Fatherhood
All three of our children were born at home – at the insistence of my wife – unnerved by the rising maternal mortality rate and the disparity between black and white women she determined that a home birth was her safest option. When she gave birth to our third baby, the experience was no less extraordinary or invigorating than the first time. Although as third time parents, we had gotten into a birthing groove and could almost do it ourselves. In fact, we basically did. I delivered all three of my children and relished each magical moment I wacthed them transition into this world.
The innovative startup I worked with at the time was too nascent to grant meaningful parental leave – they offered two and a half weeks paid. While they were willing to be flexible with unpaid leave, ultimately it didn’t make sense for my family. So, I decided to quit. I took off a total of four months, convinced that after a short while, I’d be able to juggle it all. This wasn’t the first time I’d make such a mistake.
When our first child was born in 2013, my job at the time (another startup) allowed me to take exactly one week – unpaid. Four weeks later we packed up everything we owned to pursue my programming dreams in San Francisco.
When we agreed to this legitimately insane schedule, we were first time parents and had absolutely no clue what we were getting into. The toll that it took on me, my wife, and our relationship was substantial. We couldn’t sleep, our stress levels were through the roof, and there was no way to RTFM!
After that experience, we both committed to never to doing anything like that again. Just kidding – two years later we had another kid. But this time, I took a month and a half off, paid. While it still didn’t feel like enough time given my wife was recovering from birth-related complications, it definitely felt better than before.
Taking Time
The importance of parental leave is gaining visibility and momentum. People like Alexis Ohanian have become champions for the cause of paternity leave, especially for fathers, but there is still a long way to go. Few companies (11%, to be exact) offer official parental leave. And it’s is usually only reserved for birthing mothers, discounting or ignoring completely the fathers, adoptive and foster parents, and others who are newly caring for a child.
It’s a shame, really, because nobody wins. It’s a short-sighted decision on the part of companies, who are only looking at immediate project delays and “lost productivity” instead of thinking holistically about the well-being of their employees. Parenting, especially for newborns, is a 24-hour on-call job. I found out firsthand, as all new parents do, how incredibly exhausting it is to have a tiny human who is dependent on you for meeting 100% of their needs. It’s simply not possible to do that and put in a full effort at a job. Employees become exhausted and burnt out, employers don’t get high quality work, and resentment builds on both sides.
When you’re pulled in too many directions, some things fall by the wayside. For parents of young children, this usually means giving up most or all of their social life, at least for a time. You’ve probably had a friend who had a kid and suddenly they’re MIA. It’s not that we don’t like you, I promise. We just juggle so many things that we put friendships on the back burner. It seems like a necessary trade off, and often it is, but it leads to another unexpected result: isolation. It’s a strange experience: on the one hand feeling more connected to a person than you ever have before, and on the other, becoming more isolated from friends and coworkers.
Growing Up
Some time after being thrown into the deep end of parenting and learning how to swim, it occurred to me that I wasn’t making the most of it. Challenges are opportunities for growth, and fatherhood was the biggest challenge of my life. I asked myself how was I taking advantage of this opportunity. Honestly, I recognized that in many ways I wasn’t, so I vowed to do better. I took a hard look at what I was doing right, wrong, and what lessons the crucible of fatherhood was teaching me. I was initially surprised by how many lessons I could apply across my life, especially to coding.
Patience
More than anything, parenting is about patience. When babies come into the world, they have enormous needs and only a handful of subtle cues to tell you what they need. If you don’t pick up on the cues fast enough, they cry. A lot. Crying baby is a rather stress-inducing sound, especially when it wakes you from a sleep. Every night. For years. The pressure to “do something” to soothe and quiet your child is enormous. Eventually they grow through that and get to what some people call the “terrible twos” (though this can really be anywhere from 1 – 3 years old). Their desire to do outstrips their ability to communicate and regulate their emotions, so they throw a lot of tantrums. Frustration is a natural emotion for children and adults alike. When you’re cooking dinner and they’re screaming because you told them “no Cocoa Puffs”, there’s plenty of frustration on both sides. Throughout all the stages of infancy I’ve learned to develop a tremendous – almost superhuman – amount of patience, coupled with keen observation skills to develop an important habit that’s applicable to everything in life: considered action.
You may have seen a parent dealing with a screaming child in public, trying one remedy after another in rapid succession in an attempt to end the scene as quickly as possible. I’ve definitely been there myself more times than I care to admit. Though it sometimes does work to try every solution and see what sticks, it’s reactionary. As the parent, my responsibility is to lead my family. When events are unfolding in a way that isn’t optimal (whether a bad attitude at home or a scream-fest in a restaurant where everybody is staring at me), I take a deep breath, check in with myself, then take stock of the situation so I can consider the next right action. It helps me diffuse a chaotic situation quickly and gracefully, and set things on a better course. I use the same approach when I break code in production, during a tense meeting with coworkers, and when handling the normal friction that occurs between people on an everyday basis.
Understanding
Parenting, like good coding, is not copy-and-paste. Building an array of solutions for any given situation requires a thoroughness of understanding. Most things in life we do until we improve to a level of “good enough”, and we stay there. It’s what one coworker described as “cruising altitude”. For most things, that’s fine. There’s no need to constantly search for a better hair salon, a better way to brush your teeth, or a better way deal with inconsiderate neighbors. But when it comes to things you value most, when you wish to achieve a level of mastery, there is no “good enough”.
