Ask HN: How does a marriage of 2 programmers work?

3 points·ElectricMind··2 comments

Any advantages or disadvantages or experience or insight or advice from someone who is actually been part of this kind of marriage? Thanks.

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We had to make and follow a deceptively simple rule: no shop talk. Before we agreed upon it, we had a huge problem with not being able to leave work at work. We weren't cultivating other interests and our conversations were getting stale, which didn't exactly do wonders for our sex life. Nowadays we turn off our computers and phones at 5:30pm and keep them off until 9:00am the next morning. Because we both tend to be obsessive, it was the only way to actually have lives and a mutually beneficial marriage.

My wife and I are programmers (I was her senior at a company when we met). She gets a free coach/interview practice partner. I get more visibility into companies other than mine (e.g. in terms of compensation, work-life balance, joel test, etc)

Sometimes we use programming analogies to convey ideas to each other that are not related to programming. Work-related frustrations are usually very easy to relate to, since they're often things the other has also experienced first-hand.

I know of a couple whose husband was CTO and that helped the wife get promoted in the company (objectively speaking, she was no slouch by any means). Bit of an outlier scenario, but alas, it plays back to the coaching thing.

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