How Getting Married and Having Kids Made Me a Better Programmer | Hacker News Reader

How Getting Married and Having Kids Made Me a Better Programmer

johnpolacek.com

97 pointsjohnpolacek54 comments

As someone with a four month old this really resonates with me. I got the best grades of my entire life the two semesters my wife was pregnant, despite having to spend time helping her cope with e.g. morning sickness and school at the same time. I take the night feedings now and find that I just don't need as much sleep as I used to. Some people have always functioned fine on 5 hours or so but I was never one of them. I'm forced to be efficient. My wife needs me to be there to give her a break from the baby on weekends and late in the evening, so I have to try and make every baby free hour count.

I have mixed feelings about this. Being married definitely forces you make different decisions than you would otherwise. You cling on where you are longer, no adventure. There are no quick decisions, but long and strategized, calculated ones. I think one makes more "mature" decisions when dealing with an adverse situation.

However, on the other hand being married and having children (2 in my case) is a huge attention drain. You probably will buy the dwelling you're living and it bring its own distraction. Working long stretches of time, and even keep on thinking and solving problems while not working is long gone.

Would I trade family to the other? No way, life is more than that. It's probably a cliche but true; smile of a cute 1 year old daughter worth more than millions of lines of code.

Opposite for me. I was only able to launch my startup after getting married, and having a wife with steady income and health care.

How about children?

I imagine most everyone with kids will agree with this at some level. The environment changes dramatically.

For me, I discovered that work and programming and problem solving slowed down, in a good way. While not suggesting comparability, it's something that top athletes have consistently remarked on -- how the game slowed down for them and it made them able to move about more effectively as they competed.

I experienced the same thing as a developer after I had kids. Problems seemed more clearly defined, challenges seemed not so insurmountable, and alternatives with little/no chance of succeeding became more clearly defined. I absolutely attribute that to having kids, and the mindset it imposes on you as a responsible parent.

It may have been that I needed something else to focus on in order to ensure I was not missing the forest for the trees. Nonetheless, having kids and being a better programmer? No one could ever convince me that's not the best outcome for my own circumstance.

My experience with parents was, that they became more serios about their career. But I can't say they became really good at their job.

Probably they became better than they were before, but not as good as I wished them to be...

Anyway, I don't like to work with people when they get to serious about stuff.

I remember when hearing about this asshole MBA standing on a stage in Singapore talking about how he wouldn't hire developers who were parents.

I've not done my own startup yet, but I suspect developers that also were parents would understand responsibility and dependency the best. It's a bit of a generalisation, but so is the fact that most MBA's are useless cunts. Not going to name this person, but googling could help.

I'm not a father, and I have no need to become one, but I've noticed parents are usually incredibly responsible.

Dude sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Not hiring parents is a great idea if you just need some warm bodies willing to kill themselves for beanies, but that doesn't say much about your company. If you're looking for people with real expertise, then you're limiting yourself greatly by focusing only on people who are still single into their 30's (not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just atypical).

In Silicon Valley, nobody has kids until their late 30s, if ever.

Edit: the post I replied to originally said something to the effect that finding engineers without kids by age 30 would be statistically difficult. Which is false in Silicon Valley. That said, it's also not atypical in Silicon Valley to remain single well into your 30s.

This is just not true. If you look at immigrant software engineers, they are usually married by 30 and then start having kids.

I'd like to see your data. Silicon Valley aside, the trend for women with college degrees has been to postpone childbirth until around age 35. This isn't exactly news.

The average age of college educated women at first birth is 30: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/getting-mar...

If Europe, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are included in those statistics, the age is closer to 35.

I don't have data for Silicon Valley, only anecdotal evidence. If you look at Indians and Russians around 30, they are mostly married and having/preparing to have kids. It is a well-known fact that immigrant fertility is higher in US than native fertility.

I don't know where 35 years at first child came from. This is way too high for an average, even among well-educated. There might be a trend but at that age you will have all kinds of problems even with modern advances in IVF.

Are we talking about entrepreneurs or engineers?

Does it matter? The social dynamics are similar.

We're talking about hiring employees, not finding co-founders. The question is what the pool of engineers looks like, not the pool of entrepreneurs. It's quite reasonable to believe that the latter will postpone having children much longer than the former.

