I have been working in the industry for 8 years and am now considered a senior developer, also as a team lead.
Three years ago, my first child was born, and a few months ago, a second one arrived. While I don’t regret my decision to have kids at all, I do feel bad about how the lack of free time affects my career and how my knowledge falls behind the industry.
Before having kids, I used to spend a few hours a week on never-ending personal projects to learn new things. However, now I neither have the time nor the energy for that.
The only way that has worked for me is to read some tech books, which are often not about coding, and to read some blogs or subs like this.
However, I feel like this approach is too passive and is not providing the best outcome that I would expect.
Any tips there, perhaps from someone who was is similar situation?
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Keeping up with current tech is part of your job, so do it on the clock. Senior developers are absolutely expected to spend time on experiments and exploratory projects; it’s how they can safely and confidently propose and lead major refactors and improvements.
Understanding the potential risks and complications with a project supports your ability to properly scope, staff, and mentor.
This is a very fair point, similar to what some other members wrote. The only thing I need is to organize my work time a way that will make this possible and still let me perform in a similar pace as I do now.
One of the biggest things you can be learning during this time if you haven’t already (and it’s an intensely uncomfortable thing to learn) is how and what to delegate. My projects don’t take me less time when I’m effective in this, but they do free up mental load for doing only the important grind-y work, and separately thinking about the things that need to be thought about.
Junior devs are scary, and giving them actual responsibility is scary, but it’s also how they get more competent and eventually do more good work than things that need adjustment or rework.
Answer here is simple: put your family first.
Tech has managed to convince so many young people that they’re not supposed to have a life outside of work. I fell for this too when I entered tech, working insane overtime, doing “hackathons” where we just worked all weekend, and spending every remaining moment trying to “stay ahead of the curve”.
This is a trap, and it’s not necessary. I worked this way for years until it completely burned me out and I realized that the things that really mattered were being neglected because some tech bros made me feel like work needed to be my life.
Once I rejected this my life simply became better. I put my 40 hours in and I did my best in those hours, but I took back the other 40-50 hours a week I was working and invested it back into my family.
Today my relationship with my wife and kids is better than it had ever been, I am happier and better rested, and my career has skyrocketed as a result. Turns out when you find balance in your life the quality of what you do improves pretty radically, and maybe your attitude and work relationships improve with it.
I’m an EM for a very large corporation today, I make better money and am healthier and happier than I ever was when I was trying to make work consume my every waking moment. I spend a lot of my time with my direct reports today trying to reinforce that they can clock out at the end of the day and it’ll be fine.
Don’t worry about your career, put that time and energy into your family and your friends. Later-in-life you will thank you for it.
Absolutely. Something that has somehow gotten lost in all the SE grind and staying ahead of the curve is the idea that it is our job’s responsibility to us to help us grow and develop in ways that are useful to the job. We have significant informal education just from tinkering / doing personal projects when we had the time that (my hypothesis) we keep that expectation of ourselves as we enter the workplace. We wrongly believe that it is our responsibility to on our own time learn new things about technology.
When you’re 12, 18, whatever, you’re learning technology because you want to. You’re curious and you branch out into other areas. Maintaining that curiosity in the workplace is excellent. AND, remember that a job is something that takes your labor and turns it into capital. The responsibility of a good organization is to understand what skills it needs (whether because we notice that something is missing / lacking, or because there’s competent leadership), and then to prioritize its use of our time to grow those capabilities. My company gets my 40 hours. They pay me well for it. Unless there’s truly an emergency, they don’t get another minute of my time. They have determined that they make a profit off my salary at the level of work that I provide because we agreed to it.
If a company doesn’t understand that they need to pay me to learn something that they want me to learn, then they are going back on that agreement.
Technology is both my job and my passion. I will spend all weekend messing with things in my home lab if that’s what I want to do, and it often is. Other times I want to disappear into the woods and stare at trees all weekend. Prioritizing your family’s needs and your needs should always come before your employer’s needs.
This is it. From another angle, setting clear boundaries on your time, delegating and trusting your team, and managing expectations are all powerful skills that need to be developed from the senior level and up. Clearly knowing and articulating your limits can lead to working on more valuable and meaningful work within those limits.
Yeah, kids are exhausting. I have way less time for personal projects.
First, don’t be afraid to take time off when your kids need you. Kids get sick, kids have bad days. Family comes first. If you’re responsible about communication, your job can handle you taking time off when needed. Don’t let your job add to your stress more than necessary.
Then, you have to learn to redefine productivity and impact. I used to focus on more tangible measures of accomplishment like the number of commits, number of bugs fixed, and so on. But after a while I realized that nobody cared about those things when it came time for performance review. In fact, sometimes I got more kudos for a little side project I spent less than a day on, than work that took me months.
So, I learned to focus on what has the highest impact. I don’t overload myself with tasks so that I have lots of time to mentor, to do cleanup work, and to think about the big picture. If my “regular” tasks are going to take all of my time, that’s too much - I ask my manager what’s the highest priority and I push some things back. The “big picture” thinking allows me to sometimes make some great insights and do work that wasn’t asked for, but makes a big difference.
If you do that, you also have plenty of time to learn new things on the job. Rather than personal projects, do side projects related to your work. Try rewriting something in a new language you wanted to learn. Try out a new library or framework. It’s okay if some of them are throwaway - turn them into a useful proof-of-concept or demo. It’s an opportunity for you to learn and to do something useful for work.
And don’t forget to enjoy your kids and take lots of pictures and videos! Oh, and write down all of the funny things they say. They’re only young once.
So, if I understand correctly, it comes down to managing my workload in a way that allows me to allocate some of my work time to learning. This sounds interesting, but I wonder if it’s achievable in my case.
