[CoolGuySteve]

See a lot of parents posting here about their success in raising children while working at a startup.

But I have a question that will sound condescending no matter how I phrase it: How many of you are developers vs product managers, business people, designers etc?

The reason I ask is because development is hard. It takes time to figure things out, and it's difficult to half-ass your way out of something when the clock hits 6pm without it coming back to get you the next morning.

[DannyBee]

It depends on how you develop, really. People in startups whose development is coding crazily 18 hours a day, obviously won't fit well with parenting. Of course, i'd be very impressed if you are coding 18 hours a day and aren't spending hours of that time rewriting code from early in the day/the day before (because it turned out to be broken or not well thought out or whatever).

When i was younger, i would hack at stuff very quickly until it worked (IE thousands of lines of code a day, it turns out,), and be proud of the result. 3 years later i'd look at the code and wonder what the hell was wrong with me.

Now i write code, if i hit a hard problem or things aren't working like i think they should, maybe i'll go take a walk for an hour to think about the problem and the code, then come back and code some more. I still end up getting more done at the end of the day, and the code looks better.

The extra time you get doing this kind of thing is the time you spend parenting.

You also get a much more acute sense of your limits as you get older, and know when you need to say "i just won't have time to do that, someone else needs to". Just because it's a startup doesn't mean people should try to take on every task. It doesn't help anyone if you say you can do something you can't :)

[mattdeboard]

I'm a dev at a startup. Sometimes I work at home late at night on work stuff after my kid is asleep after working all day. Who cares where you work from?

[emperorcezar]

37signals four day work week comes to mind, and a load of other writing. Development is a creative work. Sometimes it's not about the hours put into it.

Some people have bursts of real productivity, for a few hours tops.

If you don't have kids in your life, what else are you doing? Most are browsing the internet.

if you're in the position to do so. Recognize those bursts and use them to code. Then the time where you're looking at pictures of your cats, use that time for the kids.

[jw_]

Development is not that hard, really.

[pyre]

Depends on what you're doing. Saying "development is *" is way too broad. It's like saying "construction is easy," because you left off the qualifier, "I build sub-divisions for a living." Obviously building cookie-cutter houses in sub-divisions for a living is different than building suspension bridges or skyscrapers.

[jw_]

Fair enough - work that falls under the umbrella term "development" does have a wide range of technical difficulty.

What I was objecting to was the implication that the GP made that people with kids must be one of those "businessy hangers-on" because development itself is too difficult to balance with family. The vast majority of development is not that demanding - most developers are not building the equivalent of suspension bridges, and even if they are, it's not impossible to leave at 6pm most of the time unless something critical is down.