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Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad's Manifesto

229 points by aschepis 15y ago

DanielStraight 15y ago
Reminds me of: http://jbf.posterous.com/bluyah-development-blog-5-things-i-wish-someo http://jbf.posterous.com/bluyah-development-blog-5-things-i-... From which comes one of my favorite lines about business ever: "You will be forced to choose between work and family - and there’s only one right answer."
- ghostshield11 15y ago
  Absolutely. I think it's sad that we need to state this so firmly, it should be automatic.
MartinCron 15y ago
Death marches and late nights take a lot out of you Death marches seem to happen far less often (in my experience) when I'm releasing early and releasing often. If the system automatically tests and ships out every incremental change multiple times daily, you don't have the crazy weeks before/after big releases as there are no big releases. Shipping new code is a normal part of every day and I get to go home to hang out with my kids on time.
- thom 15y ago
  A bad week or tricky release isn't a death march, and I congratulate you on a career well managed if that's what you genuinely believe.
  - MartinCron 15y ago
    You are completely correct. I've been involved with bad weeks, tricky releases, death marches, pretty much every sort of dysfunctional software development clusterfuck you can imagine short of Duke Nukem Forever. The point remains the same. My experience shows that committing to incrementalism in design/code/test/release improves quality of life as well as quality of product.
phuff 15y ago
This reminds me of this great article by Clayton Christensen to Harvard Business students about life balance: http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1 http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1 Looking back over a short 7 year or so career I can't remember many projects where I can go: "Oh man, I'm so glad I spent all that time late at night on that project. It's really made a lasting difference in the world." I'm sure there are some things that are worth spending a lot of overtime on; I'm sure there are ways to write software that will literally make a massive change in the way the world works. But most of the stuff that I see coming out of startups, most of the stuff that I've worked on in a wide variety of companies is stuff that ends up being rewritten soon, or changed or what have you. One of my favorite CS professors was diagnosed with terminal cancer relatively early in life (late 50s, early 60s). He had another 10 or 15 years of teaching in him probably if he hadn't gotten sick. Towards the end of his fight with cancer, one of the other professors visited him and came back to us and said that he had been visiting the dying professor on a way to his daughter's flute recital. The dying professor looked at him when he mentioned the recital and said something like: "Good! More flute recitals! More ball games! Fewer papers! fewer conferences!" I know that the time I spend away from work, particularly on my family -- my relationship with my spouse, with my kids -- ends up being the time that matters most in the long term.
- aschepis 15y ago
  If i could upvote this comment 100 times, i would. I've seen that comment before, but had forgotten about it. It sums things up much more eloquently than I can.
  - Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
    As my father used to put it "No-one ever died thinking 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office'".
- deleted 15y ago
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- watmough 15y ago
  Time is so fleeting, and so precious. It's criminal to stuck in cube for a large portion of that lifetime. Every so often, stop, just stop and think about what's important. Best to do it now, rather than regret later.
deleted 15y ago
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johngalt 15y ago
Sounds like he's made the right decision. It's important to have balance in your life. However, I don't want to hear him cry "ageism!" when that young kid that's doing 80hour weeks gets promoted ahead of him. It's important to make these kinds of sacrifices when you have a family, but you should also understand that they are your sacrifices.
- mapgrep 15y ago
  I hope the guy working 80 hour weeks was not promoted into a management job. He doesn't sound particularly efficient.
  - andylei 15y ago
    efficiency = output / input you can't measure efficiency by only looking at time spent. if the 80 hr a week guy produces twice as much as the 40 hour a week guy, their efficiency is the same. if the 80 hr a week guy produces 3 times as much, his efficiency is 50% higher
    - aschepis 15y ago
      Software engineers aren't making widgets, and its hard to measure output quantitatively. I can assure you that your ability to make good decisions isn't as good after 18 hours of working as it is during the first 6. In engineering, good decision making can save you tons of time in the long run.
    - fullmoon 15y ago
      But the assumption that an the very same guy produces twice the amount in twice the amount can't obviously be true in any job that requires mental exertion.
- hga 15y ago
