Being a new dad while working at a startup
blog.rainforestqa.com
blog.rainforestqa.com
Just be thankful we make a bit more then most in the workforce...
Lets be realistic, its hard no matter what job you have... anything is possible... its the stigma that is attached to having kids in the tech industry that is the reason why people need to read posts like this...
It is definitely harder for people with lower salaries who needs to have two jobs (I know some!).
It is also easier, at least here in Quebec, for people that works, as an example, for government. They have a lot of vacations, work less hours per week, flexible hours, sick days, etc.
I am glad I work @ Rainforest QA and to have so much flexibility, which makes it easier for me and my wife!
If you're working at the mall selling clothing that's pretty unlikely. In my former life in publishing, that was pretty unusual.
It's a cultural thing and it's not strictly relegated to tech, but it's not universal. Plenty of people have reliable 9-5 jobs, Monday-Friday. That's a lot easier to reconcile with parenthood than when there's a huge release sprint and they expect you to work from 9 a.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Sunday or whatever.
I think the attitude towards kids in the tech industry has more to do with its general youth worship. There's a big attitude shift towards kids from early 20's as you go into early 30's.
There is always a tradeoff between reliability and availability when it comes to the 20 year old dev and the 35 year old dev.
Those first few months are brutal. Not only was I in a terrible mood, but work stacked up like nuts. Productivity nosedived and I started earnestly looking into pharmaceuticals that could reduce my need for sleep (more "obtaining modafanil" searches in my history than I'd care to admit). And as much as I hate to admit it, there was a period wherein I felt like the two are completely incompatible (being a parent and working at a startup).
The last month or so has been a massive reprieve - granted, I'm at a spot now I'd not have envied a year ago, but compared to operating on 4 hours of sleep a day for months, I'll take it.
The obvious truth here is it's still about balancing your time. If you want to be a parent and be able to work feverishly, that means abandoning something else.
I'll agree with this. Parenting, work, hobbies: pick 2.
Which - I swear - is what I'll tell my wife the next time I say "I've gotta finish this" and she starts humming Cats in the Cradle softly.
Hah! My daughter woke up every three hours for a bottle, like clockwork, until 7-8 months. She's 20 months now, and still won't sleep in her crib through the whole night. My dad once told me that, between my brother and I, he'd wake up in the middle of the night to check up on a kid for the better part of 10 years.
Good "luck"! Apparently the first 20 years are the worst...hehe ;)
I wonder if it's possible to automate night feeding of small children without waking anybody up. Sounds like a good idea for a startup.
When my kid was in this stage I'd stumble in and give him a bottle, but I was always aware that I wouldn't be doing it forever, and someday soon I'd miss holding his little warm body against my chest every night in the darkness. I don't miss the exhaustion, but I do look back warmly on that middle-of-the-night time together.
I'm all for automating and using technology to make difficult situations better, but this is really something where you do want human interaction every time.
Which you won't check if you happen to have a quiet child that doesn't wake up during the night.
If you have the money to afford automatic feeding you probably have the money to afford an Au Pair or similar to help in the short term.
On the other side, I don't see how you can die from a soft rubber nipple.
"Au Pair" I would actually pay quite some money to avoid interacting with unrelated human beings.
To investigate the debate, Dr. Harlow created inanimate surrogate mothers for the rhesus infants from wire and wood.[5] Each infant became attached to its particular mother, recognizing its unique face and preferring it above all others. Harlow next chose to investigate if the infants had a preference for bare wire mothers or cloth covered mothers. For this experiment he presented the infants with a cloth mother and a wire mother under two conditions. In one situation, the wire mother held a bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food, and in the other, the cloth mother held the bottle and the wire mother had nothing.[5]
Overwhelmingly, the infant macaques preferred spending their time clinging to the cloth mother.[5] Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the monkeys visited her only to feed. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the mother/infant relationship than milk and that this “contact comfort” was essential to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was this research that gave strong, empirical support to Bowlby’s assertions on the importance of love and mother/child interaction.
Seriously, it's not for disappearing mother from their child's life, just back up during the inconvenient nighttime.
Quiet children miss this in the first place because they don't wake up during the night. And they're fine.
But honestly I think being a self employed developer is the best option if you want to really help out with the upbringing of your kids and avoid getting a nanny.
In the end, we always have to do what we have to do for our kids and whether you are in retail or in a startup its always gonna be hard... but you and I seem to be brave enough to take on that task...
It will be hard but it will also be alot of fun...
Wow, 3 soon 4? Awesome and congrats on the new one!
I've decided that the single biggest thing to aim for as a new parent is to be flexible. People will tell you all sorts of things, and you'll have all sorts of ideas about how things will go, but in the end being flexible and willing to try new things is key.
When I was a kid of 10, my parents had to work a lot to provide for a family so naturally I came from school, ate some food and proceed tinkering with my PC, studyind and reading books. I would certainly not be happier having helicopter mom or dad around. I didn't have that much appetite for communication these days.
So naturally I don't understand why everybody is expected to drive children around and watch them constantly.
Of course this doesn't apply to very small children who I'm in totall loss how to handle.