

Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad's Manifesto - aschepis
http://adamschepis.com/blog/2011/09/15/why-i-go-home-a-dads-manifesto/

======
gruseom
Sorry, but this is getting a little unctuous.

I don't think the trend in our time of parents organizing their lives around
their children is very good for anybody, especially the children. I'm
thinking, for example, of fathers who call their kids "buddy" and think it's
the meaning of life to play with them. This is pandemic where I live. People
have convinced themselves that the good life consists of being child-centered
parents in child-centered families. Everybody [†] is busy confirming to
everybody else that this is true (consider the platitudinous tone of most of
the comments in this thread), but I doubt that it is true. It has much to do
with parents' emotional needs (edit: specifically the need to Be A Good
Parent, which if you think about it is actually a selfish concern) and little
to do with kids'. Children ought to be running around outside playing with
_other children_ and depending on nice-but-otherly (not pseudo-peer) adults to
keep their world secure and stable and fix things when they cry. Children
raised by child-centered parents seem at a loss when they aren't at the center
of attention. This bodes ill for inner strength and good breeding. Most such
parents fail even to teach their kids basic manners. They're so identified
with their child, or rather with the mini-me they imagine their child to be,
that they don't notice if the child is routinely disrespectful to others. When
they do occasionally notice something egregious and limply intervene, it's
always with the same whiney "Honey..." followed by a feeble plea which the
child ignores with no consequences. What they ought to do, of course, is what
any ordinary mammal does when their offspring goes too far - smack them.
Figuratively if you prefer.

The problem is that we're immature and infantilized ourselves, so we've
forgotten all of this. Perhaps it's an outgrowth of postwar youth culture.

One tell-tale symptom is that children have fewer friends than they used to,
and adults consequently have fewer friends and less time for the ones they do
have. (Nowadays when a friend has a kid I tell them "See you in 20 years." Not
my choice.) Adults' time is taken up with the sacred family-ness we all must
bow before. Children's time is taken up by their parents. I remember how hard
it used to be to arrange for my son to play with a classmate after school.
(Arrange! When such a thing need to be _arranged_ in the first place, we're
already losers. This whole subject really needs a Louis CK to do it justice.)
Parents would look up times for "play dates" in a calendar. I swear they were
jealous of their kids seeing other "buddies".

In short, a little neglect never hurt anybody.

p.s. Maybe it seems like the above hasn't much to do with "work-life balance"
(blessed be its name), but it totally does. However, I'm over quota.

[†] Well, everybody in my lily-white liberal world.

~~~
eob
Let me take a wild guess: you don't have kids, do you?

~~~
watmough
"Adults' time is taken up with the sacred family-ness we all must bow before.
Children's time is taken up by their parents. I remember how hard it used to
be to arrange for my son to play with a classmate after school. (Arrange! When
such a thing need to be arranged in the first place, we're already losers.
This whole subject really needs a Louis CK to do it justice.)"

Heh, I initially had the same reaction, but he's talking a lot of sense. It
needs to be read a couple of times.

Way too many peoples' lives are utterly dominated by their children,
essentially because children can be allowed to exist in this world for even a
minute without supervision.

This is very much not how it was for me as a child. Benign neglect would be
putting it nicely.

~~~
gruseom
Your last paragraph (if I'm reading it correctly) leads to a point I've often
mulled over. We tend as parents to overcompensate for what happened to _us_ as
children. I think this happens at the social-historical level too. Traditional
child-rearing was something between harsh and brutal. Physical and emotional
violence was common. We have rightly come to abhor that. But, typically human,
we (or at least the educated white North American middle class) have merely
flipped a bit and gone to the opposite extreme of elevating our children to
little gods. This can't be good for the little buggers, deceive ourselves and
adore our own virtue though we may. (Side note to the indignant: I like
children. Including my own!)

Back to how, as parents, we overcompensate for what happened to ourselves in
the past: we do this unconsciously, so it's hard to know that we're doing it.
And it's a bad thing, because almost inevitably we end up creating a mirror
image of the old mistakes. But there is a way out of this dilemma: personal
healing and growth. To the extent that one can integrate one's own experience,
feel one's own feelings, etc., one becomes free of the compulsion to resolve
them through one's child and able to behold the child as an independent being.

~~~
mbreese
> We tend as parents to overcompensate for what happened to us as children

It happens at all levels. It's a common criticism of militaries that are
equipped to fight the last war, not the next one.

------
phuff
This reminds me of this great article by Clayton Christensen to Harvard
Business students about life balance: <http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-
measure-your-life/ar/1>

Looking back over a short 7 year or so career I can't remember many projects
where I can go: "Oh man, I'm so glad I spent all that time late at night on
that project. It's really made a lasting difference in the world."

