I managed to be highly productive, build a career, yet be there for bath times, tucking into bed, school plays / sports days, nursing when ill, impromptu dancing to toddlers programs on the TV.
I can, because I lived that life. My wife and I moved from 1 bedroom apartment in the city to a house in a suburb ("only" 10 miles away) and the only time during the week I was able to spend much time with my child was 7am-8:30am before school. By the time I got home, he was going to bed. Generally, one weekend day had to be devoted to home/yard maintenance in the summer.
Before he started kindergarten, my wife and I decided that's not how we wanted to live our lives, so we sold the house and went back to renting w/a 2 bedroom apartment back in the city. My commute was 30 minutes, if I walked, with my son's school about at the halfway point of the commute. I was able to walk my son to school daily, and leave my office at 5pm and get to the sports fields at 5:15pm to coach sports. As a bonus, no house or yard to take care of meant both weekend days were also free. No regrets.
I love having a house and yard, and never having to pollute the environment to shift my bag of carbon water to do the same work worse somewhere less adapted to my being. There will come a time when passions die about RTO and companies stop paying for real estate simply to improve profits for those that don’t need to be collocated. “Culture” and other malarkey will matter not at all once passions die, the current management retires, and the bulk of workers went to college and high school online.
Then children will have their parents again.
In most developed countries, parents already spend more time with their kids than at any point in the past fifty years:
https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids
(What they've sacrificed, at least in the US, seems to largely be non-work social connections and group participation.)
I will bet you, furthermore, that pre industrial America parents, fathers included, spent way more time with their children than post industrial and more likely post war America. The data linked only extends to the start of post war American history though, and I’ll wager there’s no quantitative source to back me up. But the commuter culture started with the highway and interstate system, and before that factories brought parents away from the home en masse for the first time. Frankly I see the breaking down of the commute and office culture as a reversion to a more historically natural state where families are generally together most of the time.
That seems very unlikely, if going back more than a few decades. When parents used to work on the family farm one could be around the kids all day.
> tell parents they aren't doing a good enough job
It's not about not doing a good job, it's about wanting to be near the kids when they're young.
Yeah, coming from a horrible situation, everything is an improvement. The article isn't very clear on what qualifies as "kids", but if teenagers aren't pulling the average down, that is still a very bad number.
This is odd to me. This is not a long distance. Is there zero transport infrastructure where you live?
Some of the more dense urban areas(US Northeast and west coast population hubs) have somewhat effective transport in the locality but due to living where it's affordable most workers who would want to leverage this have problematic commutes crossing multiple travel systems. Things change from county to county and city to city.
Look at the cluster that is determining where the California High Speed train corridor will stop along the way and the complications from interests and that. Same story, different protagonist and perspective.
There is, in fact I lived a 5 minute walk from a bus stop and worked near a subway stop. My commute was:
1) 5 minute walking
2) 15 minutes bus to end of subway line
3) 25 minutes subway to transfer
4) 10 minutes subway to stop near the office
5) 5 minutes walk
I later bought an electric blower and lawn mower. They are super quiet. No exhaust. It helps to have a small yard.
Perhaps try a reel mower or an electric mower?
https://www.homedepot.com/b/Outdoors-Outdoor-Power-Equipment...
For instance, I can vacuum and mop my whole 3k sq ft house in a solid hour or so (including the stairs). Do that 2-3 times a month with spot vac in between and the entire place is always super clean and I barely spend any time. It doesn't even kill an afternoon.
In fact, I'd take it over my precious 800 sq ft city apartment. That place got way dirtier way faster due to size and location. And a full mop and vac of it would still take a solid 30-45 min (there are fixed costs involved). And it would need it weekly due to aforementioned proneness to dust and dirt.
I guess my time management and prioritization skill have improved by necessity, but the lack of uninterrupted quiet time is real.
I know it sounds hard to do if your family is used to you 'floating around', but I can tell you with 100% certainty it will just not work out long term any other way.
Do you have dedicated office space in your home? This is crucial.
Additionally, once the kids go to school the house gets very, very quiet for most of the day.
And yes, I am sure once everyone is at school for a big chunk of the day it all gets much easier.
