Programming Post-Progeny: A New Parent's Perspective by Jacinda Shelly

Speaker 1: And thank you all for coming. This is a bit of a different talk for me. So bear with me. Slides are all right. So I'm Jacinda and this is Ada. She's also with us in the audience today because leaving for five days. is still a bit challenging. Welcome to Programming After Progeny, a talk that is part time management, part encouragement of flexible work arrangements, and definitely an excuse for us to all enjoy cute baby pictures. pictures together. First I'd like to thank Heather and Jeff for taking my daughter and holding her.

Speaker 1: If that change she changes, she may end up on stage. at some point as well. I'd also like to thank the organizers for accepting this talk. This isn't the first talk that I've given at a conference, but it's certainly the most personal My previous talks are more used to giving talks with titles like Connecting Patients to Doctors in Real Time, Delving into the Django Admin. admin performance talks, iPython, Twilio programmable video. However, despite the fact that I am not a childcare expert and My anecdotes are not statistically significant data. I feel it's important for us to share the rest of our lives with each other because we are people, not just programmers. And it would be foolish to think that we work in isolation from other important parts of our lives.

Speaker 1: There are also many things that I acknowledged as being important before I had a child, but that still blindsided me, even though I thought I was prepared. So if nothing else, I hope this talks reaches a parent out there or a someday parent or someone who works with parents and lets them know that they're a people with similar feelings. And that they are probably not alone. Now before we begin, I'd like to set expectations just a bit. First, this is a personal story. Talk to other parents and you'll hear as many other stories as there are parents. And as there are children. Um, this is the things that have worked for me are not things that I'm saying everyone sh

Speaker 1: can or should do. People have different feelings about children and different feelings about parenting. Heck, I wonder on an almost daily basis if I'm screwing this up. and might do things differently in the future or if I could go back in time. But this is where I'm at right now. My daughter entered the world about two weeks late, so she was right on par with uh programming even then. Nothing ever arrives on time. We had actually struggled with infertility, a pregnancy loss, and long induction, all topics for another time, but that I'm happy to share more about with anyone who has questions. And we were delighted she was here.

Speaker 1: I was exhausted and needed to heal, but incredibly happy. I had started maternity leave a few days earlier Uh when I had gone to the hospital and was looking forward to time to recover and to get to know this brand little new little person. So It was time for expectations to meet reality. Before I had a child, I expected that it would be tough. I knew plenty of other parents. I had three younger siblings I'd spent quite a bit of time around babies. I thought I knew what I was getting into. I'd done a lot of reading. Oh yeah, books, books are great. I knew I would have a small human being who'd take up an awful lot of time, but in between diapers, feedings, and nap time, I would have some time to myself, right?

Speaker 1: Yeah, no. So that's my daughter when she was about four months old. This is my daughter when she was about nine days old. Uh the first few months are not what you picture when you think about babies. Newborns eat every one to two hours around the clock. Um they maybe three if you're if you're lucky. They don't sleep for long stretches of a time. Um they're actually Except in some cases, physically incapable of doing that. There are exceptions, just like everything else, but most newborns don't sleep. sleep for very long at any stretch of the time. They have stomachs that are about the size of, oh I think it was a marble

Speaker 1: by the end of the first week and they're like this big when they're born so they they have to eat frequently because they really can't eat um a lot at any given time. Um and then I I also thought I have I have 12 weeks of maternity leave to figure this out. That's that's plenty of time. So keep that in the back of your mind because I have to take a necessary detour on this talk and just go through the obligatory. US has no guaranteed paid maternity or paternity leave. We rank dead last in the OECD in company with only Papua New Guinea. This is a ranking of other countries in the OECD and how much paid maternity