I'm sure there are some things that are worth spending a lot of overtime on;
I'm sure there are ways to write software that will literally make a massive
change in the way the world works. But most of the stuff that I see coming out
of startups, most of the stuff that I've worked on in a wide variety of
companies is stuff that ends up being rewritten soon, or changed or what have
you.

One of my favorite CS professors was diagnosed with terminal cancer relatively
early in life (late 50s, early 60s). He had another 10 or 15 years of teaching
in him probably if he hadn't gotten sick. Towards the end of his fight with
cancer, one of the other professors visited him and came back to us and said
that he had been visiting the dying professor on a way to his daughter's flute
recital. The dying professor looked at him when he mentioned the recital and
said something like: "Good! More flute recitals! More ball games! Fewer
papers! fewer conferences!"

I know that the time I spend away from work, particularly on my family -- my
relationship with my spouse, with my kids -- ends up being the time that
matters most in the long term.

~~~
watmough
Time is so fleeting, and so precious. It's criminal to stuck in cube for a
large portion of that lifetime.

Every so often, stop, just stop and think about what's important. Best to do
it now, rather than regret later.

------
jswinghammer
Totally agree with all these points. Ever since my first daughter was born I
made a similar decision but I still work less hours than you do. I end up
working around 40 hours a week and have never felt compelled to work any more.
I will work after the kids go to bed particularly when my wife goes to bed and
I don't feel like reading for whatever reason.

My first obligation on this Earth is to my family and part of that means not
being gone all the time at work. I do that for the kids but also for my wife.
Raising kids is hard work and she needs my help particularly at the end of the
day. This changes a little when the kids are older and are less physically
demanding I guess but when you have small kids you really need to take your
wife's feelings into account when deciding how much to work. She really needs
to feel respected and honored in the decision and part of that comes from
making sure she is in total agreement with the final decision.

Also if you're any good at programming companies are so desperate to hire you
that they will accept pretty much whatever schedule within reason you want.
You might not be the absolute favorite employee of management but if you're
good people will respect you and your contribution.

~~~
BlazingFrog
> My first obligation on this Earth is to my family

No disrespect but to what was your first obligation before you had a wife and
kids?

I'm always tempted to interpret this kind of statement one of two ways: either
your life before your family was so miserably empty that it gave you a purpose
(nothing wrong with that) or you're borderline schizophrenic that you can fool
yourself (or worse, truly believe) that your personality suddenly morphed and
you're now a different individual who will be just as content with a lifestyle
radically different from what he ever had, obligations as well as
satisfactions that cannot be possibly imagined until you actually cross that
line and have kids.

I personally have a hard time believing people can change _that_ much...

~~~
mbreese
> No disrespect but to what was your first obligation before you had a wife
> and kids

Obviously something else... ?

Life has a way of changing whether you want it to or not. So, maybe whatever
was #1 got bumped down to #2. That doesn't mean that their life was meaning-
less and empty before having a family. Nor does it mean that their lives
really had to change all that much with a family.

I don't understand the false dichotomy here.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
This is exactly it.

You don't prioritise your life around things that aren't relevant to you - to
have your number 1 priority as kids when you don't have kids clearly makes no
sense.

It's like suggesting that someone who gets a new hobby had an empty life
before that hobby. Nope, they just filled it with different things. When
something they wanted to do more came along, everything else got shuffled
about a bit.

------
DanielStraight
Reminds me of:

[http://jbf.posterous.com/bluyah-development-
blog-5-things-i-...](http://jbf.posterous.com/bluyah-development-
blog-5-things-i-wish-someo)

From which comes one of my favorite lines about business ever:

"You will be forced to choose between work and family - and there’s only one
right answer."

------
minimax
> When you work crazy hours you yo-yo between 20 hour days and 8 hour days
> that really only have a few hours of productivity (or none at all!)

This would not have made any sense to me until I had actually spent three
months working 12-18 hour days (+ Saturdays). Yay for salespeople selling
things the company doesn't actually make! It's a really stupid feeling to
spend 12 hours staring at your keyboard, getting almost nothing done, and
knowing you're going to come back and do the same thing tomorrow.

~~~
aschepis
and honestly, you probably could have done the job better and faster if you
had done 8-10 hours (or less) per day and had enough time to mow your lawn,
pay your bills, unwind, etc.

~~~
minimax
No question about it. Repetitive long hours are deleterious to critical and
creative thinking abilities. It always makes me think twice when I see stories
about game dev / wall st / startup developers working insane hours. I think
the story is better than the reality.

------
MartinCron
_Death marches and late nights take a lot out of you_

Death marches seem to happen far less often (in my experience) when I'm
releasing early and releasing often.

If the system automatically tests and ships out every incremental change
multiple times daily, you don't have the crazy weeks before/after big releases
as there are no big releases. Shipping new code is a normal part of every day
and I get to go home to hang out with my kids on time.

