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

There's one big thing to note about boring jobs. A little background on me. I'm a full time student taking online courses, I have an 18 month old so he's old enough to now be a handful and need constant monitoring, and I work in forensics which to me is pretty boring. My wife is also a full time student who is in class till 8pm every night and works weekends. I've definitely learned to prioritize and spend much less time doing things that are more a waste of time, but surprisingly enough I love it this way. I take my son to daycare every day, work my butt off at work, learn a ton, pick my son up, come home feed him, play with him, give him a bath and put him to bed at 8pm. After that I sit down and knock out some homework, do some self study, and work on personal projects. If I'm on schedule or ahead of schedule I spend time playing Forza or TitanFall 2, or working on my cars. This usually happens 1-2 days a week, but I've reached the point in my life where that's all I need to make me happy(I'm only 27 though lol).

However, even though my job is boring I love it due to the management. I'm lucky enough to have the type of job that even though it's boring, it offers me a lot of other opportunities to keep me sharp, and puts me in a location with a lot of extremely competent developers and engineers. I learn from my colleagues every single day. I'm also always in some type of training, even if it doesn't directly apply to my position. If there's a nearby course offered in advanced C methodologies, hardware advancements, intrusion system implementation, or anything else I'm honestly interested in, my company is fine with me going.

I understand this is rare to find, but I think if you have the right atmosphere, being on the bleeding edge of development isn't even remotely necessary. In the end you're gonna look back and see what you remember. And the things that will stick out will be time with family, the friends you made, and the impact you made. I gauge my impact based on my family and I couldn't ask for more. My friends and colleagues at work are amazing. And I get to be here for my son for every new thing he experiences.

Also on a side note the best way to learn is to teach. I heard that a long time ago and I'm a huge advocate for it. Because if you can break something complex down to the simplest level then you really know it. Having a son thats always interested in what I'm doing gives me a constant avenue to teach. So I'm always willing to spend time with him showing him new things and watching how quickly he picks them up. He's still young, but I know once he gets to where he wants to learn how to do the stuff I do at work it'll be a huge boost for me professionally. Because then I'll have to push myself even harder to learn more so I can always have something to teach him.

You are distracted every five to ten minutes. If everyone on your team did this, nothing would get done. You are being extremely selfish and very inconsiderate of other people's time.

Well, time for the politically incorrect, yet reality based, "dad pill".

First of all most people social status signalling are liars and the few who aren't are very unusual from unusual situations. There aren't that many book authors or operating system kernel authors. So debating the engineering operations of lightning strikes and lotto wins is kinda pointless nonsense. What if my project takes over the world? Well it won't now stop daydreaming and work on real issues that are important. As for the liars you just have to read the books they talk about a little more than they do, which might mean as little as a light skim or getting to page 2 instead of giving up on page 1, or experiment with the new flash in the pan software for an hour instead of their five minutes. You'll still be ahead of 90% of the population.

Secondly give up on careers, ignore upward mobility, if you're not happy where you are today, daydreaming about being one of the very few who make it to the top of the pyramid is a bad life strategy dooming you to unhappiness in later life. Anyone over 30 is probably working with tools in a field that didn't exist when they were 20 and if they claim they got their via conscious effort they're just liars and status signalling see #1 above. If they're over 40 ageism is about to remove almost all of them from the field so since you're going to get kicked out anyway may as well have fun having kids along the way, because you aren't going to "win" and thats OK. The difference between a guy unemployed by ageism at 45 without kids and a guy unemployed at 45 by ageism with kids is the unemployed guy with kids is had more fun, had a better life. Merely not having kids doesn't mean the "agism fairy" will not wave her wand on you ending your career. Sometimes the rate of change is crazy, I spent my early 30s in a field that didn't exist when I was in school. If you think you can plan that and apply a timeline for a career against it, you're merely lying to yourself or others. Nothing wrong with having general goals, but specific tasks of "XYZ at 40" is for losers. Even worse there's survivorship bias where random lotto winners think they have ESP but actually just won the lotto and thinking they have ESP leads to very bad life decisions.