Speaker 1: It's fantastic that so many tech companies have fabulous leave policies. Google, Amazon, actually, I'm not sure how good Amazon's I think it's good. But I know Google's Netflix, uh, Facebook all have great maternity leave policies and paternity leave policies, but that leaves out a whole bunch of people. And this is not something that should be dependent upon employment status. In 2014, only 13% of U. S. civilian employees had any access to paid family leave. Uh the Family Medical Leave Act provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave, which means that um after you've given birth, you have 12 weeks

Speaker 1: uh where you may not be fired from your position. But only sixty percent or so of US workers are actually eligible for the Family Medical Leave Act. So that means 40% of people who are employed are not eligible for the Family Medical Leave Act. And remember that's unpaid leave. So 40% of U. S. employees, if they had a child, would not be eligible to take any form of leave and have their job be guaranteed when they came back. Additionally , the World Health Organization recommends six months of exclusive breastfeeding with one year as a primary nutrition source. Nursing can be hard.

Speaker 1: Pumping can be harder. And good parental leave policies make this easier. It's hard to even think you have breastfeeding figured out at twelve weeks um and going back to work at that point For some people is easy and for a lot of other people is hard. The US does not do a good job of supporting those people This is not the main thrust of my talk, but I felt like I needed to include it because it's something that we don't do well here in the US and that we should do better. So back to my personal story and not statistics. Here are a few more details about my expectations.

Speaker 1: I expected that 12 weeks would be plenty of time to figure out everything I needed to know, and that I would be ready to go back to work at that time, and that she would be ready to go to daycare. I expected that by 12 weeks she wouldn't be sleeping well, but that we would have started figuring something out. I expected that she would go to childcare and that she might be a little unhappy with unfamiliar caretakers, but that she would adjust. I expected that pumping would be easy. I was wrong. Reality, uh, 12 weeks is short. This is actually a picture of Ada from when she was 13 weeks old

Speaker 1: At 13 weeks, babies are still generally immobile. Most of them can't even roll over yet, and are only starting to develop reasonable head control. Uh the other reality is that babies are individuals and all of those expectations I had about how she would do it with other people , how she would sleep, how I would do all of the things that the book said I should do and that things would turn out fine. It didn't happen. From day one, she had a vocal personality. She hated car seats, swaddles, and strollers, which leaves out pretty much all of the sleep strategies that they tell you about. Um it would take 40 minutes to an hour to get her swaddled and down, and then she would sleep for about 20 minutes in the swaddle

Speaker 1: and wake up screaming. This meant that A lot of the things that you typically hear from people like have you heard have you driven them around in a car? Oh yes, we tried that. That's the baby equivalent of how you restarted your computer. Um she also had silent reflux, which is essentially baby heartburn, except that uh you don't actually see the spit-up. as much and she refused a bottle for a long time. None of these boded well for a seamless transition back to work. And as you can see from this early photo, for her, strollers were great for carrying everything except the baby. Um she often would only fall asleep if you went on a long walk. Um and in contrast to how she slept if we tried swaddling her and putting her in

Speaker 1: a crib or a bassinet. She would sleep for a couple hours at a time in a carrier. No problem. The other reality was that I felt more conflicted than I expected. At 12 weeks, I didn't feel ready to just hand her off to daycare Um I love my job, but I wanted to be there for this and for this and for this. But like I said, I I really love my job. So how could I make this work? Well The engineer in me was like, okay, well this is this is part of it.

Speaker 1: I would sit on a yoga ball, which was one of the ways that we could get her to fall asleep, was bouncing on a yoga ball in a carrier. and work on my laptop. This is actually, I think, when I was still on maternity leave in our chat program. All right. And she can come join. Hey there. She still seems to think that I'm an okay person to hang around. What a judge of character. We'll have to fix that later. So this I think was about two months in. So I had to try a bunch of different things. First remote work

Speaker 1: and um I've been very fortunate to have a flexible work environment and manager. And that is something that I'm strongly advocating for in this talk. Flexible work environments help everyone, especially with with retaining talent and I'll reiterate this point at the end, but if my only choice had been uh go back to commuting to work five days a week and be in an office at 12 weeks, the decision would have been a whole lot harder. I was able to continue working remotely for as long as I felt I needed to after my leave was over. This gave me more time to adjust and figure out what would work for me longer term.