Locking myself in my home office during work hours isn't a solution to this problem. I have to use the bathroom, get water, coffee, eat lunch, take walks, etc. The kids see me and want to play, want to hang out, want to tell me about everything that happened since the last time they saw me. They might come to the office door and start pounding on it, yelling out for Mom or Dad, depending on who's in the office working. At that point one of us has to physically respond to the situation. There's also the simple fact that sometimes only Mom or Dad can truly manage the situation at hand. I've had to go break up fights outside in the back yard after I realized the background noise I was hearing was an exasperated grandparent who couldn't get them to stop.
We have 3 kids, a set of twins and a singleton, whose average age is still under 3 years. It's a very challenging situation and work generally takes a back seat when the kids are in the house.
Sounds exactly like issues at our open offices too?
This week I've just given up on sleep completely, and accepted that I have already gone insane. I got 2 hours last night. After managing to pass out from exhaustion between coughing fits at 3AM, I was called back from the Ethereal Realm to this land of the damned by a mysteriously sweet voice in the dark, asking me for "a piece of cheese", and "bread, the round kind like for feeding a duck". To aid in my quest, I was hastily thrown the plastic base of a holy cheese grater from the land of Ikea; no more questions. Since then I've fed a baby about 5 oz of formula and coughed up about 2 oz of mucus. Like my daughter, it's been sort of fun to observe the change in consistency, color and flavor from day to day.
Overall things have been going well, though. No complaints. There's some clear benefits to operating at my physical and mental limit. I've lost some weight from all the involuntary vomiting and appetite loss. I abandoned my futile attempt to be delicate dealing with our difficult and jaded next door neighbors, and am instead stomping on egg shells calling them out on their unintentional but very rude behavior. I also feel like I've had a lot of really creative and productive, impactful breakthroughs at work lately. My only real disappointment is that I have absolutely no energy left to pick up my Steam Deck, and when I force myself to anyway, I get simulation sickness after 5 minutes.
The noro/rota/adeno/entero viruses are terrible, they tear through the whole class and family leaving a trail of vomit and diarrhea…and usually hit once or twice per year. Majority are just corona/rhino/influenza which are not as bad since they just usually just cause congestion and the kids can play through it.
I notice that my daughter stopped getting sick between 3 and 4 though, so I guess that is how long it takes to build up immunity to most.
I don't think this is actually a good anecdote in support of your stereotype? Let me tell you more about my recent personal work experiences. After taking 3 months of paid paternity leave, I eased back in by working a few 10-20 hour weeks, then my wife broke her leg while we were out of town helping her mother who herself had broken her shoulder. The CTO of my company immediately called just to say not to worry at all about the company, and to focus 100% on taking care of my wife and daughters. I worked a few 5 hour weeks, mainly just asynchronously answering people's technical questions to keep the cogs of progress turning. There was a re-org while I was on paternity leave, and my new manager who was also a new hire was getting worried that maybe I should take some sort of formal leave. To be honest it sounded pretty good at the time, since I was stressed out to the point of having abdominal pain; 3 month old, post-partum wife bedridden in extreme agony, unable to breastfeed, young daughter bouncing off the walls. I called the CTO just to mull over with, then called my former manager who himself had just gotten back from a several month leave that he spent doing yoga on an island off Portugal. He had me fully convinced to just take the next 4 months off, abandon my family and zip off to Portugal; just kidding. The CTO called me back to say that he talked to the head of engineering and the HR rep, and they all agreed that it seemed silly to take leave. They all agreed that I should continue not worrying at all about the company and focus 100% on my family, at least for another month or two. "You've always gone the extra mile for the company, so let the company do the same for you." He suggested that I should only consider taking leave once my wife's leg is better, if I felt burnt out and I thought it would make be happier. He also offered to go check in with my new manager, just to make sure he himself wasn't stressing out about the situation. Then the HR rep called, and clarified that there's no company policy or legal reason why I would need to take leave. She preferred the zero paperwork option of just calling it paid-time-off (the company has an unlimited vacation policy.) I've been gradually ramping up my hours since then, and I would describe my current situation as a positive feedback loop between productivity and sleep deprived euphoria. My work is a lot of fun and very rewarding, and it's easy for me to get sucked into it. https://youtu.be/DOWDNBu9DkU
I've had so many viruses since the older one started preschool 8 months ago, I can't remember what feeling good feels like.
The lack of sleep from trying to help my wife feed the newborn on top of keeping a norovirus-infected toddler away from said newborn in-between my own trips to the bathroom has been.....not fun.
