This is so important. I have a 3yo and wife, I currently work for a series-A startup - It's incredibly easy to do things out of hours, answer messages, train, lab things up, etc... But at the end of the day that is a part of my career.
So except for when I'm traveling for work, I don't do a GD thing past 5pm, unless i choose to. When I choose to, it's likely because a lot of my team is in IST time zone rather than EST.
When you're a family person, your job is to be there for yourself first, your family second, your other commitments after that.
I have a weekly 4:30p friday call. Would i rather have that at 1:30p? Yes. But i've chosen to work remotely in Ohio instead of move to Cali like the last four companies have asked. So I take that friday 4:30p call.
But you better believe that i check out until monday after that.
During the week I'll take odd hour calls for my counter-parts in IST, but that's nearly entirely out of courtesy than necessity.
Take care of things in the following order: 1. You, as a human, holistically 2. Your family, spouse first, kids second 3. Your work 4. Everything else
It's reduced a huge portion of stress from my life by doing this.
The hedonic treadmill exists in all countries, stepping off it is a personal priority and discipline regardless of where you live.
There’s a few other expenses and some cons of living here but some research and YouTube videos will help you figure out if it’s right for you. And of course you can ask me :)
My experiences were similar, however I must add when your day job is not related to skill building activities, you may find your "on" time to be greater.
Still, be careful.
In my case, my day job was manufacturing and I was an effective prototype mechanic. Loved the work, hated the pay, so...
I used a percentage of my free time learning more computer related things.
When the time was right, I was ready to take the jump.
Landed nicely, and have no regrets.
Now, later in life I find the dynamics above are in play and we all ignore them at our peril.
Real talk: the gender wage gap exists due to misogyny. That's it.
However, on the point of last names, I feel the urge to point out that I personally know several, very devout and traditional, catholic couples who kept their last names in wedlock.
On a slightly different note: Hammurabi's name means literally "his uncle is a healer" (related to Arabic عم (ʕamm) meaning paternal uncle, and the latter part to rabbi).
I my mind there's a mildly funny* movie where Hammurabi, the person who created/codified the foundations of our law, someone remembered for 1000s of years... was an insecure overachiever. "You conquered the Elamites? And Larsa? Oh, that's cute my boy. Now get a real job like your uncle who is a doctor!"
* (for me, my bar is low)
Cultures share history but the whole point is that they’re not continuous. You specified the pre-Christian era, and there have been many significant changes since then which any common definition of the term would consider discrete boundaries.
> Also, I've never ever heard anyone say that wives need to take names of their husbands, because the Bible says so. Is that an American thing?
It’s not specific to the US but there are certainly American churches which have strong opinions on this point. One thing to remember is that these things aren’t just the literal text of the scriptures in whatever version of the Bible they use but also the collection of interpretation and custom around it, and people have a history of interpreting scriptural text differently based on a position which they want to support.
Now is the fact women take over the majority of the childcare and are more likely to take off to raise their children misogyny? Depends on your definition and perspective.
Yes, given that:
- In conservative circles, there is a strong expectation that a woman's chief job is to be a mom,
- Many businesses are lead by conservatives, and
- Many states (at present) are run by conservatives and enact policy to make this so (anti-abortion laws being the biggest example)
Regardless, whether women want to enter motherhood or not should be irrelevant when determining employee compensation.
Many of us developers justify our sky-high compensation packages in today's remote-first working culture by the "value" that we provide relative to the profit margins produced by our work.
If this is true, then this should apply equally apply to working moms since them being moms doesn't take away from the value they bring to the table. Moms don't stop being great programmers once they bring children into this world!
However, if we're going to use _availability_ as a compensation-affecting performance metric, then dads should also be paid less since, in an ideal world, they are just as involved in parenting as moms are.
Given that being paid less due to being a parent is de facto illegal in the US, then I think that any argument for suppressing women's wages is either uninformed or in bad faith.
(As an aside, we don't and won't have kids, but I am a huge advocate for equal-length parental leave; nobody is at their best when they're working on two hours of sleep because the baby's always crying through the night.)
> Regardless, whether women want to enter motherhood or not should be irrelevant when determining employee compensation.
Whether a women wants to enter motherhood is irrelevant to her compensation. But how much time, effort, and experience she brings to the job is relevant to her compensation. And despite there being plenty of mothers who bring more of those things to their job than their childless counter parts, most people cannot bring as much time and energy to bare on work as they could if they were childless given how we currently divide up childcare. If you're on partner track at a lawyer, you're expected to bill 2000 hrs a year which means working 3000. It's very hard to continue to work 3000 hrs a year while raising a kid and the lack of billable hours will effect bonuses and promotions. How could it not?
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
Then the social security cut gets distributed regardless of preference to who raised the kids who now pay the taxes.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons, offload almost all the cost on moms then socialize the taxed gains.
Your brain only has so many truly 'on' hours in a day, and it's already less than 8. Trying to burn even more in the pursuit of complex knowledge isn't just robbing Peter to pay Paul, it's eating the seed corn and wondering why your harvest failed.
It's a scary thing to realize, and can be hard to stick with. But limits are real, and respecting them gets more work done in the long run than not.