4 ms·

Mothers should be programmers

18 points by araneae 17y ago

mahmud 17y ago
Let's hope the kid stays asleep in 5 hour blocks, because that's how long my hacking runs go. Programming doesn't suit people who are constantly distracted; the way I cope with others' presence around me is to completely ignore them. I can have conversations for hours on end while I program and not remember any of it. I agree to things, laugh with jokes and listen attentively. All of it a facade, of course; I don't really care about others when hacking. Days run into each other sometimes and you have no idea what went in the world. I wouldn't do this when I have a baby, and I don't recommend it to new parents. Do marketing for 2-3 years, instead, and give that kid full attention when you go home.
- anonjon 17y ago
  That sounds more like being on a bad opium trip to me than programing (not that I've ever been on an opium trip...). I mean, sure I agree, in certain aspects of the job there is a level of concentration and 'state' that you have to maintain in your skull in order to be able to program properly. But a certain amount of the required 'state' can be alleviated by having a pad of paper next to your desk and writing everything down. The rest of it can be dealt with by writing code that has a simple and sensible structure. And honestly, the majority of my coding is mind-work. I don't have to sit at a computer for 5 hours to be thinking about that piece of code I'm going to write. One I have read the right documentation and I have figured out what the problem is, I normally need a bit of time for it to gel, then I type it into the machine. I think the point of the post was that new mothers need time to bond with their infant. 'Doing marketing' for 2-3 years instead implies to me that they are working the 9-5 grind (which a programmer can theoretically avoid). Which misses the point entirely... There's no reason you can't sit at the computer with the baby right next to you.
bugs 17y ago
This is reasoning that programmers can be mothers not that mothers should be programmers. But one main problem is when children are young mothers are much more likely to be tired or worn out running on little sleep and probably have less time/will to work on complicated problems
- justinhj 17y ago
  You've never looked after a baby have you? Going to work in the morning feels like going on vacation.
  - colomon 17y ago
    That's because you're leaving the house and getting away from a constant distraction. This is exactly why trying to work from home at the same time you are being a stay-from-home-parent is incredibly hard. Believe me, I've tried doing programming work during periods while watching our young son, and it is nigh impossible to do any heavy duty work unless he is sleeping. Writing one-line unit tests is doable. Debugging complicated code is just barely possible if you are lucky. Breaking new ground is downright impossible. I suspect the author of the original post is not actually a mother...
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Get a nanny.
      - bumblebird 17y ago
        I'd disagree. Just learn to use time better. When you're feeding a baby, think over problems. When baby's asleep, code them up. When you have less time to hack, you tend to use it more efficiently (I've worked at home most of the time my youngest 2 were babies). I can't imagine having had a nanny and missed out on all that bonding, fun, and awesomeness that is baby/toddlers. (Not to mention things like my son puking up a full bottle of milk straight onto the keyboard of my laptop - I was feeding him and coding at the same time, which was probably a bad idea).
        tptacek 17y ago
        You can absolutely do both things: have a nanny, and bond with your infant. Work from home, and use the nanny to keep the kid out of your hair when you need to focus. Of course, no nanny costs more than the most junior developer makes. I'm not sure how toddler awesomeness is relevant to the discussion. Nobody's offering a free lunch. But there clearly are jackasses who don't want to hire women because they think maternity leave is going to screw them.
joshuarodd 17y ago
I work as a senior-level programmer/analyst for a mid-sized private university. My workday normally starts around 7:45 AM. On a good day, I leave for home around 7 PM. Sometimes I get to leave "early" by 6 PM. I usually break for about 1 hour (or less) at lunch time. I do not wear T-shirts or tennis shoes to work. There is one other programmer who does; his contract has not been extended past the end of this December. I do work from home, but only because I don't get all of my work done between 7:45 AM - 7 PM when I'm at the office. I could not use an OLPC formatted with Breezy for my work. I use a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 4GB of RAM, and I still find my computer is too slow and doesn't have enough RAM to, for example, run more than a few VMs at once. I do often work from 2 AM - 4 AM at home when inspiration strikes and I cannot sleep. One reason for this is the lack of distractions at this time of night: my wife is in bed sleeping and there are no coworkers to stop by and try to chat. However, I could not work from home and satisfy my job duties. There are too many times when I need