  Sounds like you're measuring input rather than output, an all too common failure of software development management. There's a rather good chance the experienced pro with a life is several more times efficient than the "young kid"; I certainly know that e.g. after 20+ years of programming my skill at debugging became almost frightening. Or after 15 years how low my error rate became and how good my designs were (best metric: accommodating totally unanticipated requirements).
topherjaynes 15y ago
Thanks for giving all of us future Dads (or soon to be) something to aspire to.
Rotor 15y ago
This is a great article about work/life balance. Frequently that balance is asymmetrically weighted in favor of work at the expense of time spent with family. The author is making a commendable point to commit to time well spent with his family while still putting in nine hours at the office. When we're near the end of our lives and reflecting, are you going to wish you spent more time with your family or more time at the office? There's a simple answer there.
- stygianguest 15y ago
  I'll just make a comment from my cosy European perspective. He's still working 9 hours a day. But it's okay, he "doesn't feel as burned out". Seriously, is this what is expected, or is it just the default?
  - aschepis 15y ago
    In many cases it is expected or at least the cultural norm. However, I think that there is a growing body of research that shows how unhealthy it can be.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    Yeah, 8-5 is absolutely expected.
  - tobych 15y ago
    I think 8-5 is actually 8 hours in the US: federal laws guarantee you an hour lunch break, just as in the UK. Of course, I imagine in a lot of start-ups that's ignored or perhaps doesn't even hold.
    - stygianguest 15y ago
      Ah, so that probably means he's not actually working 9 solid hours per day. That's better. I admit to doing the same, albeit at different times of the day (10h-19h).
georgieporgie 15y ago
I'm impressed that the guy managed to find a wife while working so hard during the earlier years.
- aschepis 15y ago
  LOL. I'm lucky, that's very true. She is a saint.
  - eludwig 15y ago
    Long time lurker and made an account just to reply to this. What does it say about the expectations of this industry when you have to even weigh working almost 60 hours a week against 15 hours with your daughter!! Good god. I am so glad that you made the right choice. Great article.
aschepis 15y ago
hey all, thanks for the positive discussion. Apologies that my blog is terribly slow. I didn't notice that it spiked because, well, it was between 4:30 and 7:30 ;) I'm working in my spare time to get it all off of wordpress and onto Jekyll so i can just host it out of S3 and get rid of the EC2 instance its running on.
- 0x12 15y ago
  > I'm working in my spare time There is a subtle joke in there somewhere. Great piece and thank you for writing it.
- cosmicman 15y ago
  Really loved your article man.
jswinghammer 15y ago
Totally agree with all these points. Ever since my first daughter was born I made a similar decision but I still work less hours than you do. I end up working around 40 hours a week and have never felt compelled to work any more. I will work after the kids go to bed particularly when my wife goes to bed and I don't feel like reading for whatever reason. My first obligation on this Earth is to my family and part of that means not being gone all the time at work. I do that for the kids but also for my wife. Raising kids is hard work and she needs my help particularly at the end of the day. This changes a little when the kids are older and are less physically demanding I guess but when you have small kids you really need to take your wife's feelings into account when deciding how much to work. She really needs to feel respected and honored in the decision and part of that comes from making sure she is in total agreement with the final decision. Also if you're any good at programming companies are so desperate to hire you that they will accept pretty much whatever schedule within reason you want. You might not be the absolute favorite employee of management but if you're good people will respect you and your contribution.
- BlazingFrog 15y ago
  > My first obligation on this Earth is to my family No disrespect but to what was your first obligation before you had a wife and kids? I'm always tempted to interpret this kind of statement one of two ways: either your life before your family was so miserably empty that it gave you a purpose (nothing wrong with that) or you're borderline schizophrenic that you can fool yourself (or worse, truly believe) that your personality suddenly morphed and you're now a different individual who will be just as content with a lifestyle radically different from what he ever had, obligations as well as satisfactions that cannot be possibly imagined until you actually cross that line and have kids. I personally have a hard time believing people can change that much...
  - mbreese 15y ago
    > No disrespect but to what was your first obligation before you had a wife and kids Obviously something else... ? Life has a way of changing whether you want it to or not. So, maybe whatever was #1 got bumped down to #2. That doesn't mean that their life was meaning-less and empty before having a family. Nor does it mean that their lives really had to change all that much with a family. I don't understand the false dichotomy here.
minimax 15y ago
