heenap, Author at Quardev

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Paternal Leave: Why You Should Take It, If Offered (and Push For It, If Not)

Traditionally, parental leave was seen as a “mother’s issue”, but that is not the case anymore. Paternal leave is becoming increasingly common, and it’s a good thing for everyone. Here are some reasons why new parents should take advantage of paternity leave. Additionally, while this article focuses primarily on fathers in heterosexual relationships, it’s paramount to acknowledge that there are many types of families, and they would all benefit from having more family leave.

Better relationships with spouse and children

Paternal leave can have powerful and positive effects on families. Paternal leave allows fathers a bigger part of their children's lives from the very beginning. Studies have shown that dads having a more active role in parenting leads to better behavioral, social, and psychological outcomes for children. Paternity leave has also been shown to strengthen romantic partnerships, and even correlates with lower divorce rates. When both parents are able to take time off, they learn together how to navigate the new responsibilities of parenthood, together. This builds trust and understanding and sets up a strong foundation for their relationship as partners and co-parents.

Improved gender equality in the workplace

It’s well-known that women, on average, earn less than men and that this wage gap is especially large for women of color. A contributing factor is that women are disproportionately driven out of the workforce due to the caregiving expected from them. This also contributes to hiring bias. Employers may subconsciously choose a man over a woman expecting that the man will have fewer responsibilities at home. Normalizing paternal leave helps to level the playing field at work. Additionally, research shows that with every additional month of parental leave taken by the father, the mother’s earnings increase by about 7%. And mothers whose spouses take paternal leave tend to return to work more quickly.

Help fight the stigma that caregiving is a woman's responsibility

The idea that keeping house is a woman’s responsibility is obviously problematic and outdated. Caregiving is valuable and rewarding for people of all genders. In fact, qualities that are often strengthened during caregiving like empathy and patience are also qualities of great leaders at work. Studies have shown that dads who take paternity leave continue to have a greater role in housework and childcare long after they return to work. This not only contributes to better equality and satisfaction at home but leads to them being more well-rounded individuals.

Better work-life balance

Half of fathers say that they have missed out on important milestones and events in their children’s life because of work conflicts. Dads who take paternity leave often report better job satisfaction. Better job satisfaction allows them to be more productive at work and home. They also frequently report the time they spend at home is very fulfilling. While on leave, they don’t have to worry about missing out on important parenting moments. Paternity leave gives them the time they need to establish routines and get used to parenting. This makes it less overwhelming once they go back to work.

What prevents fathers from taking it?

Now that we’ve talked about the benefits of paternal leave, it’s important to talk about why not everyone takes it. Some of the main reasons are economic pressures and stigma.

Economic Factors

In the United States, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows up to 12 weeks of job-protected (but unpaid) leave for specific family and medical reasons. Of course, with no source of income, it can be a challenge for parents to take much time off. Some parents even report fear of losing their jobs due to taking too much time off. That is why Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) is crucial. Many people are working to expand paid family leave. This would allow both mothers and fathers to take time off to raise their families without penalty. Celebrities like Chance the Rapper, Anne Hathaway, and John Legend are even joining the fight.

Social Stigma

The old-fashioned idea that men are supposed to be the sole breadwinners of the family may is outdated. However, it still leads many men to feel as though they shouldn’t take time off for family. What’s more, just 26% of managers encourage men to take leave. But choosing to take paternal leave, even if it is not already encouraged, is a huge step fathers can take in breaking the stigma. 73% of fathers believe there is little support for fathers in the workplace, and 72% of men said they would have taken longer parental leave if they had seen their co-workers do so.

Being brave enough to push for paternal leave at companies where it’s not already offered will help employers understand that it’s something employees value. This would be a huge step toward changing the culture. Plus, companies that offer paternal leave generally have happier and more productive employees. This shows that it is beneficial to the companies as well.

Taking paternal leave improves dads’ relationships with their children and spouse, leads to a better work-life balance, enables better gender quality at home and in the workplaces, and even benefits companies by creating happier and more productive employees. However, it is not universally accessible and there is still a stigma surrounding it. If paternity leave is offered at your company, you should take it. If it’s not, we greatly encourage you to push for it.

