I have been working in the industry for 8 years and am now considered a senior developer, also as a team lead.
Three years ago, my first child was born, and a few months ago, a second one arrived. While I don’t regret my decision to have kids at all, I do feel bad about how the lack of free time affects my career and how my knowledge falls behind the industry.
Before having kids, I used to spend a few hours a week on never-ending personal projects to learn new things. However, now I neither have the time nor the energy for that.
The only way that has worked for me is to read some tech books, which are often not about coding, and to read some blogs or subs like this.
However, I feel like this approach is too passive and is not providing the best outcome that I would expect.
Any tips there, perhaps from someone who was is similar situation?
Answer here is simple: put your family first.
Tech has managed to convince so many young people that they’re not supposed to have a life outside of work. I fell for this too when I entered tech, working insane overtime, doing “hackathons” where we just worked all weekend, and spending every remaining moment trying to “stay ahead of the curve”.
This is a trap, and it’s not necessary. I worked this way for years until it completely burned me out and I realized that the things that really mattered were being neglected because some tech bros made me feel like work needed to be my life.
Once I rejected this my life simply became better. I put my 40 hours in and I did my best in those hours, but I took back the other 40-50 hours a week I was working and invested it back into my family.
Today my relationship with my wife and kids is better than it had ever been, I am happier and better rested, and my career has skyrocketed as a result. Turns out when you find balance in your life the quality of what you do improves pretty radically, and maybe your attitude and work relationships improve with it.
I’m an EM for a very large corporation today, I make better money and am healthier and happier than I ever was when I was trying to make work consume my every waking moment. I spend a lot of my time with my direct reports today trying to reinforce that they can clock out at the end of the day and it’ll be fine.
Don’t worry about your career, put that time and energy into your family and your friends. Later-in-life you will thank you for it.
Things will get better the moment your youngest becomes more independent, and sleeps well at night.
I’m a staff engineer with a toddler and went through (am going through?) a similar thing. At the end of the day, I’m just tired and want to veg, not necessarily try to learn something new about programming. There were a few things that helped me though:
- The biggest thing was just to recalibrate my expectations. I talked with other dev parents who all said that, until the kids are able to play a bit more independently (eg 6 or so), you just have to accept that your self enrichment time is going to be limited.
- For my off hours learning, I stick to mainly portable skills. Ways of thinking about technical debt, etc. Things that are both widely applicable, and can be learned more passively.
- I try to carve out time to learn during work hours. I’m lucky in that the company I work for allows for a lot of independence, so my team actually instituted an “investment day” where we work on whatever we want, with the only goal being that you should try to do something that you’ll learn from.
