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Right before the first lockdown I started a new high stress job and for several months our two toddlers weren't allowed to attend school. During the first few w

by stef25 5y ago

Right before the first lockdown I started a new high stress job and for several months our two toddlers weren't allowed to attend school. During the first few weeks we tried to make it "fun", I'd start working around 4-5AM , alternating morning and evening shifts of work / toddlers with my partner. Then colleagues started complaining "wtf this guy's playing with his kids in the park at 2PM" and I got really bad feedback from my manager. He'd tell me full of glee that "certain colleagues" went to complain behind my back. And since then it was non stop screaming at the kids, my partner ... it was hell. I'm not even ashamed to admit I was opening bottles of wine at 10AM and downing them in 30 min. When the wife & kids went abroad for a week to stay with her parents and I took a week off from work I didn't even drink a drop of alcohol. It was purely to cope with the stress, for which alcohol does work very well! But it was a truly horrible time. And IMHO if you weren't at home with toddlers you didn't experience true suffering. Ten months in to the job I got laid off and spent a year basically doing nothing apart from be there for the kids and the household. Since then I did however develop bad sleeping habits and I still tend to wake up at 3-4AM to start work, which I actually enjoy if it wasn't for the fact you're destroyed as from late afternoon. It's been a really rough 2 years. And I really enjoyed the 5 minutes between the pandemic and WWIII.

