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Comment by _l4jh | Hacker News Reader

I’m 36 and followed a similar path “retiring” a few years ago to be a stay at home dad. I missed out on my daughters early years due to being a workaholic and didn’t want to do the same with my son. I failed to realise when I was young I can earn more money but never more time and memories built from a phone video suck.

I enjoy spending time doing work on the house and since we moved to [redacted] in 2018 I do a few small volunteer jobs such as teaching IT, programming, and helping people improve their conversational English at coffee meet-ups or picnics in the park. Nothing special as I’m not properly trained but it keeps me active and social.

I should probably look at making some money from it but I also don’t really care and like how it’s something I want to do rather than have to do because money is involved.

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I am far away from being a dad but curious, how do you balance "providing for your kid" and "being there for your kid"?

The two aren’t mutually exclusive and the roles change as the kid gets older.

When they’re newborns you are focused totally on providing: they can’t feed themselves, change their diapers, or bathe themselves.

When they get older they can do those things but then start having questions about the world and girls and faith. That’s when it really gets fun because you strengthen the bond.

So you’re always providing for the kid. Being there is the tougher part.

Any two things involving time that can't be done simultaneously are, to a degree, mutually exclusive.

You can't be running a code review and chasing a two year old around the house.

In my experience, you have to make sacrifices. Everything in life is a trade-off in one eaybor another.

I gave up my nice car and doing track days. Many of my time consuming hobbies that involved going somewhere have been greatly reduced or eliminated. I tried replacing them with smaller hobbies at home while I can watch the kid - like small batch beer brewing or learning bass guitar.

Career-wise I have accepted that I will not be promoted and will remain an average midlevel dev for the foreseeable future, mostly due to the cultural expectation that you have to put in more hours to be higher level (and some past decisions still dragging me down). I also acknowledge that I can't afford to changes jobs, eventhough I hate my current job. I need the money to support my family.

The responsibilities that come with marriage and kids is vastly understated - it can be absolutely crushing. If it weren't for these responsibilities, I would have changed jobs, been a senior dev or tech lead, made and saved more money, and likely would have been able to move to a lower cost area to retire early.

Hmm I can maybe understand why you think you’ll be a mid level dev without putting in hours.. you didn’t mention your location so not sure.

But why in the world can’t you afford to change jobs? Plenty of places need mid level devs and it doesn’t cost anything to change jobs.. in fact they usually pay you more.

The company I'm at requires longer hours for promotions (unofficially of course). I worked as a tech lead and the a senior dev a few years ago. They wouldn't promote me unless I worked at least an extra hour per day.

That system ended up being outsourced and I had to get a new position at the same company. The tech was obscure (FileNet) and thevonky other position I could get was in equally obscure tech (Neoxam). There I became the ASC for the system across 6 teams and two departments - a role typically reserved for senior devs and above. Then they cut the budget in half and did some stuff that I didnt agree with and wouldn't want to be responsible for the security of. So now I'm on a team with modern tech (AWS). It still feels like extra hours are required and they also expect me to be an expert in multiple stacks/systems simultaneously, which is tough. I also feel like, what's the point? The company keeps breaking their own policies and my expertise is just throwaway in their eyes.

Once I become an expert in AWS (which will take a long time the way the work is structured) then I can maybe switch companies. It's still a risk since I have a family to support and I'm responsible for basically all the bills.

This reads like an ad for Resume Driven Development.

By "providing for your kid" I assume you mean financially?

There is no secret. I go without some things I would like but are not as important to me, such as an expensive car and expensive holidays.

Basically if it qualifies as "expensive" I usually forgo it. Not for everything but I try to balance if spending more on something is worth it.

Financially we have a comfortable life. We have no debts at all. My wife has a good income and a "safe" job. We have a decent amount in savings. And so we just live a simple life.

Is there anything specific you would like to know? I am happy to share.

To follow on to my other comment (didn't want to edit it as this is a separate point)...

My reason for doing what I did is that a good friend and former manager died in his early 50s and I realised that could easily be me in twenty years.

It breaks my heart that he worked so damn hard only to die alone in the middle of the night in his home office with a fucking P&L still open on his screen. His wife and kids found him as they were getting ready for school :(

He gave up so much time with his kids as he always said he was working hard to provide the best for them in the future but you want to know the worst thing? His family are now financially struggling. He had two teenager kids and while his wife worked they lived beyond their means so when he passed their whole world collapsed.

All that time working, all the missed time with his kids and still he left so little. It crushed me if I am honest and I swore I would do whatever I had to do to minimise the chance of it happening to me.

Reminds me of my father. He worked hard, spent much time away from home, and when he was home during weekends, he was usually tired, sleeping during the day on the couch in the living room -- that's exactly how I see him when I try to remember his face.

His plan was to make a lot of money, build a huge house for the family, and then probably to switch to some less stressful work and enjoy a calm family life.

But right after buying the land for the house, he died of heart attack. His money disappeared (he always handled the finances himself, my mother had no idea where any of it was, some things most likely got stolen), we struggled financially, had to sell the land, so at the end nothing remained, except for memories of a few great vacations spent together. Even there, he often brought the family to the vacation, but disappeared in the middle of it to handle some business, so I have more memories of the places than I have of him.

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