~~~
thom
A bad week or tricky release isn't a death march, and I congratulate you on a
career well managed if that's what you genuinely believe.

~~~
MartinCron
You are completely correct. I've been involved with bad weeks, tricky
releases, death marches, pretty much every sort of dysfunctional software
development clusterfuck you can imagine short of Duke Nukem Forever.

The point remains the same. My experience shows that committing to
incrementalism in design/code/test/release improves quality of life as well as
quality of product.

------
johngalt
Sounds like he's made the right decision. It's important to have balance in
your life. However, I don't want to hear him cry "ageism!" when that young kid
that's doing 80hour weeks gets promoted ahead of him. It's important to make
these kinds of sacrifices when you have a family, but you should also
understand that they are _your_ sacrifices.

~~~
beagledude
experience can do in 40 hours what younger, inexperienced can do in 80. As you
build your tool chest, things become faster and less mistake prone.

~~~
hga
Except that it's often more like 80 minutes vs. 80 hours, or the inexperienced
---although it's more often the less ... skilled---simply can't solve the
problem at all. In my other comment I mentioned debugging; my ability to
recognize the ... pattern/smell/whatever of a bug will often let me
heuristically narrow the search to an amazing degree. What once would take me
hours or days became minutes.

~~~
MortenK
You're just a whole bucket full of humble aren't you :-)

~~~
hga
Heh, indeed.

But just as it's unbecoming to boast about what you are not, one needs to
recognize what one is and can do to arrange that things work out best, at
least in startups where that vs. e.g. politics determines personal and
project/corporate success. The flip side of the theme of the 2nd Dirty Harry
movie, "A man's got to know his own limitations."

Plus I think I'm allowed to be proud of what I've accomplished over decades of
hard work. I started with punched card FORTRAN "IV" on the IBM 1130 in high
school in the fall of 1977 (scare quotes because it was closer to a FORTRAN
II, e.g. no logical IFs), that prompted me to begin a lifelong independent
study of software engineering (since I realized there _had_ to be better ways
to do this) and the cited level of skill in debugging nasty C programs was
achieved by 1999, a full 22 years later. One would really hope one has learned
a thing or two over a couple of decades.

------
Rotor
This is a great article about work/life balance. Frequently that balance is
asymmetrically weighted in favor of work at the expense of time spent with
family.

The author is making a commendable point to commit to time well spent with his
family while still putting in nine hours at the office.

When we're near the end of our lives and reflecting, are you going to wish you
spent more time with your family or more time at the office? There's a simple
answer there.

~~~
stygianguest
I'll just make a comment from my cosy European perspective. He's still working
9 hours a day. But it's okay, he "doesn't feel as burned out". Seriously, is
this what is expected, or is it just the default?

~~~
tobych
I think 8-5 is actually 8 hours in the US: federal laws guarantee you an hour
lunch break, just as in the UK. Of course, I imagine in a lot of start-ups
that's ignored or perhaps doesn't even hold.

~~~
stygianguest
Ah, so that probably means he's not actually working 9 solid hours per day.
That's better. I admit to doing the same, albeit at different times of the day
(10h-19h).

------
polemic
I completely agree with the post. Most of the negative responses are clearly
from people who have no clue what it means to be a parent. Firstly, it has
nothing to do with raising kids with 'good manners', or anything as simple or
_boring_ as that. Hanging, teaching and interacting with your kids is actually
_fun_ and _rewarding_. A lot like coding.

I can also highly recommend a 4 day week. 1 day a week is purely my daughter
(20 months) and I. Not only does it give you more time than you have in an
evening, it also opens up other opportunities to go out and do things you
wouldn't normally be involved with. I've been fortunate to have employers who
are happy to oblige and live in a country - New Zealand - where it's
relatively easy to arrange.

I also agree that it makes you a more focused coder. It gives you a healthy
dose of perspective about what you're doing, and I've found I spend far more
time on productive work than I did before.

------
aschepis
hey all, thanks for the positive discussion. Apologies that my blog is
terribly slow. I didn't notice that it spiked because, well, it was between
4:30 and 7:30 ;)