Well, I wish I hadn't replied since you edited your comment to say something quite different to what I was responding to. That said, if I was wagering money on the age of when any tech employee in Silicon Valley gets married and starts having kids, I would pick 33.

Get out of the bubble sometime, there's a whole world out there.

What does the rest of the world have to do with my comment?

You have a very narrow view of things if you don't think people are having kids (yes, even in the valley).

Clearly, as the world population approaches 7 billion, people are indeed having kids. My comment was Silicon Valley specific. Do you know something I don't? Are 20 something tech employees in Silicon Valley all of the sudden having lots of kids? Because that would be interesting news, worthy of a news article. I don't appreciate the insinuation that I live in a bubble or have a narrow view of things, simply because I made a comment about Silicon Valley demographics.

Tired of these self-fluff pieces getting upvoted. Is this 'popular hacking' or hacker news?

On the face of the article: No, I wholeheartedly disagree. Less is not more and don't believe anyone telling you that. This guy is claiming that now that he has less time he is 6X better at his job due to 'unconscious cognition'.

I feel for all the parents out there that have kids and still maintain a career, but we need some evidence to go along with the article. Right now, this article looks like appeal to emotion. Everybody likes family and feels good about it. Skill and ability, like everything else, still needs to be measured and tested.

>On the face of the article: No, I wholeheartedly disagree. Less is not more and don't believe anyone telling you that. This guy is claiming that now that he has less time he is 6X better at his job due to 'unconscious cognition'.

I think becoming a parent, like everything in life, just taught him some lessons: How to manage his time and looking at the big picture often puts things into perspective. Both these things help with efficiency.

It's almost identical to what I went (and still going) through with having kids. I got much better at 'mind hacking'. I could be playing with the kids or making dinner or whatever and my mind is hacking away at solution to problems.

I thought I was a great programmer when I was 19 and staying up for 30 hours grinding it out. I was totally wrong. I'm on the wrong side of 25 and I've realised even though I spend less time writing code, I'm a significantly better programmer because of it. Sometimes to write code, you must not write code; wax on, wax off grasshopper.

Agree. And this probably works if you want to be a programmer ie something quite independent and you don't 'run' things.

I used to be a lot more entrepreneurial before my son. Having a child changes things, a lot more than marriage. There was a constant feeling of guilt of working on something when he was there to play with. I always felt I would miss out on something if I was working. Ultimately, entrepreneurial pursuits weren't as much fun as they used to. At some point (subconsciously), I decided my time with the kid was time I would never get again and gave up on my side projects.

Only time will tell if my decision is what makes me have no regrets :)

That said, I certainly believe that having no family commitments make you do 'big' things. If you see history, most 'great' people achieved things at the cost of family - Gandhi, Einstein, etc.

There is simply no time to do 'great' things and be with your wife/children.

I noticed something similar (though without having the wife and kids (though I'm getting the hints)).

I recently switched to working from home while I sorted out a new office and thought "wow, 8-10 hours a day I'll be so productive"... nope.

Much the same as mentioned in the article I find I work best in blocks of 2-3 hours with a decent period to cogitate before the next block. Now I've moved into my new offices I have someone to grab lunch with and/or can go for a wonder round the museum (which is opposite office and has a lovely garden/pond).

It was a valuable learning experience though as I'd always aimed for working from home as a perfect programming environment and it turns out that I'm only productive at home on a night if I've been somewhere else during the day.

Great post, and good follow on commentary as well. I wholeheartedly agree with the author. Using this technique (forcing myself to walk away from directly solving a problem) got me through my college calculus course.

Now that I have kids (3 of them), i know that a battle with a tricky bug or business problem is nothing compared to a battle of wits with a two year old.

Definitely agree with you. From the moment my now 2 years old daughter was born, a hidden register in my brain was activated to warn me every time i was losing time. I mean: losing time in my programming work. This is the main effect of having a constraint, less time, results in more efficiency. I also agree on the unconscious problem solving function, always related to taking a break, it really seems our lives could be better lived taking the right time to pause, relax, think. Still researching and experimenting on these things.

When you have kids and you realize how little time you have, it forces you to learn to identify and focus on the things that matter. This easily translates to your career.

I think it really comes down to the programmer.

