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Success at Work, Failure at Home

scott.a16z.com

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Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#71

Post by steven2012 »

nailer wrote: post #27

> And that part about sitting on my ass in front of the TV with a cocktail? This ran counter to all of her efforts to teach the kids about pitching in as a family. The message of everyone helping to cook, clean, and be responsible for the household fell completely flat when daddy wouldn’t so much as take out the trash or change a light bulb. Take out the trash and change a lightbulb by all means, but seriously if you…

It doesn't count.

Your kids didn't ask to be born. You decided to have them. If you're going to raise your kid by simply providing for them, and not nurturing them and spending time with them, then all of your "providing for" is worthless. If you decided to have kids when you could barely afford it, and had no extra time to do anything besides work, then they are right to consider you a bad parent.

Go listen to Cat's in the Cradle by Harry Chapin.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#72

Post by mpclark »

larrys wrote: post #56
codingdave wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common misunderstanding in young families, and one that causes a lot of damage to families in the long run. The misunderstanding is the assumption that the wife was not working all day. IF she has a job, then she was working. If she stays at home with kids, she was also working. Coming home and relaxing, saying, "Hey, I'm paying the mortgage" is also saying, "Hey, the work my wife did today was worth nothin…

"If she stays at home with kids, she was also working." I think it's reasonable to believe that some jobs are harder than other jobs. Staying home with the kids, while hard (and maybe even boring) isn't as demanding as the jobs that some people have. I have to tell you that I'd rather the person who operates on a heart or a brain or flys a 777 (and there are many more I'm just picking a few obvious ones) focus on the…

Oooh, that could be a controversial point of view.

I've done a fair bit of the stay-at-home dad thing and I found it HARD. There something unremitting about dealing with the demands of small children while trying to keep the house clean and food on the table (and while my office life was all about getting rid of repetitive tasks, stuff like cleaning and cooking just has to be done again and again, which I found very hard to deal with).

I used to look forward to the days I went to the office; they were like days off.

No, I would never say that "staying at home with the kids" was the easy option.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#73

Post by steven2012 »

larrys wrote: post #56
codingdave wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common misunderstanding in young families, and one that causes a lot of damage to families in the long run. The misunderstanding is the assumption that the wife was not working all day. IF she has a job, then she was working. If she stays at home with kids, she was also working. Coming home and relaxing, saying, "Hey, I'm paying the mortgage" is also saying, "Hey, the work my wife did today was worth nothin…

"If she stays at home with kids, she was also working." I think it's reasonable to believe that some jobs are harder than other jobs. Staying home with the kids, while hard (and maybe even boring) isn't as demanding as the jobs that some people have. I have to tell you that I'd rather the person who operates on a heart or a brain or flys a 777 (and there are many more I'm just picking a few obvious ones) focus on the…

True, it might not be harder than brain surgery, but neither is your current job, and raising kids is probably harder than your current job. If you don't give a shit about how your kids turn out, then raising kids is pretty easy, but if you actually care, it's probably going to be the hardest job you'll ever have.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#74

Post by coffeemug »

I'm facing many of the challenges Scott is talking about. I churned through the first part of the essay and thought "yes! yes! yes, yes, let's get to the solution!" But the second part of the essay falls short for me.

It's a bit like the depression and the broken hand cartoon[1]. I can't disconnect. I know I'm supposed to turn off my phone, do household chores, and take my wife out to a nice dinner. I know taking the time to do these things makes me happier and more productive. It's not that I don't know this, it's that actually doing it requires enormous discipline, but after spending 80 hours a week slowly changing reality by a sheer force of will, I have no more willpower left for anything else.

I also know I don't have to feel like I'm changing reality by a sheer force of will, and in fact, feeling this way is a sign that I have a lot to learn about leadership and about life. But that's not something I can just decide to change either.

The problem is very real. The solution, at least for me, is as elusive as ever.

[1] http://www.akimbocomics.com/?p=573

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#75

Post by mratzloff »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

I very clearly remember the week this clicked in my brain. Being very successful, really crushing it, and whining to my wife that the company should give more vacation, and her reminding me that I had been at work on Christmas Eve. My whole perspective collapsed around that instant. I could see the hit in career path I was going to take by changing my perspective, but I decided to do it anyway. And I have always been…

> The challenge is there will always be people who are willing (either consciously or unconsciously) to throw away their family and personal relationships in order to pursue success in their career, and it is difficult, if not impossible to compete against them with the 'balanced life' bit set.