thesaintlives 5y ago
Dude that sounds horrible. I feel you. Keep up the fight and try to concentrate on what is really important, you and your family. I had one wife and two dogs, now I don't. The 'pandemic' most certainly accelerated that outcome. Stay positive!
DigitalSea 5y ago
I am so sorry. When we talk about collateral damage from the pandemic, nobody thinks of the parents who had their kids home for months. In Australia, the lockdowns were quite severe. My wife and I were aware that while we were suffering, our kids were too. Their lives were completely turned upside down. Sadly, kids lack the needed brain capacity to deal with emotions and serious changes in routine, so it compounds the stress. To top it all off, for us, we were renovating and being without a working kitchen, bathroom, toilet for months and weeks on end, it compounded things for us. I don't know how we survived or how others did. We live in an era where we are afforded the ability to have flexible working hours, starting early and finishing early. Or chopping/changing hours and days. Your colleagues were wrong to criticise you, the metric of performance should never be measured based on hours working, but the output and quality of your work. I once worked at a place where someone was fired because his number of commits was lower than the other developers. He was a brilliant developer and always got his work done. But apparently his commits were too small (he liked to lump a lot of things into commits, instead of several smaller ones). Did you end up finding another job?
- stef25 5y ago
  Thanks :) In all fairness, while the colleagues were assholes I was out of my depth at the job and there was no support so getting fired was the right solution. Money was never really an issue and I did start an awesome new job 2 months ago. And the kids are thriving. The only thing that would have made those 2 years worse is renovations! We've gone through 2 of those, luckily before the pandemic. So I very much feel your pain and hope it's all working out for you now.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >I once worked at a place where someone was fired because his number of commits was lower than the other developers. He was a brilliant developer and always got his work done. But apparently his commits were too small (he liked to lump a lot of things into commits, instead of several smaller ones). Bloody hell, I can't imagine how dysfunctional other things must have been if this was allowed to happen without someone pointing out what a daft rationale for firing someone that is.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    Yeah, that right there is getting gold in the Olympics for "measuring the wrong thing".
    - wincy 5y ago
      My work tried measuring commits and PRs briefly as a metric. At the time I was doing a bunch of semi-automatic upgrading of repos with some tools is written for a substantial number of our micro services. So I looked about 300x more productive than the second most productive employee because I was batching hundreds of PRs using our GitHub API. It prompted the IT guy who was supposed to set up and demo the tool to higher ups come over and show it to me, we had a pretty good laugh. I like to think the absurdity of my numbers is what caused the idea to be scrapped.
simonh 5y ago
As with many disruptive events the impact and costs are extremely unevenly distributed. I first noticed this back in the 80s as a teenager here in the UK, we went through a horrible recession with mass unemployment. The 70s were no joke either, but my parents both had jobs which they kept, so we were fine. As it happens I had a great pandemic, we have a nice house with a garden backing on to a park and my kids are late teens. My heart goes out though, if it had hit us back when we lived in a small flat when the girls were little it would have been a whole different story. This is why, while I'm a free market capitalist at heart, I also fully support social welfare and one payer healthcare. I've been very lucky, but many aren't. The idea that all you have to do is work hard and be self reliant just doesn't take into account things that can happen to you that are completely out of your own control.
giantg2 5y ago
"And IMHO if you weren't at home with toddlers you didn't experience true suffering." Hahaha that's just life (laughing at the statement, not the situation). For the past few years, most days I get off of work and immediately have to start watching the kid for several hours while my wife works. Of course they're too young to do (safely watch) many of the chores or projects I have to do (mechanic work, handyman work, mow the lawn, etc). I get one day a week "off" to do all those chores and projects, although it's not unusual for part of that day or one or two of those days per month to require me to watch the kid too. I haven't gone fishing or participated in certain hobbies since the kid was born.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
I feel you, I ended up working from 8pm to 4am when my kindergartners were at home. I’d sleep until 10 (my partner got the kids up in the morning) and then watch them while my partner worked.
willcipriano 5y ago
I only have one kid, but similar situation for me. I learned something about jobs during this time. The effort and stress involved is not proportional to the pay. Some jobs are just hell and you can go next door and make the same thing in a pleasant environment. I ended up taking about half my skills off my resume. I'm no longer a full stack dev, I'm a backend engineer. I removed the stuff about DevOps and project/product management. Then when interviewing I found a role that paid the same as my previous job but required me to only wear one hat rather than 5 of them. Life is much better now.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Yeah, I dialed back significantly and found that everyone was still super impressed. I approach everything gently and only work a few hours a day now to keep my energy and creativity up.
  - p10_user 5y ago
    I’m very privileged to have the ability to work as little or as long as I want most days (within reason, and there’s always exceptions). I often still have trouble relaxing in the afternoon until the clock hits 5. But I spend much more time planning and thinking, which actually lets me get more done when I do work. Why are we fighting ourselves by trying to be creative after lunch when we should be taking a nap? I’m seriously considering getting a day bed for work.
j-bos 5y ago
Did your colleagues get jealous because you used the alternate schedule well or simply because you had an alternate schedule?
- lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  They got jealous because they're toxic dickheads. Who does that to people?
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    Hard to say without knowing their complaints. Not sure how I’d manage to be productive when collaborating with some of my team members if they were not there during Norma working hours but were there during the middle of the night. Offsets all requests and fixes from them by a day.
    - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
      Sounds more like a problem with how stories/tasks are split.
      - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
        Being part of a team means being part of a team and communication and connecting with the team to be a coherent whole, not just logging in and staring at your ticket todo list and not speaking to anyone.
        lkxijlewlf 5y ago