to work in person with, for example, a professor having trouble with one of the programs I've written, or go to a meeting with the deans of some of the schools at my university. I also don't have sufficient bandwidth at home to work satisfactorily. I often do tasks where I need a 100Mbit or 1000Mbit pipe to my workstation; a 10Mbit connection is not sufficient. (For this same reason, I don't sit outside on the commons and work on my laptop wirelessly.) Because of these reasons, I have chosen not to have children at this point in time, as I don't feel I could adequately give them the time and attention they deserve. It would be really nice to take off a few months of time to spend with my wife & my family, and have my job guaranteed when I choose to return, but that is simply not an option I have. (For the geeky amongst you, the thing I do that needs bandwidth is mostly using TNS for running PL/SQL; running TNS over a 10Mbit WAN is frustrating at best, and completely useless at worst. It is not suited towards dealing with terabyte-sized data sets.)
- bugs 17y ago
  I must say you are most definitely the normal programmer and if that truly is your workday it is insane.
  - joshuarodd 17y ago
    The 10 1/2 hour workday is surprisingly common in several departments here; I'm not sure how the fact that an academic environment is bureaucratic, even for staff programmers, makes me a "normal programmer".
bumblebird 17y ago
There's nothing stopping them is there. Any mother that wants to program can, and they can easily find work to do at home. The fact is though that most mothers aren't interested in programming :/ Something that doesn't really need 'fixing' (Because it's up to them what their interests are).
jlm382 17y ago
It's almost a little sad to hear that having a child brings down a woman's ability to go into a good working profession... running a startup takes a long time, and many founders end up having kids in the midst of all the action. (Evan Williams just had a child a few months back...) but women don't have that fortune. I was speaking to a female VC a few weeks ago on being a professional and having kids. She told me flat out not to think about having kids until my thirties (if ever), because it's the only way. And even then, it's going to take a crap load of time away from your job.
- tptacek 17y ago
  VC's make poor company operations advisors, and even poorer family planners. Women delay having kids because men expect priority treatment for their careers, and so make inadequate concessions to child care (or standard of living). Here's a news flash: if you're an entrepreneur, your life will be no more or less accomodating to children when you're 35 than it is now.
zby 17y ago
I now babysit my daughter and hack on some Open Source projects. When she is playing she likes to have my attention, when I sit at the computer she would come and show that she wants that I take her on my hands, I can read Hacker News or something but usually I can do programming only when she is asleep which is now two times a day about 1/2 - 1 hour, and often she gets asleep when we are on the daily walk - then this 1/2 hour of my time is lost. Then there is feeding her and cooking for me and my partner, and cleaning, usually I can do some cooking when she is awake but it's not very effective work. Not much time is left, maybe in the evening.
- niels_olson 17y ago
  This is a great observation. I watched my (then) 4 and 1 year-old kids the summer after my first year of med school. It took me about 2 days to decide it was time to install this operating system called Linux I'd heard about. I could read while they were awake, but could only dive deeper when they were asleep, which was not much time at all. So I agree with you, and I'll up that to say that things don't really get easier as they get older, because they sleep less. You'd think the older they get, the more time you'd have, but, at least at 4 and 7, it really just means they can climb higher, fall further, hit harder, and break bigger things.
Dove 17y ago
It's a decent idea in principle, but I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. I can think of two problems. The first is distraction. When I am working on a difficult problem, it's true that I often need periods of inane distraction interspersed with periods of extreme focus. In theory, taking care of a child and hacking could be combined; where I go for walks or play video games now, I could be playing patty-cake. But those breaks need to occur when I intellectually need them, not when the baby needs them. When I am madly coding something I understand well, I very much need to avoid distraction. When I am mulling over something I don't understand, I very much need to embrace it. So I suspect this would not work well in practice. A second problem arises from simple physical compromise. I am presently seven months pregnant, and--much as the admission grates on me--I have found my performance slipping throughout. Sometimes because I am tired, sometimes because I am forgetful, sometimes because I am more excited about the coming baby than the current project, sometimes because half a dozen random things are wrong with me physically and discomfort is . . . distracting. I had hoped to keep working at full capacity, and while