 Having a child to change my identity in so many ways. See, I love working. And since becoming a developer a couple of years ago, I really love going to work every day. I've always worn a lot of hats. I've been a community organizer, a mentor, a mentee, developer, an entrepreneur, an amateur baker, a sister, a daughter, a COO. And then all of a sudden, it was a mom. So this is Devin. He was born in early April. This talk is going to have a lot of pictures of him, so I'm sorry in advance. Devin will be one on Monday, so feel free to buy me a drink later for making it through my first year of parenthood. And today, I want to talk about two things, the parallels between coding and parenting, and the challenges that we face being parents and developers. As I sat at home just weeks after giving birth with this tiny human in my arms just trying to figure things out, I actually realized how many similarities there were between what I was doing as a mom and what I do as a developer. I'm sure that most of the folks who are parents here remember what it was like to take home your new tiny baby and what it felt like to realize that they were letting you go home unsupervised. Didn't they realize that you had no idea what you were doing? Similarly, learning to code for me also felt really overwhelming at times, and I would never be successful. But then gradually, minute by minute and day by day, I got better at being a developer and at being a parent. So let's get into these parallels. We all know that good developers Google. It's a really important skill, which isn't as easy as it sounds. You need to search for the right thing with the right additional pieces of information. You need to learn how to tune out unhelpful responses or bad solutions. And you need to skim through a lot of results fairly quickly to decide which ones you want to dive deeper into. As a parent, Googling is also really important, but wow, there is a lot of really scary and bad stuff out there. So if you're Googling about a child-related issue, keep a calm head, skim through lots of results quickly, and get site recommendations from friends because there is no stack overflow for parenting. Now, as you learn and exponentially increase your experience of being a parent or as being a developer, you start to form your own opinions. In programming and parenting, you may start to see an earned dogmatism effect. The earned dogmatism effect is when people feel they've earned the right to close their ears and their eyes and to become dogmatic because they feel like they're experts. Some of these opinions might sound familiar. Always use single quotes. Don't let your child cry it out. Practice test-driven development. Anything other than breastfeeding is horrible for your baby. We all know people who are unwavering in opinions like these. And while being unable to see other points of view is negative, forming opinions as your experience grows is really important. There are two things that we spend most of our time as developers doing, debugging, and building features. The idea for this talk actually stemmed from a week where I was trying to debug my baby. See, Devin was having a bunch of really rough nights. And we were trying to figure out if it was something that we did or just a phase that we needed to get through. So we started by looking at the common issues to make sure that it wasn't just a quick and easy fix. We then checked the logs to see if anything different stood out. And finally, we ended all of the new things that we had introduced that week so that we could introduce these things one thing at a time to see if any of those were the cause of the issue. Through following this process, we were able to pinpoint the issue and work on a quick fix to solve it. Does this process sound familiar? I mean, the whole thing is basically the same process we go through when debugging code. The other thing we do a lot of are feature builds. I like to think about feature builds as new things you're doing with your kid. So for example, when your baby starts solid foods. First, it's really exciting. You can't wait to see their face. You can't wait to start working on this new project with lots of unknowns and fun directions that can go in. How will they react to one food or another? Will they like it? Will they spit it out? And finally, you can record that funny video of your own child eating. You do some research? Seriously, where is my stack overflow for parenting? But as the project wears on, things get less exciting. Your child has an allergic reaction to a food you may or may not know exactly which one be able to solve the problem. Additional requirements come into play. Your child might decide that they like to do things like throw food. And if your child is anything like Devin, he'll decide that he loves something one day and then hates it the next. So feature builds or even green-filled apps can often be like this. They start with lots of excitement, but then you encounter issues along the way. I've also found myself both as a parent and as a developer saying things like, oh, next time we should definitely do this or next time we should really keep this in mind. Finally, we often talk about developer happiness and how important it is. Amazingly, the things that I do to stay calm, clear, and happy as a developer are often the same things that I do as a parent. So for example, taking short periodic breaks or taking a walk outside can make a huge difference. And don't forget the fact that pairing is encouraged. Whether it's a diaper change or trying to get that bounce rock sway thing down, sometimes you need an extra brain to figure out how to problem solve something or even to show you a different perspective. In the end, you know two things are true about being a developer and being a parent. You're in for a life of learning new things. No two babies and no two apps are the same. And second, that no one really knows what they're doing. The faster you realize these two things, the more confident you'll feel every day. Now, the other aspect that I wanna discuss are challenges. I wanna talk about the