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Preach! Bryan Cantrill (inventor of DTrace and cofounder of Oxide Computer) comes to mind as someone who seems to do both. It’s hard to know somebody’s parenti

Preach! Bryan Cantrill (inventor of DTrace and cofounder of Oxide Computer) comes to mind as someone who seems to do both. It’s hard to know somebody’s parenting quality from the outside, but he talks about his kids a lot. In his case, I think he didn’t start his company until his kids were older. I’m not sure what the early childhood years were like for him.

bcantrill 1mo ago
Wow, thanks for that shout out! When we started Oxide in 2019[0], my kids were 15, 12, and 7, so out of those time-consuming younger years. But when we started Fishworks[1] inside of Sun in 2006, that 15-year-old (now nearly 22) was not yet 3 -- and his brother and sister were still in the future. Point being: I worked plenty hard with young kids. More generally, I have always believed that the choice between work and parenting is broadly a false dichotomy (especially in our domain and age, which affords quite a bit of flexibility). In my role as a parent, I served on the board of the kids preschool (hello, SOMACC!); I was the president of the elementary school PTA (originally called the Mothers' Club!); I led the kids' Cub Scout Den (hardest parenting job no question); I coached baseball several times over; and I have been (and still am!) the scoutmaster of the kids' Scout troop. These experiences were all time consuming (and truthfully, there were moments with each of them when I wondered what I had signed up for!) -- but they also made my life richer, and that very much includes my professional life. There are many dimensions of this, but to take one very concrete example: anyone who is familiar with scouting will see an echo in Oxide's values[2] -- but a subtler influence can be found in our hiring materials[3], the open-ended questions of which coming from an adult training that I did in 2017. I won't profess to the quality of my parenting (it's... really hard), but it's something that I've certainly spent a lot of time on -- and it has paid surprising dividends to my professional life. [0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-computer-company/ https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co... [1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-be-told/ https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can... [2] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002 [3] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003

bcantrill 1mo ago

Wow, thanks for that shout out! When we started Oxide in 2019[0], my kids were 15, 12, and 7, so out of those time-consuming younger years. But when we started Fishworks[1] inside of Sun in 2006, that 15-year-old (now nearly 22) was not yet 3 -- and his brother and sister were still in the future. Point being: I worked plenty hard with young kids. More generally, I have always believed that the choice between work and parenting is broadly a false dichotomy (especially in our domain and age, which affords quite a bit of flexibility). In my role as a parent, I served on the board of the kids preschool (hello, SOMACC!); I was the president of the elementary school PTA (originally called the Mothers' Club!); I led the kids' Cub Scout Den (hardest parenting job no question); I coached baseball several times over; and I have been (and still am!) the scoutmaster of the kids' Scout troop. These experiences were all time consuming (and truthfully, there were moments with each of them when I wondered what I had signed up for!) -- but they also made my life richer, and that very much includes my professional life. There are many dimensions of this, but to take one very concrete example: anyone who is familiar with scouting will see an echo in Oxide's values[2] -- but a subtler influence can be found in our hiring materials[3], the open-ended questions of which coming from an adult training that I did in 2017. I won't profess to the quality of my parenting (it's... really hard), but it's something that I've certainly spent a lot of time on -- and it has paid surprising dividends to my professional life. [0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-computer-company/ https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co... [1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-be-told/ https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can... [2] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002 [3] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003