I've kept working full time, I have to be honest: I haven't been as effective as I once was. Where I used to produce a couple brilliant ideas a day, now it's more like one or two a week. I don't see that improving just after the trauma of birth, during the subsequent hormonal adjustment, and what with the excitement and distraction of having a baby around. Programming is an activity that depends so much on mental sharpness; where caffeine and sugar are performance-enhancing drugs, insomnia and strange hormones are remarkably destructive. On a bad day, I can spend 8 hours not-quite-achieving what should be half an hour's work. Mundane programming I can usually still do, but great hacks? Not so often anymore. Nor do I see them recurring with regularity for a while. No doubt about it, being a mother is a sacrifice intellectually. All indications are that it's well worth it, and I wouldn't do otherwise. But it strikes me as unrealistic to suggest that it's a light side-activity that one can casually combine with a serious commitment to work. Even very intellectual work.
- DaniFong 17y ago
  Very good points, I suspect that programming and other forms of concentrated work will require a phase shift in order to continue a high level of productivity, and the type of productivity won't be the same. But, as DHH of 37signals points out, people don't typically use their hours well anyway. If raising a child left only two hours a day to work, that's still 10 hours during the week -- as much time as DHH spent coding basecamp and rails his first year. If you add to that time you can spend planning, communicating, and thinking about the problem (to fill the time when you're more likely to be interrupted) you can optimize those few hours even further. So far as I can tell, this is the pattern my mother used while she was caring for me and working her way through journalism school. I had colic. But she'd do her interviews in the intervening time, and she'd collect all the information she needed, and wrote fragments she wanted to include. When she got the chance, she sat down and wrote the whole article in a single sitting. PS: Thanks for being part of this community. I started to read your comment page, and you've contributed many wonderful insights I've had to copy to remember for later :-)
pbiggar 17y ago
I had a very similar thought. Programming is very enjoyable in the same way that puzzle solving is. There are millions of people out there who enjoy puzzles, evidenced by the popularity of Sudoku and those Nintendo DS "brain games". If you put the two together, you end up with millions of housewives programming. New book from O'Reilly: Hacking for Housewives.
tptacek 17y ago
The reason maternity leave is so long, and results in so many women never coming back, is because of breastfeeding and bonding. The physical trauma of childbirth doesn't last that long, and some women won't want to breastfeed, but pretty much all women will be bonding with their infants. So what? Both men and women bond with their infants. One, the other, or both will inevitably sacrifice bonding for income. Women with full time jobs who want their kids breastfed, pump. Why do women need special arrangements to rejoin the workforce? Doesn't that simply perpetuate the gender discrimination we already have in the industry? It is unlawful to discriminate against female candidates because they might take maternity leave. It's also stupid: whether they take formal leave or not, the performance of a new father is going to plummet as well. Let's leave it at that.
Mz 17y ago
This piece only talks about the needs of the new mom and neglects to address reasons why the company should feel motivated to be accommodating. That's like asking for a raise because you need money rather than because you bring more value to the company than you used to. Here are a few reasons companies should make an effort to accommodate the needs of moms: Diversity. A diverse workforce is a strength for a company. Excluding moms would cause a weakness in the corporate culture which may go entirely unrecognized, even if it ultimately helps contribute to the failure of the company. One thing this particular form of diversity could help address: The fact that females play games a lot less than males as well as generally have less interest in a variety of tech products. If there were more women and mothers in programming, the odds are good that apps would be designed in a way which appealed more to the female market than many of them currently do. Company policies that are friendly to moms and their kids tend to also be better climates for anyone who can't make it on "traditional" terms of success. Finding an effective means to accommodate the rather large issue of motherhood would tend to automatically create a company culture and set of policies that resolved many lesser issues with little or no additional effort. Happy workers who don't hate some aspect of their job are generally going to do a better job. If the working climate is vastly superior to that of your competitors, you will likely also garner high levels of employee loyalty and a lower turnover rate. Lower turnover pays dividends in many ways, well beyond just the obvious savings of not having to spend so much time and money on the hiring process.