My kids love to visit the aquarium. Their imaginations light up when they see creatures that live a place so different from their own. One day I was there with my son and he was asking me questions about all the animals. He asked “papa, what’s that?” and I told him, “that’s a turtle”. Then he asked me a question that left me dumbfounded: “why is that a turtle?” My thoughts raced, “does he mean evolutionarily? taxonomically? experientially? phenomenologically?” I wasn’t content to give him a shallow answer like “I don’t know” or “because that’s what they call it”. So I told him “let’s find out together”.
Children look to their parents for answers to make sense of the unknown. It’s a mentoring relationship that has similarities to junior and senior developers. In the more experienced role, it’s critical to admit when I don’t know something and model how to find out. Wisdom is not a status to achieve, it’s a habit, a way of doing that leads to making better choices. It’s based on asking ever-better questions and never being content that there is one right answer. Senior developers don’t know all the answers any more than parents do. Too often they feel like they should, so they posture and pretend to everyone’s detriment. It’s not a realistic expectation to have of ourselves or others. Let the student guide the inquiry, and “let’s find out together” on our path of wisdom.
Expectations
As a parent, I enforce consequences rather than give punishments. Punishments are things done because the other person doesn’t like them, like spanking. Consequences are natural results of making choices, like losing the ability to play if you haven’t taken care of your responsibilities. My kids make their fair share of wrong choices (and I do too), but I’ve been surprised to learn how often those are based on mismatched expectations. I’ve had to back off or revise consequences many times because I realized through discussion that my expectations and their understandings weren’t the same, so I couldn’t expect them make right choices. Making my expectations clear and confirming that clarity with my kids before beginning tasks has helped immensely in guiding their decision making for the better.
On the flip side, I’ve had to work harder to understand my kids’ expectations as well. They’re young, so they sometimes put things together in ways that don’t necessarily make sense to me. Many, if not most, tantrums, breakdowns, and episodes of despair can be avoided by getting clear on my children’s expectations beforehand. I have to know where they’re starting from in order to be the best guide I can be. As I’ve grown as a parent here, the parallels with development have become more clear to me.
Working with code is hard. Even for experienced developers, wrapping our heads around the full picture of what’s happening takes serious effort. When working in an organization with bizdev, marketing, operations, administration, finance, and so on, there’s a high probability of misalignment of expectations. I’d go so far as to say that it’s the main source of strife between devs and others. Getting clear on expectations is foundational to being part of a smooth running team, and there are more and less constructive ways to go about it.
It’s possible to go about clarifying expectations from a place of “I don’t want to be held responsible for any problems.” The questions have the flavor of “you need to tell me what you want”. The energy is adversarial, and this type of approach divides teams and sets the stage for blame. A better approach is understanding and explaining expectations to build a shared vision of the collective goal. The perspective is, “as a person striving for excellence, I’m happy to be responsible for my part.” The purpose of setting expectations together is to enable the whole team to work in concert to achieve a result that everyone can be proud of. The energy is collaborative, generative, and invigorating.
Connection
Even with clear expectations, sometimes goals just aren’t going to be the same. My kids want to play instead of clean up, they want cupcakes instead of vegetables, or they want another new toy that I’m simply not going to buy. Such is life. I’ve learned that making sure they feel heard and understood is the best way to help them through their disappointment. Working with my kids has been great practice for me to develop empathetic listening skills that I can carry over into the workplace. The idea of empathy has become popular in tech circles (which is a great start), but there’s still a lot more work to do putting into practice. In the times that don’t see eye to eye with our coworkers, building an empathetic connection can actually strengthen our teams through constructive disagreement.
Children require a lot of play time. It’s not an optional, nice-to-have. They need it to learn, develop their nascent emotional life, and connect with their family. Aside from the obvious benefits (it’s fun!), play with my kids has helped me reconnect with my passion for creation. Whether building fantastical sea creatures with legos, drawing treasure maps, or dressing up as a dinosaur and chasing my kids around as a snack, I’m reminded of the joy of pure, raw creation. In tech, the breakneck pace of change and the pressure to stay current can easily obscure the wonder of possibility. In code, it can get buried under libraries, deadlines, best practices and code reviews, but it’s still there. I’ve chosen to be more deliberate about what I learn and why, to stoke the fire of creativity that got me started programming in the first place.
In my time away from work, I’ve explored the JAMstack, caught up with React hooks, refreshed my foundational JS knowledge, and set up a blog for myself and my wife. These are what interested me, sparked my curiosity, and made me wonder about possibility. When I find myself with a burning desire to understand the how and why of something new, I make it a point to learn about it, whether it’s directly applicable to my job or not. There’s a small chance it may be applicable in the future, it fuels my passion for learning, and learning new tech expands my perspective and knowledge base which helps me in general.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Søren Kierkegaard
What Now?
As I reflect on my past and plan for my future, I’m building new habits around the lessons I’ve learned. Leveling up from here means bringing my whole self to bear on coding challenges, seizing each opportunity to transform not only a product, but myself in the process. Mastery of a craft is a habit developed one project at a time, continually reflecting and improving. Knowledge comes in two forms: what you know, and where you grow.
Human beings are social creatures, and developers are no different (despite the stereotypes, lol). Connection defines who we are as a species, and sharing knowledge is a foundational human activity. Almost all development projects have multiple contributors, and the heart of our community is open source. To improve myself as a human and a developer, I’m reorienting my coding approach to be much more social. I’ll be posting to my blog, Twitter, reddit, dev.to, various Slack channels, and will be speaking, mentoring, and teaching.
Naturally, I’ll also be keeping up on the latest evolutions in JavaScript. Frameworks, libraries, best practices, tools, and of course, the language itself. The future of coding is exciting as it’s ever been, and I will be doing my part to make it the best it can be. Good luck and happy coding!