I honestly cannot describe how much better I suddenly feel knowing I'm not the only one in that boat. I was totally unable to remember that this is temporary, we will stop getting sick, and I will feel good again until I read this.
I just smiled at the toddler for the first time in a week.
Our older daughter got hit with the norovirus a couple days before we did, so by the time it took us down she was over it. We didn't take any special precautions to isolate the baby, given that she most definitely got exposed the same time we did. Luckily the baby never developed any major symptoms. My wife was totally screwed with her broken leg. New lifetime achievement personal low. I had a 60 minute window between when she became violently ill and I did, which I used to build her an elevated makeshift bed close enough to the toilet that she could stand up and pivot on one leg. It was luxuriously memory foam padded. Our older daughter had the opportunity of her lifetime: camped out in the living room with the TV remote, Disney + button, no bed time. She's was so sweet and concerned though, that she kept checking in on her mom every half an hour until she passed out from exhaustion. I myself had a relatively tame night; all of my indignities could be kept between me and the washing machine.
A couple weeks ago our dog started vomiting on the mat by the back door of our kitchen. My wife started urgently shouting at me to do something. I kept doing whatever I was doing at a snails pace, probably staring at the hot water kettle or something. She got progressively more frustrated with me, "what are you doing?! Vomit! Hurry!" I turned to her and said, why are you shouting at me? Do you want me to feel stressed out about it? My sole purpose in life right now is to clean up vomit, wipe butts, and be spat up on. Of course Ollie's throwing up right now, it's the perfect compliment to my morning coffee. Just look how masterful he is, our entire house is hardwood and he intentionally walked over to that absorbent floor mat. Let me brew my coffee and enjoy a few sips. Then I'll grab some paper towel and the folex, the trash can, gag two or three times, and then it will be all fixed. I'm an expert at this.
I don't really know what I'm rambling on about anymore, but I was quite amused by the fact that I happened to throw up twice from coughing fits while typing out this post.
It gets better!
Sounds glorious.
If you need some daytime distraction get a cat or dog. Taking the house-beast for a stroll around the neighborhood is good for my mental health, gets me away from work, and keeps the pooch happy. Kids make having a dog easier too -- he can bug them to play while I finish reports.
It is, but also I really miss having lunch with them. And definitely get a little stir crazy if I forget to go outside now, so I usually take a 20-30 minute walk around lunch time.
Phone calls, people talking around you, movement everywhere, unwanted taps on your shoulder and a lot more.
Unless your job provides you with a closed office where you can actually focus on, it's pretty much the same as having kids around.
When I worked in an office I remember the most productive hour I had was right after I got there, because I arrived ~1h early (due to commuting BS) and was basically alone.
Once teammates arrive, it's chaos. No matter how good your headphones are, something will interrupt you at random times just like your kids. Except if you do have an office in your house, you can actually close the door and have uninterrupted time, even if it's in small chunks.
There’s screaming and crying, if your help is needed, it needs to be right now, kids wont take no for an answer, etc.
When I was in an open office, people generally kept a reasonable background volume my brain could tune out. As adults, they respected my answers the first time, and certainly no one screamed at me.
Of course everyone's experience will vary, which kind of invalidates the idea that all of this is because of WFH. It depends on your kids, your home/office, your work office, teammates, commute time and so on.
My point is that blanket statements like "WFH with kids ruins productivity" don't accurately portray the reality and helps bad managers justify unjustifiable RTO policies with anecdotes.
I know you didn't use a blanket statement though. But when I read your comment I could almost feel a bad manager reading it and using it to ruin more people's lives. Sorry about the rant.
In-person interaction can be fun and is important for team bonding and meta work communication but it would be so much better to facilitate that explicitly, outside of the work space.
Optimally this would mean 95% remote plus cool getaways together (at minimum, actually fun evenings out).
It’s like with conferences, the most important learning usually happens outside of the premises.
Why not be smart about that fact?
But the one most-of-a-floor-of-a-highrise open office I worked in, for a "more mature" company than the little startups I usually work for... that was a whole lot worse then even at-home-with-kids (and, not coincidentally, was the least "mature"/professional place I've ever worked, despite on-paper looking far more serious than other places I've worked).
I don't know how anyone got any work done there. I suspect their handful of fully-remote senior devs were doing most of the actual work. WFH with small kids would have been a big improvement.