        If you're blocked because you can't get an answer from a teammate within the next few hours, you're doing it wrong.
        stef25 5y ago
        There were quite a lot of discussions about this. The one ticket that was the nail in my coffin was rewriting a a 2000 line function written by some guy who left years ago, full of if / else ladders in god damn Zend framework. Nobody could really explain what it was supposed to do. Calculate some commissions based on conditions x,y,z. The input was a CSV that nobody could give me an example of. Every time I talked to someone it was "Ok I have 2 min before my meeting what do you want". Because it was all remote work it was super easy to see who I contacted when in Slack and was info was communicated. Timestamps of all the commits. After a few days of trying and failing I just threw in the towel. It's not worth it.
sjg007 5y ago
Sounds like a bad job and even worse colleagues and a terrible manager. I found that alcohol just makes everything worse. Yes it relieves stress in the moment but that stress rebounds 2x the next day, then 3x the day after that and so forth compounding itself. Having young kids changes your sleep schedule. I am sorry your job treated you that way. I also tend to wake up at 4am-5am as I have kids. I just try to make it to 8 or ideally 9pm before I go to sleep. Also consult with a sleep doctor, alcohol acerbates sleep apnea which can cause poor sleep. Practice good sleep hygiene as best you can.
anonu 5y ago
> And I really enjoyed the 5 minutes between the pandemic and WWIII. I chuckled. I'm glad you still have your sense of humor. But from another perspective, yes, it's quite sad for humanity. I remind myself that disease and war were far more widespread in centuries past.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  This is how I compartmentalise the awful situations across the world, no matter how bad things get they were much worse in the past and we still managed to endure. I include a nuclear exchange with Russia and extreme climate change in this category because apparently humanity got down to as low as around 40 families at one point in our history which is about as close to extinction as you can get and still come back. The other side of this is that even though there was more bad things happening in the world in the past, the average person would have known about far fewer of them by virtue of lack of access to information. I don't feel shame in going days or even weeks ignoring the news sometimes because humans aren't built to mentally function with a 24 hour news cycle pumping a firehose of the world's doom and gloom into our heads, let alone psychologically manipulating us into scrolling past ads all day.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > I remind myself that disease Yes but no time in the past did we decide to prohibit people from working for more than a year. At no point in the past did we decide to keep kids out of school... If we didn't have zoom, we never would have done these lockdowns.
api 5y ago
It's impossible to describe to non-parents how high maintenance toddlers and very young children are. There are no words.
tallanvor 5y ago
> And IMHO if you weren't at home with toddlers you didn't experience true suffering. You're entitled to your opinion, but the lockdowns affected everyone differently. I know parents who thrived with their toddlers, but they didn't have the same issues at work where people were complaining about when they were working. But I also know people who's marriages ended due to longstanding issues that were magnified by being locked down. Some single people did fine. Some of us also turned more to alcohol to try and cope with the loneliness of having to work at home, not be able to go out, and in the worst of it not being allowed to gather with more than one or two other people.
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  > I know parents who thrived with their toddlers, With both spouses expected to continue full time working, and no child care coming in? Politely, I doubt it.
- lampshades 5y ago
  > I know parents who thrived with their toddlers Doubt. You just aren't hearing the war stories.
adnmcq999 5y ago
lampshades 5y ago
You sound like a variation of me. Right after lockdown I started a new job (that I really wanted) and had a toddler and a pregnant wife. I've always been a drinker, but my drinking started getting earlier and earlier in the day and I would go until bed. I'm also a marijuana smoker and I reverted back to my previous self of smoking from sun up to sun down. On top of my substance abuse issues, my wife had a rough pregnancy and didn't (feels like still doesn't) understand that if I'm WFH I still have a job and can't just take care of our kid at random times throughout the day, so I was trying to juggle my job and my wife's requests. It didn't get any better after our second was born, because my wife had PPD and now we had two children to deal with. Eventually I had to leave my job because I couldn't deal with it all and was missing deadlines and just not being performant. I'm terrified to go back to work because I know my wife isn't able to treat my job like a job and thinks I just have it easy sitting on a computer all day. The random requests might end, but her resentment for me won't and I'll have to hear about it all night when I get off. Hence, I doubt the substance abuse will stop anytime soon. To top it off, it is so damn difficult knowing that all these single people I work with, or married without children, have absolutely no idea what I'm going through and frankly they don't care. All in all, I agree, the last 2 years have been fucking rough, and I expect the following 2 to be rough as well. PS Your post triggered some venting I needed to express. I am happy with my life and wouldn't change it but it is still so fucking hard sometimes.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Sounds like you should seek couples counseling. If you’re unable to find a way to explain to your wife how WFH should work, and your wife doesn’t or won’t understand it on her own, there are likely larger issues at play and a few sessions with someone who can mediate might help you guys.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > single people I work with, or married without children, have absolutely no idea what I'm going through and frankly they don't care Not only did they not care many of them actively shamed you for expressing your feelings. "I don't like it either but I'm just doing what the experts say" and "Are you an expert? No? Then stay in your lane!". What we did over the last two years is despicable.
antisinguIarity 5y ago
I'm so glad to hear these stories finally surfacing. I had a one-year-old and a pregnant wife when lockdowns started. It was absolutely brutal, as we both had full-time jobs, and obviously there was absolutely nowhere to go or no-one to turn to for help. It has most definitely coloured my opinions of the usefulness of lockdowns. One of the most dismaying long-term effects of what parents have been made to go through is what I consider the abrupt decline in acceptable parenting techniques - how many young kids have now been deliberately stuffed in front of a TV or given a tablet to keep them quiet, while parents try to hold down jobs? Part of what made our lives so hard was my refusal to do such things.
asdfjlkjt43tl 5y ago
[flagged]
asdfjlkjt43tl 5y ago
AlwaysRock 5y ago
It's a spiral as well. Drinking helps with the stress in the moment but increases anxiety so then you drink more to cope with increased stress and anxiety...