18 points by araneae 17y ago

Let's hope the kid stays asleep in 5 hour blocks, because that's how long my hacking runs go. Programming doesn't suit people who are constantly distracted; the way I cope with others' presence around me is to completely ignore them. I can have conversations for hours on end while I program and not remember any of it. I agree to things, laugh with jokes and listen attentively. All of it a facade, of course; I don't really care about others when hacking. Days run into each other sometimes and you have no idea what went in the world. I wouldn't do this when I have a baby, and I don't recommend it to new parents. Do marketing for 2-3 years, instead, and give that kid full attention when you go home.

anonjon 17y ago
That sounds more like being on a bad opium trip to me than programing (not that I've ever been on an opium trip...). I mean, sure I agree, in certain aspects of the job there is a level of concentration and 'state' that you have to maintain in your skull in order to be able to program properly. But a certain amount of the required 'state' can be alleviated by having a pad of paper next to your desk and writing everything down. The rest of it can be dealt with by writing code that has a simple and sensible structure. And honestly, the majority of my coding is mind-work. I don't have to sit at a computer for 5 hours to be thinking about that piece of code I'm going to write. One I have read the right documentation and I have figured out what the problem is, I normally need a bit of time for it to gel, then I type it into the machine. I think the point of the post was that new mothers need time to bond with their infant. 'Doing marketing' for 2-3 years instead implies to me that they are working the 9-5 grind (which a programmer can theoretically avoid). Which misses the point entirely... There's no reason you can't sit at the computer with the baby right next to you.

bugs 17y ago

This is reasoning that programmers can be mothers not that mothers should be programmers. But one main problem is when children are young mothers are much more likely to be tired or worn out running on little sleep and probably have less time/will to work on complicated problems

justinhj 17y ago
You've never looked after a baby have you? Going to work in the morning feels like going on vacation.
- colomon 17y ago
  That's because you're leaving the house and getting away from a constant distraction. This is exactly why trying to work from home at the same time you are being a stay-from-home-parent is incredibly hard. Believe me, I've tried doing programming work during periods while watching our young son, and it is nigh impossible to do any heavy duty work unless he is sleeping. Writing one-line unit tests is doable. Debugging complicated code is just barely possible if you are lucky. Breaking new ground is downright impossible. I suspect the author of the original post is not actually a mother...
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Get a nanny.
    - bumblebird 17y ago
      I'd disagree. Just learn to use time better. When you're feeding a baby, think over problems. When baby's asleep, code them up. When you have less time to hack, you tend to use it more efficiently (I've worked at home most of the time my youngest 2 were babies). I can't imagine having had a nanny and missed out on all that bonding, fun, and awesomeness that is baby/toddlers. (Not to mention things like my son puking up a full bottle of milk straight onto the keyboard of my laptop - I was feeding him and coding at the same time, which was probably a bad idea).
      - tptacek 17y ago
        You can absolutely do both things: have a nanny, and bond with your infant. Work from home, and use the nanny to keep the kid out of your hair when you need to focus. Of course, no nanny costs more than the most junior developer makes. I'm not sure how toddler awesomeness is relevant to the discussion. Nobody's offering a free lunch. But there clearly are jackasses who don't want to hire women because they think maternity leave is going to screw them.

