Family or Career - Zero Sum Game? | Hacker News Reader

Family or Career - Zero Sum Game?

ben.casnocha.com

49 pointstbrooks20 comments

Steve Blank had a good post about this, if you want some perspective from someone who has actually dealt with these issues:

http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur...

I use the similar approach, with the main principle being that the family must not be neglected no matter what.

As my daughter slowly grows, I see clearly that a neglect of not spending enough time with her for a longer time can't actually be compensated later on, and that could only create regrets when I'll get older.

My experience have been so far that family/career can be balanced, since it is always possible to squeeze out more time for work by getting up sooner, stay awake longer or give up some personal leisures.

We currently live somewhere where my work is a 20 minute walk away, my wife's work is 15 minutes walk away and our son's school is 10 minutes walk away.

That has made a huge difference to what we can both get done in a day - no need for long commutes (previous role had a commute of 2.5 hours a day) or school drop off and pick ups.

Wow, that's really, really cool. How'd you swing that?

The main factor is probably being in central Edinburgh - which has a combination of nice homes, offices and good schools in a fairly compact area.

I spent 2.5 years repairing the distance created by my absence during the first year of my first daughter's life.

Its seems like its only now that I've gotten as close and comfortable with my first as I am with my second child.

Thanks for posting this great article.

I'm learning first hand that babying a startup while starting up a baby is an awesome challenge. Actually the two don't differ much in mindset - total dedication is the key.

So I try to do one thing at a time - and do it wholeheartedly. It's trickier then it sounds, requires constant tweaking, but pays off in dividends.

(I find that this related HN post deals with some of the practicalities mentioned above - "Self-control is a limited resource, use it sparingly" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207136)

Work on your family as hard as you do your career:

"A truly rich man is someone whose children runs into their arms even when they're empty"

"My daughter one time said... We were leaving church, like a church party. We were driving home, in the car. And she didn't want to go home. She was like 3 or 4 at the time. I don't want to go to Mommy's house. I don't want go to Mia's house.

OK, we'll go to Daddy's house. OK.

We pulled into our house and she started freaking out crying. Why? She thought my house was the office.

And that's when I realized I needed to start pulling back.

To step it up, be a baller at home"

- Josh James, founder of Omniture

From video originally posted by adammichaelc (I highly recommend the entire 1-hr video for inspiration and a kick-in-the-seat-of-your-pants)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164815

Thanks for posting that link. As someone with a 1 year old and aspirations of having my own software business, the video provides tremendous inspiration and food for thought.

I really liked the Steve Blank post. As for my personal experience, Skype and Google Apps turn this old paradigm around. I am launching my first business right now, and last week my first son was born. As I work 90% from home, the 60 hours weeks don't interfere with my family time at all.

This. The technology we have at the moment actually assists a great work-life balance. If you're spending fourteen hours a day working at the exclusion of everything else, you're simply doing it wrong. That's the long and the short of it.

It was amusing to see a book with a picture of Ben Franklin being advertised on that page. It's hard to think of a stronger anecdotal rebuttal of the blog entry's argument.

Wow, all of the sudden I feel very grateful: I'm a few years into running my first startup and I hired my wife (who has a PhD in my startup's field) as the 3rd employee.

Felt risky at the time, but it has definitely made life easier working those 12+ hour days together.

Now just gotta have some kids and hire them too..."Finish your code or no desert for you!"

I used to work for a guy who was a family man, good at his (demanding) job, and ran triathlons. This is doubly impressive, as I see many fat programmers who might be successful in their families and careers but are neglecting their health. As far as I could tell, his method was:

1)Be very focused while on the job and have mounds of energy.

2)Be very smart.

3)Be very clear about your goals and what you want from life.

4)Do not care about appearances. He would regularly come in and leave at odd hours. But his superiors didn't care because he got good results.

5)Be insanely likeable. Maybe his superiors or his clients would have grumbled about his hours if they didn't think he was a swell guy. Note: being good at your job and likeable is a killer combination for being able to bend the rules and get away with it. Either quality alone is probably not enough.

6)Pick reliable underlings and delegate. This is related to point (5). Everybody wanted to work for him, you couldn't know the guy and NOT want to work for him, so he was able to choose competent people for his team.

I don't know that I could be like my old boss. Right now, I can barely keep grad school and my health together. But I have an example to emulate.

A calling is an activity you find so compelling that you wind up organizing your entire self around it -- often to the detriment of your life outside of it.

From this definition I would say that a family is a calling (and IMHO the most rewarding one). I've seen too many exceptions to believe that you can't do both.

I always wondered whether part of it (at least in this day and age) was that it's disadvantageous for the spouse to have a hard charging partner. If the partner gets ahead, then they could get a better spouse.

it doesn't have to be a choice.. but for most startup oriented people it will probably become one. also probably unintentionally. they end up ignoring their kids etc...

i love my job and even though it gives me a lot of freedom to spend time with my family i still sometimes get so caught up i have to remind myself to focus on the family.

Family + Career = 0? Of course it isn't. If it were, success would be an automatic by-product of your family's misery.

What a silly, silly, statement.

Exactly, there are even situations where one's family is the reason for whatever semblance of career they have. Look at that Octomom person (I never thought I'd reference her on HN).

Her entire "career" is based around her ability to breed.

I think it's entirely wrong to say you have to choose between one and the other, because there are lots of cases where the model is broken.

Zero sum doesn't mean that the two terms literally sum to zero, just that one trades off directly against the other.

Family + Career = K

would be the algebraic expression of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com