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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

> I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant.

Sounds like you dont have kids to help look after or a parent to care for, and you're still in the desirable age to hire from. Wait another ten years after you help kids with their homework or sports in the evening and dont have energy to work on a side projects.

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As someone who has kids and actively participates in their lives (homework, hobbies, etc), I think I can safely say: the need to keep learning and growing never stops.

You have to balance it with other needs.

But this industry doesn’t stand still, and as a part of it, I can’t either.

how am i supposed to achieve this balance? after working, doing some of the housework, helping to take care of the kids, spending time with them, spending time with my wife and taking some personal time to relax (1 hour tv, no more) there simply is no more energy or even time left to work on side projects.

Anecdotally mornings seem to be a good time, if you can stick them.

You don’t need side projects or to work at night to continue to learn new technologies. (I am a parent too)

when do you do it then? not on the job, at least not any job that i ever had, unless the job itself was already using new tech.

Sure, weekends and holidays will do.

This is a crazy assumption and really insulting to parents or non-parents and wrong on nearly every count.

Don't know why I'm being downvoted. Almost everything assumed in the GP comment about me is wrong. I'm north of 40 and I have dependents. Don't blame your decision to have kids for your failures or deficits. It's a really annoying thing people do and inevitably gets projected onto the children, who didn't ask to be here in the first place.

You do have a good angle that it is entirely possible. I dont think we're "blaming" children though, just the reality that a young single person with 10 years experience likely has a lot more spare time and energy than those older. Saying its easy to keep working long hours and learning new waves of technology likely aren't sustainable.

It's because the experience of so many parents these days is exhaustion. There just aren't enough hours in the day. In my experience it often turns out that if a fellow parent has significantly more personal time than me (for side projects, exercise, whatever) it turns out there is an unequal distribution of labor in the household. For example, a spouse who doesn't work who handles all the domestic stuff could allow the other spouse more free time. That same stay-at-home-spouse could find themselves with a lot of free time as the kids get older and require less hands-on parenting. That sort of thing.

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