Episode 058: Co-parenting with Brandon Hays

Welcome Brandon!

Brandon Hays is a dad and engineering leader based in Austin, TX. His professional mission is to help the tech industry improve by organizing people to accomplish things together in environments that recognize and support their "human-ness". His personal mission is to survive parenthood until the kids are in college.

02:40 Brandon's co-parenting

• Starting with traditional gender roles
• Co-parenting was a foriegn concept until remote work..
• The invisible work becomes more visible
• Covid has forced parents to confront the amount of work it takes to raise kids

06:30 Co-parenting during the pandemic

• Awareness that things changed… kids cannot return to school
• Brandon becomes the educator during the pandemic
• The amount of work to parent became too high when everything shut down
• Reworking the home dynamic when one partner needs help
• Asking for flexibility in places where he had previous thought was not available before

10:53 Working out responsibility between partners

• Clear contracts
• Splitting up tasks and making them known to each partner
• Alternating cooking dinner and clean up
• Family clean day
• Creating activities for kids, even after a long day
• Check in with your partner, how are you feeling burden?

14:05 Recognize your partner's strengths

• Being comfortable with how each partner co-parents
  
• Recognition of each partner
• Optimize each parenting style and continue to check in
• Asking and taking the self-care when it is needed

17:30 Working together

19:10 How has Covid refocused things?!

• Strengthened the team mentality
• Hard to sustain the intensity of the pandemic
• Constant change, the on-call parent

24:40 Prioritization - Do our actions line up with our values?

27:00 Take away: preserve time for planning and reflection

28:35 Genius / fail moments

• Allison checks in while her son is in virtual school and feels major mom guilt…
• Chris’s family visits and brings his camper for a huge win!
• Arit slyly phases out her daughters stuffed animal #genius
• Jess’s son goes full into minecraft, but it may be too much.. #possiblegenius
• KWu repurposed geotags for wooden toys for her kids #genius
• Brandon get creative taking pictures of his kids in their natural habitat

How can I support the podcast?

Please follow us @parentdrivendev on Twitter or email us at panel@parentdrivendevelopment.com.

Our website is at ParentDrivenDevelopment.com.

Chris Arcand
Jess
Arit
Allison
KWu

Special Guest: Brandon Hays.

Sponsored By:

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Episode 031: Negotiating A Shorter Workweek

00:16 Welcome, Itamar Turner-Trauring

Itamar Turner-Trauring started his software career in the cutting-edge field of multimedia CD-ROMs. He currently works as a consultant helping speed up Python code and deployments, and shares his software and career mistakes every week with 3700 programmers on his Software Clown newsletter. His crowning achievement as a parent was when months of brainwashing paid off and his daughter stopped saying "my legs are tired" and started saying "my legs are getting stronger! Itmar is that author of "You Can Negotiate A 3-Day Weekend".

00:51 Working Part-Time as a Programmer and Writing a Book

• "You Can Negotiate A 3-Day Weekend

03:54 Overcoming "This Isn't Normal" or "Entitlement" Feelings

• Negotiation is easier at your current job. Your work ethic is already established.
• Frame/approach it as a problem-solving situation.

08:05 Difficult Parts of Negotiation

• Harder to do up-front at new companies.
• Communication concerns.
• What about emergencies?
• Worries about getting work done and job commitment.

11:26 Scheduling Your Shorter Workweek

• Be courteous of your team.
• Plan around regularly-scheduled meetings.

14:40 Utilizing Extra Time as a Parent

17:52 Taking on Remote-Friendly Tasks + Peer Reactions

20:12 Output Value + Impact

• You can be productive and work shorter hours.
• The better the management, the less of an issue.
• Asking yourself, "What is enough work?" can be a struggle to measure when you're not counting hours.
• Honor your commitments.
• Parents are excellent multitaskers!!!

28:44 Genius / Fail Moments

• KWu uses a sippy cup at night so she doesn't knock it over. (#Genius)
• Chris told his daughter, "You are not your homework," which was adapted from "You are not your code!" (#Genius)
• Itmar's daughter's snack negotiation skills are getting more sophisticated. (#Genius/Fail)
• It took less than 90 seconds for Allison's life to fall apart in her household! (#Fail)

Follow & Support

Please follow us @parentdrivendev on Twitter or email us at panel@parentdrivendevelopment.com.

