Comment by ye-olde-sysrq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ye-olde-sysrq | Hacker News Reader

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>Add in parental responsibilities

Out of curiosity, how many of your coworkers have kids?

I have 3, and I've always found it a bit ominous that even when I'm on large teams (8+) I'm typically still the only person with kids. So far:

1. job 1, team of 8, only 1 other IC had kids

2. job 2, team of 10, nobody else had kids

3. current job, team of 8, nobody else has kids. If you expand it to the suborganization we're in, you get ~16 people and only one other person has kids.

And it's not like these teams are mostly college new grads or anything, it's usually people like me in their 30's.

I always wonder how much of a disadvantage it is that other people get to clock out of work, enjoy an evening, sleep through the night, and then wake up and go to work. Whereas a parent is going to clock out of work and clock in to parenting, and then when it's kid bedtime, you finally get 2-3 hours to fit in personal time that's usually still not "you" time but is you spending time with your partner.

I'd never trade my kids for my career, and I find the time I spend with them incredibly fulfilling, but it's definitely extra load. And I do depend on being good at my job to help feed them and stuff. And I did opt into this, so it's hard to say it's "unfair". But I feel like our society doesn't need more reasons not to have kids given fertility is already below replacement rate.

Fertility is definitely not below replacement rate. Maybe in western countries.

You find it hard to say it's unfair but you seem to hint to it. I don't think it is in the slightest. Also you sound like a software developer from the US so you likely can afford to work say 80% and "recoup" some of that free time.

Yes, I meant in the West, where much of the high-tech work the article is about.

Well of course I feel it's unfair at some level! That is indeed why I made the comment.

Assuming we want society to continue, someone has to have kids. And while of course we don't want to force individual people to have kids, we should (again assuming we do want humanity to continue) probably try to achieve some kind of balance to where large swathes of people don't self-select out of having kids due to economic/career reasons.

And if the working spouse tries to shed home responsibilities to help them focus on their career, this simply promotes inequity, both sex-wise (since more women are stay-at-home spouses than men) and class-wise (wealthier people will be able to hire additional help, while poorer people will not).

Do you really have 2-3 hours after kid bedtime? By the time my kids are asleep, it's already late and have no left time to do anything more than going to sleep myself

It varies a lot - sometimes the kids are in bed by 8 and I stay up till 11. Sometimes they're not in bed till 9 and I stay up till 12 and regret it the next day. I suspect as my kids get older (they're 4.5, 2.9, and 0.8 years old atm) that will shift later and later as they converge towards more 8-9 hours of sleep per night. I'm already starting to see it with the 4.5-year-old who will often stay up until 10ish playing in his room. Probably going to need to start allowing him a later bedtime.

Children seem like a liability in almost every aspect. I'm honestly a bit surprised when anyone mentions they have/want them, and I'm not even a type A/career climber, who I would think would see them as even more of a liability.

They're amazing. They're a lot of work, and a lot of that work is at odd hours ("3am: dad I'm scared of the wind also I accidentally peed on the floor") and/or highly frustrating ("me: son, please stop leaning out that window. son, balancing precariously halfway out his playhouse window: why. me: because if you fall out of it, it will hurt. 2 mins later: falls out of window and it hurts.") (also - feeding kids of any age).

But it's so worth it. My oldest is old enough to be playing with legos, and teaching him how to follow the instructions, and then seeing him both follow the instructions and then also deviate from them sometimes with his own creativity without compromising the rest of the build (well, usually) is just amazing to see happen. And then take this sentiment ^ and apply it to practically every facet of life. Having kids is about finding magic and bonding in both everyday things, like watering the garden together, and in the once-in-a-lifetime things like going on a vacation to someplace.

But of course it's not for everyone! It is really hard work and it takes a certain maturity and disposition for selflessness to be good at it. So I of course respect people who want to opt-out.

But - setting magic aside - so much of our economy is literally predicated on populations either continuously growing or at the very least not shrinking that we need to be careful about fertility rates. I think we can look to Japan to see what happens when you make your society too much of an economic rat race: people either solely focus on it or drop out of it, and both will cause fertility rates to drop.

A good step in the right direction here is that it's probably in the interest of us all that people who want to have kids are enabled to do so. (And indeed we have some policies like this already - public schools, child tax credits, etc).

And note that my concern about none of my coworkers having kids is mostly in this vein ^: it seems to me like it's a bad sign if a bunch of people with ample means are all still deciding not to have kids despite nominally having the funding to bankroll it.

It is really hard work and it takes a certain maturity and disposition for selflessness to be good at it.

I think it's easier to be selfless about it if you don't have any ambition outside of your typical 9 to 5 career. For a lot of people genetic propagation is the summit of their existence, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I did find that it's important to work on teams where folks have kids. If you're politely vocal about the time blocks... it helps. But honestly I've had to use the 8PM-11PM slots for work with folks on the west coast. I treat is as a red flag if the management/other senior engineers don't have kids.

It worked alright for about 1.5 years, but ... I need to get more PTO to sustain this type of work load.

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