Someone I know hired a woman that was already pregnant and almost lost his business (non-IT). Invested time/money into training her+she couldn't legally do ~80% of her work anymore. Had to keep her employed+she didn't have to tell him she was pregnant (also illegal to ask that when hireing which I think is extra lol). One extra person on payroll will break many small companies.
It's basically only this case that upsets me because I think it's pretty unethical to get the job in the first place without telling the employer.

It's a black swan type of event but I'd still rather not take the risk. For IT it's much less of a risk because the work can usually be carried out regardless. That being said I'm pretty sure the typical startup-stress and/or deadline-deathmarches aren't exactly great for the mother-to-be.

if anyone is good at prolog and wants to give me some help with work, will happily pay some $$ (itll be very simple for those who can at least write recursive predicates). really struggling with it all

That video was so good.

If you're in this situation, hiring strangers is not recommended regardless of gender. The idea that gender is a meaningful indicator of risk in this sense is quite absurd.

First of all, asking questions is not illegal at least in the United States, but may be considered as evidence that you used illegal criteria as basis for hiring. But so can your 2p2 post.

Also, federal non-discrimination laws don't apply to small employers.

Are you based in Europe?

Yes, Europe. You can't ask any questions about privacy related matters (are you pregnant, are you married etc)* and can't discriminate in any way. Those laws are the most idiotic stuff ever. I'm a strong believer in "if it's my business let me run it my way" and am a strong proponent of hire and fire alas...that's absolutely not how it works here. I mean there's far worse stuff than pregnancy (which by and large isn't a huge risk and hopefully a positive anyways i.e. if I can afford it I'd be very happy if my employees got kids) the bigger issue is "slackers". Work a couple of days...sick...rinse, repeat. The honest employees are the ones that get ****ed must by this.

*but there have to be some ways around this because iirc you can do drug-screens and you can also dig up the criminal history of someone.

Margins aren't always as great as they are in software. It makes perfect sense to hire someone else if you can assume they'll work decently well in many areas of business. Obviously it would be better to have more profits first.

It really is spot on. I was not expecting it to be nearly that good.

Wouldn't most girls who are taking a position at a startup not be interested in having kids at the time they look to be hired?

I just can't imagine some 22 year old girl taking an important role at some startup and then a few months later deciding she wants to have a kid. She's probably way more interested in her career and the odds of her getting accidentally knocked up are pretty slim.

Yeah it's pretty much a non-issue for programming jobs imo since the benefits (profit from potential systemic discrimination against women by hiring women) far outweight the potential downside. For those jobs I'd probably rather hire a woman c.p.
For (top) management jobs I'd much rather hire from the pool of women because I think discrimination is a way bigger issue there and you can pick up great reciprocality-value.

But for jobs that involve lifting stuff, standing for long times, health issues (chemicals, human contact etc.) it's a bigger problem and incidentally the c.p. clause is far more likely to apply in these fields as well.

Clown, your response (Edit: I was talking about your first response a number of hours ago) basically ignores the points I said, seems to admit its a unlikely risk, and then basically says "But it happened to this guy I know!".

We had to fire the first person we hired at our start-up. Yes it was expensive, but it would be silly to draw some big generic conclusion against 50% of the population because of that.


This is also bull****. You're taking a very self-centered view in that you want to do everything in your power to increase your businesses success regardless of if it unfairly hurts a large group of people (aka women that have no intention of getting pregnant anytime soon). But you have a problem with someone doing everything in their power to increase their personal success regardless of if it hurts their employer's success unfairly.

Not sure why you think you should have it both ways.

Just for perspective...firing someone in the US is a lot easier than over here for the most part.

As someone running a business I think it should be my right to decide how I spend my money. It seems downright absurd to me that laws force someone to employ someone else for a year+ especially if they can't really work any more and knew they couldn't when they took the job.
Sure it's on the employer to do some screening and some of the fault is always on him but I'd much rather have a system where you don't have to invest resources into screening and can just hire someone, see how they are doing and fire them if they suck and give the job to someone else.

Yes it happened to someone I know but it's a way bigger problem that is totally unrelated to gender over here. There are down right fraudulent employees in pretty much every company I know that game the system to the max and actually tell you with a straight face. Usually some other employee that "plays by the rules" gets fired instead or does the work for them.

I dunno I'm just very upset at our labour laws, sorry for the derail :P

Edit: I don't think I'm unfairly hurting anyone. I don't unfairly hurt anyone by telling them to stay off my lawn either.

Where do you draw the line? Should you have the right to ask what sports a person enjoys to see how likely it is they get hurt? How much they drink? How rich their family is to see if they could quit at a moments notice? Their personal medical history?

And so on. Saying its rude for someone to not disclose a pregnancy or intention to get pregnant is absurd. Especially since the majority of the time that someone is not visibly pregnant is the same time they're not telling most other people in their lives.

The reason your beliefs seem sexist, is because of the different standards you seem to have towards perspective employees.

Yea, you've deserved the hate on your ****ed up opinion on it.

+1

I disagree with this, but its a reasonable opinion. The problem is that the same logic should then apply to the employee. You shouldn't think its rude to not tell an employer about a pregnancy since every other perspective employee won't list out all of their traits/habits/missing skills that might hurt the business.