> When you work crazy hours you yo-yo between 20 hour days and 8 hour days that really only have a few hours of productivity (or none at all!) This would not have made any sense to me until I had actually spent three months working 12-18 hour days (+ Saturdays). Yay for salespeople selling things the company doesn't actually make! It's a really stupid feeling to spend 12 hours staring at your keyboard, getting almost nothing done, and knowing you're going to come back and do the same thing tomorrow.
- aschepis 15y ago
  and honestly, you probably could have done the job better and faster if you had done 8-10 hours (or less) per day and had enough time to mow your lawn, pay your bills, unwind, etc.
  - minimax 15y ago
    No question about it. Repetitive long hours are deleterious to critical and creative thinking abilities. It always makes me think twice when I see stories about game dev / wall st / startup developers working insane hours. I think the story is better than the reality.
mathattack 15y ago
I would have never understood this before I had a child of my own.
- arcanebook 15y ago
  Completely agreed. Having children changes your perspective.
zrail 15y ago
After a particularly bad stint at a previous job I've vowed to never work past my normal hours just for the sake of being there. If there's something immediately wrong that I can help with, or if it's something that I broke, I'll stay and work the problem. Otherwise, I'm in out at my established hours.
_cttz 15y ago
Sorry, but this is getting a little unctuous. I don't think the trend in our time of parents organizing their lives around their children is very good for anybody, especially the children. I'm thinking, for example, of fathers who call their kids "buddy" and think it's the meaning of life to play with them. This is pandemic where I live. People have convinced themselves that the good life consists of being child-centered parents in child-centered families. Everybody [†] is busy confirming to everybody else that this is true (consider the platitudinous tone of most of the comments in this thread), but I doubt that it is true. It has much to do with parents' emotional needs (edit: specifically the need to Be A Good Parent, which if you think about it is actually a selfish concern) and little to do with kids'. Children ought to be running around outside playing with other children and depending on nice-but-otherly (not pseudo-peer) adults to keep their world secure and stable and fix things when they cry. Children raised by child-centered parents seem at a loss when they aren't at the center of attention. This bodes ill for inner strength. Most such parents fail even to teach their kids basic manners. They're so identified with their child, or rather with the mini-me they imagine their child to be, that they don't notice if the child is routinely disrespectful to others. When they do occasionally notice something egregious and limply intervene, it's always with the same whiney "Honey..." followed by a feeble plea which the child ignores with no consequences. What they ought to do, of course, is what any ordinary mammal does when their offspring goes too far - smack them. Figuratively if you prefer. The problem is that we're immature and infantilized ourselves, so we've forgotten all of this. Perhaps it's an outgrowth of postwar youth culture. One tell-tale symptom is that children have fewer friends than they used to, and adults consequently have fewer friends and less time for the ones they do have. (Nowadays when a friend has a kid I tell them "See you in 20 years." Not my choice.) Adults' time is taken up with the sacred family-ness we all must bow before. Children's time is taken up by their parents. I remember how hard it used to be to arrange for my son to play with a classmate after school. (Arrange! When such a thing need to be arranged in the first place, we're already losers. This whole subject really needs a Louis CK to do it justice.) Parents would look up times for "play dates" in a calendar. I swear they were jealous of their kids seeing other "buddies". In short, a little neglect never hurt anybody. p.s. Maybe it seems like the above hasn't much to do with "work-life balance" (blessed be its name), but it totally does. However, I'm over quota. [†] Well, everybody in my lily-white liberal world.
creationix 15y ago
As an added bonus, I've discovered that not being able to hack till after the kids are in bed means you're more motivated to get them to bed on time. They get more sleep and you can code once the house is quiet and you brain just had a break. I find it extremely productive.
chubs 15y ago
I find it really hard, because nobody in this career has kids! Very few have wives, i have a suspicion that most are single. So when you put family first, it really is a culture clash. My solution is to try and become self employed. I hope it works out.
- abalashov 15y ago
  Maybe in bohemian Silicon Valley startup circles of 20-somethings. However, that is an extremely inaccurate supposition about the IT profession as a whole.
mkent 15y ago
Sometimes I think about how lucky most of us white collar workers really are. I grew up with a Dad that worked rotating day/evening/graveyard shifts and I know how much it would have meant to me if he could have spent more time with us. My neighbour, who used to work in construction, gave me some advice after the birth of my son: "Make sure to spend time with your kids, especially when they're young. One of my biggest regrets was working too much and not being around to watch them grow up." Now they live in Australia.
Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
One thing that seems to be missing from the debate here is that spending time with your kids is actually fun, it's something that's nice to do and really isn't a sacrifice. I know no-one who spends time with their kids out of a sense of obligation (and trust me, your kids would work out if that's what you were doing and really not want you about) - in spending time with my daughters instead of in the office, I'm doing what I want to do, not what I feel I should do.
pointyhat 15y ago
I'm in the UK. I spend as much time as possible with my children so that I can teach them that a 37 hour working week is actually normal and that they don't NEED to become an American-style 80-hour-a-week corporate slave. Humans have needs: family, friendship and companionship. "Work" is a relatively new thing; a product of the rapid growth of the population and the distribution of self-responsibility. Go back a couple of thousand years, and we were farming in family groups much like the Amish are today. We're short-changing ourselves and missing out on a large chunk of life by not spending time with our closest ones.
polemic 15y ago
I completely agree with the post. Most of the negative responses are clearly from people who have no clue what it means to be a parent. Firstly, it has nothing to do with raising kids with 'good manners', or anything as simple or boring as that. Hanging, teaching and interacting with your kids is actually fun and rewarding. A lot like coding. I can also highly recommend a 4 day week. 1 day a week is purely my daughter (20 months) and I. Not only does it give you more time than you have in an evening, it also opens up other opportunities to go out and do things you wouldn't normally be involved with. I've been fortunate to have employers who are happy to oblige and live in a country - New Zealand - where it's relatively easy to arrange. I also agree that it makes you a more focused coder. It gives you a healthy dose of perspective about what you're doing, and I've found I spend far more time on productive work than I did before.
robmay 15y ago
I think people should do what they want to do. If you are passionate about your work, and want to spend more time there than everyone else, I'm not sure that sends a bad message to kids. If you want to spend more time home with kids, that's fine too. People are different, and you shouldn't adopt the standards of other people.
thebany 15y ago
My husband (a developer who is frequently "death-marching" his way through projects) sent me this article yesterday. We are about to have our first child, and it was so cool to read this, especially since we've already been talking about what it's going to be like after our son is born in regards to his work schedule. He also works with West Coasters and is a team leader, which makes things tricky in terms of scheduling meetings and conference calls. Let me just say I so appreciate that this blog post was written and that he came across it. I love that my husband loves his job and is so incredibly talented at it. He is so dedicated to his work and spends way more than 9 hours a day at it (his recent "early" bedtime has been 3am consistently, with 6am actually being the most frequent hour he finally lays down to get a minute of shuteye). It's a kind of commitment that I admire, and that I myself have benefitted from. But it's also good to read that his dedication can still be seen, even if he isn't "death marching" through coding problems night after night. I do not see this at all as "parents organizing their lives around their children," but rather a parents taking care of and giving priority to all aspects of their lives, especially their children. I think there is so much wisdom in the statements concerning how a person can always get another job, but not just "get" another family. Cheers to you and yours and all the hard work you put into all aspects of your life!
vegai 15y ago
He should cut that 9 hours at the office to 6. And yes, I fail at this too :(
- redrising1 15y ago
  Same here. I think we can all be guilty of this.
geebee 15y ago
Egads, are we at the point where developers with young children have to write a manifesto to justify working a "mere" nine hours a day, followed by frequent meetings after the kid goes to bed?
cgopalan 15y ago
I feel the same way about my cat. I love her and would rather spend a bigger percentage of time with her than what I spend now. Question though is, why is this on hacker news?
jroseattle 15y ago
Very true, and I learned this early on: your job, no matter how much you like it, will never hug you back.
horseracer999 15y ago
You should be proud of yourself.
sylax 15y ago
I think it's great that you make time for your children.
whiteduck 15y ago
Thankyou for writing this.
keyboarder 15y ago
It's good that you have your priorities straight.
deathmatch 15y ago
I wish more people did this.
gorbachev 15y ago
I was recently in the process of changing roles at work, so I was doing a few internal interviews for another roles that seemed to be good fits. I lost one of the roles, because apparently I wasn't hungry enough for it. One of the reasons stated by the manager doing the hiring was that I consider my kids more important than my work. It wasn't stated exactly like that, but that's what he meant. In my younger days I would've let the idiot have it or bursted out laughing. I am so glad I no longer work there.

