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Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

It’s a gift if you don’t have small children. It’s ridiculously harder if you do. It’s like trying to work in an emergency room, where every minute there’s some emergency, and you’re trying to do something different.

Of course most people working in tech aren’t facing this issue and so think working from home is great for everyone.

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I beg to differ. We've grown accustomed to the insane idea that someone else should provide childcare for our children while we are away for 8-10 hours a day.

if childcare requires constant attention and presence, how can you do that while also working?

For the period of time when constant attention is required, there's paid parental leave.

How are the childcare needs managed when you are at office?

In which world? I started working remotely in 2014, when my youngest one hadn't even born yet (I only had 2 back then, and they were small).

Yet, there was more peace and ability to concentrate at home than there was at my previous office. Less interrupts, no time wasted to driving. And my kids weren't at the kindergarten.

The remote possibility even gave me enough energy to finalize my MSc finally (at evenings), something I wasn't able to do while working at the office for many years. Weird, huh?

I do miss beers with my colleagues though. But that's a bit difficult when none of my colleagues work in the same country, not much difference whether I would be in the office or not.

What setup enabled all this productivity?

I hope I'm wrong but this comment reads like it came straight out of this piece of satire - http://www.columbia.edu/~sss31/rainbow/wife.html

I don't think there's any "weird setup", other than having a separate room for work/computer. It's pretty good insulator for all the interruptions. And of course, better coffee.

The additional productivity probably came from the added time per day and reduced fatigue from lower amount of noise (office room vs. open office floor). I don't think there's anything weird about it, I at least found working at the office very tiring since concentration was difficult and required energy.

Sorry, I meant what setup keeps the kids away from your productive time.

Mostly teaching them. "When dad works, don't bother him". And since I do come out of the room in any case often enough (coffee/toilet/eat/etc), they saw me enough often. But it's not like single productive period is a long time, rather it's a patches of smaller events during the day.

Of course now that they're bigger, everything is a bit different.

This strongly implies you had a partner watching the kids while you work, which has scaling problems if you both want to work at the same time.

Let me ask this directly. Is your wife watching over the kids while you get productive time?

If so, then that's not a luxury many people (including, you know, many wives) with small children have. Hence the comment that you originally replied to makes sense.

Yes, she was on maternity leave (which isn't unusual in Finland and more like a norm).

Quite the opposite. Working close to my kids is incredibly convenient. When school or daycare calls that they're sick, then I can easily pick them up without having to travel home first.

It's exactly having kids that makes working from home extra convenient. Though of course it definitely helps to have a separate room for your home office.

Let's not bring any nuance to this conversation. It's all about "ME ME ME ME ME AND ME!". I don't have children, so obviously my arrangement is superior and has to be codified for everyone and anyone everywhere and you are WRONG if you disagree.

(Seriously, this debate is about as dumb as any other american political debate, just bunch of myopic people screaming at each other with no ability to think.)

As a parent myself, working from home, I can't relate to what you describe, at all. What you describe sounds like a communication and relationship problem first and foremost.

If those same "emergencies" are urgent to you and demand your attention only when you work from home then the issue lies someplace else.

I have worked from home from before my kids were born. They’re now 8 and 10. I don’t recognise what you are saying, probably because when I’m at work I’m uncontactable.

More recently it seems people think working at home means you get to do things like washing, cleaning, babysitting etc as well. That’s not a work from home issue, it’s an attitude problem.

> That’s not a work from home issue, it’s an attitude problem

How did we get to a point where we consider this opinion to be normal? It is expected someone else to care for your children while you commute hours each day and work 8+ hours at an office? When you get home you still need to spend whatever free minutes you have with your children, cook, put them to bed, wash, clean, find some time to share with your spouse, then repeat daily?

How about we normalize working from home, and spending time with your children and spouse? Is it so bad to have your child do their homework on the desk next to you so you can explain and answer their questions? Play around in the room while you work, so you can actually interact with them, instead of being away for the major part of their conscious life?

Also, is it so bad to go load and start the washing machine while you wait for your build to finish? Maybe load the dishwasher? What do you do at the office at the same time? Go to the kitchen to prepare yourself an unhealthy amount of coffee so you can grind your busywork with more focus?

But when I work from home, I do am able to do things like washing and cleaning. (I'm not going to babysit of course; that implies other people's children.)

When I'm stuck on a problem or frustrated by some issue, doing the laundry is a great way to clear the mind and approach the problem in a new way. Similar to how you often get the solution to a problem in the shower or on the drive home. It's pretty awesome to be able to do that during my work day, and office doesn't really give good opportunities for this.

Interesting comparison - I can put a load of washing on faster at home than what it takes for me to walk to the toilet and back in the office.

Wait what, most people in tech don’t have small children? I don’t think those in tech have kids any less than other industries

Plus if you worked an office job instead you would need day care, which is still an option for you when working remotely (unless you prefer nannies?)

And what if the alternative is spending 25% of your take home salary on day care?

You obviously need to have a sitter come over or take your kids to daycare/school.

Yes this! Under say school age there is no hope. Daycare can help but is another cost.

Do you leave young kids at home unsupervised? I really don't understand this argument.

The comment I replied to:

> It’s like trying to work in an emergency room

So… nothing about unsupervised. Either the working parent is doing that as per their comment, or a daycare as per mine.

In reality if the kid is home the parent is not getting much work done.

If the kid is home then either office work was never an option, or there's another parent present. Just make sure you've got a separate room as your home office. (Admittedly not always possible with smaller apartments; this is the real additional cost of working from home.)

I see yes never crossed my mind the one working parent scenario for some reason. In that case you need a good setup. For me dogs barking is way worse than kids noise though. I prefer a baby cry to a dog bark terms of if I am working.

Where and how you live certainly matters. If your neighbours have a noisy dog, working from home won't be as good an option. And of course there's a million other reasons working from home can be problematic, especially in small apartments with too many neighbours, or living in a noisy or distracting environment. Or it might be too hot or cold to work comfortably.

Of course it's also possible for offices to be noisy or otherwise uncomfortable, and you might not have any power to do anything about it. I guess WFH is a great option mostly for people who have a great home.

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