Speaker 1: I didn't feel any pressure to return to the office before I was ready. And this is something that I am very, very grateful for and that is something I just can't express how fortunate I feel to have been able to do that. And I want to strongly advocate if you are an employer uh that have policies in place like this and you will retain employees. I also was fortunate to have some family support who from in-laws who uh live nearby. So they were able to actually watch Ada a couple days a week and provide a better transition because she was familiar with them

Speaker 1: them already. And last thing that I would say for my story is daycare is not necessarily the only option It wasn't realistic for me to, especially as Ada got older and didn't just uh sleep all the time, it wasn't realistic for me to only work while she slept. Um she was getting more active and needed more attention. But I was still able to work during her afternoon naps. We looked at daycares full and part-time in the Bay Area and really around the country. Those are pretty expensive and have long waiting lists. So we also looked at the cost of a part-time. Let's hide that, shall we?

Speaker 1: Um we looked at the cost of a I can sit this up here. Yeah, let's do that. Uh no. She can't see it. It's it's good. Okay. Um Consider whether having a part-time babysitter or a nanny who comes consistently is is something that is an option because uh for me and for other parents that I've talked to, the cost can actually actually be equivalent or for us it was significantly less than full-time daycare. I was able to work from home and have someone come and watch her uh in the mornings three days a week. So what does this look like today?

Speaker 1: I work from home three days a week with part-time child care in the mornings on those days So I get up, get her ready, um, hands her off, I work uh upstairs and someone else watches her for that time period. In the afternoon, I get a little bit of time with her and work during her afternoon nap I commute to the office two days a week now. That will probably continue to change. Like I said, I work during her afternoon nap. I also work evening after bedtime and on weekends if needed. I don't advocate anyone work on weekends in general, but if that's

Speaker 1: but that's what's been working for me to be able to spend time. with my daughter. And this evolved over time and continues to change. I started only going into the office one day a week when I felt comfortable. I moved to two days when I felt comfortable with that. At some point uh she probably will go into full-time child care. Um but it's something that we're taking a day at a time. And uh that still seems hard. So how do how do I actually do it? So this is probably the slide that a lot of you were hoping to see is some time management tips that I've come across. So the first one is I can't do it all. I have put some things on hold.

Speaker 1: I I realize that this is a temporary thing and that Things will change. She's not gonna be this size forever. Five months ago she uh she couldn't even crawl, so this all goes by very quickly Second thing is uh you have to sleep. I I relied heavily on caffeine before I got pregnant, um cut it out almost completely because you're you're not supposed to drink caffeine when you're pregnant Um also with nursing, the last thing that anyone wants is a uh a caffeinated baby. So I still don't drink much caffeine. Um I had to find something that let me sleep. Um and when I was only getting When she was four days old, uh

Speaker 1: I was very adamant about the baby will never sleep with us. Um and I learned how to do it more I learned some some things about doing it more safely. The official recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics is to now But they do they did revise the recommendations and say that if you do, um they provide ways to do it safely, or at least more safely. Boy. And as you know, things never go quite as planned with kids. See that's and the last point on this is uh

Speaker 1: Be kind to yourself because things don't always go according to plan and having help is important Learning to get in the zone fast. This is probably something that anyone can use, regardless of parenting status. Taking notes all the time. and planning up front is something that I do much better now. I thought it was important before I became a parent, but now if I'm trying to get in the zone and I know I only have two hours to work. Um I've developed strategies for keeping track of what I've been working on. So the basic way that works is uh matching work to s to the situation.