struggles related to parenting and coding. See, a few months ago, I felt like I was losing my mind. After a particularly bad week of getting about four hours of sleep a night from, I mean, who knows what, growth spurt, teething, whatever. And having a really challenging work week, I just wasn't sure how to do it. How do I keep doing all the learning that I should be doing while being a great mom, a great employee, and at least an adequate wife? How did others do it? Was I being unrealistic, lazy? Could I be a good mom and a good developer? Or was this field just not for me? And if I'm being really honest, there were a few weeks where even though I still loved being a developer, I just wasn't sure if I could remain in the field and be a successful mom and dev. I seriously thought about leaving tech and just going back to the positions I knew how to do well and could sort of do on autopilot. I created a survey to ask parents a few questions about this issue. So far, I've surveyed around 100 parents. And what I found from reading these surveys from both moms and dads is that there are some real trends and common issues. In an industry that values open source contributions, GitHub as your resume, and keeping up to date with the most recent programming developments, parents are struggling to keep up. Let me take a second to describe my typical day from like a month or two ago. So Devin wakes up around seven, which is actually amazing, I'm pretty lucky. A lot of parents start their day closer to five, 30 or six. We get dressed, we do breakfast for both him and me. We play a little bit until 9.30. At 9.30, our nanny comes, or at 9.15, I get in the car to drop Devin off. At 9.30, I pump breast milk and then I jump into the workday and do that until around 5.30 punctuated with a couple of breast milk pumping breaks. At 5.30, Devin plays for 15 or 20 minutes while I do some dinner prep. From six until around 7.30, my husband and I do Devin's dinner, continue cooking our dinner, clean up Devin's dinner and toys and then do the bath time and bedtime routines. From 7.30 until around nine, we finish cooking our dinner, eat dinner, clean up, prepare Devin's food and bottles for the next day, jot down any notes for our nanny, discuss whatever pertinent household business we need to, make sure we're on the same page for the next day and then we relax a little, usually while checking email or doing some final work for about 30 to 40 minutes and then we head to bed. We have it pretty good. Now, fortunately, I'm getting a little more time back in my day as I wean my son and don't need to pump breast milk as much. Dropping the number of times that I've had to pump has felt really amazing. Being able to have more time in my day to concentrate and not have to go through this huge context switch every two hours has been really incredible. I mentioned this little tangent because... I mentioned this little tangent because pumping breast milk was mentioned in over half of the surveys for mothers and their answer is about company provisions or issues they faced. Now, the only time in that whole day that I could do any code would be the 30 minutes I have to relax. And even if I gave up that tiny little bit of self-care time that I have, my brain is so tired by 9.30 that I wouldn't get anywhere fast. And if you think about it, if you don't have a great GitHub profile and you don't have side projects and you can't show potential employers code from work that you've worked on, when you go to look for a new job, you really have very little to show. All of this means that when you're looking for a new position, you're depending on your code challenge, which demands additional hours of focused time outside of your workday in order to complete. This means that anyone looking for a new position would have to spend a large portion of the weekend working on just a couple of code challenges, which also means depending on a husband or spouse to do all of the childcare for an entire weekend and you not getting to spend time with your child. This might not seem like a big deal, but when you're already working full-time, it really is. This, of course, is even more challenging if you're a single parent. If that's the case, then you're probably paying for weekend childcare in order to complete these tasks. I imagine that most parents have schedules like this, if not worse, and the schedules only get busier as the number of kids increases. A parent said, getting everything organized like taking the kids to daycare, shopping, households, family time, relationship time, social life, all will suffer, but none should be starved. The other time issue is related to the community. We value our Ruby community above a lot of things. It is vital for networking, for finding jobs, et cetera, to attend community events. I love going to meetups and community events, but it's really hard for me to do. If I go to a meetup, this means that I'm forcing my husband to do everything I mentioned before solo, which is even more exhausting and takes longer. We've actually made a deal with each other that we can each have one evening a week to do whatever we'd like, and the other person will handle the entire bedtime routine. But we couldn't do that until Devin was at least eight months old, and it does take a toll. It takes twice as long to get everything done if you're doing it alone, and we spend more time the previous evening just to make sure that whoever is going to be solo the following evening is really set up for success. A mother mentioned that she was not able to go to conferences and events anymore without it being a huge cost to her family time or even material costs if babysitters are required. The second biggest issue was being able to stay sharp. Developers live on coffee. If you're a nursing mom, you're often getting significantly less sleep, and you can't rely on those four cups of coffee a day to keep you going. Regardless of whether you're a mother or father, you need to stay sharp through lack of sleep and keep a clear mind to solve hard problems. At the beginning, on a really good night, you'll get six