Being a new dad while working at a startup

https://blog.rainforestqa.com/2014-07-24-startup-dads/

by jipiboily • 12 years ago

37 55 12 years ago

blog.rainforestqa.com

jipiboily12• 12 years ago

Hey, I'm the dad from that blog post, feel free to ask questions :)

delmarc4• 12 years ago

Hey man thanks for this post and sharing your story... as a father of 3(soon 4) people always are like "oh you have kids???" and think that it is almost always negative...

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...

jipiboily12• 12 years ago

It's fun and there is a lot of love.

Wow, 3 soon 4? Awesome and congrats on the new one!

usefulcat• 12 years ago

I don't have a question, but I wanted to say that you're very right to guard your time with your family. For at least the first year of my son's life, I can't count how many times I'd come home from work and I could see a difference in him compared to the day before. Maybe not even something I could quite put my finger on, but I could just tell there was something different about him. They change and learn so quickly that you could miss a lot in only a few days, let alone weeks or months.

jipiboily12• 12 years ago

This is so true. I didn't think it could be some fast. Some days she changes so much, it's impressive...new skills every now and then.

lygaret2• 12 years ago

My six week old daughter recently started to smile at me. Even knowing it's just mirroring my face, and there's not much in the way of consciousness there, I could have died happy...

lygaret2• 12 years ago

As a new dad (Mirah's six weeks today :)), congrats, and thanks for sharing!

jipiboily12• 12 years ago

Congrats to you! :)

delmarc4• 12 years ago

I have 3 kids and about to have one more in a month... people in the tech world act like its so amazing and different... get over it... no matter if you work in retail or work in a shitty work/life balance startup, its the same thing...

Just be thankful we make a bit more then most in the workforce...

jipiboily12• 12 years ago

I agree it's not more amazing than someone working anywhere else, but startups are often seen as non-sense as you need to work 80 hours a week to get shit done, we were trying to break that a bit and just tell "hey, it's possible, it's not that hard actually!" :)

delmarc4• 12 years ago

Correct the work/life is way offset but what about those people who need to work two jobs while their partner is also working...

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...

nkozyra4• 12 years ago

I think there's a big difference. In the tech world, there's this expectation that sometimes you're going to pull all-nighters or work 14 hour days or do sprints or whatever.

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.

rayiner6• 12 years ago

That's the expectation in a lot of industries (finance, consulting, law--heck my dad works in public health and he's worked 60-70+ hours most of his career). I worked at a big law firm in New York, and most of the partners had kids. Indeed, my daughter was born a month after I started at the firm. I immediately got put on an internal investigation, where the client was under threat of getting their stock delisted unless we made its auditor happy. It was a "if you're awake, you have to be in the office" situation. Somehow we all managed, despite several people on the team, including the partner, having small kids.

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.

rayiner6• 12 years ago

We’re reading a bunch of stuff and like people say, “my baby is sleeping 10 hours a day, every night.” Nope, that’s really not the case for us. I’m expecting that Sara will sleep way better in the next three or four weeks. Like hoping to, at least.

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.

jipiboily12• 12 years ago

It was every 1.5 - 2 hours for a while and it is still that often, sometimes she sleeps 4+ hours (she did that 3 or 4 times now)...kinda crazy.

Good "luck"! Apparently the first 20 years are the worst...hehe ;)

delmarc4• 12 years ago

Try 22 years... cause they will be our responsibility for all the years in college and who knows how long after

guard-of-terra9• 12 years ago

"My daughter woke up every three hours for a bottle"

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.

jipiboily12• 12 years ago

Hard for breast feeding though hehe

rayiner6• 12 years ago

A dad feeding a baby at 3am running on a few hours of sleep is pretty close to a robot.

japhyr2• 12 years ago

It's exhausting, but it's really not something you want to automate. Whether through breastfeeding or a bottle, those feedings are pretty important bonding time.

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.

jcromartie2• 12 years ago

This is why some mothers sleep with their babies, so that they can feed them without moving or being too disturbed.

DanBC• 12 years ago

Children die from feeding accidents. Automation would need to be excellent quality to avoid dead children.

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.

jaredhansen• 12 years ago

Probably a bad idea - there's a lot more going on in those feedings than just the food:

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow

pzaich• 12 years ago

As a soon-to-be dad (in the next few weeks), thanks for posting and sharing!

jipiboily12• 12 years ago

Gladly, and congrats!!!

guard-of-terra9• 12 years ago

I hate this children-centrific notion that modern world puts on us. Makes me be wary of having kids.

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.

jipiboily12• 12 years ago

New bord are effectively different, and I had no idea either how to handle them until day 1 of Sara. I even never changed a diaper before that day!

tdicola• 12 years ago

There's quite a difference between a 10 week old child and a 10 year old child.

jcromartie2• 12 years ago

I'm absolutely fine with giving my kids space. That doesn't mean I don't want to be around to see them, though.

guard-of-terra9• 12 years ago

Well, my parents saw enough of me, I don't feel that I missed anything. There are evenings, there are vacations, all the things. It's just I didn't had a solid schedule of them helicoptering me daily.

thom2• 12 years ago

I suppose one of the most relevant things as a geek with a new baby is that it's _very_ hard to be an introvert with a new family. It takes a lot of work and co-operation to find the time to be alone and recharge. Obviously it's really hard being on call 24 hours whoever you are, but I'd love to hear how other introverts managed once kids arrived!

wilsonfiifi• 12 years ago

My 9 month old son has 45min sleep cycles during the day so that doesn't leave much time to code after washing and sterilising his bottles and grabbing a quick bite myself! He doesn't always sleep into the next cycle by himself so I have to be by his crib to pat him and thats where my new workstation is lol!

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.

nkozyra4• 12 years ago

I'll say this, also, as someone who runs the tech side of a startup and now has an 8-month old:

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.

rayiner6• 12 years ago

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.

nkozyra4• 12 years ago

Another factor critical to success and sanity is having a partner that understands the demand and zeal that goes with having a startup.

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.

gdubs• 12 years ago

We moved, I started working with a new startup, and we had a baby, all since January. She's four months old now, and I smiled reading this.

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.

rikkus2• 12 years ago

One tip I can give: As soon as you start getting closer to a normal number of hours of sleep, get some exercise. You'll feel so much better.

Being a new dad while working at a startup

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