The tradeoff is being away from the people I love for 8-10 hours a day, and even just being present in a baby's/toddler's life is huge. I'd still stay home again.
I recommend finding a nearby coworking space. Spend 2-4 hours of the house if the chaos is too much.
The lunchtime breaks were my favorite, getting to see how their day was going and help out or share a quick laugh.
It really was and still is priceless for me.
For anyone starting out, I highly recommend trying to be home as much as possible in your kid’s 1st 5 years before they make strong friendships and when you’re their mentor and best friend.
FWIW, I commuted through most of my son's childhood. I still made it home for those things you list. But, it did take optimizing house location/commute, etc. I certainly wasn't gone 7am-7pm. Even with 60 min of driving and 60 min for lunch, that's an 10 hour day.
To spell the quiet part out loud here, what you're describing is an extreme privilege in a world where homes near tech campuses often go for $1M+. New fathers aren't going to have a down payment for even $600k+. Tech at this point starts as a rich persons game which is why so many tech workers intermarry with other wealthy people. It takes two or a trust fund to do what you're talking about early on, unless you want to rent in a place where rents are highly inflated. At that point, you're choosing between a family and any shade of financial freedom.
No, it's not.
Working for a huge tech company _and_ doing what's described is an extreme privilege. But working for a huge tech company is a huge privilege in and of itself. And you don't have to work for one of those, at which point doing what's described can become a lot easier.
I'd be more interested in median commute time though.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-commute-time-statistic...
Edit: this has an interactive map of bad commute hotspots! https://www.ridester.com/average-us-commute/
My old commute was 12 mile and consistently <30 minutes each way.
My current commute is a 1 mile walk that takes <20 minute. Def. lucked into this - my wife's commute is more typical at 10 miles/20-30 minutes.
My dad's old commute was 5 miles/15 minutes. Mom's was similar.
Of my friends, 2 commute downtown (Flex Time/hybrid) for .gov positions. I can't think of any that commute more than 30 minutes each direction.
Edit - I'll add that almost all of us could take jobs downtown for more money. And either deal with the commute or move into more expensive housing closer in. It's a balance. We're lucky to be in a position to make that balance. But, just about any software developer is going to have that option (except perhaps in SV).
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
It's also out of context, which was that two tech parents were discussing having time for family. There's a strong correlation between expensive homes near tech campuses and tech jobs at tech campuses paying over $150k/yr for someone out of undergrad (if HN reports are correct). And besides, optimizing your location includes choosing both job and location; there are tech jobs that are not in expensive locations, and spending most of one's money on an expensive mortgage to buy free time for family is also an option.
Technically, you need to inherit the genes that allow you to do this kind of profession successfully.
we don't need to be reminded there are poor people out there. no shit, really? we see it every day. some of us started out that way, some of us are the children of millionaires. so what? i'm not going to self-police what i talk about on the internet just because poor people exist in this world. i don't feel envy or animosity towards the rich or the poor. some poor people get rich, some rich people lose their damn marbles and go to the poor house, dragging entire families down with them - let me guess, you feel no sympathy towards that type of poor person, right? they deserved it, right? either way, life goes on.
it's like stating that water is wet or the sky is blue and then chastising people about not mentioning the water and sky when they talk about their new smart phone or laptop. absolutely no value add. it's a non-sequitur.
who does this actually help, by pointing this out? nobody is going to accidentally buy a million dollar house with their well compensated corporate job if they're not by definition winning/privileged. we're not selling subprime mortgages here.
It sounds like you prefer a conversation to be more tailored to your experience, that is normal. In places like HN, a large portion of people live in their bubble and don't see out of it. Bringing up a more common experience is necessary to put a topic in complete context in some cases or at a minimum expands the field of view, it's not meant to make you feel guilt.
A part of being human is to point out abnormality, and many times it's done without even a thought. I'm not sure why you're having a melt down, just ignore it if it bothers you. Telling people to stop mentioning their experience isn't going to be constructive and people who WANT to guilt trip you can just fuck right off so don't let it get to you.
i demand that you acknowledge his state of precariousness in a sacrificial caveat before you speak one more word of your laptop-able existence.
afterwards i demand you meditate for 5 minutes and say your affirmations of gratitude out loud three times.