229 points by aschepis 15y ago

Reminds me of: http://jbf.posterous.com/bluyah-development-blog-5-things-i-wish-someo http://jbf.posterous.com/bluyah-development-blog-5-things-i-... From which comes one of my favorite lines about business ever: "You will be forced to choose between work and family - and there’s only one right answer."

ghostshield11 15y ago
Absolutely. I think it's sad that we need to state this so firmly, it should be automatic.

MartinCron 15y ago

Death marches and late nights take a lot out of you Death marches seem to happen far less often (in my experience) when I'm releasing early and releasing often. If the system automatically tests and ships out every incremental change multiple times daily, you don't have the crazy weeks before/after big releases as there are no big releases. Shipping new code is a normal part of every day and I get to go home to hang out with my kids on time.

thom 15y ago
A bad week or tricky release isn't a death march, and I congratulate you on a career well managed if that's what you genuinely believe.
- MartinCron 15y ago
  You are completely correct. I've been involved with bad weeks, tricky releases, death marches, pretty much every sort of dysfunctional software development clusterfuck you can imagine short of Duke Nukem Forever. The point remains the same. My experience shows that committing to incrementalism in design/code/test/release improves quality of life as well as quality of product.

phuff 15y ago

This reminds me of this great article by Clayton Christensen to Harvard Business students about life balance: http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1 http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1 Looking back over a short 7 year or so career I can't remember many projects where I can go: "Oh man, I'm so glad I spent all that time late at night on that project. It's really made a lasting difference in the world." I'm sure there are some things that are worth spending a lot of overtime on; I'm sure there are ways to write software that will literally make a massive change in the way the world works. But most of the stuff that I see coming out of startups, most of the stuff that I've worked on in a wide variety of companies is stuff that ends up being rewritten soon, or changed or what have you. One of my favorite CS professors was diagnosed with terminal cancer relatively early in life (late 50s, early 60s). He had another 10 or 15 years of teaching in him probably if he hadn't gotten sick. Towards the end of his fight with cancer, one of the other professors visited him and came back to us and said that he had been visiting the dying professor on a way to his daughter's flute recital. The dying professor looked at him when he mentioned the recital and said something like: "Good! More flute recitals! More ball games! Fewer papers! fewer conferences!" I know that the time I spend away from work, particularly on my family -- my relationship with my spouse, with my kids -- ends up being the time that matters most in the long term.

aschepis 15y ago
If i could upvote this comment 100 times, i would. I've seen that comment before, but had forgotten about it. It sums things up much more eloquently than I can.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
  As my father used to put it "No-one ever died thinking 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office'".
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watmough 15y ago
Time is so fleeting, and so precious. It's criminal to stuck in cube for a large portion of that lifetime. Every so often, stop, just stop and think about what's important. Best to do it now, rather than regret later.

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johngalt 15y ago

Sounds like he's made the right decision. It's important to have balance in your life. However, I don't want to hear him cry "ageism!" when that young kid that's doing 80hour weeks gets promoted ahead of him. It's important to make these kinds of sacrifices when you have a family, but you should also understand that they are your sacrifices.

mapgrep 15y ago
I hope the guy working 80 hour weeks was not promoted into a management job. He doesn't sound particularly efficient.
- andylei 15y ago
  efficiency = output / input you can't measure efficiency by only looking at time spent. if the 80 hr a week guy produces twice as much as the 40 hour a week guy, their efficiency is the same. if the 80 hr a week guy produces 3 times as much, his efficiency is 50% higher
  - aschepis 15y ago
    Software engineers aren't making widgets, and its hard to measure output quantitatively. I can assure you that your ability to make good decisions isn't as good after 18 hours of working as it is during the first 6. In engineering, good decision making can save you tons of time in the long run.
  - fullmoon 15y ago
    But the assumption that an the very same guy produces twice the amount in twice the amount can't obviously be true in any job that requires mental exertion.
hga 15y ago
Sounds like you're measuring input rather than output, an all too common failure of software development management. There's a rather good chance the experienced pro with a life is several more times efficient than the "young kid"; I certainly know that e.g. after 20+ years of programming my skill at debugging became almost frightening. Or after 15 years how low my error rate became and how good my designs were (best metric: accommodating totally unanticipated requirements).

topherjaynes 15y ago

Thanks for giving all of us future Dads (or soon to be) something to aspire to.

