A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.
Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.
For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:
Keeping up with current tech is part of your job, so do it on the clock. Senior developers are absolutely expected to spend time on experiments and exploratory projects; it's how they can safely and confidently propose and lead major refactors and improvements.
Understanding the potential risks and complications with a project supports your ability to properly scope, staff, and mentor.
This is a very fair point, similar to what some other members wrote. The only thing I need is to organize my work time a way that will make this possible and still let me perform in a similar pace as I do now.
I’m a staff engineer with a toddler and went through (am going through?) a similar thing. At the end of the day, I’m just tired and want to veg, not necessarily try to learn something new about programming. There were a few things that helped me though:
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.
Things will get better the moment your youngest becomes more independent, and sleeps well at night.