I have heard from people without kids that they wouldn't hire people with kids sometimes based on them being busy.

I have heard married with children people say that they like to hire married with kids for more dedication.

What I have found is that single or married, some people just manage time better and have a knack for contributing in a way that makes a product better or not. Personally, I feel that parenting and being married with a kid has not only made me a better efficient programmer but it has made me a better product person somehow. I care more about a larger set of the target market. I want my things to work for kids, core and adult to old age if possible.

In the end it is all bias, it comes down to good and bad and who can deliver in ample time with the best product. It isn't easy either way. I know I would tire of chasing girls and finding time to code/build/make products, with my wife and kid and home it is very much like a lab or study kind of setup. Lots of support and lots of motivation but also great time for focus.

This article really hit a nerve with me. I am 21, single, surfer, and have had the opportunity to be able to spend time with many pretty and interesting ladies. But I got accepted into DBC and am now, more or less, out of the "college-mentality" and am now thinking more clearly.

As a 21 year old, when you are not working or studying, almost everything you do revolves around trying to pick up some girl. I got tired of it because I would rather learn software than pretend like I care what some girl is talking about just to get in her pants.

I have known this one girl for 8 years and we have essentially grown up together and spent our teenage years together. I used to be against marriage because of not wanting to get tied down. But she is my best friend, someone who I could spend every day with, which is what marriage really is about. She wouldn't tie me down, because she understands what i am doing and what I want to accomplish. Pursuing some girl just to bed her...would tie me down because you get "addicted" to trying to it. It's fun, but it makes you feel dirty and shameful.

Many of the arguments the OP makes really resonates with some of the reasoning I have come up with. If you have someone who supports you, and she in return is expecting you do to the same, that is the most valuable asset that you could have. It provides better motivation than almost anything else I could think of. She is trusting YOU to provide for her. When your back is against the wall, you can do some pretty incredible things because what your doing HAS TO work.

Not to go too far into it, but the point I was trying to make was I am seriously considering proposing to this girl. I am leaving, so this is kind of my Hail Mary. Maybe this is the worst decision I could ever make, maybe not. Thanks for a great read and I will be taking this article into consideration when making my next move.

Keep the good writing coming!

as a young man, girls and sex was always a distraction in my mind, I had more frustrations than successes.

all my achievement have been post my marriage, most after having my kids. It brought me focus and calm to my mind, I was not looking around, I was happy and contend, I knew what I wanted and was making progress each day.

This is why I sleep on tough problems. I can honestly feel my brain thinking about it while I sleep and usually by the time I wake up, I have a solution or at least a new vector for attack. My father is the same way and keeps a notepad by his bed for this same reason.

There might be a correlation, but it is almost impossible to prove that kids cause one to get better at one's job. For example, I am sure that people with kids (up to a certain number) earn more. But it might just be that they started earning more and then had kids.

What I believe is that kids are a normal part of life very different from anything you have experienced before them. Having them has nothing to do with your career (or should have nothing to do with it), and they don't really care where you work up to a certain age.

Even though I have not taken the entrepreneurial plunge yet (in the true sense), I just had my first child 2 weeks ago and for some reason, at age 31 with a kid, I feel like I am more than ready now to get into doing what I want. No more distractions. I know what I need to focus my day on and nights on (well nights is mostly for baby with breaks in b/w :))

What he is describing is basically Hammock Driven Development: http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586

Dealing with kids is a form of stepping away from the computer.

+1 My kids are sleeping right now!

1.5 - 2 hours is the max 'free programming time' I have anymore.

And you're wasting it here. :)

Thanks for posting this! I think there is a lot of true in it.

There's a lot of truth in this, but there's one thing I'll disagree with:

When you have a family to support, becoming great at what you do is excellent job security. Thus, doing web development has gone from being a fun thing that I do for a job, to a very important fun thing I do as my career. Now, my own personal hustle factor is at an all-time high.

This assumes that being good at your job and job security are positively correlated. Possibly above the 75th percentile and certainly above the 90th, it swings the other way, and hard.

