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Congrats to Jessica! As a parent of a 1 year old mastercrawler, I am also so grateful to Paul taking time off earlier to spend time to watch his kids grow up an

Congrats to Jessica! As a parent of a 1 year old mastercrawler, I am also so grateful to Paul taking time off earlier to spend time to watch his kids grow up and I love his tales of them growing up. Having a family changes everything. Right now parenthood is incompatible with startups - how can we change this and make startups better for young parents as well who for now will just always try to get corporate jobs?

ben_jones 11y ago
Consider these two statements that I believe to be true. "Start-ups are these great enterprises where individuals make huge sacrifices in order to take a chance at achieving amazing things." "Great parents make huge sacrifices in the best interest of their children". The problem is that you can only make so many sacrifices in life. Maybe one day we'll live in a utopia, but not anytime soon. Sometimes you have to pick one.
- eggy 11y ago
  This is 'grown-up' truth vs. children's belief they can have everything; you sometimes have to chose. How you chose determines everything. I was very successful at what I did, but I couldn't save enough to early, or semi-retire due to family dependencies. I made the choice to take what little I did manage to save and live in East Java, Indonesia, where the savings will last me approximately one year. They would last all of 2 months maximum in NYC, or any other big Western city. The flip side is that I have been healthier than ever before. Sleeping more than 8 hours per day, exercising each day, meditating and just playing with my one-year old in a very rural setting (half or more houses have dirt floors here), with clean air. It is about choices, and sometimes the right choice is clouded by our daily routine, or personal fear to break out and try something new. I may be returning to a similar job if I don't find a way to make a minimal income to remain here, but it will always have been beneficial to my mental and physical well-being moving forward. I wish Jessica all the best, and regardless of her regrets with her family before, she is headed in a positive direction. Better late than never.
  - Retra 11y ago
    One of main reasons people work so hard is because they believe they can have everything. And all the stuff you have right now is "everything" to a great many people in human history, so it's obviously possible that you can have more.
- gbog 11y ago
  > "Great parents make huge sacrifices in the best interest of their children". I have 3 kids all below 6yo, and can't understand why people believe they have to make so many sacrifices for their kids. I go drink beers with friends every week-end, my wife and I watch movies, go hiking or camping with the kids, do normal stuff adult do. At home, with the kids, I do the stuff that I like and listen to the music I like, watch cartoons with them. I'll never force myself to listen to shitty kid music, or watch silly cartoons: I have found some cartoons that we all can enjoy (Miyasaki, Les Shadocks, Old Disneys, Pink Panther, ...) I also consider that sacrificing yourself to your kids is not only bad for you, it is bad for them too: it is a burden on their shoulder they didn't ask for. Moreover, faking it do not work, they'll know before you that you are bored by shitty kid's music or cartoons. Oh, and we play Lego together too.
  - whistlerbrk 11y ago
    Thank you for writing this. I'm about to become a new dad and this is very reassuring and I have seen exactly what you describe in my brother, ie needlessly sacrificing himself for the "sake of his kids".
  - cik2e 11y ago
    As an almost 30 year old male who is very anxious about the prospect of having to have children in the next <5 years due to my girlfriend's biological clock, I find this very reassuring. Looking back on it, my childhood was similar to what you describe and I gained a huge amount of independence from it. Granted, as a single child, it seems that being left to my own devices so often while growing up may have added to my introverted tendencies. However, having some siblings around should help my future little introverts find balance.
    - danieldk 11y ago
      As an almost 30 year old male who is very anxious about the prospect of having to have children in the next <5 years due to my girlfriend's biological clock, I find this very reassuring. I don't think your parent's post is necessarily representative. It depends a lot on the child and the circumstances. E.g., we live relatively far away from family, so we cannot just bring our daughter to her grandparents for a sleepover. Our life has definitely changed and where there used to be a lot of time to hack and tinker, it's far less now. Our daughter falls asleep easily and sleeps until 8 or 9 in the weekends, so we are still pretty lucky :). The important thing is that you also get a lot back. Having a child is a lot of fun. They are cute and do funny things. And you can do nice things together, like going to a playground or hiking a bit. I also think having a child put more balance in our lives. Work is really 8:00-17:00 (you have to pick them up ;)), but you also become more focused and efficient.
- djkrul 11y ago