Cybersecurity Awareness Training | The Why and How

With data and company processes moving more and more online, cybersecurity is extremely important for your company. Additionally, the actions of every employee influence a company’s overall security. Thus, it’s important to make sure your system is secure from the bottom up. Even though an individual’s mistake could result in a data breach, employees shouldn’t be blamed. It’s each company’s job to adequately train its employees in cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity Training

First, it’s important that employee training is a priority for the company. You could have the best training practices in the world, but if the manpower and time aren’t allotted, you’re not going to get good results. A company’s cybersecurity is only as strong as its weakest link, and often, that’s an untrained employee. Second, as a part of onboarding and routine training, you should highlight cybersecurity as a priority. These days, cybersecurity is almost as important as the job an employee is tasked with. It should be thought of as a necessary part of training.

Teach Password Security

So with that out of the way, what does a company really need to teach its employees? First, it’s crucial to teach good password security habits and best practices. It helps to use longer and more complex passwords. But ultimately, it’s best to use a service such as LastPass or 1Password. Such services auto generate individual, incredibly complex passwords for each of your accounts. These are then locked behind one long and complex password you can remember. This ensures that your accounts are very difficult to attack via brute-force. And if they do get hacked, each account will be separately secured.

Increase Awareness of Social Engineering Attacks

Next, it’s important to train employees to understand and notice social engineering attacks. If all of your employee’s passwords are secure, the only way for a potential attacker to compromise your system would be to phish or get those passwords from the employees themselves. Spoofed emails, URLs, and websites are becoming more common and are used to perform man-in-the-middle attacks. Your employees could think they’re merely signing into a work account but could really be sending their passwords directly to bad actors. Infosec recommends these 5 simple steps to combat phishing and social engineering attacks:

Confirm sender email or phone number
Make sure the email format is professional
Make a phone call to the sender before fulfilling a strange request (just to make sure nothing is fishy)
Hover over links to verify their authenticity
Don’t click on attachments from unverified sources

Provide Opportunities for Practice

Finally, to make sure your training is working and to give your employees real experience, it’s recommended to perform live, simulated attacks. There are many vendors that will perform such attacks for you or you could perform them in-house. Drills like this will help your company learn progressively how to deal with social engineering attacks. These could be crucial in reinforcing your training.

Cybersecurity, overall, is one of the most important aspects of employee training right now. With frequent news stories coming out about data breaches, your company’s cybersecurity is also an aspect of your public relations. A large-scale data breach could tarnish your company’s record and lose future clients or customers. To combat these malicious attacks, you must train your employees better and with a focus on cybersecurity awareness.

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) – Cryptocurrency’s shifting ecosystem

A blockchain, simply, is a decentralized, public ledger of transactions. This technology can be used for cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and many other applications currently swirling around the web. However, one ongoing problem in blockchain technology is how to deal with security. Currently, many of the most popular cryptocurrencies use the technique Proof of Work (PoW). To validate any transaction, several third-party computers, “nodes,” in the system have to solve a cryptographic puzzle then verify the transaction as legitimate. This way, nodes must be at least somewhat powerful to ensure an individual doesn’t create thousands and thousands of virtual systems to verify false transactions, these nodes are then rewarded for their effort with small amounts of generated cryptocurrency.

There are serious problems with this technique, however. Because such a system incentivizes individuals to sink more and more power into verifying these transactions, significant pollution and waste can be produced. According to an article by Investopedia, “By the latest estimates, the bitcoin network uses as much energy in one year as the country of Argentina … accounts for about 35.95 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year—about the same amount as New Zealand.” These insane figures show both the size of the cryptocurrency industry, but also how surprisingly damaging it is.

There’s also another source of waste produced by the blockchain, Ewaste. As crypto “mining” becomes more and more popular, more specialized hardware is being produced to increase efficiency. However, due to their specificity, it’s almost impossible to repurpose these circuits which then, after obsoletion, simply become waste. Additionally, because in the PoW protocol verification power is directly related to computational power, a potential attacker would only need 51% of the network’s computational power to verify a false transaction.

One potential and increasingly popular solution is the Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism. Instead of relying on cryptographic puzzles and computational power, PoS distributes mining and verification by the usage of total coins a miner holds. This way the high computational power and electrical requirements plummet because the system doesn’t inherently require them. Additionally, as an attacker would need to acquire 51% of total coins in the system in order to create a fraudulent block, these assaults would be practically impossible. Even if an individual or group was able to obtain 51% of the total coins in a network, it would no longer be in their interest to perform such an attack.