Thirdly a super politically incorrect "dad pill" is depending on demographics about half the kids out there are growing up with no dad, so having you around and out of jail and providing and guiding and playing with them occasionally immediately puts the kids in the upper half or even upper quarter of society even if you do the worst bad job as dad in the country, which you probably will not sink to. Actually doing anything with the kids already puts you in elite territory. Another way to phrase it is there's a lot of political indoctrination that kids only need 1.00 parents that being the mom of course, so if you're feeling bummed about taking time for yourself or career you're still providing 1.75 worth of parents which is 0.75 more than society claims is necessary or even ideal. Just like the kid who gets a Ferrari for his birthday from dad doesn't necessarily turn out better in life than the kid who got a Ford from dad, when you're far enough into the corner of the bell curve of doing anything at all, the specific ordering and timeclock measurements don't affect rank as much as paying attention and being there and not being a dirtbag and actually parenting the kids as opposed to being their big person friend roommate and "skills" in general.

Fourthly related to "no one is gonna make it to the top of the pyramid" just learn at work like everyone else does. Well, actually some people don't even learn at work. If you're not a quick learner, its important to learn how to learn first. You're not really competing against people who claim to have infinite time to learn because they have no kids, you're competing against people who never learned in college or refuse to learn post college. You're gonna do fine.

Fifth relating to liars telling lies, decades ago when I was a young single guy it sounds very self serving to express lies about how all I ever did was work on technology because I had no kids, but mostly I drank and watched sports and chased girls and had sex and breakups and interpersonal drama and listened to music and watched TV. Well the dad pill is you might want to think about growing up, and when you cut all that waste of time junk out that doesn't really matter in the long run anyway or you've outgrown binge drinking or you got a wife so dating is probably over for awhile, even when you add back in "dad duties" you still have plenty of free time because you're not being a drunk bastard every weekend night, or if you're doing that instead of parenting, you suck so fix that at which point you'll have plenty of free time again. So grow up, man up, dad up, whatever and put down the beer bottle or switch off the TV, in the long run parenting the kids is going to be most important, then all this "work for free for the boss at home" stuff a distant second, and you'll still have some time to goof off anyway.

Believe it or not when farmhands worked the fields sunup to sundown or dads worked in factories six twelves a week or when dads fought in war deployments for years at a time, they still fathered their kids reasonable better than the current crop of kids. You got it easy now. Just put some effort into it and you'll be fine. So thats the "dad pill". Not as cool as the red pill or blue pill but more masculine and useful in the real world.

Honestly I think learning new technologies comes out of a passion for learning and has nothing to do with kids, wives, friends, social life, or work.

I have five kids (all teens now) and have managed to keep up with technology throughout their early years and to today.

There is all kind of parenting advice I could offer, but it all depends on how you personally wish to raise your kids. I'm old school. I think the more kids play on their own, by themselves, the more they read....the better they'll be. I'm highly aware of other parenting techniques, especially where there's some weird expectation that we devote our lives to our kids every moment of the day outside of work. I find that patently ridiculous.

When I've needed to carve out time for learning, I just tell the kids I have to learn something. They ask me what it is and I explain as much as I can. I ask them if it's okay that "this weekend" they focus on friends or read a book. I get complaints on occasion and if I need to bend I bend. More often than not, my kids respect my request. Even so, I still cook, clean, play board games, take them to movies, and have discussions with them.

But the underlying aspect (to me) is passion to learn. If you don't have a passion to learn new things _on your own_, I can't help you.

I have a 2 hour commute to work (1 hr each way) and I am not allowed to Work From Home -- this is a blessing in disguise.

Addition to this, since my Wife is from other end of the globe from where I live -- I will send her and my 1 yr old for nice few months to visit her parents and siblings where I can focus on bulking up on my skills :-)