  I have successfully bootstrapped a VPS / cloud hosting company with my 2 partners while my wife was pregnant of our first. We've had two more in the years after. Me and my wife both work 4 days so we can each spend a day a week with the kids (and weekends are reserved family time too). I started coding in my spare time and me and my partners only quit the day jobs when the company was pretty much self-sustaining. 7 years later we are an established and fast growing company (and if you're Dutch: We're hiring! https://www.tilaa.com/en/jobs https://www.tilaa.com/en/jobs ;). I'm not sure if things are much different in the US (I'm from the Netherlands), but I definitely think it's possible to have it both (a loving family and a flourishing business) without making big sacrifices.
dominotw 11y ago
>I am also so grateful to Paul taking time off earlier to spend time to watch his kids grow up You are grateful because he is setting an example for us to follow?
- julianpye 11y ago
  Not an example. You can have kids or not have kids. But my girlfriend's uni teacher at University College London said 'I have two kids - I call them the enemies of entrepreneurs'. It should not be like that. Being free means that you can take care of your kid whenever it needs you. Being able to setup your own company structure means you can support everyone's personal lives. In startup situations this is so much easier, since you know them personally.
  - maaku 11y ago
    > I have two kids - I call them the enemies of entrepreneurs Wow. Someone who thinks like that just shouldn't have kids.
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      Or just not be an entrepreneur, which is presumably the route the university professor took. There's nothing wrong with knowing your limits.
  - balls187 11y ago
    > It should not be like that. Being free means that you can take care of your kid whenever it needs you. The crux of the issue is that you have two things require an inordinate amount of time and attention, and both of which are very schedule unforgiving. When my infant son is hungry, he has to be fed. Similarly, when I had a very early stage startup, and an important customer demo first thing Monday AM, the work had to get done over the weekend. What happens when you have a conflict between the two priorities?
    - Swizec 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
davidw 11y ago
> how can we change this and make startups better for young parents "Fix health care" would be a good one. It's all kinds of broken in the US. I'm glad for JL though, and also quite envious. There's never enough time for everything when kids are young.
- T2_t2 11y ago
  ... or simply accept you can't do everything? {INSERT HIGH PERCENTAGE HERE}% of startups fail. What makes anyone think "fixing it for parents" is a more important goal than fixing those odds? It baffles me, when I hear these sorts of lines. If you can fix startups so parents can do them, fixing them so that current founders can work less hard, with the same or greater chance of success seems as important. When I phrase it like that, I think the problem with the question becomes self evident.
  - geofft 11y ago
    You're assuming that work is fungible, and that success is a monotonic function of amount of work. There are certain types of work that I don't have the mental energy to do when I get home from a full workday, or at least not to do well. And, honestly, if I try too hard, I risk lowering the quality of my work the next day and burning out completely at some point. And burnout is a fairly large reason that startups fail: "But I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized" (http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html). There are other types of work (e.g., practicing piano or voice, two pursuits where the amount of time spent is pretty steadily and monotonically correlated with success) that I can do just fine. It seems more than likely that, if we get it to the point where you can do a successful startup on 5 or 6 hours a day, spending an additional 5 or 6 hours per day on the startup is unlikely to make you more successful, but those same 5 or 6 hours can be productively directed towards music practice, raising children, or whatever else you want to do. (There's also a line of argument about parenthood being of intrinsic importance, above success at startups, success at music, etc., but I'll let someone else argue that point.)
    - 001sky 11y ago
bbcbasic 11y ago
> how can we change this and make startups better for young parents as well who for now will just always try to get corporate jobs The middle ground is to buy an existing business and/or invest. Yes booooooring! but lots of parents start businesses. Flipping a house is a viable alternative to starting the next uber.
- elliotec 11y ago
  The REAL middle ground could be something like a small business which doesn't require insane amounts of time to run, so that you can still raise your kids. You might not make it to a billion dollars, but boo hoo.
  - cik2e 11y ago
    I'm at a growing startup of almost 100 employees. In my 2 years there I've repeatedly heard the CEO bash our partners' "lifestyle businesses" for their lack of ambition. These are companies of 20-30 people where the founders are pulling in 300-500k a year without working much more than 40 hours a week. Ironically, if our upside game flops our company would devolve to exactly the same thing. This is a fantastic middle ground as far as I'm concerned and I'll be very happy to take a stab at this myself after I feel that I've learned all I need to know from working for the man.
    - elliotec 11y ago
      Me too. Good luck with your endeavors.
  - bbcbasic 11y ago
    Yes... that's why I flippantly mentioned flipping a house, which isn't a business as such but can be used to make money on the side where the money isn't linked to the time you spend.
st3v3r 11y ago