uninterrupted hours of sleep, maybe, but more often than not, you're sort of looking at five hours a night of interrupted sleep for a week or even longer than that, and no, you don't get the weekend to catch up and recharge. A parent wrote, sometimes the last thing I want to do or even have time to do when I get home is code or learn new code. Gone are the days of no responsibility in doing whatever I want when I get home. Finding a couple of hours to work on a personal project or pick up something new is hard, especially when trying to help out my other half who's also tired. The last issue was related to schedules and flexibility. This issue was actually stated in two different ways based on surveys from mothers or fathers. Most fathers said that a schedule or routine was a really difficult issue because as soon as you got used to something, everything would change, and so they suggested being as flexible as possible. Mothers more spoke about work hours. They said that having flexible hours during the day was great, but an issue that really frequently came up was regardless of work-hour flexibility, they still had hard starts and stops to their day, often based around childcare or school hours. One parent said, think of your brain as a snow globe. After your ex-years on Earth, you figured out how you work best, what's important to you, et cetera, and then this little person is going to come along, just give it a little shake, and things are going to land in different places, not better or worse, just different. Another parent said pre-baby, if my work day was interrupted, I'd get a solid amount of work done post three or 4 p.m., and then I'd head home late. Post-baby I no longer had that option and had to work with extra traffic. And finally another parent said, having to go home at 5.30, no matter what, even if I'm super in the zone, that can be so frustrating. When I asked if having children helped or hurt their career, no father said it had hurt their career. They felt it had helped or had a neutral impact. One dad said, it's helped me a ton with empathy and patience, which has positive impacts with clients, coworkers, and other people I interact with daily. Interestingly, only a small percentage of women said that having children hurt their career, but they did say that it had changed it. About one third of respondents said it slowed their career, affecting the overall trajectory and growth potential. I venture to say that these career changes are in fact hurting mothers' careers. Both men and women said that having children definitely helped them stay more focused at work because they were aware of the finite amount of time they had to accomplish tasks and wanted to make the most of their workday. A parent said, knowing that taking your work home isn't really an option, motivates you to be more productive during the workday. I find that I'm able to be more focused during the parts of my life that I've dedicated to work, both professional as well as creative. Personally, I don't feel like I have less time for the stuff that matters. I just have literally no time to waste. There were some interesting findings more broadly from the survey. First, all except for two fathers said it was fine to use their name, but one third of mothers wished to remain anonymous. Additionally, a lot of survey respondents mentioned that either they or their spouse took significant time off of work, six months or more, after the birth of each child. For those who took time off of work, often as senior level technologists, there was little concern about difficulty re-entering the workforce. We should recognize that this is definitely a luxury and a privilege to take that much time off of work and not be concerned about re-entering the workforce, and that is definitely not afforded to everyone. For those who became the sole provider for the family, they did mention extra stress and pressures about this fact, but there are solutions. So looking at these surveys, there are identifiable solutions that companies can put into place and that we as developers can help shape. First and most importantly, parental leave. I'm going to focus for a minute on maternity leave. Our country has a really atrocious maternity leave policy, basically nothing. We are one of the only countries in the world to not offer any sort of paid maternity leave, and paid maternity leave is incredibly important. Not only does a woman need time to heal, but giving birth takes a tremendous toll on your mental and emotional well-being. The prospect of going back to work before a mother is ready can lead to postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression, and have numerous negative health consequences on both mom and baby. Most companies think that four weeks of paid leave is standard and fair when most women are barely back on their feet after four weeks. Not to mention, and that's if you have a completely normal, uncomplicated birth, by the way. Not to mention the fact that babies aren't and shouldn't be sleeping through the night, and often really vital things like breastfeeding still aren't established or by any stretch of the imagination, easy or routine at that point. So for example, it's recommended for mothers who want to continue nursing to not introduce a bottle to their baby before four weeks of age, but if you're expected to be back at work after four weeks, what are your options? Now for paternity leave. Most men only receive two weeks of paternity leave and that's if they're lucky. I could not even imagine how terrified I would have been if my husband had to go back to work after two weeks. I hadn't even changed a diaper at that point because I couldn't go up and down stairs or respond fast enough to the baby. A parent commenting on this said, when it comes to parenting, I think about 10 year scale. We expect people to take eight weeks of paternity or maternity leave, but if they wanted 12, the answer is yes. 16, okay. 10 years from now, is it going to make a difference whether they took eight or 12 weeks? No, but if we pull them back, students and they're ready and then they