Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?

Share duties with wife. She can stuff food into their mouths as they watch cartoons while you recover from work and talk with wife, you can play with them and put them to sleep while she recovers from all the morning chores.

Afterwards, 21:00-24:00 is plenty of time to work on projects.

With our 4mo, what works well for my wife and I is that we coordinate periods where either one or the other is on active baby duty. This allows the other to have uninterrupted blocks of time necessary to get stuff done, to catch up on rest, or whatever else. Of course you'll want to have lots of family time together too with both wife and baby.

It is true that your work/hobby time will become more limited, so you must carefully prioritize how you spend what time you do have.

Embrace the challenge of finding balance between family and work. You will probably find that having good work-life balance has a positive impact on your work productivity and overall happiness.

One of the many great things about children, if you're not a total heartless bastard of course, is that having them really sharpens your mind as to what's important and what's not.

Most of these things the HN crowd obsesses over are shit, and the things that replace those things will also be shit, and the thing you make with those things--even if it makes you fabulously wealthy--will also be shit, and if you don't believe me, take Ryan Dahl's word for it: https://gist.github.com/cookrn/4015437

So rather than worry about sliding further away from the apex of our shit pyramid, ease up and enjoy the ride. You may even come up with something of actual value to society along the way.

This thread is slowly filling up with stories of enthusiastic workaholic parents who are disciplined and fit enough to take every single 15 minute break to sit down and get some code out.

If you're able to code up a blog engine with one hand while holding your baby in the other, I envy you. I wish I could muster up the energy and discipline to do something like that. But to other readers: for many people this is not the way. I hope that by writing this comment I can provide some counterpressure to this usual HN moral of "work harderer, even hardererer, all the time, at the cost of everything" that these proud over-achieving-parent comments breathe.

It's perfectly OK not to code outside work time. It's perfectly fine to, once you're finally done with the intensive and tiring quality time you spent with your kids, to sit down, have a cup of tea, watch some Netflix and go to bed early.

This means that you must ensure you have a challenging job. Not learning on the job is not an option - you'll be out of work in 10 years, maybe sooner. So be critical, request transfers, and if your financial situation allows, care less about salary than about how much you can learn on the job. The downside of our market is that knowledge gets outdated fast. But the upside is that we programmers are in great demand. We get to make demands - not many people have that priviledge. Use it. You can't afford not to.

I'd say that this is good advice for most people - as you might guess I'm a violent opponent to this whole "you're not worth your salt as a coder if you don't do hobby-OSS every evening" meme. But it becomes a need if you can't or won't be Superdad or Supermom every day.

Think about yourself, think about your future. Consider letting off-time be off-time and getting yourself a better job :)

There are two things going on: one is that many of them have spouses whose full time labor is taking care of the kids. I remember that being the strongest predictor of getting tenure for university professors, too.

The other is that you realize that you can accomplish significant things by stringing together scraps of time and making sure you don't obsess over minutiae. Or, more directly, when you've got twenty minutes to write, you're not going to concern yourself with the font.