by stef25 5y ago

thesaintlives 5y ago

Dude that sounds horrible. I feel you. Keep up the fight and try to concentrate on what is really important, you and your family. I had one wife and two dogs, now I don't. The 'pandemic' most certainly accelerated that outcome. Stay positive!

DigitalSea 5y ago

I am so sorry. When we talk about collateral damage from the pandemic, nobody thinks of the parents who had their kids home for months. In Australia, the lockdowns were quite severe. My wife and I were aware that while we were suffering, our kids were too. Their lives were completely turned upside down. Sadly, kids lack the needed brain capacity to deal with emotions and serious changes in routine, so it compounds the stress. To top it all off, for us, we were renovating and being without a working kitchen, bathroom, toilet for months and weeks on end, it compounded things for us. I don't know how we survived or how others did. We live in an era where we are afforded the ability to have flexible working hours, starting early and finishing early. Or chopping/changing hours and days. Your colleagues were wrong to criticise you, the metric of performance should never be measured based on hours working, but the output and quality of your work. I once worked at a place where someone was fired because his number of commits was lower than the other developers. He was a brilliant developer and always got his work done. But apparently his commits were too small (he liked to lump a lot of things into commits, instead of several smaller ones). Did you end up finding another job?

stef25 5y ago
Thanks :) In all fairness, while the colleagues were assholes I was out of my depth at the job and there was no support so getting fired was the right solution. Money was never really an issue and I did start an awesome new job 2 months ago. And the kids are thriving. The only thing that would have made those 2 years worse is renovations! We've gone through 2 of those, luckily before the pandemic. So I very much feel your pain and hope it's all working out for you now.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
>I once worked at a place where someone was fired because his number of commits was lower than the other developers. He was a brilliant developer and always got his work done. But apparently his commits were too small (he liked to lump a lot of things into commits, instead of several smaller ones). Bloody hell, I can't imagine how dysfunctional other things must have been if this was allowed to happen without someone pointing out what a daft rationale for firing someone that is.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  Yeah, that right there is getting gold in the Olympics for "measuring the wrong thing".
  - wincy 5y ago
    My work tried measuring commits and PRs briefly as a metric. At the time I was doing a bunch of semi-automatic upgrading of repos with some tools is written for a substantial number of our micro services. So I looked about 300x more productive than the second most productive employee because I was batching hundreds of PRs using our GitHub API. It prompted the IT guy who was supposed to set up and demo the tool to higher ups come over and show it to me, we had a pretty good laugh. I like to think the absurdity of my numbers is what caused the idea to be scrapped.

simonh 5y ago

As with many disruptive events the impact and costs are extremely unevenly distributed. I first noticed this back in the 80s as a teenager here in the UK, we went through a horrible recession with mass unemployment. The 70s were no joke either, but my parents both had jobs which they kept, so we were fine. As it happens I had a great pandemic, we have a nice house with a garden backing on to a park and my kids are late teens. My heart goes out though, if it had hit us back when we lived in a small flat when the girls were little it would have been a whole different story. This is why, while I'm a free market capitalist at heart, I also fully support social welfare and one payer healthcare. I've been very lucky, but many aren't. The idea that all you have to do is work hard and be self reliant just doesn't take into account things that can happen to you that are completely out of your own control.

