for the next 17 weeks, paid. You get 50 weeks of leave here to split between mom & dad. It seems so ridiculous these articles saying that it'll be hard for the company to deal with the loss of the employee for that long. Hire someone for a 1 year term... done. There's really no excuse when so many other countries have been doing it for so long.

This matches the 401k match that Google has had for some time now.<p>I would <i>love</i> to see this become a standard benefit in the tech industry. Given that many tech workers are young, and young tech workers usually have high salaries for their age (relative to other professions), 401k money is very, very valuable.

Really interesting to compare this with another (current) front page article, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10012312" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10012312</a><p>As someone who is employed by a company of &lt;10 and had to take 1 of 2 weeks vacation for the my kid&#x27;s birth, I wish I had this kind of benefit, but then if I did, I&#x27;d have to deal with all of the negative parts of working for a big company. It&#x27;s a trade-off, and here in the hinterlands where there isn&#x27;t VC funding to be had for every app idea or billions behind the company already, we end up with what we can. I&#x27;m happier in my small company 8-5 with almost no extra time than I would be working for a big company 7-7 with regular demands for time put in outside of the office.

Good move, but I fear this will lead to inequality being further entrenched into the workforce. It appears as if the very skilled workers like the ones at Microsoft, Netflix etc are going to have great lives, and the lesser workers (who may not have such great jobs) will have shittier lives.<p>That&#x27;s why the state stepping in is important, this needs to be the norm at a federal level. Otherwise we&#x27;ll have the rich spend more time with their kids and raising healthier&#x2F;smarter children, and the poor raising a class of slaves (low child IQ is connected to less parental involvement in early years) to serve the rich. That&#x27;s not the American dream.

Wow, and I was excited about 4 weeks of paternity leave at my company. Which I&#x27;m still excited about by the way, Microsoft just seems like they are going above and beyond.<p>I know some places let people take longer off, and Netflix essentially lets you take a year off. This amount of leave is insane to me. Even a month seems like so much I won&#x27;t know how to use it. I mean after 2 weeks I was ready to go back to work, but the option to go work 2-4 days a week and then spend the rest of the time at home would be awesome.<p>Last place I had to take vacation and my wife does not get Maternity leave at all.... That on the other hand is terrible.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sweden.se&#x2F;quickfact&#x2F;parental-leave&#x2F;#shortfact-parental-leave" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sweden.se&#x2F;quickfact&#x2F;parental-leave&#x2F;#shortfact-parent...</a>

Here&#x27;s the source:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-employee-experience-at-microsoft-aligning-benefits-to-our-culture&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-employee-exp...</a>

I&#x27;ve always viewed benefits like this as a way for the company to incentivize and&#x2F;or reward certain behavior from employees. Offering a 401(k) match is a way to encourage employees to save for retirement.<p>By that logic, offering parental benefits is a way to encourage people to have babies. That&#x27;s always seemed a bit weird to me because it seems inappropriate for a company to be involved in something so personal. It seems reasonable for the government to say, &quot;we want more people to have kids for the greater good&quot; but it seems strange for companies to take it upon themselves to do that.<p>I&#x27;m not saying new parents shouldn&#x27;t be able to take time off, but it seems like people who choose not to have kids should receive similar benefits. Maybe companies should offer sabbaticals to everyone, and if some people choose to use that to take time off after having kids, then that&#x27;s fine. But if someone isn&#x27;t interested in having kids and instead wants to spend three months pursuing a hobby, that seems equally valid to me.<p>Thoughts?

Between this and Netflix, I&#x27;m excited to see how quickly others in the industry respond to match.

I&#x27;m not sure why people find the 401k changes confusing, here is how it works:<p>The employee defers up to 18K (IRS limit), MSFT matches 50% of it, which is up to 9K.<p>Previously they contributed 50% of the first 6% the employee deferred = a maximum of 3% of the salary. So for anyone who makes less than 300K (9K &#x2F; 0.03), this means a higher match from MSFT.

This is a really good move on Microsoft&#x27;s part &amp; affects about 60,000 people - so not an insignificant number.<p>What is sad and pathetic is that in the US people are actually shocked by how good this is!! Everyone is programmed to go into &quot;Oh but this will be a huge burden on the company&quot; mode.<p>What about the fact that currently the US has some of the shittiest laws on the books when it comes to Time-off for new parents?<p>What about the burden on society when New Moms are forced into their workplace way too soon because of the crappy support from the govt.? So companies do not have to bear this burden but the new moms &amp; babies can bear the hardship easily?<p>Free enterprise does not mean a license to shirk some of the most basic responsibilities. We should be pushing our elected peeps to take stornger action on this

You have to be careful about this. At a previous employer I got a bunch of comp time for my new kid, but when I got back I had these sort of sucker tasks for me to do and I felt this odd kind of resentment towards me from some. So I started looking for a different job cause I felt no matter what I did I could never go back to how it had been. I was pretty depressed about it, it was really subtle, and I think some of my coworkers must have felt I went off the deep end there.

Do you think its fair for someone who is childless to ask in response to this about a leave program for people like me who don&#x27;t have kids?

I wonder if Facebook will step up their 401k matching to meet or exceed this, particularly for their Seattle employees. I would ask the same for Amazon, but I seriously doubt anything will move their benefits needle much.

Benefits are all well and good, I&#x27;d just prefer the large tech employers work to employ more people rather than provide more to those that already have jobs. When these people are out on mat leave are they to be replaced by perma-temps on zero-hour contracts?<p>There is also something to be said for pay over benefits. Pay is of equal value to all employees. Benefits like leave and 401ks are only valuable to some and can, if dominant over pay, lead to employers having undue influence over the lives of employees.