joshuarodd 17y ago

I work as a senior-level programmer/analyst for a mid-sized private university. My workday normally starts around 7:45 AM. On a good day, I leave for home around 7 PM. Sometimes I get to leave "early" by 6 PM. I usually break for about 1 hour (or less) at lunch time. I do not wear T-shirts or tennis shoes to work. There is one other programmer who does; his contract has not been extended past the end of this December. I do work from home, but only because I don't get all of my work done between 7:45 AM - 7 PM when I'm at the office. I could not use an OLPC formatted with Breezy for my work. I use a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 4GB of RAM, and I still find my computer is too slow and doesn't have enough RAM to, for example, run more than a few VMs at once. I do often work from 2 AM - 4 AM at home when inspiration strikes and I cannot sleep. One reason for this is the lack of distractions at this time of night: my wife is in bed sleeping and there are no coworkers to stop by and try to chat. However, I could not work from home and satisfy my job duties. There are too many times when I need to work in person with, for example, a professor having trouble with one of the programs I've written, or go to a meeting with the deans of some of the schools at my university. I also don't have sufficient bandwidth at home to work satisfactorily. I often do tasks where I need a 100Mbit or 1000Mbit pipe to my workstation; a 10Mbit connection is not sufficient. (For this same reason, I don't sit outside on the commons and work on my laptop wirelessly.) Because of these reasons, I have chosen not to have children at this point in time, as I don't feel I could adequately give them the time and attention they deserve. It would be really nice to take off a few months of time to spend with my wife & my family, and have my job guaranteed when I choose to return, but that is simply not an option I have. (For the geeky amongst you, the thing I do that needs bandwidth is mostly using TNS for running PL/SQL; running TNS over a 10Mbit WAN is frustrating at best, and completely useless at worst. It is not suited towards dealing with terabyte-sized data sets.)

bugs 17y ago
I must say you are most definitely the normal programmer and if that truly is your workday it is insane.
- joshuarodd 17y ago
  The 10 1/2 hour workday is surprisingly common in several departments here; I'm not sure how the fact that an academic environment is bureaucratic, even for staff programmers, makes me a "normal programmer".

bumblebird 17y ago

There's nothing stopping them is there. Any mother that wants to program can, and they can easily find work to do at home. The fact is though that most mothers aren't interested in programming :/ Something that doesn't really need 'fixing' (Because it's up to them what their interests are).

jlm382 17y ago

It's almost a little sad to hear that having a child brings down a woman's ability to go into a good working profession... running a startup takes a long time, and many founders end up having kids in the midst of all the action. (Evan Williams just had a child a few months back...) but women don't have that fortune. I was speaking to a female VC a few weeks ago on being a professional and having kids. She told me flat out not to think about having kids until my thirties (if ever), because it's the only way. And even then, it's going to take a crap load of time away from your job.

tptacek 17y ago
VC's make poor company operations advisors, and even poorer family planners. Women delay having kids because men expect priority treatment for their careers, and so make inadequate concessions to child care (or standard of living). Here's a news flash: if you're an entrepreneur, your life will be no more or less accomodating to children when you're 35 than it is now.

zby 17y ago

I now babysit my daughter and hack on some Open Source projects. When she is playing she likes to have my attention, when I sit at the computer she would come and show that she wants that I take her on my hands, I can read Hacker News or something but usually I can do programming only when she is asleep which is now two times a day about 1/2 - 1 hour, and often she gets asleep when we are on the daily walk - then this 1/2 hour of my time is lost. Then there is feeding her and cooking for me and my partner, and cleaning, usually I can do some cooking when she is awake but it's not very effective work. Not much time is left, maybe in the evening.

niels_olson 17y ago
This is a great observation. I watched my (then) 4 and 1 year-old kids the summer after my first year of med school. It took me about 2 days to decide it was time to install this operating system called Linux I'd heard about. I could read while they were awake, but could only dive deeper when they were asleep, which was not much time at all. So I agree with you, and I'll up that to say that things don't really get easier as they get older, because they sleep less. You'd think the older they get, the more time you'd have, but, at least at 4 and 7, it really just means they can climb higher, fall further, hit harder, and break bigger things.