Our website is at ParentDrivenDevelopment.com.

Support us via Patreon and get access to our our Slack Community.

Panel

KWu
Chris Sexton
Allison McMillan

Special Guest: Itamar Turner-Trauring.

Episode 028: Primary Caregiving

00:17 Introducing Guest, Nick Gauthier! Becoming a Full-time Parent

Nick is currently the CTO and Co-founder at Nomics. Before co-founding Nomics, Nick created MeetSpace, a video conferencing application for distributed teams. Before that, Nick worked at Codeship on the Codeship Pro Continuous Delivery platform, as well as various other web application consulting projects in Ruby on Rails, Go, and JavaScript.

03:55 Being a Full-Time Parent as a Man

• "Aww, you're babysitting!" 🙄
• Experiences with "Mommy and Me" groups and Meetups.
• Feeling instrusive in Mom spaces.
• Breaking into a "Mommy Group".

08:17 Partner Dynamics and Making Decisions

• Getting the scoop and being thankful to not have other parents' problems.
• Liking vs not liking the baby phase.

11:07 Changes as Baby Grows

• Transitioning to a nanny but still working from home.
• When going to work is a "vacation" or an "escape".
• Fielding distractions.

17:11 How Having a Child Has Changed the Way Nick Works

• Working with other parents.
• Context switching and protecting time.
• Asynchronous communication.

24:16 Communication Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

• Any communication, the normal expected turnaround time is 24 hours; unless in text is says urgent.
• Cell phone calls are last resort, but must be answered.
• Everything is "Do Not Disturb".
• Keep communcation very close to or 100% on topic.

29:06 Team Relationship Building + Watercooler Talk

• Optional "huddles" with no agenda. Explicit watercooler time.
• Company retreats.

31:21 Genius / Fail Moments

• Nick's daughter announced "Oh yeah! Get some beer!" in the middle of the store. (#Fail) But, she is mastering potty training with M&Ms as rewards! (#Genius)
• Chris: M&M inflation. (#Fail) "Scream Parade" on the other hand... (#Genius)
• Allison: Flow picture charts for the morning on what her son needs to do to leave the house 👍🏻. (#Genius)

Follow & Support

Please follow us @parentdrivendev on Twitter or email us at panel@parentdrivendevelopment.com.

Our website is at ParentDrivenDevelopment.com.

Support us via Patreon and get access to our our Slack Community.

Panel

Josh Puetz
Chris Sexton
Allison McMillan

Special Guest: Nick Gauthier.

Episode 017: Work and Family Boundaries

00:16 Welcome, Chris Arcand!

Chris is a Software Engineer at HashiCorp where he works on Terraform Enterprise, a product that adds collaboration and governance features to the popular open source infrastructure tool, Terraform. As an advocate of distributed teams and open source, he’s spent the majority of his career at other distributed, open source companies such as Red Hat. He calls the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota his home where he organizes the local Ruby users group, RubyMN, as well as moderates the ‘MSP Tech’ community Slack. Outside of software, Chris is an avid backpacker and amateur ice hockey player, as well as the father of a rambunctious little 19-month-old.

01:32 Balancing Working From Home with a 19-Month-Old

• The Aspect of Literal Time: Utilizing time when kids are napping/otherwise busy
• "Shift Work" vs Having Flexible Hours
  • Hashicorp's "Flexible Time Off" Policy vs "Paid Time Off"
• Approaching Work and Dividing Up Your Day

06:46 Making Family Plans

09:29 Commuting Vs Working From Home

• Location is Vital
• Having an At-Home Nanny

13:28 Choosing a Nanny Over Daycare

18:19 Maintaining Balance and Avoiding Excessive Interruptions

• Noise. Cancelling. Headphones.
• Shutting The Door

21:14 Improving Mental Presence When Not Working

• Give Yourself Time to Decompress Before Family Time
• Mindfulness/Meditation

25:23 Exposing Kids to "I'm working, and this is how I'm working."