Honestly? Get rid of this notion that everything in a startup has to be done yesterday. Despite what people say, time is not that critical in a startup. You don't need to press everyone to live at the company. Hell, you'll probably get more done if you press your people to work more of a regular hour schedule, as they won't be exhausted and burnt out.
- contingencies 11y ago
  Get rid of this notion that everything in a startup has to be done yesterday. Totally agree. If you can't iterate, you're either in a niche like manufacturing (where your USP had better trump 2 weeks lead time, or your business plan is rotten anyway), or you're simply doing it wrong. Right now parenthood is incompatible with startups - how can we change this and make startups better for young parents as well who for now will just always try to get corporate jobs? I have a 2 year old and am a work at home dad. My wife and I share responsibilities and launching and relaunching some of our own businesses at our own pace. We find that this works a lot better than working for others. I just came back from a 1.5 hour mountain bike trip, had some homebaked sourdough (learned yesterday) and spent some time with my daughter. Now I am preparing to dig in to work for awhile. This afternoon I will take a break at 3PM to go play a new RPG, Blades in the Dark, for a few hours, in a local pub. Life is good. (Of course, we live in China and overheads aren't San Francisco or London, but that's by design. London also has no mountain biking, and the climate here is closer to high altitude LA.) Life's too short to commute. See also, article in an Australian paper on this subject this morning: http://www.smh.com.au/money/tree-change-for-families-financial-pros-and-cons-of-moving-to-a-country-town-20160331-gnusu9.html http://www.smh.com.au/money/tree-change-for-families-financi...
callmeed 11y ago
Maybe start by allowing startups to have remote staff
theoh 11y ago
It's a bit odd to assert that parenthood should change to facilitate startups. Suddenly it seems like we are in Shulamith Firestone territory, except that it's men, not women, who are objecting to the amount of work involved in raising children.
d0m 11y ago
mastercrawler, funny ;-) I'll need to remember this one for in a few years.
cliffcrosland 11y ago
Anecdotal data point: my father was an entrepreneur for 100% of my childhood. It was rare for him to miss dinner with us, and he attended easily more than 60% of our extracurricular events. He'd often work from home late after we went to sleep, sometimes sleeping next to the phone to take customer support calls 12-5am. He had freedom to spend time with family and worked sufficient hours to achieve successful outcomes for his businesses. I think this form of scheduling is effective. Another anecdote: apparently Sheryl Sandberg also eats dinner with her family every day but works from home late at night and early in the morning.
- chris11 11y ago
  Sleeping next to the phone to take customer support calls sounds really tough. I don't think I could do that for long.
  - unwind 11y ago
    It's probably not too unlike sleeping next to a baby, though. Something that wakes you up randomly and is sometimes very hard to calm back down ...
- mootothemax 11y ago
  >It was rare for him to miss dinner with us, and he attended easily more than 60% of our extracurricular events... I think this form of scheduling is effective. Thanks for posting this. As a parent of small kids, this is pretty much well what I'm doing right now, and it's lovely and reassuring to see that your father's scheduling worked out for you. Before kids, being able to define my own working hours was awesome; now with small children, it's working out really well, and "being there" is a noticeable quality-of-life thing, especially when you're not having to ask for a boss' permission to do so!
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  My father worked for a series of banks and brokers, and I never saw him - in no small part because as soon as I was old enough (6) I was shipped off to boarding school. not being an entrepreneur likewise doesn't mean that it's happy family time, all the time. Some folks want a relationship with their children, others don't.
qmr 11y ago
> Right now parenthood is incompatible with startups Be a grownup and assert that your work is at work, and work ends when you leave the office. Unless you are on call, turn off your email and work phone. Stop being conned into staying at the office for "free" dinner, ping pong, "teambuilding", or whatever bullshit is being peddled by your employer.
- danielbarla 11y ago
  I completely agree, but is this a "reasonable" approach to take in a startup world (from the startup's point of view)? Or does this make us incompatible / unfavourable with startups, as OP said?
  - edent 11y ago
    Yes. Yes it is reasonable. A startup is hiring people to perform a job in exchange for compensation. If they want you to work weekends, they can pay a fair market rate for that. Or they can hire more people. In some countries, it's extremely unusual to perform overtime. If a startup has 10 employees and they each do an hour of overtime a week - they're effectively denying another worker a job. Yes, it's a bit "mythical man month" - but if there's too much work to go around, your employer needs to hire more people.
    - cromulent 11y ago
      Perhaps you meant an hour of overtime per day.
      - edent 11y ago
        Indeed!
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - chrisan 11y ago
      > Yes. Yes it is reasonable. Reasonable, sure. But is it realistic when we have things like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11430596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11430596 ?