Dove 17y ago

It's a decent idea in principle, but I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. I can think of two problems. The first is distraction. When I am working on a difficult problem, it's true that I often need periods of inane distraction interspersed with periods of extreme focus. In theory, taking care of a child and hacking could be combined; where I go for walks or play video games now, I could be playing patty-cake. But those breaks need to occur when I intellectually need them, not when the baby needs them. When I am madly coding something I understand well, I very much need to avoid distraction. When I am mulling over something I don't understand, I very much need to embrace it. So I suspect this would not work well in practice. A second problem arises from simple physical compromise. I am presently seven months pregnant, and--much as the admission grates on me--I have found my performance slipping throughout. Sometimes because I am tired, sometimes because I am forgetful, sometimes because I am more excited about the coming baby than the current project, sometimes because half a dozen random things are wrong with me physically and discomfort is . . . distracting. I had hoped to keep working at full capacity, and while I've kept working full time, I have to be honest: I haven't been as effective as I once was. Where I used to produce a couple brilliant ideas a day, now it's more like one or two a week. I don't see that improving just after the trauma of birth, during the subsequent hormonal adjustment, and what with the excitement and distraction of having a baby around. Programming is an activity that depends so much on mental sharpness; where caffeine and sugar are performance-enhancing drugs, insomnia and strange hormones are remarkably destructive. On a bad day, I can spend 8 hours not-quite-achieving what should be half an hour's work. Mundane programming I can usually still do, but great hacks? Not so often anymore. Nor do I see them recurring with regularity for a while. No doubt about it, being a mother is a sacrifice intellectually. All indications are that it's well worth it, and I wouldn't do otherwise. But it strikes me as unrealistic to suggest that it's a light side-activity that one can casually combine with a serious commitment to work. Even very intellectual work.

DaniFong 17y ago
Very good points, I suspect that programming and other forms of concentrated work will require a phase shift in order to continue a high level of productivity, and the type of productivity won't be the same. But, as DHH of 37signals points out, people don't typically use their hours well anyway. If raising a child left only two hours a day to work, that's still 10 hours during the week -- as much time as DHH spent coding basecamp and rails his first year. If you add to that time you can spend planning, communicating, and thinking about the problem (to fill the time when you're more likely to be interrupted) you can optimize those few hours even further. So far as I can tell, this is the pattern my mother used while she was caring for me and working her way through journalism school. I had colic. But she'd do her interviews in the intervening time, and she'd collect all the information she needed, and wrote fragments she wanted to include. When she got the chance, she sat down and wrote the whole article in a single sitting. PS: Thanks for being part of this community. I started to read your comment page, and you've contributed many wonderful insights I've had to copy to remember for later :-)

pbiggar 17y ago

I had a very similar thought. Programming is very enjoyable in the same way that puzzle solving is. There are millions of people out there who enjoy puzzles, evidenced by the popularity of Sudoku and those Nintendo DS "brain games". If you put the two together, you end up with millions of housewives programming. New book from O'Reilly: Hacking for Housewives.

tptacek 17y ago

The reason maternity leave is so long, and results in so many women never coming back, is because of breastfeeding and bonding. The physical trauma of childbirth doesn't last that long, and some women won't want to breastfeed, but pretty much all women will be bonding with their infants. So what? Both men and women bond with their infants. One, the other, or both will inevitably sacrifice bonding for income. Women with full time jobs who want their kids breastfed, pump. Why do women need special arrangements to rejoin the workforce? Doesn't that simply perpetuate the gender discrimination we already have in the industry? It is unlawful to discriminate against female candidates because they might take maternity leave. It's also stupid: whether they take formal leave or not, the performance of a new father is going to plummet as well. Let's leave it at that.

Mz 17y ago

This piece only talks about the needs of the new mom and neglects to address reasons why the company should feel motivated to be accommodating. That's like asking for a raise because you need money rather than because you bring more value to the company than you used to. Here are a few reasons companies should make an effort to accommodate the needs of moms: Diversity. A diverse workforce is a strength for a company. Excluding moms would cause a weakness in the corporate culture which may go entirely unrecognized, even if it ultimately helps contribute to the failure of the company. One thing this particular form of diversity could help address: The fact that females play games a lot less than males as well as generally have less interest in a variety of tech products. If there were more women and mothers in programming, the odds are good that apps would be designed in a way which appealed more to the female market than many of them currently do. Company policies that are friendly to moms and their kids tend to also be better climates for anyone who can't make it on "traditional" terms of success. Finding an effective means to accommodate the rather large issue of motherhood would tend to automatically create a company culture and set of policies that resolved many lesser issues with little or no additional effort. Happy workers who don't hate some aspect of their job are generally going to do a better job. If the working climate is vastly superior to that of your competitors, you will likely also garner high levels of employee loyalty and a lower turnover rate. Lower turnover pays dividends in many ways, well beyond just the obvious savings of not having to spend so much time and money on the hiring process.