giantg2 5y ago

"And IMHO if you weren't at home with toddlers you didn't experience true suffering." Hahaha that's just life (laughing at the statement, not the situation). For the past few years, most days I get off of work and immediately have to start watching the kid for several hours while my wife works. Of course they're too young to do (safely watch) many of the chores or projects I have to do (mechanic work, handyman work, mow the lawn, etc). I get one day a week "off" to do all those chores and projects, although it's not unusual for part of that day or one or two of those days per month to require me to watch the kid too. I haven't gone fishing or participated in certain hobbies since the kid was born.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

I feel you, I ended up working from 8pm to 4am when my kindergartners were at home. I’d sleep until 10 (my partner got the kids up in the morning) and then watch them while my partner worked.

willcipriano 5y ago

I only have one kid, but similar situation for me. I learned something about jobs during this time. The effort and stress involved is not proportional to the pay. Some jobs are just hell and you can go next door and make the same thing in a pleasant environment. I ended up taking about half my skills off my resume. I'm no longer a full stack dev, I'm a backend engineer. I removed the stuff about DevOps and project/product management. Then when interviewing I found a role that paid the same as my previous job but required me to only wear one hat rather than 5 of them. Life is much better now.

datavirtue 5y ago
Yeah, I dialed back significantly and found that everyone was still super impressed. I approach everything gently and only work a few hours a day now to keep my energy and creativity up.
- p10_user 5y ago
  I’m very privileged to have the ability to work as little or as long as I want most days (within reason, and there’s always exceptions). I often still have trouble relaxing in the afternoon until the clock hits 5. But I spend much more time planning and thinking, which actually lets me get more done when I do work. Why are we fighting ourselves by trying to be creative after lunch when we should be taking a nap? I’m seriously considering getting a day bed for work.

j-bos 5y ago

Did your colleagues get jealous because you used the alternate schedule well or simply because you had an alternate schedule?

lkxijlewlf 5y ago
They got jealous because they're toxic dickheads. Who does that to people?
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  Hard to say without knowing their complaints. Not sure how I’d manage to be productive when collaborating with some of my team members if they were not there during Norma working hours but were there during the middle of the night. Offsets all requests and fixes from them by a day.
  - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
    Sounds more like a problem with how stories/tasks are split.
    - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
      Being part of a team means being part of a team and communication and connecting with the team to be a coherent whole, not just logging in and staring at your ticket todo list and not speaking to anyone.
      - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
        If you're blocked because you can't get an answer from a teammate within the next few hours, you're doing it wrong.
      - stef25 5y ago
        There were quite a lot of discussions about this. The one ticket that was the nail in my coffin was rewriting a a 2000 line function written by some guy who left years ago, full of if / else ladders in god damn Zend framework. Nobody could really explain what it was supposed to do. Calculate some commissions based on conditions x,y,z. The input was a CSV that nobody could give me an example of. Every time I talked to someone it was "Ok I have 2 min before my meeting what do you want". Because it was all remote work it was super easy to see who I contacted when in Slack and was info was communicated. Timestamps of all the commits. After a few days of trying and failing I just threw in the towel. It's not worth it.

sjg007 5y ago

Sounds like a bad job and even worse colleagues and a terrible manager. I found that alcohol just makes everything worse. Yes it relieves stress in the moment but that stress rebounds 2x the next day, then 3x the day after that and so forth compounding itself. Having young kids changes your sleep schedule. I am sorry your job treated you that way. I also tend to wake up at 4am-5am as I have kids. I just try to make it to 8 or ideally 9pm before I go to sleep. Also consult with a sleep doctor, alcohol acerbates sleep apnea which can cause poor sleep. Practice good sleep hygiene as best you can.

anonu 5y ago

> And I really enjoyed the 5 minutes between the pandemic and WWIII. I chuckled. I'm glad you still have your sense of humor. But from another perspective, yes, it's quite sad for humanity. I remind myself that disease and war were far more widespread in centuries past.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
This is how I compartmentalise the awful situations across the world, no matter how bad things get they were much worse in the past and we still managed to endure. I include a nuclear exchange with Russia and extreme climate change in this category because apparently humanity got down to as low as around 40 families at one point in our history which is about as close to extinction as you can get and still come back. The other side of this is that even though there was more bad things happening in the world in the past, the average person would have known about far fewer of them by virtue of lack of access to information. I don't feel shame in going days or even weeks ignoring the news sometimes because humans aren't built to mentally function with a 24 hour news cycle pumping a firehose of the world's doom and gloom into our heads, let alone psychologically manipulating us into scrolling past ads all day.
spookthesunset 5y ago
> I remind myself that disease Yes but no time in the past did we decide to prohibit people from working for more than a year. At no point in the past did we decide to keep kids out of school... If we didn't have zoom, we never would have done these lockdowns.