ben_jones 11y ago

Consider these two statements that I believe to be true. "Start-ups are these great enterprises where individuals make huge sacrifices in order to take a chance at achieving amazing things." "Great parents make huge sacrifices in the best interest of their children". The problem is that you can only make so many sacrifices in life. Maybe one day we'll live in a utopia, but not anytime soon. Sometimes you have to pick one.

eggy 11y ago
This is 'grown-up' truth vs. children's belief they can have everything; you sometimes have to chose. How you chose determines everything. I was very successful at what I did, but I couldn't save enough to early, or semi-retire due to family dependencies. I made the choice to take what little I did manage to save and live in East Java, Indonesia, where the savings will last me approximately one year. They would last all of 2 months maximum in NYC, or any other big Western city. The flip side is that I have been healthier than ever before. Sleeping more than 8 hours per day, exercising each day, meditating and just playing with my one-year old in a very rural setting (half or more houses have dirt floors here), with clean air. It is about choices, and sometimes the right choice is clouded by our daily routine, or personal fear to break out and try something new. I may be returning to a similar job if I don't find a way to make a minimal income to remain here, but it will always have been beneficial to my mental and physical well-being moving forward. I wish Jessica all the best, and regardless of her regrets with her family before, she is headed in a positive direction. Better late than never.
- Retra 11y ago
  One of main reasons people work so hard is because they believe they can have everything. And all the stuff you have right now is "everything" to a great many people in human history, so it's obviously possible that you can have more.
gbog 11y ago
> "Great parents make huge sacrifices in the best interest of their children". I have 3 kids all below 6yo, and can't understand why people believe they have to make so many sacrifices for their kids. I go drink beers with friends every week-end, my wife and I watch movies, go hiking or camping with the kids, do normal stuff adult do. At home, with the kids, I do the stuff that I like and listen to the music I like, watch cartoons with them. I'll never force myself to listen to shitty kid music, or watch silly cartoons: I have found some cartoons that we all can enjoy (Miyasaki, Les Shadocks, Old Disneys, Pink Panther, ...) I also consider that sacrificing yourself to your kids is not only bad for you, it is bad for them too: it is a burden on their shoulder they didn't ask for. Moreover, faking it do not work, they'll know before you that you are bored by shitty kid's music or cartoons. Oh, and we play Lego together too.
- whistlerbrk 11y ago
  Thank you for writing this. I'm about to become a new dad and this is very reassuring and I have seen exactly what you describe in my brother, ie needlessly sacrificing himself for the "sake of his kids".
- cik2e 11y ago
  As an almost 30 year old male who is very anxious about the prospect of having to have children in the next <5 years due to my girlfriend's biological clock, I find this very reassuring. Looking back on it, my childhood was similar to what you describe and I gained a huge amount of independence from it. Granted, as a single child, it seems that being left to my own devices so often while growing up may have added to my introverted tendencies. However, having some siblings around should help my future little introverts find balance.
  - danieldk 11y ago
    As an almost 30 year old male who is very anxious about the prospect of having to have children in the next <5 years due to my girlfriend's biological clock, I find this very reassuring. I don't think your parent's post is necessarily representative. It depends a lot on the child and the circumstances. E.g., we live relatively far away from family, so we cannot just bring our daughter to her grandparents for a sleepover. Our life has definitely changed and where there used to be a lot of time to hack and tinker, it's far less now. Our daughter falls asleep easily and sleeps until 8 or 9 in the weekends, so we are still pretty lucky :). The important thing is that you also get a lot back. Having a child is a lot of fun. They are cute and do funny things. And you can do nice things together, like going to a playground or hiking a bit. I also think having a child put more balance in our lives. Work is really 8:00-17:00 (you have to pick them up ;)), but you also become more focused and efficient.
djkrul 11y ago
I have successfully bootstrapped a VPS / cloud hosting company with my 2 partners while my wife was pregnant of our first. We've had two more in the years after. Me and my wife both work 4 days so we can each spend a day a week with the kids (and weekends are reserved family time too). I started coding in my spare time and me and my partners only quit the day jobs when the company was pretty much self-sustaining. 7 years later we are an established and fast growing company (and if you're Dutch: We're hiring! https://www.tilaa.com/en/jobs https://www.tilaa.com/en/jobs ;). I'm not sure if things are much different in the US (I'm from the Netherlands), but I definitely think it's possible to have it both (a loving family and a flourishing business) without making big sacrifices.