So don't compete with them.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#76

Post by 001sky »

levlandau wrote: post #41
tikhonj wrote: post #32

I think this is an example of a problem I see with a lot of hard-working cultures like startups. You're always optimizing your productivity locally . It's easy to just say "oh, I'll work harder now " because, simply, you'll get more done than you would otherwise. Today will be more productive. Most importantly, the increased productivity is viscerally obvious. But working too much, making sacrifices at home, having p…

i agree with the spirit of this but the flaw in this reasoning is an assumption that all hours are equal. Working consistent 80 hour weeks is the reason we got the Mac as well as Facebook. The extreme outcome possible due to one locally focused push could far outweigh any other strategy and could also be the maximum of the global state.

The issue is one of serial vs parallel processing. You cannot treat all hours as equal when you or someone else is the bottleneck for your entire startup/project. In this case the local and the global optimization problem need to be solved together, or it just won't work. That being said, I think that not all local optimization problems are of this type, but some certainly are. And many of the nasty ones fall on founders and startups disporportionately.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#77

Post by afterburner »

yulaow wrote: post #47
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #17

So what I'm reading here is why CEOs shouldn't go to the office on weekends and check their mail at dinner. What's glaringly absent from the second part of this article is not asking the engineers to come in on weekends, either. Those guys have families and their negligible equity certainly doesn't justify 80-hour weeks. It sounds to me like the author would rather have gone home on weekends while the engineers staye…

Each time I read madness as 60h/w, 70h/w or the wtf 80h/w I am really happy to live and work on EU. I think I would fall in depression really fast if I had to sacrifice (because over a certain limit, to me, it is only sacrifice) so much of my time and passion. Also in my opinion, ever over a certain limit (For me is 50h/w), the productivity of an engineer just vanish. I prefer work to live against live to work.

And just think, Americans (and Canadians) also get much less vacation time than Europeans! Geniuses!

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#78

Post by steven2012 »

My wife and I are going through this right now. My wife has a senior director position in a multi-billion dollar financial company, and I am a programmer at a startup. We just had a child several months ago, and it's been very hard trying to balance work and life. It's actually the hardest thing we've both had to do in our lives.

Her job is a minimum of 60-hrs per week, but luckily I'm able to limit my work to 40-hrs per week, my company has been incredibly supportive. But truth-be-told my productivity has been affected by at least 50% over these past few months, especially after my wife and I both went back to work. There's been a lot of guilt from both our ends, due to how much slips through the crack both at work and at home because of trying to raise our kid as best as we can.

The key, I hope, is to keep focused as a team, meaning we try to pick each other's slack with no resentment. It's tough living and raising a family in Silicon Valley, due to the demands of work, and given how expensive things like houses in decent areas are.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#79

Post by stephen »

coffeemug wrote: post #74

I'm facing many of the challenges Scott is talking about. I churned through the first part of the essay and thought "yes! yes! yes, yes, let's get to the solution!" But the second part of the essay falls short for me. It's a bit like the depression and the broken hand cartoon[1]. I can't disconnect. I know I'm supposed to turn off my phone, do household chores, and take my wife out to a nice dinner. I know taking the…

> The solution, at least for me, is as elusive as ever.

If you define "the problem" as "I want to work 80 hours/week + have a healthy family life", well, yes, that's always going to be elusive. I.e. impossible.

Pretty sure the answer is to just not work 80 hours/week.

> but it's not something I can decide to change either

It is probably convenient for you to think that, but unless you have some sort of mental health condition (delusions of grandeur, etc.), I doubt it.

One way or the other, you're making choices you want to make.

And that's fine, but you might as well be honest with yourself/others about why you're making them, and that you must implicitly be okay with the trade offs.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#80

Post by barry-cotter »

steven2012 wrote: post #71
nailer wrote: post #27

> And that part about sitting on my ass in front of the TV with a cocktail? This ran counter to all of her efforts to teach the kids about pitching in as a family. The message of everyone helping to cook, clean, and be responsible for the household fell completely flat when daddy wouldn’t so much as take out the trash or change a light bulb. Take out the trash and change a lightbulb by all means, but seriously if you…

It doesn't count. Your kids didn't ask to be born. You decided to have them. If you're going to raise your kid by simply providing for them, and not nurturing them and spending time with them, then all of your "providing for" is worthless. If you decided to have kids when you could barely afford it, and had no extra time to do anything besides work, then they are right to consider you a bad parent. Go listen to Cat's…

Your culture and values are not universal. Children can adapt to and thrive in much worse environments than mostly only see Dad at the weekend.

Your kind of judgmental attitude is of a piece with the helicopter parent Amy Chua bullshit that makes so many have fewer, more stressed, stressful kids rather than have more and just let them be.

There is more than one acceptable combination of parental responsibilities and time outlays, even in America.

We don't have any obligation to live up to your ideals.

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