quit a few months down the road, that has huge consequences. Most workplaces don't offer any additional support for parents, men or women who are transitioning back to work. Companies do their employees a disservice and often create resentful employees by having insufficient parental leave policies. Think critically about your policy as you put it in place. Think about the consequences of having an employee back at work who doesn't want to be there and who really isn't mentally ready to contribute to the team versus providing a few extra weeks off and having an employee who is ready and excited to return to work. Talk to parents on staff about how much time they could have used and what resources or process they would have found helpful upon returning to work. Second, allowing work from home, remote or unconventional working options. Even once a parent is ready to come back to work, offering different working options can make a huge difference in their happiness level. For women who are pumping, being able to work from home makes a huge difference. For me, when I worked from home, I could pump in 22 minutes each time because I had everything set up and ready to go. But when I went into an office, it took me 32 to 34 minutes each time because I had to set everything up, break everything down, clean everything when I was done, not to mention the travel time just to get to and from the room because it often isn't just near your computer. I want to mention again that over half of surveys from women suggested issues or difficulties around pumping. If you have women at your company that are pumping in the bathroom, you need to seriously consider how you prioritize mothers in your workforce. Working from home also takes the stress of a commute out of the equation and just allows parents, regardless of how old their children are, a little more flexibility and a little more time with those who matter most. Furthermore, the idea of getting everyone out of the house on time with everything that they need for the day can be really stressful. If you have to worry about one less person, you can be just a little less stressed and your checklist can be just a little shorter. Another option is to offer a part-time transition back to work. Surveys showed that parents took this in a variety of ways, some working less hours, some working less days. But a gradual transition back to work for as long as the company can possibly allow it makes an enormous difference in a parent's lifestyle. Third, I touched on this a little bit when talking about parental leave, but it's worth mentioning again. Companies can take a much more proactive role in creating support systems. A simple example might be including a parenting slack channel where parents can share experiences, issues, and pictures of their children. Another more involved option might be to connect parents returning to work with those who have taken parental leave in the past and allow it to be a safe space for both parties to discuss successes, issues, and challenges. Finally, train managers on what to expect when someone who has been on parental leave comes back to work. This is important for both moms and dads, but for moms in particular, oftentimes managers, especially in tech, may have never had a mother on their team go on maternity leave. They might have no idea what challenges that woman is facing, what questions might help or hurt her return to work transition, and how to best support her as both an employee and a colleague. Over and over again, I saw quotes like, my boss was a big part of my success when I was a new parent. Another said, you can only be a good developer when being supported by your company or manager. It's all about the feeling, the work ethics, feeling good in your team. Being a developer is really just being an artist but on a keyboard. You have to be creative, and you can't be creative in an oppressed work environment. Fourth, create realistic expectations for parents returning to work. If your company operates off of KPIs or goal setting, recognize that these goals should be revisited when parents come back to work, and set new goals. These goals will likely not be as ambitious as they've been in the past. If you're a manager, encourage realistic goal setting, and if you're an employee, recognize that your whole life has changed, and give yourself at least a quarter or two to adjust to the new normal. As your children get older, they'll become more aware of what effective goal setting and realistic expectations looks like for you. At least that's what I hear. One mom mentioned, parents need different things at different times in their kid's lives. Now I need the holidays, but before my kids were in school, that didn't matter. There are symbolic things companies can do to signify they welcome parents, such as pre-tax childcare savings accounts, or having a mother's room with a comfy chair, power, and a mini-fridge, away from the work area. Fifth, and this is really important for self-care but doesn't have that much to do with a company-provided solution, but get rid of your parent guilt. This Halloween, I sewed two, yes, two Halloween costumes for my then six month olds. Why? Because I work, and to me, spending time in the evening and on the weekends after he's gone to bed working on this Halloween costume made me feel like he knows he's my top priority. Of course, this is a ridiculous statement, but lots of working parents feel this way, right? Like we feel badly ordered takeout, we feel badly missed those special activities, but we also need to realize that working and doing something that we love is just as important for us and for our children to see. A mom said, I thought I was a bad mother and a bad developer because I didn't make everything perfect. Sixth, if you don't have children or if a majority of your team is childless, don't make parents stuff weird. Talk about nursing or pumping or kid stuff in whatever way feels comfortable. One of the first things I did when I was back in the office was create an emoji for when I was away from my computer pumping, yeah? This helped me feel