I have been working in the industry for 8 years and am now considered a senior developer, also as a team lead.
Three years ago, my first child was born, and a few months ago, a second one arrived. While I don’t regret my decision to have kids at all, I do feel bad about how the lack of free time affects my career and how my knowledge falls behind the industry.
Before having kids, I used to spend a few hours a week on never-ending personal projects to learn new things. However, now I neither have the time nor the energy for that.
The only way that has worked for me is to read some tech books, which are often not about coding, and to read some blogs or subs like this.
However, I feel like this approach is too passive and is not providing the best outcome that I would expect.
Any tips there, perhaps from someone who was is similar situation?
My approach was something like this: for a few years (maybe until all my kids were at least age 3 or 4) I simply didn’t try to push my career forward.
When I was at work I put in plenty of effort, but I didn’t work much overtime, I didn’t do my own software projects outside of work, and I didn’t even spend much time reading programming blogs.
Young children are really overwhelming, if you are going to really parent them!
My career was fine. Career advancement is a marathon, not a sprint. Mmmm… that’s not true – I’ve seen people sprint through the career ladder. But if you want advice on how to do that you’ll need to ask someone else. MY approach to career advancement has been a marathon; keep improving until I am so ready for the next level that it’s really obvious, briefly do enough politicing to secure a promotion, then go back to the self-improvement. For me, the approach worked (I’m a “senior director” level non-manager-track software engineer today.)
When my kids were young I really just focused on them; these days they are in highschool and college and they work WITH me on my outside-of-work person programming projects.
This is a decent advice, to take this part of my career easy, focus on what’s more important (the kids), and wait for when they will be able to spend more time together, leaving more for me. Soo, like 3 years from now at least.
Well, given how exhausting fatherhood can be and the stability of my current job, I might just continue learning passively through articles or books. Additionally, I could incorporate the advice from this post and spend some time during work hours researching topics that I’ll need for my project. This approach would allow me to snipe two birds with one stone.
Thanks for the advice here.