dominotw 11y ago

>I am also so grateful to Paul taking time off earlier to spend time to watch his kids grow up You are grateful because he is setting an example for us to follow?

julianpye 11y ago
Not an example. You can have kids or not have kids. But my girlfriend's uni teacher at University College London said 'I have two kids - I call them the enemies of entrepreneurs'. It should not be like that. Being free means that you can take care of your kid whenever it needs you. Being able to setup your own company structure means you can support everyone's personal lives. In startup situations this is so much easier, since you know them personally.
- maaku 11y ago
  > I have two kids - I call them the enemies of entrepreneurs Wow. Someone who thinks like that just shouldn't have kids.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    Or just not be an entrepreneur, which is presumably the route the university professor took. There's nothing wrong with knowing your limits.
- balls187 11y ago
  > It should not be like that. Being free means that you can take care of your kid whenever it needs you. The crux of the issue is that you have two things require an inordinate amount of time and attention, and both of which are very schedule unforgiving. When my infant son is hungry, he has to be fed. Similarly, when I had a very early stage startup, and an important customer demo first thing Monday AM, the work had to get done over the weekend. What happens when you have a conflict between the two priorities?
  - Swizec 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

davidw 11y ago

> how can we change this and make startups better for young parents "Fix health care" would be a good one. It's all kinds of broken in the US. I'm glad for JL though, and also quite envious. There's never enough time for everything when kids are young.

T2_t2 11y ago
... or simply accept you can't do everything? {INSERT HIGH PERCENTAGE HERE}% of startups fail. What makes anyone think "fixing it for parents" is a more important goal than fixing those odds? It baffles me, when I hear these sorts of lines. If you can fix startups so parents can do them, fixing them so that current founders can work less hard, with the same or greater chance of success seems as important. When I phrase it like that, I think the problem with the question becomes self evident.
- geofft 11y ago
  You're assuming that work is fungible, and that success is a monotonic function of amount of work. There are certain types of work that I don't have the mental energy to do when I get home from a full workday, or at least not to do well. And, honestly, if I try too hard, I risk lowering the quality of my work the next day and burning out completely at some point. And burnout is a fairly large reason that startups fail: "But I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized" (http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html). There are other types of work (e.g., practicing piano or voice, two pursuits where the amount of time spent is pretty steadily and monotonically correlated with success) that I can do just fine. It seems more than likely that, if we get it to the point where you can do a successful startup on 5 or 6 hours a day, spending an additional 5 or 6 hours per day on the startup is unlikely to make you more successful, but those same 5 or 6 hours can be productively directed towards music practice, raising children, or whatever else you want to do. (There's also a line of argument about parenthood being of intrinsic importance, above success at startups, success at music, etc., but I'll let someone else argue that point.)
  - 001sky 11y ago

bbcbasic 11y ago

> how can we change this and make startups better for young parents as well who for now will just always try to get corporate jobs The middle ground is to buy an existing business and/or invest. Yes booooooring! but lots of parents start businesses. Flipping a house is a viable alternative to starting the next uber.

elliotec 11y ago
The REAL middle ground could be something like a small business which doesn't require insane amounts of time to run, so that you can still raise your kids. You might not make it to a billion dollars, but boo hoo.
- cik2e 11y ago
  I'm at a growing startup of almost 100 employees. In my 2 years there I've repeatedly heard the CEO bash our partners' "lifestyle businesses" for their lack of ambition. These are companies of 20-30 people where the founders are pulling in 300-500k a year without working much more than 40 hours a week. Ironically, if our upside game flops our company would devolve to exactly the same thing. This is a fantastic middle ground as far as I'm concerned and I'll be very happy to take a stab at this myself after I feel that I've learned all I need to know from working for the man.
  - elliotec 11y ago
    Me too. Good luck with your endeavors.
- bbcbasic 11y ago
  Yes... that's why I flippantly mentioned flipping a house, which isn't a business as such but can be used to make money on the side where the money isn't linked to the time you spend.

st3v3r 11y ago

Honestly? Get rid of this notion that everything in a startup has to be done yesterday. Despite what people say, time is not that critical in a startup. You don't need to press everyone to live at the company. Hell, you'll probably get more done if you press your people to work more of a regular hour schedule, as they won't be exhausted and burnt out.