43:42 Genius / Fail Moments

• JC: Has successfully kept his kid alive for 18 years! (#Genius) Also, his sophomore is starting in varsity football! (#Genius) Also, also, he is the team photographer which is a great hobby to have. (#Genius)
• Josh: Andrew Bredow's Chore Chart
• Chris A: His hockey room! His son is showing interest! (#Genius) ...But, having a new roof put on his house during naptime was probably not the best plan. (#Fail)
• Chris S: Let his kids help him paint a room! (#Genius) ...But, it turns out they weren't very good at it. (#Fail)

Follow & Support

Please follow us @parentdrivendev on Twitter or email us at panel@parentdrivendevelopment.com.

Our website is at ParentDrivenDevelopment.com.

Support us via Patreon and get access to our our Slack Community.

Panel

Chris Sexton
JC Avena
Josh Puetz

Special Guest: Chris Arcand.

Episode 008: Remote working with kids

00:37 Who all works remotely?

02:30 Working remotely with kids at home

Lifestyle choice
Nursing and alternate schedules
Spouses working from home as well

06:00 Working remotely before and after having a child

The difference between working from home with a spouse also working from home vs. not
Hard starts and stops to your day

10:00 JC forgets pickup

11:00 Dealing with interruptions

This classic example
Interruptions from your spouse vs. the kid(s)

15:00 Allison joins

15:45 Do companies who accept remote work also do better at understanding flexible schedules and work/life balance?

Tyranny of the green dot on Slack
What are the expectations of being remote?
Do we feel guilty about doing "life" or kid stuff during the work day?

19:53 Being a remote worker vs. being on a distributed team

Understanding working hours
Helping colleagues be more purposeful about working hours and communication

23:00 Shared calendars and communicating hours to your team

slack notifications and snoozing
google calendar work hours
basecamp Tools

24:00 Based on Cate's blog post Going in to an office established a lot of defaults for a team and working remotely it helps to be more explicit

25:30 Being in the office is nice because you get to talk to other adults. How do you deal with isolation?

Going to stores
Being in the coffee shop
Parenting groups and daycares
Playdates with other kids
The difficulty of coworking and coffee shop working while pumping
Leads to great isolation which is pretty difficult
Rant about when people tell you to be social while pumping (spoiler: it's not that easy!!)

31:00 Being home instead of going out as a matter of priorities

What do you want to have time for?

33:00 Listener Question!! Our first!! It is so exciting!!!

When is the right time to introduce screens to your child and how did you do it?

Allison introduced games first, mostly on flights. When Allison introduced tv shows, she tried to make it educational like Daniel Tiger, PBS shows, etc.
Talking to your child about what they watched and what they learned
KWu thinks what screen time and for what purpose. And introduce something, see the effect and make changes from there.
JC said as you have more kids, it's harder to control media and screen time. Having structure around things is very important.
Josh remembers lots of research but can't remember when they introduced screens
Andy says do it collectively and sparingly
KWu says that technology and watching things can be used as bonding time and can focus on artistic or creative endeavors as opposed to isolating
JC talks about use of imagination using programs like minecraft.

45:00 Genius / Fail moments

JC - my daughter has been playing softball and she looked at pictures of herself batting and fixed an issue! She was resilient and didn't get discouraged. #Genius
Allison - Everything is a genius and fail right now. My son's preschool teacher told me that he's doing fantastic #Genius
Josh - my daughter has guinea pigs named Ana and Elsa and one of them fell which led to a visit to the vet. There they found out Ana and Elsa are male which led to a great discussion about gender and what gender means. #Genius
KWu - Marriage win! We started watching the Americans together and it is so nice to be doing something together and have something not household related to talk about. #Genius
Andy - After a difficult day, my daughter wrote "I love you daddy, even when you're grumpy" #Genius? or #Fail?

53:00 Contact Us!

Tell us what you're learning!

Follow & Support

Please follow us @parentdrivendev on Twitter or email us at panel@parentdrivendevelopment.com. Our website is at ParentDrivenDevelopment.com
Support us via Patreon and get access to our our Slack Community.

Panel:

Josh Puetz
Allison McMillan
JC Avena
KWu
Andy Croll

Additional links:

• 100 Remote Work Stats, Quotes, and Statistics
• https://medium.com/@benthompson/breaking-down-the-father-on-bbc-being-interrupted-by-his-children-9840cdc8857b
• https://youtu.be/-Ojvk-4IcOE