I'm working in my spare time to get it all off of wordpress and onto Jekyll so
i can just host it out of S3 and get rid of the EC2 instance its running on.

~~~
0x12
> I'm working in my spare time

There is a subtle joke in there somewhere.

Great piece and thank you for writing it.

------
zrail
After a particularly bad stint at a previous job I've vowed to never work past
my normal hours just for the sake of being there. If there's something
immediately wrong that I can help with, or if it's something that I broke,
I'll stay and work the problem. Otherwise, I'm in out at my established hours.

------
creationix
As an added bonus, I've discovered that not being able to hack till after the
kids are in bed means you're more motivated to get them to bed on time. They
get more sleep and you can code once the house is quiet and you brain just had
a break. I find it extremely productive.

------
thebany
My husband (a developer who is frequently "death-marching" his way through
projects) sent me this article yesterday. We are about to have our first
child, and it was so cool to read this, especially since we've already been
talking about what it's going to be like after our son is born in regards to
his work schedule. He also works with West Coasters and is a team leader,
which makes things tricky in terms of scheduling meetings and conference
calls. Let me just say I so appreciate that this blog post was written and
that he came across it. I love that my husband loves his job and is so
incredibly talented at it. He is so dedicated to his work and spends way more
than 9 hours a day at it (his recent "early" bedtime has been 3am
consistently, with 6am actually being the most frequent hour he finally lays
down to get a minute of shuteye). It's a kind of commitment that I admire, and
that I myself have benefitted from. But it's also good to read that his
dedication can still be seen, even if he isn't "death marching" through coding
problems night after night. I do not see this at all as "parents organizing
their lives around their children," but rather a parents taking care of and
giving priority to all aspects of their lives, especially their children. I
think there is so much wisdom in the statements concerning how a person can
always get another job, but not just "get" another family.

Cheers to you and yours and all the hard work you put into all aspects of your
life!

------
mkent
Sometimes I think about how lucky most of us white collar workers really are.
I grew up with a Dad that worked rotating day/evening/graveyard shifts and I
know how much it would have meant to me if he could have spent more time with
us.

My neighbour, who used to work in construction, gave me some advice after the
birth of my son: "Make sure to spend time with your kids, especially when
they're young. One of my biggest regrets was working too much and not being
around to watch them grow up." Now they live in Australia.

------
chubs
I find it really hard, because nobody in this career has kids! Very few have
wives, i have a suspicion that most are single. So when you put family first,
it really is a culture clash. My solution is to try and become self employed.
I hope it works out.

~~~
abalashov
Maybe in bohemian Silicon Valley startup circles of 20-somethings. However,
that is an extremely inaccurate supposition about the IT profession as a
whole.

------
gorbachev
I was recently in the process of changing roles at work, so I was doing a few
internal interviews for another roles that seemed to be good fits.

I lost one of the roles, because apparently I wasn't hungry enough for it. One
of the reasons stated by the manager doing the hiring was that I consider my
kids more important than my work. It wasn't stated exactly like that, but
that's what he meant. In my younger days I would've let the idiot have it or
bursted out laughing.

I am so glad I no longer work there.

------
Tyrannosaurs
One thing that seems to be missing from the debate here is that spending time
with your kids is actually fun, it's something that's nice to do and really
isn't a sacrifice.

I know no-one who spends time with their kids out of a sense of obligation
(and trust me, your kids would work out if that's what you were doing and
really not want you about) - in spending time with my daughters instead of in
the office, I'm doing what I want to do, not what I feel I should do.

------
robmay
I think people should do what they want to do. If you are passionate about
your work, and want to spend more time there than everyone else, I'm not sure
that sends a bad message to kids. If you want to spend more time home with
kids, that's fine too. People are different, and you shouldn't adopt the
standards of other people.

------
topherjaynes
Thanks for giving all of us future Dads (or soon to be) something to aspire
to.

------
vegai
He should cut that 9 hours at the office to 6. And yes, I fail at this too :(

------
geebee
Egads, are we at the point where developers with young children have to write
a manifesto to justify working a "mere" nine hours a day, followed by frequent
meetings after the kid goes to bed?

------
mathattack
I would have never understood this before I had a child of my own.

------
cgopalan
I feel the same way about my cat. I love her and would rather spend a bigger
percentage of time with her than what I spend now.

Question though is, why is this on hacker news?

------
jroseattle
Very true, and I learned this early on: your job, no matter how much you like
it, will never hug you back.

------
pointyhat
I'm in the UK.

I spend as much time as possible with my children so that I can teach them
that a 37 hour working week is actually normal and that they don't NEED to
become an American-style 80-hour-a-week corporate slave.

Humans have needs: family, friendship and companionship.

"Work" is a relatively new thing; a product of the rapid growth of the
population and the distribution of self-responsibility. Go back a couple of
thousand years, and we were farming in family groups much like the Amish are
today.

We're short-changing ourselves and missing out on a large chunk of life by not
spending time with our closest ones.

------
georgieporgie
I'm impressed that the guy managed to find a wife while working so hard during
the earlier years.

~~~
aschepis
LOL. I'm lucky, that's very true. She is a saint.

~~~
eludwig
Long time lurker and made an account just to reply to this. What does it say
about the expectations of this industry when you have to _even_ weigh working
almost 60 hours a week against 15 hours with your daughter!! Good god. I am so
glad that you made the right choice. Great article.

