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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."
I used to work at startups and I currently work at the in-house development department for a major HMO (it's a big department, like 3500 people). The work itself hasn't changed a whole lot, but the expectations about hours certainly have -- at my current job, we're not relying on the next release to stay alive so there isn't a constant scramble to push product out the door. I've found, incidently, that this suits me much better than high-pressure 90 hour work weeks.
You might expect that sort of job to pay less, but it actually doesn't. Sure, I'm not going to become suddenly rich off stock options, but who does these days?
My advice would be to look for a job like mine -- someplace stable and with reasonable expectations when it comes to the hours you work. That's going to be someplace big and probably someplace in a industry where software/hardware isn't the big money-maker. Be sure they know your priorities; an interviewer at the sort of company you're looking for will respect a commitment to family. After all, these sorts of people are looking for *you* to be stable, too...
Aside from that: Kudos to the author for realizing that his kids are more important than the software release. Bringing home the bacon is important, but it ain't everything -- When I was with the startups, all of the parents just dumped their kids into daycare and with babysitters a week after they were born -- our sales VP probably spent a week total of waking time with his new daughter over the course of a year. Bet he felt really good about that when the place went under...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
Just because it's possible to have "unplanned death marches." in the software world doesn't meant that you should have too. In fact, if you do it'll probably mean that the software you write won't be adequately tested before it's deployed.
Anyway, you shouldn't have to stand for that crap. If you're team is slipping behind deadlines, it's the managers fault, not yours. Asking you to sacrifice your social/family life because of someone else's fuckups is ridiculous.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I've been programming for about 13 years now, the last three of them as a parent. This has been compounded by the fact that my wife is even less of a stay-at-home mom than I am a stay-at-home dad. The truth is that it's workable, if somewhat demanding. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Tagteam the kids. Take turns keeping them distracted while the other one gets stuff done. This gets much easier after they start to walk, although you REALLY have to childproof your home if you're going to get any programming done while they're keeping themselves busy.
2. If your boss would fire you over putting your family over your job, you need to find a different boss. As long as it isn't a continual parade of parental interruptions, most employers are entirely understanding when family life interrupts.
3. Encourage your employer to use a better management technique (for instance Scrum), which doesn't encourage forced death marches to make up for bad planning. Programming is a demanding field, but if your employer expects you to wreck your health over a deadline, then they're doing something wrong, not you.
4. Don't expect to be a perfect parent. Perfect parents don't really exist because parenting is always a tradeoff between overmanaging your children (in which case they don't learn) and letting them run too freely (in which case they get hurt). If you have ANYTHING to do besides parenting then you will have to juggle that priority in with that balancing act. If you don't have anything to do besides parenting, then it isn't likely that you'll have the perspective necessary to make healthy decisions.
On the other hand, programming trains you for parenting pretty well. The long sleepless nights, the time spent explaining very simple things to really stoopid people, and the ability to tune out the rest of the world all really help when dealing with children.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Steve McConnell wrote about this in his book After the Gold Rush, in a chapter entitled "Orphans Preferred". He slams the heroic crunch coding style of programming and gives his ideas for a saner, more professional, development process.
Both my wife and I are very senior engineers, with over 20 years programming experience each. We have two kids, 13 and 9 (both girls).
It really helps to have understanding managers - ideally, managers who are parents themselves. I would not want to be at startup where the life of the company depends on deathmarch mode work - in fact I turned down several such jobs during the bubble specifically to avoid that.
One thing that helps a lot is that we're both pretty damn well paid (~$250k total). This means that we could buy very good day care when that was needed, and hire sitters/minders to stay with the kids during summer vacation.
Try looking for a situation where the boss doesnt care what your actual hours are, so long as the major milestones get hit each month. This works better when you are not in a big team - you can pretty well set your own hours.
In sum, it can be done, but not at a startup which expects to own you 24/7.
Ah, what corporation are you working at? As a consultant, I have seen many, many organizations, both large and small, with asinine deadlines and unrealistic schedules.
My present client (Fortune 500 company) doesn't just have asinine deadlines, they change the criteria of success to meet the missed deadlines.
I travel for a living. I only see my 10 month-old son on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays. But, I see him all day long each of those days. I would suggest that the soon-to-be Dad not focus on the size of the company he works for, but he focus on what kind of benefits they offer and what kind of balance they have between work and life.