Rotor 15y ago

This is a great article about work/life balance. Frequently that balance is asymmetrically weighted in favor of work at the expense of time spent with family. The author is making a commendable point to commit to time well spent with his family while still putting in nine hours at the office. When we're near the end of our lives and reflecting, are you going to wish you spent more time with your family or more time at the office? There's a simple answer there.

stygianguest 15y ago
I'll just make a comment from my cosy European perspective. He's still working 9 hours a day. But it's okay, he "doesn't feel as burned out". Seriously, is this what is expected, or is it just the default?
- aschepis 15y ago
  In many cases it is expected or at least the cultural norm. However, I think that there is a growing body of research that shows how unhealthy it can be.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Yeah, 8-5 is absolutely expected.
- tobych 15y ago
  I think 8-5 is actually 8 hours in the US: federal laws guarantee you an hour lunch break, just as in the UK. Of course, I imagine in a lot of start-ups that's ignored or perhaps doesn't even hold.
  - stygianguest 15y ago
    Ah, so that probably means he's not actually working 9 solid hours per day. That's better. I admit to doing the same, albeit at different times of the day (10h-19h).

georgieporgie 15y ago

I'm impressed that the guy managed to find a wife while working so hard during the earlier years.

aschepis 15y ago
LOL. I'm lucky, that's very true. She is a saint.
- eludwig 15y ago
  Long time lurker and made an account just to reply to this. What does it say about the expectations of this industry when you have to even weigh working almost 60 hours a week against 15 hours with your daughter!! Good god. I am so glad that you made the right choice. Great article.

aschepis 15y ago

hey all, thanks for the positive discussion. Apologies that my blog is terribly slow. I didn't notice that it spiked because, well, it was between 4:30 and 7:30 ;) I'm working in my spare time to get it all off of wordpress and onto Jekyll so i can just host it out of S3 and get rid of the EC2 instance its running on.

0x12 15y ago
> I'm working in my spare time There is a subtle joke in there somewhere. Great piece and thank you for writing it.
cosmicman 15y ago
Really loved your article man.

jswinghammer 15y ago

Totally agree with all these points. Ever since my first daughter was born I made a similar decision but I still work less hours than you do. I end up working around 40 hours a week and have never felt compelled to work any more. I will work after the kids go to bed particularly when my wife goes to bed and I don't feel like reading for whatever reason. My first obligation on this Earth is to my family and part of that means not being gone all the time at work. I do that for the kids but also for my wife. Raising kids is hard work and she needs my help particularly at the end of the day. This changes a little when the kids are older and are less physically demanding I guess but when you have small kids you really need to take your wife's feelings into account when deciding how much to work. She really needs to feel respected and honored in the decision and part of that comes from making sure she is in total agreement with the final decision. Also if you're any good at programming companies are so desperate to hire you that they will accept pretty much whatever schedule within reason you want. You might not be the absolute favorite employee of management but if you're good people will respect you and your contribution.

BlazingFrog 15y ago
> My first obligation on this Earth is to my family No disrespect but to what was your first obligation before you had a wife and kids? I'm always tempted to interpret this kind of statement one of two ways: either your life before your family was so miserably empty that it gave you a purpose (nothing wrong with that) or you're borderline schizophrenic that you can fool yourself (or worse, truly believe) that your personality suddenly morphed and you're now a different individual who will be just as content with a lifestyle radically different from what he ever had, obligations as well as satisfactions that cannot be possibly imagined until you actually cross that line and have kids. I personally have a hard time believing people can change that much...
- mbreese 15y ago
  > No disrespect but to what was your first obligation before you had a wife and kids Obviously something else... ? Life has a way of changing whether you want it to or not. So, maybe whatever was #1 got bumped down to #2. That doesn't mean that their life was meaning-less and empty before having a family. Nor does it mean that their lives really had to change all that much with a family. I don't understand the false dichotomy here.

minimax 15y ago

> When you work crazy hours you yo-yo between 20 hour days and 8 hour days that really only have a few hours of productivity (or none at all!) This would not have made any sense to me until I had actually spent three months working 12-18 hour days (+ Saturdays). Yay for salespeople selling things the company doesn't actually make! It's a really stupid feeling to spend 12 hours staring at your keyboard, getting almost nothing done, and knowing you're going to come back and do the same thing tomorrow.