We once had an agreement to allocate 1-2 days per month to learning, but that quickly fell by the wayside due to the constant need to work on something that brings value.
However, if taking a break is not a natural and agreed-upon solution, then managing my time more effectively on my own could potentially make a difference.
I’m a staff engineer with a toddler and went through (am going through?) a similar thing. At the end of the day, I’m just tired and want to veg, not necessarily try to learn something new about programming. There were a few things that helped me though:
- The biggest thing was just to recalibrate my expectations. I talked with other dev parents who all said that, until the kids are able to play a bit more independently (eg 6 or so), you just have to accept that your self enrichment time is going to be limited.
- For my off hours learning, I stick to mainly portable skills. Ways of thinking about technical debt, etc. Things that are both widely applicable, and can be learned more passively.
- I try to carve out time to learn during work hours. I’m lucky in that the company I work for allows for a lot of independence, so my team actually instituted an “investment day” where we work on whatever we want, with the only goal being that you should try to do something that you’ll learn from.
A) daycare, B) 4 days a week for work, 1 day a week for work-related learning/projects/ideas. YMMV depending on your employer
If only this were true for all.
That one day usually gets occupied with wanting to clean the house or get other chores done so the weekend is available for the family to enjoy together.
Daycare costs cause for reevaluation of need once they hit school age.
Employers also need to have upgrading or continued education built into budgets to allow for that growth as well or at least I’m hopeful they would do that. Understandably you train people to leave is the mantra I’ve heard over and over. But those tend to be the better employers and the good karma comes back to them.
So functionally speaking I take my 20% of other time on the mornings when I don’t want to start as opposed to it’s own day.
Working from home I need the whole space empty, but daycare for us is now $660 a week which bests out the mortgage so that may have to change.
In any event, work time is now also fun time so I pack it as densely as I can, then grind with the fan in the evenings. Weekends are pretty nice with the fam, but weeknights… Eesh.
and I can really relate to that part of the need to use that one day for some home errands or other stuff. this would also probably come with the payment problem for that day (depends on the job, contract etc). So, as long as it sounds good on paper, it’s not something that can be applied with no limitations or drawbacks.
It’s a mental adjustment. It’s a schedule or routine you and your partner may need to build. All depends on how you keep your domicile concerning the errands aspect.
I’d carve out your productive time or when the creative juices flow and try to get that moment for you setup for the day you’d get. Then have your mindmap, notebook or whatever easily accessible to just note or draw your thoughts on the problems or concepts.
Maybe you can look into alternative sleep cycles (Edison, Tesla, Bell etc) and see if that allows for a you time.
I’ve found looking for news aggregated sites related to your niche can also just give you a little pick me up boost to stay in the know on trends but also gives you content for say a Pocket or repo to gather content to read before bed or another time. Heck even reading it to your young one.
I’ve been combatting this for several years. Once the independence kicks in for them you are freed of things you thought you would never be. Also really neat when they are interested and or can do work while mom or dad works.
About payment problems. If the employer looks to 4 day work weeks it’s either going to be 4-8’s or 4-10’s and if 8’s to stay competitive will need to accommodate for 5-8’s pay schedule. Then there is the pay off of carving out your time to maybe push a side project or contribute for a slice of revenue that could be your play money.
It may complicate the money situation, but as a new parent my wife and I have found a lot of value in paying the extra price for stuff like grocery delivery. We also found value in getting a roomba.
The roomba keeps the main floor of our house clean enough that we can afford to go a few weeks without using a real vacuum if we need to.
The grocery delivery saves us on having to get the kid together, ensure the diaper bag’s packed, drive out to the store, find the stuff, drive back home. Or at least we can avoid locking down one of us with kid duty while the other runs out to shop. It’s not cheap, between fees and a tip we often end up paying ~20% more, but it’s a time vs money value decision. I find we’re valuing our time more than money a lot lately. It also allows us to re-up groceries or household goods on days one of us is working from home, while we’re working.
Granted, I’m in a very stable salaried position where I’m not constantly being picked apart on metrics or qualified productivity (I’m more sysadmin and automation than software dev). We’re also in the early stages of child rearing, not even 6 months in yet. Mileage may vary.
We do groceries via delivery, tho for us it’s more of a time saver to spend it with kids, instead of losing that 1-2h to go to the store. So, it’s not changing that much in terms of time for self improvement.
My approach was something like this: for a few years (maybe until all my kids were at least age 3 or 4) I simply didn’t try to push my career forward.
When I was at work I put in plenty of effort, but I didn’t work much overtime, I didn’t do my own software projects outside of work, and I didn’t even spend much time reading programming blogs.
Young children are really overwhelming, if you are going to really parent them!
My career was fine. Career advancement is a marathon, not a sprint. Mmmm… that’s not true – I’ve seen people sprint through the career ladder. But if you want advice on how to do that you’ll need to ask someone else. MY approach to career advancement has been a marathon; keep improving until I am so ready for the next level that it’s really obvious, briefly do enough politicing to secure a promotion, then go back to the self-improvement. For me, the approach worked (I’m a “senior director” level non-manager-track software engineer today.)
When my kids were young I really just focused on them; these days they are in highschool and college and they work WITH me on my outside-of-work person programming projects.
This is a decent advice, to take this part of my career easy, focus on what’s more important (the kids), and wait for when they will be able to spend more time together, leaving more for me. Soo, like 3 years from now at least.
Well, given how exhausting fatherhood can be and the stability of my current job, I might just continue learning passively through articles or books. Additionally, I could incorporate the advice from this post and spend some time during work hours researching topics that I’ll need for my project. This approach would allow me to snipe two birds with one stone.
Thanks for the advice here.
Things will get better the moment your youngest becomes more independent, and sleeps well at night.