Edit: And the appropriate analogy is one where you forbid only a portion of the population from coming on to your lawn based off of some minor risk while ignoring many other risks from the people you do let on your lawn.

Yes I believe I should be allowed to ask whatever I want. And untruthful answers should be a reason for termination. Drinking is a fairly decent example. It makes very little sense to me that you can order someone to take a drug test but not ask them about their drinking habits.
FWIW I would probably decline any job where I was asked questions that I deem irrelevant for the task at hand (I'd tell them that I decline to answer the question and think it's not relevant and if it's important to them they shouldn't hire me). But that doesn't mean they should be facing a potential lawsuit just for asking the question.

No you can't, not in the UK at least. Drug testing needs to be "limited to testing employees that need to be tested", "ensure the tests are random" and "not single out particular employees for testing unless this is justified by the nature of their jobs". A far sight away from "ordering someone to a drug test". Secondly, that doesn't sound like a respectful place to work where I'm being demanded to have drug tests.

Asking if they are pregnant or plan to be pregnant is also incredibly invasive and can be degrading/humiliating. I'm glad we're trying to build a society where invasion of privacy and the potential for degreadation is minimised.

Also, it's probably not as bad as you make out. Here in the UK:

- You only get maternity leave if you are employed (not a contractor as far as I understand it)
- First 6 weeks you pay 90% their salary. Let's say they are on an excellent salary of £52k per year, that's £900 * 6 = £5,400
- Next 33 weeks you pay no more than £136.78 per week (https://www.gov.uk/maternity-pay-leave/pay), a grand total of just over £4,500 worst case scenario
- Assuming £52k salary, maternity leave is going to cost your business ~£10k

£10k spread over 52 weeks shouldn't break a business, if it does they you have massive cash flow issues and you should not be employing anyone, you should be contracting them. If someone decides to get pregnant to get a £10k payment spread over 52 weeks, then they are absolute idiots and you should of worked that out before hiring them.

A human beings right to have a child and the rights of potential employees to be interviewed respectfuly in a non invasive and non degrading manner is far greater than the rights of any business.

And now we get into the politics territory so I'll just leave it at strongly disagreeing with that.

Edit: To clown.

If someone asked me this question and I was a woman I probably wouldn't take the job either. But I also wouldn't apply for a job that I know I couldn't do ~3 month after being hired.
I guess this is where we disagree. I value the rights of the business owner as highly as the rights of the potential employee and you'd prefer to grant some special rights to potential employees at the cost of the business owner.
Let me be clear though. I don't think asking these questions is required or even smart in most instances and like I said I would react pretty drastically to them if I was the potential employee because I value privacy a lot (and am actively working for better privacy politically). But that doesn't mean that a business owner should be denied from asking these questions, his loss if he comes off like a total prick.
I'm also very much against insurance companies being forced to charge the same premiums for women/men or smokers/nonsmokers etc. (which is the case now in Germany)

But that's pretty much the last thing I'll say on the topic because...

Yeah let's just drop the entire topic and get to more interesting stuff. I can agree with that
[and yes I'll bite my tongue and not respond to any follow up responses]

Pong took about an afternoon. It's not perfect yet (start/end screens missing) but it's a working two player game (with sound). Hardest part was actually setting up the virtualenv and configuring PyDev (which ties in nicely with my earlier question about "a devs frist day at work").

Football all day tomorrow, I think I'll improve it a bit and add an interesting twist I thought of today then maybe upload it to github or go straight to a game that has potential for more interesting AI...or back to the adventure game

yes, but just imagine how long it would have taken if you had some preggers woman working with you, pestering you with questions about "baby due dates" and "a few days off to give birth".... consider yourself lucky :P

For those cases I do my programming with noise cancelling headphones + http://www.rainymood.com/ or similar sites
:P

So this gets all possible combinations from a list...can someone tell me what the last 4 lines do/how it actually works.

i dont understand how it makes [1,2]. from the code. . i understand how it gets [1,2,3], but why does it lose the 3 on the second time

Lol PC white knights

It helps if you think about the code as "describing what the result looks like"
Let's call this A
Basically says:
- The initial list and the result both have the same first element
- Compare the rest (call this predicate on the rest)

Let's call this B
Basically says:
- The initial list and the result don't have the same first element
- Compare the rest (call this predicate on the rest)

Or tl;dr version: either keep the first element or remove it, continue with the rest of the list. Run through all possible combinations of those. In the end it matches the first one because both lists will be empty eventually (because you always move on to the rest and [1,2,3] is the same as [1,2,3|[]]).

So to get [1,3] it would run like this:
[1,2,3]: A -> the 1 is "kept"
[2,3]: B -> the 2 is "removed"
[3]: A -> the 3 is "kept"

Summary:
To get [1,2,3]: A,A,A
To get [1,2]: A,A,B
To get [1,3]: A,B,A
To get [1]: A,B,B
To get [2,3]: B,A,A
To get [2]: B,A,B
To get [3]: B,B,A
To get []: B,B,B

As you can see that's all possible combos of matching A/B. Hope that helps. Keep in mind that predicates with the same name and number of arguments are treated as a logical or.

Also: the first line should not have a capital g.