aschepis 15y ago
and honestly, you probably could have done the job better and faster if you had done 8-10 hours (or less) per day and had enough time to mow your lawn, pay your bills, unwind, etc.
- minimax 15y ago
  No question about it. Repetitive long hours are deleterious to critical and creative thinking abilities. It always makes me think twice when I see stories about game dev / wall st / startup developers working insane hours. I think the story is better than the reality.

mathattack 15y ago

I would have never understood this before I had a child of my own.

arcanebook 15y ago
Completely agreed. Having children changes your perspective.

zrail 15y ago

After a particularly bad stint at a previous job I've vowed to never work past my normal hours just for the sake of being there. If there's something immediately wrong that I can help with, or if it's something that I broke, I'll stay and work the problem. Otherwise, I'm in out at my established hours.

_cttz 15y ago

Sorry, but this is getting a little unctuous. I don't think the trend in our time of parents organizing their lives around their children is very good for anybody, especially the children. I'm thinking, for example, of fathers who call their kids "buddy" and think it's the meaning of life to play with them. This is pandemic where I live. People have convinced themselves that the good life consists of being child-centered parents in child-centered families. Everybody [†] is busy confirming to everybody else that this is true (consider the platitudinous tone of most of the comments in this thread), but I doubt that it is true. It has much to do with parents' emotional needs (edit: specifically the need to Be A Good Parent, which if you think about it is actually a selfish concern) and little to do with kids'. Children ought to be running around outside playing with other children and depending on nice-but-otherly (not pseudo-peer) adults to keep their world secure and stable and fix things when they cry. Children raised by child-centered parents seem at a loss when they aren't at the center of attention. This bodes ill for inner strength. Most such parents fail even to teach their kids basic manners. They're so identified with their child, or rather with the mini-me they imagine their child to be, that they don't notice if the child is routinely disrespectful to others. When they do occasionally notice something egregious and limply intervene, it's always with the same whiney "Honey..." followed by a feeble plea which the child ignores with no consequences. What they ought to do, of course, is what any ordinary mammal does when their offspring goes too far - smack them. Figuratively if you prefer. The problem is that we're immature and infantilized ourselves, so we've forgotten all of this. Perhaps it's an outgrowth of postwar youth culture. One tell-tale symptom is that children have fewer friends than they used to, and adults consequently have fewer friends and less time for the ones they do have. (Nowadays when a friend has a kid I tell them "See you in 20 years." Not my choice.) Adults' time is taken up with the sacred family-ness we all must bow before. Children's time is taken up by their parents. I remember how hard it used to be to arrange for my son to play with a classmate after school. (Arrange! When such a thing need to be arranged in the first place, we're already losers. This whole subject really needs a Louis CK to do it justice.) Parents would look up times for "play dates" in a calendar. I swear they were jealous of their kids seeing other "buddies". In short, a little neglect never hurt anybody. p.s. Maybe it seems like the above hasn't much to do with "work-life balance" (blessed be its name), but it totally does. However, I'm over quota. [†] Well, everybody in my lily-white liberal world.

creationix 15y ago

As an added bonus, I've discovered that not being able to hack till after the kids are in bed means you're more motivated to get them to bed on time. They get more sleep and you can code once the house is quiet and you brain just had a break. I find it extremely productive.

chubs 15y ago

I find it really hard, because nobody in this career has kids! Very few have wives, i have a suspicion that most are single. So when you put family first, it really is a culture clash. My solution is to try and become self employed. I hope it works out.

abalashov 15y ago
Maybe in bohemian Silicon Valley startup circles of 20-somethings. However, that is an extremely inaccurate supposition about the IT profession as a whole.

mkent 15y ago

Sometimes I think about how lucky most of us white collar workers really are. I grew up with a Dad that worked rotating day/evening/graveyard shifts and I know how much it would have meant to me if he could have spent more time with us. My neighbour, who used to work in construction, gave me some advice after the birth of my son: "Make sure to spend time with your kids, especially when they're young. One of my biggest regrets was working too much and not being around to watch them grow up." Now they live in Australia.

