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Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

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Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

#51

Post by achou »

I'm a founder looking for ways to make my next startup family-friendly. I'm a parent of two sons in SF so I know what it's like. A grab bag of ideas so far:

- Allow parents to bring babies to work (0-6mo)

- Locate in suburbs where parents live instead of in the city

- Hire remote employees who work from home

- Establish a culture of taking an office break around 4-5pm then resume at 8pm for a couple hours

- Do social events during the day instead of after hours

- Suspend email delivery certain hours, such as 4-8pm, and on weekends until Sunday afternoon

- Same as above for real-time chat for most employees (some exceptions for things like sales)

- As an exception to above, have on-call schedules planned way in advance

- Flexibility on holidays to help synchronize with school schedules

Other thoughts?

Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

#52

Post by ashark »

linkregister wrote: post #17

As your kids get older, and especially when they enter school, a large part of the evening will be spent by them doing homework. Their weekends will be spent more with friends and doing activities (organized sports, etc). You'll have more time to yourself. In the meantime, enjoy your family time because your kids won't always want to spend all their free time with you (they'll have friends and hobbies to compete with…

Note that 30 minutes/day is a much bigger commitment for a parent of young kids than other people. I've run the numbers in posts on here before, but the TL;DR is that you've got ~28 hrs of kid-free (and non-work/commute) time a week without cutting into sleep, but before taking out unavoidable activities (prepping for the next day, cleaning, spouse time) that's likely to eat at least half of it. So 30min/day is like 25% of your kinda-halfway-free time if you're sleeping 8hrs, unless you get creative and multi-task with it somehow—maybe you go running with friends so you get some face-time with them while exercising, for instance, though not everyone has that particular option for various reasons. And of course you can always take it out of kid-time, say by "working" 30 minutes longer but taking a workout break during the day.

There's a reason parents tend to get fatter, aside from just aging. :-/

Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

#53

Post by buf »

I was the CTO of a series-A backed startup. My entire life changed when I had my kid, and I decided to quit my job and live cheaply in eastern Europe for about 6 months. You can read about it here: https://medium.com/@buf/experimenting-with-retirement-ef6ab0... tl;dr - I retired, and it was amazing.

Since, I've come back to the States and I think I've figured out a good balance. I work remotely now, so I can spend time with the family and watch the kid grow daily. Sure, I won't be a CTO anymore the next few years, but it gives me time to take on a reasonable amount of work.

I think I'll do this for a few more years.

Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

#54

Post by abeyer »

I know that everyone's situation is different, but I really don't get people who accept that kind of commute time unless it's something you want or you have no other options. (I know people who like to drive and get their only "alone time" in the car on the commute, so it works for them, but they tend to be the exception.)

If you value your time at $100/hr (probably low end of the spectrum for a skilled dev in most of the US), that comes to an opportunity cost of $4,000/month you're losing to driving back and forth. And that doesn't even start to account for the actual costs of driving, nor the mental energy of dealing with doing it. (I want to bang my head against the steering wheel after 30 mins in traffic, and then spend at least twice as long decompressing and not productive after that.)

I know that's very different than $4k cash for most people, but it's worth thinking about

Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

#56

Post by jshaqaw »

achou wrote: post #51

I'm a founder looking for ways to make my next startup family-friendly. I'm a parent of two sons in SF so I know what it's like. A grab bag of ideas so far: - Allow parents to bring babies to work (0-6mo) - Locate in suburbs where parents live instead of in the city - Hire remote employees who work from home - Establish a culture of taking an office break around 4-5pm then resume at 8pm for a couple hours - Do social…

Living in the city means no commute which means lots more quality time mornings and evenings

Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

#57

Post by dyarosla »

johngorse wrote: post #9
dyarosla wrote: post #3

Just a comment on your side project: replacing the font would help tremendously. Super hard to read through listings in a font not suited for legibility.

Tnx for suggestion. I did a change. More like it or do you have any concrete suggestion about font?

Definitely better. Next suggestion would be to decrease spacing between each header and its details below, as well as minimize the number of font sizes you have (your by line and your tags lines are 1.5em and 1.6em, your header is another size and it also differs from the number size on the left of it). These things are more stylistic design choices, whereas the font type was definitely a usability concern.

Personally I would pick a font that is less vertically stretched, but again, stylistic choice at this point.

Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

#58

Post by maccard »

godot wrote: post #42

Having gotten married recently, things have already changed quite a bit, before even having kids. I have a similar job and commute as you do. I also recently had the opportunity to change jobs and made it a point to join a place that doesn't believe in working long hours and staying late. (I used to work in an infamous place for long hours, then I left that to cofound my own startup which was again long hours even if…

Sorry if this is over personal, but how does getting married change things? Were there more changes than marriage at the same time? I'm not married, but have been living with my partner for 3 years, together for 8 and am about to buy a house with them, so I'm wondering what I've got ahead of me!

Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

#59

Post by theossuary »

ashark wrote: post #52
linkregister wrote: post #17

As your kids get older, and especially when they enter school, a large part of the evening will be spent by them doing homework. Their weekends will be spent more with friends and doing activities (organized sports, etc). You'll have more time to yourself. In the meantime, enjoy your family time because your kids won't always want to spend all their free time with you (they'll have friends and hobbies to compete with…

Note that 30 minutes/day is a much bigger commitment for a parent of young kids than other people. I've run the numbers in posts on here before, but the TL;DR is that you've got ~28 hrs of kid-free (and non-work/commute) time a week without cutting into sleep, but before taking out unavoidable activities (prepping for the next day, cleaning, spouse time) that's likely to eat at least half of it. So 30min/day is like…

A bigger commitment than driving 2 hours? I definitely don't know the difficulty of managing time while having young children, but it's easier to justify cutting down on commute time than cutting down on exercise time.

Maybe consider talking with your boss about working from home two/three times a week, that commute time could then be a break in the middle of the day to work out, and a little extra time at the end of the day to be with your kids.

Re: Ask HN: Did your life as a parent affected your life as a developer?

#60

Post by shados »

abeyer wrote: post #54

I know that everyone's situation is different, but I really don't get people who accept that kind of commute time unless it's something you want or you have no other options. (I know people who like to drive and get their only "alone time" in the car on the commute, so it works for them, but they tend to be the exception.) If you value your time at $100/hr (probably low end of the spectrum for a skilled dev in most o…

And now you know why rent in big cities around tech hubs is so crazy high: because its worth it (and building more housing will just attract more people)
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