[ryanbrunner]

For paid leave, you have a point - most European companies don't expect employers to foot the bill for a year of paid leave. For unpaid leave, however, this really is the norm outside of the U.S. Large and small companies manage just fine to "hold a spot" for anyone on maternity leave - either you bake it into your hiring plans, or you hire someone temporarily for the length of the paternity leave.

[tptacek]

This doesn't make sense. A single engineer might represent as much as 10% of a 50-person company's engineering capacity (many of Basecamp's employees are customer support staff). Forget about the cost of a year's compensation for them: if a small company loses an engineer for a year, they have to fill the gap. What do they do about that? Besides discriminating against anyone who might potentially claim family leave, I mean.