The person I replied to said, "I got what you got working remotely by living close to where I work". Do you understand now why there's such a far degree of separation between those two things? Far more people can afford to work remotely than those that can afford to live near a tech campus.
Having privilege isn't shameful. Often privilege is gained along side accomplishments that were earned. Hybrid work is a relevant topic, and a lot of people readily eschew remote workers experience by saying, "You can have all that by living close to campus! Oh it's too expensive to buy? Just rent! Oh, rent is expensive and not nearly comparable to my 10 year old mortgage? Get room mates!" It gets old, and they're not proper analogs.
Anyway, sorry you raged hearing about why this wasn't an analog, have a better day.
I do get that hearing about privilege, especially if you're exposed to those conversations a lot (or more than others) can be pretty annoying. I've found myself in that seat before and I've felt how, I think, you're feeling.
That said, I've also gotten used to realizing that not everyone hears that point of view every day or even often enough. The hybrid work conversations have been a glass house of just that. Nobody wants to hear how good they have it compared to new entrants, they just want to be getting what they've been getting and in order to do that everyone else needs to fall in line.
The other annoyance that I had was some of your invented strawmen about how I don't empathize for people that make less than I do. I certainly do, and members of my family are among those folks. Like others, I've had to make hard decisions on how to best support them, even if it means at times giving up things that this life could afford me. That's why I do my best to argue for a world where all or most people can succeed; the point of pointing out privilege isn't to say, "You shouldn't have that". It's to say, "Other people should be afforded what you have too, especially if the difference is just geography".
I did mean that I hope you have a better day.
No trust fund here. Parents are immigrants from a farming community in Scotland. I won't deny being more privileged than many, but my socio-economic background was typical professional middle-class (dad=engineer, mom=teacher, own their home, valued education, etc).
I live in the heart or Reston VA, work for a reasonably well-known (but not FAANG) company, and bought a typical 4 bed SFH when I was 26 for well under $400 (back in 2004). When my son moved out (2017), we sold that and bought a smaller TH closer to work for under $500 (which is now worth low-$600s). Sure, it's not the latest McMansion and I don't have a garage, but it's more than adequate.
Is that option available to an hourly retail employee? No, probably not. But, it's certainly available to just about any white-collar couple in the area.
That qualifies as one of the things that I described as a privilege. Making the assumption that two white collar people are married isn't great.
Also, frankly, if you bought in 2004 then you were part of an explosion of equity nation wide. People who are initially buying in in the twenty teens are in a very different market.
I do agree that SV isn't typical, but I wouldn't say that's a reason to write off what I said.
My company's local office is open, and I do go in 2-3 times a month for various reasons (which I also enjoy as a change of pace). But every time I do it's a total ghost town. And not just our floors, but every floor.
It sure seems to me that commercial office space leases are going to collapse in on themselves over the next 3-8 years as the longterm leases come up for renewal and companies say "no thanks" or "we'll take 10% of the space we currently used".
(As the article notes, Boston has some of the worst congestion.)
I was always a very detached individual, but the experience changed me and my perspective a lot. The 2 weeks most men get for post birth bonding ( and some don't even have that ) is heartbreaking.
I am not suggesting we move to EU level craziness where a person takes a year off to care for a child, but I am sure there is some middle ground.. and from where I sit, WFH allows just that.
The year I spent before that I was lucky to see her at all during a day. She wasn't awake before I left (except for the inevitable screaming during the night) and we kept her up late so I could feed her a bottle before she went to bed.
I think it's a huge win for equality and family life. Any boss will have to wrestle WFH out of my cold dead hands.
Our second kid was born a month before the pandemic hit. I was there for so many beautiful moments. With #3 on the way, you can indeed wrestle WFH from my cold dead hands.
Hm, where I live, both parents take roughly the same amount of parent leave (around 240 working days each in total - minimum 90 days for each) from work regardless of whether they work at home or anything else. That's what I would call equality.
By contrast WFH changes the rest of a child's experience for their whole life.
The whole concept of women pumping and then someone else feeding their baby defrosted frozen breastmilk because they have to work is crazy. Women should have at least 1 year with their child, and if that means men need to be off for a year too, then so be it.
[edited to add: even if the mother takes up the majority of the childrearing (diapers, feeding, swaddling, talking, socializing, etc) the father should be taking up all of her previous chores, housework, social maintenance (e.g. familial obligations)!]