open and honest about what was going on, and it did so in a way that didn't make my team feel awkward or weird about it. I actually thought it was pretty awesome. At General Assembly, we do quarterly gatherings of the engineering team, which include lightning talks, and I did two lightning talks while I was pregnant about what that was like, and a lightning talk just a few months ago about the science of breast milk and pumping. My team was enthralled. They asked great questions and they had much more empathy and understanding for me afterwards. Furthermore, hopefully, by exposing them to some of the terminology and experiences, they'll be more understanding and empathetic to any women or parents they might work with in the future. Seventh, if you need to leave your company, leave your company. A parent wrote, your kids are more important than your career. Say it every day, write it down. Read it until it's so ingrained in your brain that you don't even have to think about it. No one lies on their deathbed, wishing they'd spent more time with rails. I say this with a caveat. The companies, listen up. If you treat your parents well, they won't leave. You'll have a much more dedicated workforce because nothing is more important to parents than a place that treats them well and values the fact that they have a family. All of the survey respondents who felt their company cared about their work-life balance mentioned that they wouldn't be leaving anytime soon. But contrastingly, parents who felt challenges, issues, or more difficulties based on coworkers and company policies had mostly already left the company they were working for when they had children. Ultimately, if your company doesn't understand the lifestyle of you as a parent and doesn't allow you to be with your children when you wanna be, then if you can, try to leave. This advice came up over and over again in surveys, although, again, admittedly, most survey respondents so far have been senior-level developers who I think have a lot more flexibility in this area. The number one piece of advice I got on surveys was that you will never get this time with your children back. So value it, prioritize it, and guard it as much as possible. Okay, so in summary, that is parental leave, creative working options, support systems, realistic expectations, no parent guilt, normalize it, and leave if you have to. Some days, I still feel like I'm not sure I can be a successful mom and developer. Some days, I can give 100% to both areas. Others, I feel like I'm letting either my child or my job down. Those days when I wanna play with my baby just a little longer, or keep my head down for a few more hours to really crack the problem I'm working on, or fully understand the concept I'm grappling with. Often though, I find myself calling on developer strategies for effective parenting, and vice versa. I personally think this makes me a better developer, and gives me more experiences and strategies I can call upon when debugging, spiking, or creating something new. What I also learned through speaking with people and through all the amazing moms and dads that have answered a few questions for me, was that the struggles that I am facing are not unique. It's important for all of us, as a community, as developers, as colleagues, as peers, and as managers to think about this. I thought that everything that I was feeling was just me, but it's everyone. Everyone has these same concerns, and everyone has had the same issues. So, let's think about how to make it better. Because they're solvable. As peers, with or without children, managers, CTOs, and directors of engineering, we can make the lives of parents who are developers better. I know that almost 100 surveys isn't a huge sample size, but it is enough to start a conversation and to start seeing trends. This research will be ongoing, so if you wanna answer a few questions, definitely tweet at me or email me. And parents, for those of you in the audience who are parents, as one person wrote on their survey, just high fives, you're awesome. Be confident. Thank you to everybody who's filled out a survey so far. Thank you. Questions? So, I haven't, it's interesting. So, oh, sorry, he asked if I got different answers from single parents versus parents who had partners to help them. I have a little bit, that's the point about code challenges and things sort of needing to be even that much more organized when you're a single parent, but to be honest, I haven't gotten a lot of survey results from non-senior developers, and I haven't gotten a lot of survey results from single parents. I've really only gotten a small handful from single parents or parents that adopted children. I am hoping that sort of the research will show more, and I'll be able to have more insight into that as more folks fill out the survey. Yes, you can fill out my survey. You can just, I don't have it in any sort of like an online survey format. I should probably do that. But right now you can just tweet at me or email me, and I'll send you the questions. It's just five questions. Super easy, can be anonymous if you wanna be. Yeah, so did spend some time talking to my employer. Most of, oh yeah, sorry, so sorry. Yes, if I'd spent any time talking to other employees other than my own about survey results and about strategies. So actually I haven't even talked to my employer about the survey results, although I did bring up some stuff on my team and at the company while I was pregnant as I was a new mom. I have not spoken to companies about the results. I know there is some really positive movement in the industry about paid parental leave, which I think is really great, and companies offering more of that. Again sort of right now hoping that some of the survey, right now what I've gotten, like the information I have about how companies can do better is really based on survey results. And so hoping that as I get more surveys, et cetera, and speak at conferences, companies might become interested in sort of what better policies they could have in place to retain, to recruit and retain parents. Great, thank you.