contingencies 11y ago
Get rid of this notion that everything in a startup has to be done yesterday. Totally agree. If you can't iterate, you're either in a niche like manufacturing (where your USP had better trump 2 weeks lead time, or your business plan is rotten anyway), or you're simply doing it wrong. Right now parenthood is incompatible with startups - how can we change this and make startups better for young parents as well who for now will just always try to get corporate jobs? I have a 2 year old and am a work at home dad. My wife and I share responsibilities and launching and relaunching some of our own businesses at our own pace. We find that this works a lot better than working for others. I just came back from a 1.5 hour mountain bike trip, had some homebaked sourdough (learned yesterday) and spent some time with my daughter. Now I am preparing to dig in to work for awhile. This afternoon I will take a break at 3PM to go play a new RPG, Blades in the Dark, for a few hours, in a local pub. Life is good. (Of course, we live in China and overheads aren't San Francisco or London, but that's by design. London also has no mountain biking, and the climate here is closer to high altitude LA.) Life's too short to commute. See also, article in an Australian paper on this subject this morning: http://www.smh.com.au/money/tree-change-for-families-financial-pros-and-cons-of-moving-to-a-country-town-20160331-gnusu9.html http://www.smh.com.au/money/tree-change-for-families-financi...

callmeed 11y ago

Maybe start by allowing startups to have remote staff

theoh 11y ago

It's a bit odd to assert that parenthood should change to facilitate startups. Suddenly it seems like we are in Shulamith Firestone territory, except that it's men, not women, who are objecting to the amount of work involved in raising children.

d0m 11y ago

mastercrawler, funny ;-) I'll need to remember this one for in a few years.

cliffcrosland 11y ago

Anecdotal data point: my father was an entrepreneur for 100% of my childhood. It was rare for him to miss dinner with us, and he attended easily more than 60% of our extracurricular events. He'd often work from home late after we went to sleep, sometimes sleeping next to the phone to take customer support calls 12-5am. He had freedom to spend time with family and worked sufficient hours to achieve successful outcomes for his businesses. I think this form of scheduling is effective. Another anecdote: apparently Sheryl Sandberg also eats dinner with her family every day but works from home late at night and early in the morning.

chris11 11y ago
Sleeping next to the phone to take customer support calls sounds really tough. I don't think I could do that for long.
- unwind 11y ago
  It's probably not too unlike sleeping next to a baby, though. Something that wakes you up randomly and is sometimes very hard to calm back down ...
mootothemax 11y ago
>It was rare for him to miss dinner with us, and he attended easily more than 60% of our extracurricular events... I think this form of scheduling is effective. Thanks for posting this. As a parent of small kids, this is pretty much well what I'm doing right now, and it's lovely and reassuring to see that your father's scheduling worked out for you. Before kids, being able to define my own working hours was awesome; now with small children, it's working out really well, and "being there" is a noticeable quality-of-life thing, especially when you're not having to ask for a boss' permission to do so!
madaxe_again 11y ago
My father worked for a series of banks and brokers, and I never saw him - in no small part because as soon as I was old enough (6) I was shipped off to boarding school. not being an entrepreneur likewise doesn't mean that it's happy family time, all the time. Some folks want a relationship with their children, others don't.

qmr 11y ago

> Right now parenthood is incompatible with startups Be a grownup and assert that your work is at work, and work ends when you leave the office. Unless you are on call, turn off your email and work phone. Stop being conned into staying at the office for "free" dinner, ping pong, "teambuilding", or whatever bullshit is being peddled by your employer.

danielbarla 11y ago
I completely agree, but is this a "reasonable" approach to take in a startup world (from the startup's point of view)? Or does this make us incompatible / unfavourable with startups, as OP said?
- edent 11y ago
  Yes. Yes it is reasonable. A startup is hiring people to perform a job in exchange for compensation. If they want you to work weekends, they can pay a fair market rate for that. Or they can hire more people. In some countries, it's extremely unusual to perform overtime. If a startup has 10 employees and they each do an hour of overtime a week - they're effectively denying another worker a job. Yes, it's a bit "mythical man month" - but if there's too much work to go around, your employer needs to hire more people.
  - cromulent 11y ago
    Perhaps you meant an hour of overtime per day.
    - edent 11y ago
      Indeed!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrisan 11y ago
    > Yes. Yes it is reasonable. Reasonable, sure. But is it realistic when we have things like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11430596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11430596 ?