Tyrannosaurs 15y ago

One thing that seems to be missing from the debate here is that spending time with your kids is actually fun, it's something that's nice to do and really isn't a sacrifice. I know no-one who spends time with their kids out of a sense of obligation (and trust me, your kids would work out if that's what you were doing and really not want you about) - in spending time with my daughters instead of in the office, I'm doing what I want to do, not what I feel I should do.

pointyhat 15y ago

I'm in the UK. I spend as much time as possible with my children so that I can teach them that a 37 hour working week is actually normal and that they don't NEED to become an American-style 80-hour-a-week corporate slave. Humans have needs: family, friendship and companionship. "Work" is a relatively new thing; a product of the rapid growth of the population and the distribution of self-responsibility. Go back a couple of thousand years, and we were farming in family groups much like the Amish are today. We're short-changing ourselves and missing out on a large chunk of life by not spending time with our closest ones.

polemic 15y ago

I completely agree with the post. Most of the negative responses are clearly from people who have no clue what it means to be a parent. Firstly, it has nothing to do with raising kids with 'good manners', or anything as simple or boring as that. Hanging, teaching and interacting with your kids is actually fun and rewarding. A lot like coding. I can also highly recommend a 4 day week. 1 day a week is purely my daughter (20 months) and I. Not only does it give you more time than you have in an evening, it also opens up other opportunities to go out and do things you wouldn't normally be involved with. I've been fortunate to have employers who are happy to oblige and live in a country - New Zealand - where it's relatively easy to arrange. I also agree that it makes you a more focused coder. It gives you a healthy dose of perspective about what you're doing, and I've found I spend far more time on productive work than I did before.

robmay 15y ago

I think people should do what they want to do. If you are passionate about your work, and want to spend more time there than everyone else, I'm not sure that sends a bad message to kids. If you want to spend more time home with kids, that's fine too. People are different, and you shouldn't adopt the standards of other people.

thebany 15y ago

My husband (a developer who is frequently "death-marching" his way through projects) sent me this article yesterday. We are about to have our first child, and it was so cool to read this, especially since we've already been talking about what it's going to be like after our son is born in regards to his work schedule. He also works with West Coasters and is a team leader, which makes things tricky in terms of scheduling meetings and conference calls. Let me just say I so appreciate that this blog post was written and that he came across it. I love that my husband loves his job and is so incredibly talented at it. He is so dedicated to his work and spends way more than 9 hours a day at it (his recent "early" bedtime has been 3am consistently, with 6am actually being the most frequent hour he finally lays down to get a minute of shuteye). It's a kind of commitment that I admire, and that I myself have benefitted from. But it's also good to read that his dedication can still be seen, even if he isn't "death marching" through coding problems night after night. I do not see this at all as "parents organizing their lives around their children," but rather a parents taking care of and giving priority to all aspects of their lives, especially their children. I think there is so much wisdom in the statements concerning how a person can always get another job, but not just "get" another family. Cheers to you and yours and all the hard work you put into all aspects of your life!

vegai 15y ago

He should cut that 9 hours at the office to 6. And yes, I fail at this too :(

redrising1 15y ago
Same here. I think we can all be guilty of this.

geebee 15y ago

Egads, are we at the point where developers with young children have to write a manifesto to justify working a "mere" nine hours a day, followed by frequent meetings after the kid goes to bed?

cgopalan 15y ago

I feel the same way about my cat. I love her and would rather spend a bigger percentage of time with her than what I spend now. Question though is, why is this on hacker news?

jroseattle 15y ago

Very true, and I learned this early on: your job, no matter how much you like it, will never hug you back.

horseracer999 15y ago

You should be proud of yourself.

sylax 15y ago

I think it's great that you make time for your children.

whiteduck 15y ago

Thankyou for writing this.

keyboarder 15y ago

It's good that you have your priorities straight.

deathmatch 15y ago

I wish more people did this.

gorbachev 15y ago

I was recently in the process of changing roles at work, so I was doing a few internal interviews for another roles that seemed to be good fits. I lost one of the roles, because apparently I wasn't hungry enough for it. One of the reasons stated by the manager doing the hiring was that I consider my kids more important than my work. It wasn't stated exactly like that, but that's what he meant. In my younger days I would've let the idiot have it or bursted out laughing. I am so glad I no longer work there.