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Comment by carlivar | Hacker News Reader

I think this is why it's no coincidence that people often become people managers around the same time they have kids. Not only are you consistently managing people at home and work, it tends to be a more steady 9 to 5 job with less late night passionate coding or such required.

Or that could just be my experience.

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For what it's worth, that hasn't been my experience. I've been working ~9-5:30 as a programmer for my whole career (2008-present) with essentially no late night coding. I think that's been very typical at the places I've worked (defense contractor, mature startup, Google, startup, Google).

I do think the fraction of managers with kids is higher, but I suspect this is just explained by managers generally being older?

Perhaps just different personality types. I have never worked well technically productive in an office. I view that as planning, reviewing, conversational time. I just love working on things at night. My brain feels optimized at that time. But kids stopped allowing me that window, which wasn't necessarily 9pm-2am or something. More like 3pm-midnight.

I’m the same way. It’s like I am more awake after 3pm and ready to finally start working. I do drink caffeine, which helps

For me it's some combination of the darkness and less "other stuff happening". Otherwise I just want to go outside and otherwise get distracted by the hustle and bustle of humanity.

Yup, me too. I can count the number of times I had to work late on two hands. I live in Europe, though.

I almost never have to work late. But historically I've found myself doing it anyway, either due to poor personal time management, or being really excited about solving a problem, or just because I didn't feel like my brain was working properly during the morning. I've worked pretty hard to adjust my schedule to something I consider more stable and sustainable, but I know I'm not alone in functioning this way.

I'm sure having kids is a powerful incentive to adjust more rapidly and more completely.

Yes I agree. I think it is just a statistical coincidence

I think it’s the opposite. Managers have more rigid schedules and less flexibility with remote work. If I want to be home at 2pm it’s much easier as an eng than a manager. Maybe depends on your employer though

In companies I worked in, the people who did late night coding were minority and they also tended to be people who come in very late in the morning. The kids force you to come to work sooner, so that you can pick them up at reasonable time.

But unless there was systematic crunch, programmers tended to come and leave regularly. Systematic crunch also lead to big turnover, most people did not stayed in that situation.

Management had less freedom due to meetings and calls with customers being at more random times.

I've actually went the other way, soon after my first kid was born, I had to stop being a manager pulling late nights, mulling over company issues during off-hours, and having work issues get to me.

I found it less stressful and better on my mental health to go back to becoming a programmer, although I have also made a bigger effort to leave work at work.

I went the other way! No more babysitting adults and spending all day and night married to work, more time for the kids.

I have never heard that before and plenty of my colleagues, developers, have family.

I also know plenty of managers without family.

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