Family Matters

This piece about a programmer dad rings so true with me.  I was fortunate to have a job that supported flex-time when my son was born, and we kept his schedule later than typical until he started preschool, so I was able to spend evenings with him and my wife after work.  When my daughter was born, it was even more important to be home for them.

And now, years later, I still prefer to be home early enough to spend some time with them before homework and other teen activities fill up their evenings.

So if you plan on having kids and earn a living programming, start figuring out how you will make the time for them.

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More Grist for the Mill

I saw this today, pushing for more and better programming education for UK schoolkids.

I'm ambivalent about it - I like that it's for strengthening programming, but I feel that the globalization of software development makes it disingenuous to try and get more programmers in the developed nations when all the corporations are looking to ship the programming jobs out to less-developed nations where developers are cheaper.

The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that the CEOs who keep pushing this without bringing programming jobs back home are just looking to hedge their bets in case India and China become too expensive; having a lot of unemployed programmers at home will make it easy to offer lower pay.

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