At a typical large company, the ingress point into the company is at an entry-level position. Many women want to interrupt employment when they have children, which isn't practical for a IT person or programmer at a bank or government agency.
My mother, to use a fairly typical example, is a nurse. She took 5-6 years off at various times when my siblings were born or when daycare costs became prohibitive. Impact on her career? Not too bad -- hospitals need nurses, especially nurses with the specialist certifications she had.
If you are hiring based on candidates winning resume buzzword bingo, you are going to get crappy candidates anyway. Hire for intelligence and capability and five years off to have a couple of kids is meaningless.
It would hurt me atleast. If I knew I would face a such situation I will rather take up some other profession.
My boss is a woman who was my peer in school and has children now. She is one of the best techies I have ever worked with and I love having her aboard.
The problem with such systems is that it is difficult to assess someone's ability to perform a job objectively. So the systems are design around measurable facts (ie. years of experience, education), biased towards promoting from withing, with the final selection being made by rolling the dice using tools like job interviews that are at best randomizers.
Humans aren't "resources" -- they are people. But we try to treat them like commodity goods, and in the process create some crappy situations for many people.
I would love it if things worked this way. But I told someone I could get coding in C# in a week, and probably be quite comfortable in a few months, and they sent me a polite rejection letter saying they were "impressed with my confidence" but there were many highly qualified candidates, etc. But then, that's probably the only advertised tech job I pursued that I didn't land an offer for.
I think paid sabbaticals have positive ROI too. Number crunchers don't think in those terms though.
It's a pity that when I read your good comments and the one above it, both had been downvoted into the grey. Many newcomers here at HN don't seem to understand that downvoting here is not meant to indicate that one doesn't like an opinion, it's supposed to be for comments that are abusive, obviously trolling, or that contribute nothing.
I propose an improvement to the downvoting API: One can downvote all they want, but each downvote will cost 1 karma/reputation point. That way, people with much good reputation can as needed mark abusive posts. But the newcomers will think more carefully about marking down posts they simply don't agree with since it can plunge them into negative.
Most of the places I've seen that advertise telecommuting are really only paying lip service to the idea that where you develop software simply doesn't matter all that much. You see places that say you can work from home one day a week, and call that "remote work." There are some companies that acknowledge this fact, and are structured for true remote work, but software engineers as a class are far more tied to location than doctors are.
So the issue is not with the profession per se - that leaves the employers. And there, you have a point for large swaths of the industry. But it seems the world of web/backend development is a bit more flexible there, no?
There is, however, stronger certification around medicine: once you have a medical license, it's pretty hard to lose it - especially through inactivity.
