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Comment by jaylaal | Hacker News Reader

Beyond her own professional search, I'd suggest you making more time to be with the kids and handle household crap that she might be dealing with. Take things off her plate so she can recover from her previous situation and reflect and act on her future path. In my experience, this will be hard for you because you'll necessarily do less at work and have less time to improve yourself professionally and personally outside of work, but the payoff in stress reduction for your wife should be worth it in short- and medium-terms until she gets re-settled.

Background: Software engineer for over 15 years; twin 3 year-olds at home; wife is a teacher.

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It will be hard, but there's ways to balance this at work - when my wife was attending a bootcamp, my work was flexible enough to let me change my hours to work early mornings and evenings on more asynchronous tasks, while I took the main 9-5 hours to handle childcare.

Everything else suffered, of course - forget improving myself, I had little time for basic maintenance! - but she graduated from bootcamp, got a job, and now has a much better career trajectory than at her previous career.

This resonates with me too. When my wife had a great career opportunity some years ago, this is roughly where it went. Unless you have deep pockets, working odd hours and managing the home ~9-5 is probably in the cards.

I found it incredibly exhausting at the time (definitely didn’t take care of myself either) but it was fortunately worth it. My wife went from soul crushing, dimly lit, repetitive, poorly paid hydrographical work for the navy to real ocean sciences. She gets to survey the coastal waters of BC, Canada, participate in technical dives, install cool tide sensing units, check out places we’d otherwise never see, and is something like 9000% happier.

I probably set my career back less than hers went forward, and ultimately, I think we’re both happier for it regardless of our earning potentials.

But yeah, what a slog. I get tired just thinking about it. To be honest, there were times where it was hard on both of us and I wasn’t sure we’d pull through! That’s why I wanted to add this note and say yes, it takes sacrifice, it’s hard, etc. Go in more prepared than I did. Above all, support the people you love. You’ll be glad you did.

This is something I like to think I'm decent about. We tend to have a fairly decent work split, but you're right that picking up a bit more would probably be a good thing. It's a bit of a balance because having something productive helps her feel better about the job search dragging on.

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