api 5y ago

It's impossible to describe to non-parents how high maintenance toddlers and very young children are. There are no words.

tallanvor 5y ago

> And IMHO if you weren't at home with toddlers you didn't experience true suffering. You're entitled to your opinion, but the lockdowns affected everyone differently. I know parents who thrived with their toddlers, but they didn't have the same issues at work where people were complaining about when they were working. But I also know people who's marriages ended due to longstanding issues that were magnified by being locked down. Some single people did fine. Some of us also turned more to alcohol to try and cope with the loneliness of having to work at home, not be able to go out, and in the worst of it not being allowed to gather with more than one or two other people.

lr4444lr 5y ago
> I know parents who thrived with their toddlers, With both spouses expected to continue full time working, and no child care coming in? Politely, I doubt it.
lampshades 5y ago
> I know parents who thrived with their toddlers Doubt. You just aren't hearing the war stories.

adnmcq999 5y ago

lampshades 5y ago

You sound like a variation of me. Right after lockdown I started a new job (that I really wanted) and had a toddler and a pregnant wife. I've always been a drinker, but my drinking started getting earlier and earlier in the day and I would go until bed. I'm also a marijuana smoker and I reverted back to my previous self of smoking from sun up to sun down. On top of my substance abuse issues, my wife had a rough pregnancy and didn't (feels like still doesn't) understand that if I'm WFH I still have a job and can't just take care of our kid at random times throughout the day, so I was trying to juggle my job and my wife's requests. It didn't get any better after our second was born, because my wife had PPD and now we had two children to deal with. Eventually I had to leave my job because I couldn't deal with it all and was missing deadlines and just not being performant. I'm terrified to go back to work because I know my wife isn't able to treat my job like a job and thinks I just have it easy sitting on a computer all day. The random requests might end, but her resentment for me won't and I'll have to hear about it all night when I get off. Hence, I doubt the substance abuse will stop anytime soon. To top it off, it is so damn difficult knowing that all these single people I work with, or married without children, have absolutely no idea what I'm going through and frankly they don't care. All in all, I agree, the last 2 years have been fucking rough, and I expect the following 2 to be rough as well. PS Your post triggered some venting I needed to express. I am happy with my life and wouldn't change it but it is still so fucking hard sometimes.

vxNsr 5y ago
Sounds like you should seek couples counseling. If you’re unable to find a way to explain to your wife how WFH should work, and your wife doesn’t or won’t understand it on her own, there are likely larger issues at play and a few sessions with someone who can mediate might help you guys.
spookthesunset 5y ago
> single people I work with, or married without children, have absolutely no idea what I'm going through and frankly they don't care Not only did they not care many of them actively shamed you for expressing your feelings. "I don't like it either but I'm just doing what the experts say" and "Are you an expert? No? Then stay in your lane!". What we did over the last two years is despicable.

antisinguIarity 5y ago

I'm so glad to hear these stories finally surfacing. I had a one-year-old and a pregnant wife when lockdowns started. It was absolutely brutal, as we both had full-time jobs, and obviously there was absolutely nowhere to go or no-one to turn to for help. It has most definitely coloured my opinions of the usefulness of lockdowns. One of the most dismaying long-term effects of what parents have been made to go through is what I consider the abrupt decline in acceptable parenting techniques - how many young kids have now been deliberately stuffed in front of a TV or given a tablet to keep them quiet, while parents try to hold down jobs? Part of what made our lives so hard was my refusal to do such things.

asdfjlkjt43tl 5y ago

[flagged]

asdfjlkjt43tl 5y ago

AlwaysRock 5y ago

It's a spiral as well. Drinking helps with the stress in the moment but increases anxiety so then you drink more to cope with increased stress and anxiety...