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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

> have a pet project

I do. My daughter. She's vastly more interesting.

I recently came back from paternity leave. I talked to all of the hiring managers about my baby, because I'm one of those new parents who really likes talking about their baby. :)

Most of the managers really liked talking about their kids. One even just got back from maternity leave. But another one didn't even pretend to care my baby. That one didn't give me an offer, but that's okay because I wanted to work on a family friendly team.

I don't mention my family in an interview unless the interviewer mentions their own family. I've had a couple of instances of (possibly) agism in interviews, and I am doing my best to get hired.

I always mention my family. I want to be "discriminated against". I want any company I work for to assume I'm going to put my family first. I don't want to work for a company that expects any less.

I always mention in the following context:

"When necessary I will work overtime, but I prefer not to. I do not normally stay extremely late because I have a child that I care to see."

If a company reacts negatively to that, I will not accept the job. If they later complain I will remind them that I mentioned this before even starting. And most people are understanding, or you just don't want to work for them.

It's true. There are so many more things I'd rather be doing than writing code. I think after 8 years in the industry, things can get boring unless you land on the right teams and the right projects.

One thing I think a lot of us struggle with is keeping our skills and minds sharp even when the code we work on for our day jobs is old and rather routine and uninteresting.

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