First, when you're really good, you tend to get into conflict with intermediate players to whom you're a threat rather than an asset. Your company might benefit abstractly from you being good, but "The Company" doesn't write your performance reviews. Maybe your boss gives you shitty work so you don't develop and become a threat. Possibly, mediocre colleagues tear you down. At the 80th percentile, you'll almost never be fired for low performance but there's little overperformance risk. At the 95th, you can be a fucking lighting rod for resentment in a nasty, dysfunctional environment and, let's be honest, most work environments are pretty broken.

Second, there are all the risks you have to take to get good. To get past 1.4 or so (scale here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector... ) you need to start taking creative risks and have room to fail. Beyond 1.8, you either need managerial buy-in or extreme autonomy-- and sometimes, you gotta take it through means that aren't the most accepted. We still live in a "hacker" reality: you get good by breaking rules.

It's great that the OP seems to live in a world where things actually work and there's a positive correlation between security and technical excellence. For most people in our industry, however, the need for a regular income induces conformist mediocrity rather than moon-shot excellence.

This is a dangerous line of thinking, useful as a counterpoint to consider, but a terrible basis for thinking about your life and career.

The problem is that the worst kind of engineer is the one who thinks he is a top 5% engineer, who proclaims his, and all other, organizations dysfunctional, who is convinced his managers and peers are out to get him because of their jealousy, who sees enemies everywhere, and who ends up getting along with no one, self-fulfilling the prophecy, and being a net negative.

Being really good at your job is a great way to succeed in life almost everywhere. If you frequently find yourself in political death struggles in organization after organization, it might be time for some self reflection.

I was just thinking that it's interesting how at least 80% of developers are in the top 5%. It's one of the truly amazing things about our industry, we defy the laws of mathematics.

I think its just another byproduct of America's confidence culture, where any sign of uncertainty next the a confident idiot paints you as inferior.

I have to plead ignorance about other countries. But in the US, I haven't really encountered too many developers who I sensed projecting superiority for the sake of job security. What I mean is that my impression is that they truly do believe they are a top developer. I have run into a few of those "job security" guys who are difficult to work with, but not that often.

I think part of it is that it's easy to look at another developer's code which you inherit and judge it to be inferior to your own work. I have found this to be very common - the developer who is constantly griping about the terrible code they inherited. (I myself have been guilty of this). But, it can be more difficult to actually create the code - especially under time or budget constraints or requirements that change over the years. So, in that case it can be tempting to judge yourself as a better developer - when in reality you may have created the same crappy code or worse.

Excellence and overperformance (which are not the same thing) are dangerous in the short term but good bets in the long run. Yes, it's more virtuous and feels better to do a good job, I agree. It's almost certainly better for your career in the long run to do things well.

If you, however, absolutely cannot afford to lose a regular income, your best bet is to manage your performance to the middle.

I'm not saying, "you should intentionally suck at your job". That would be a depressing and horrible way to live. I'm saying that society does not always reward doing the right thing.

Having a child might motivate you to think about the future, or regain faith in progress and the world, or start taking hard work serious, and that's great. It might also make you so terrified of getting fired that you stop trying to excel and cease advancing. I've seen both.

Another excellent team strategy is being generous with your abilities. Aim to appear average, but secretly prop each team member up without letting anyone else know. Maybe you fix a bug for them and don't tell anyone, talk a strategy through with someone and let them take credit for the results, or take a hit for someone you supervise knowing you can make up for it later. People eventually figure out what's going on and the team will back you later when needed.

That sounds like a terrible work environment you're in!

I've seen several, and most work environments are dysfunctional. I live in New York. Finance goes from C+ to C-; VC-istan is much worse (F). I've never worked in California so I can't evaluate Silicon Valley VC-istan but what I've heard is that it's not much better.

Including the companies where I've been brought in to consult (where I can be less specific) I've probably seen 20 corporate cultures. About a quarter are neutral or healthy; three-quarters are deeply broken.

The best work environments I've seen were in government research think-tanks. Basic research (outside of academia) has the only really good cultures that I've seen. Academia's culture is less mean-spirited than Corporate America but failure is more final (getting fired in business is no big deal in the long run; in academia, missing tenure is deadly).

I've learned some uncomfortable truths along the way. One of those is that, in a subordinate role, overperformance is dangerous-- far more perilous to your job security than the alternative.

