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Parenting and a Career in Coding?
el topher asks: "After 5+ years of being married, my wife and I have been blessed by her becoming pregnant. I've professionally been a programmer for a while now and am now concerned that commercial software development is not a good job for a dad to have. Thinking back on all the software development groups I've been in, it seems most of the coders were not parents, and the coders that were parents seemed to have trouble with things like dealing with unplanned death marches and not being there for their family. So my question to the programmers with kids out there: How does a programming career jive with family life? I'd especially like to hear about parents who have been coding for a while and the situations in this area they've faced."
feel luckey you got a girl to have sex with you.... dont worry about the rest...
... for the first 3 years:, but then my kid learned vb and started writing windows security patches.
Was i the only one thinking "el topher (Score:5, Married)" when reading this?
I remember when my kids were infants, everyone warned us of the "terrible twos", meaning that when the became two years old they would be hard to manage.
What they didn't mention was that things would only get worse from there.
So **WHY** are you asking Slashdot?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Nathan, you forgot to vacuum the hallway. Get down here. -His Dad
I also worked for a large non-profit health care company (as an attorney, not a programmer, but the observations are still applicable) and I'll tell you that the sisters could drive a harder bargain business-wise than many MBAs. There was nothing more relaxed about that work environment compared to a for-profit corporation. Plus, you always had to worry about your increased chances of going to hell if you forgot to put the cover sheets on your memos.
The worst problem I have with our new infant is figuring out how to program it.
No matter what I try, it initiates functions apparently at random. (I suspect it may have a faulty timing crystal.)
Worse, it appears to have a both a defective interpreter and a memory leak. Most of what I tell it, it doesn't seem to parse correctly; and what it does parse correctly, it appears to forget almost immediately.
I'm thinking maybe it's time to call in a consultant...
and my daughter is 2.5
Well, one thing's for sure - being a father hasn't taken away any of your geekiness ^_^
...how did you take a career in software development and become a parent?
I remember when my kids were infants, everyone warned us of the "terrible twos", meaning that when the became two years old they would be hard to manage.
Being a programmer myself, I'll simply count my child's age in binary. That way he'll go straight from 1 to 10, completely bypassing the problem area you're describing.
As a nifty side-effect, he'll also skip those terrible teenage years, and go straight into being a senior citizen before he attends kindergarten.