This greener and more secure solution is slowly being adopted by new cryptocurrencies. In an NBC article published in May, Polygon, Tezos, Polkadot, and EOS are all cited as coins that have implemented PoS mechanisms. Additionally, Etherium 2.0, a supposed successor to the wildly popular Etherium, will use PoS. The main problem, though, is that it’s immensely difficult for an established PoW cryptocurrency to transition to PoS. And as Bitcoin is by far the most popular cryptocurrency right now, it may take a while for the crypto community to transition to a more sustainable future.

Please Note: The information discussed in this article is relatively new and encapsulated within a continuously evolving field. Some information may be outdated by the time of reading and some new information or ideas may be unmentioned. Look out for follow-up articles and updates from us regarding this subject in the near future!

[Infographic] What matters most to employees in 2021

PNSQC on the horizons!

Our Quardev team is looking forward to this year’s Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) taking place in Portland October 14th, 2019. If you haven’t had a chance to attend, this is one you won’t want to miss! PNSQC provides a unique opportunity to learn from and network with industry experts in the field of software Quality. If you are keen on keeping up to date with the latest in the Quality Assurance (QA) world across various industries this is the place to be.

QA has been our team’s first love since we opened our doors here at Quardev in 2000. At the time, we were focused on Software testing right here in our technology lab. We have branched out since then to being a resource in all areas of IT, in a managed service, staffing, or direct hire capacity. Still, QA still holds a large place in our heart.

This love for being a part of QA community is the reason we have participated as speaker, exhibitor, attendee, and sponsor at PNSQC since 2004. We enjoy the intimate feeling of this conference that brings in attendees and presenters from all over the world.

Read on here to check out the speakers who would be presenting at the conference. We look forward to being a part of it this year and for the next 35.

Visit the PNSQC website to register online for the details.

Organizing Your Job Search

Raise your hand if you’ve been having trouble getting recruiters to respond to you?

Oftentimes, getting their attention begins with something as simple as keeping your search organized. Otherwise, you may find yourself reaching out to the same companies, multiple times, without even realizing it. Not to mention, forgetting to follow up on your applications, or even applying to the exact same jobs repeatedly. Big no-no’s in the eyes of recruiting teams and hiring managers.

Keeping your search organized with the help of our easy-to-use Excel template lets you keep track of the positions you’ve applied to, greatly increasing your chances of landing your next job – and future jobs to come!

But don’t stop there! It’s also important to make sure you are tracking when you’ve applied and when you will want to follow up on your applications, requesting status updates or inquiring about next steps in the process. Once actively interviewing with a team, keeping track of interviewers’ feedback and anticipated hiring timelines are known to help smooth the transition into your new role.

Be ready for your next search by keeping your template handy to help you remember which positions you were declined from, as well as the reasons, like a skills mismatch, or perhaps the position closed or was filled.

The template is completely free to use, and you can download it from here. We’ve included a few How-To Tips below to help you get started.

How To Use the Spreadsheet:

Company: In this column, fill in the name of the company you’re applying to.
Position: Here, fill in the specific position you are applying to (be sure to include a Job ID, if available).
Contact Name: This should be your contact at the company, or the recruiter you are working with for the role. Common company contacts include: Director of Human Resources or the Office Manager. This could also be the person you addressed your cover letter to.
Contact Email: Include your contact’s email (or telephone number) if applicable. This is important for your follow-up efforts.
Date Applied: This is the date you sent in your application. If you haven’t heard back within a few weeks, don’t wait – see #6 for good follow-up practices.
Application Follow-Up Date: Include the date you submitted (or will submit) any follow up materials such as a thank you letter or email. We suggest following up on your application within 2 weeks of your application date, and to continue following up for 3 months unless the company gives you an outright no.
Applied VIA: In this column, record the application method you used. Some common examples of these application types include an in-person referral, an application through a recruiter, a LinkedIn connection, direct-apply on a company’s website, or using Job Boards. Be sure to record which one as the same job is often posted to multiple Job Boards by multiple agencies as well as the company itself.
Interview Date: This is the date your interview is scheduled for, or if you’ve already interviewed, the day it was on. (Success Tip: Remember to send a Thank You email within 24-hours of your interview.)
Application Status: Update this column with the current status of your application (such as if you were accepted, rejected, or asked in for a second interview).
Notes: This is a place for you to record any relevant information about the company, position, application, etc.

Feel free to reach out with any questions, we’d love to hear from you! Email works best. recruiting@quardev.com. For more information and new job opportunities, click here.

Happy job searching!

Author: heenap