That doesn't mean people should slack off and give up. No fucking way. It's better to excel and accept the volatility. It's more virtuous, you enjoy it more, and eventually when you find your tribe or are expected to lead, it pays off to be excellent. However, in most subordinate roles, overperformance is short-term dangerous. I don't think anyone who's been around for long enough doubts that.

You seem to have had a negative experience which has caused you to invent a venture capital funded employment dystopia in your mind. This isn't entirely surprising if you are located in New York as there is always a subset in Silicon Alley that seems more inspired by "Boiler Room" than "The Social Network." However, working at a VC funded startup in California is almost nothing like the fun house mirror distortion you continually elaborate upon in your Hacker News posts. There are negatives, but they usually are at the boring and goofy end of the why-work-sucks spectrum.

The VC darlings are terrible. Unethical management, and investors do nothing. (In a couple cases, I've informed.) Really awful people. This isn't just my negative experience (I've had some bad ones, for sure) but comes from what a lot of my friends have seen.

Just to give you a flavor for it... in April 2012, I posted this, from "An ethical crisis in technology" ( http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-cr... )

Here’s some shit I’ve either seen, or been credibly informed of, in the past 24 months, most of which was never in the news: no-poach agreements, attempted blacklisting of whistleblowers, a rescinded job offer based on a rumor that suggested PTSD, abuse of process within large companies, extortion of ex-employees, gross breaches of contract, frivolous lawsuits, threats of frivolous lawsuits, price fixing among venture capitalists, bait-and-switch hiring tactics, retaliatory termination, and fraudulent, no-product startups designed to embezzle angel investors. That took me about 60 seconds; two minutes more and the list would be three times as long.

So, yeah, there are some horrible people out there. There are also good people out there. I think VC-istan gives the bad ones an advantage, however.

There are good startups. Some take VC. Some don't. There don't seem to be many of them.

However, the mainstream of VC-istan is really ugly. I don't think it's limited to NYC.

But are there humane, interesting, and all-around excellent VC-funded companies? Absolutely. They are rare, and "the cool kids" (a bunch of wankers) won't be interested in them, but they exist.

Could you give a list of the names of those negative companies, as a service to engineers seeking employment?

I blew the whistle on Google (which I regret, because Google has pockets of evil but, on the whole, isn't that bad) although I haven't given the whole story. Google's a case of a decent company (for its size) with some terrible managers, though. I don't mean to cast aspersion on the whole thing. If you get a good manager, I'd still recommend it. There's some really cool stuff happening at Google and if you can get good projects, even now it's a great place to work.

Two of the companies included are defunct. Two are of unknown status (not places I worked).

One is a close friend of mine who eventually got a severance. If I spilled, I'd expose what he told me and risk his package, so no. I shouldn't know, myself.

There's one where I still hold The Card and I'm debating it. I could probably cripple the company, but I'm afraid that it would hurt the engineers (some of whom, I'm still friends with) more than the assholes in charge. That's the real problem. I have enough experience with whistleblowing to know that it's a blunt instrument. You don't get to pick who gets hurt. So I'm being cautions with that case.

Since it was just over a year ago, I feel like the window has passed. However, any individual who wants to ask me if an NYC education startup is That One can email me and I'll confirm or deny. They have truly evil management that deeply deserves to fail, not just at this company but in the future. What keeps me from naming that firm is concern for the lower-level people.

I never ever want to get married nor have kids. I plan to be an eternal boy even way into my 90s if I'm lucky. All I want to do my entire life is experiment, play, build, learn. Nothing less, nothing more. Sure, I still have female friends to fulfill carnal needs but I do not care for long term relationships. The world has 7 billion people already. It matters not if I have no kids. I'm 35 already so I think that this is my destiny for if I were to get married I probably would have done it in my 20's.

I have plenty of nephews and boy can they be a pain. Is nice to enjoy them for a couple of hours but more than that and it becomes like trying to herd cats. Don't get me wrong, I love them, but I just don't want to spend my entire time with them. Which makes me more sure that kids are not for me.

So regarding this post, to each their own.

p.s. For some strange coincidence, all of my friends from college, female and male alike, have not gotten married or had kids yet (except for one, and she just had a kid with her partner, she doesn't really want to get married). I wonder if this is a generation thing.

edit: Why the downvotes? Everybody is free to live how they choose.

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