Speaker 1: Um what I've bit what I've been doing is Instead of tackling a coding problem like I might have in the past where I would write down a general outline and map out what I wanted to do, but maybe leave out some details. I now map out in much more detail up front what I want to do. And don't try and I try not to do it as I'm coding, which is always good practice, but when I had more more slack time, I guess I would put it, uh I I could get away with not planning up front as much Now in order to get in the zone very quickly, I have to have

Speaker 1: broken things up into very small chunks so that I'm able to say, okay, this is the next small chunk that I need to work on in order to accomplish this much bigger project. So I break things up into tiny chunks and work on those when I have time, anticipating that there will be interruptions and breaks and flows. And this is also Potentially a good tip for anyone who uh works in an open office environment or a place where you might get interrupted more frequently than you would like as a programmer because let's face it we don't all live in Ideal conditions, we don't all work in ideal conditions, regardless of whether you have a child or not. I've also started using something called personal kanban , which

Speaker 1: breaks things up into to do , do first, and done. And I have a a tool that's a board where I break out all the tasks that I need to do and only work on one thing at a time. I used to be very bad at multitasking and I'm not perfect even today, but uh this talk is It doesn't have enough time to go into the details of personal Kanban, but it's been very helpful for me in terms of working as a strategy for keeping track of what I need to do. and getting it to a done place. It concentrates mostly on minimizing the number of things that you have in progress, so don't multitask.

Speaker 1: Um I've actually been really surprised at when I started taking some of these time management things seriously and not multitasking at how much I was able to get done. I haven't found myself to be significantly worse off. Last thing is be present. When I'm with my family, I do my best to concentrate my energy on being there. When I'm working or giving a talk, I do my best to focus on that. I can only do one thing at a time. So you notice the two pictures, they're not side by side. They overlapped. Because you can't do more than one thing at a time. So what are the takeaways from this?

Speaker 1: One, I am insanely grateful For what I have and wanted to take the time to share my story with others in case it might help someone else out there. Everyone wants to contribute in this world. I don't know anyone who really just wants to sit back and let things happen to them. We need to figure out ways to make it possible for everyone to contribute. having flexible work schedules and encouraging people that if you're programming uh that's a career field where that can be more possible so if you want to have a more flexible work environment, consider

Speaker 1: programming. Flexible work schedules retain talent. So if you're an employer , See about giving your employees that option regardless of their career fields. It's not possible for every job. I know that. And not everyone wants that either. But if you do want that, then look at being a programmer as a career field where there are more opportunities for that. And adults are individuals and so are babies. Some of them require a little bit more special handling than others. And lastly, lest anyone think that I have it all figured out and all together, I don't. I have awful days where I wonder if I can keep everything going, and I question whether I'm doing the right thing for my family or myself

Speaker 1: or for Ada. But I keep going and I try and do the best I can every day and that's all any of us can do. So thank you. You can find me on Twitter. under at Jacinda Shelley. I'm also at Link on LinkedIn and GitHub and every other social media outlet, I think. Um my company is also hiring, so feel free to reach out if you're interested. And at this point I'd love to answer questions.

Speaker 2: So just uh well that was way too loud, sorry. Uh how many times have you um ended up having to deal with say you know baby related things like uh projectile vomit on the keyboard and things like that?

Speaker 1: So fortunately no projectile vomit on the keyboard. board.

Speaker 2: That's lucky.

Speaker 1: Her her reflex was silent, so most of her spit-up was small. As a parent I have dealt with projectile poop.

Speaker 2: Oh fun

Speaker 1: But uh I think the the thing that's gotten on the keyboard more often is is milk.

Speaker 2: Um

Speaker 1: and everything else just goes on the floor There's lots of cleanup to do.

Speaker 2: Awesome thanks.

Speaker 3: Thank you so much for this talk and for bringing Ada with you. It was really fun to get to spend a little bit of time with you. with her. My question is is just kind of a more general question about the the second shift that a lot of women wind up having to work. You know, we work our day jobs and then We come home and we do our evening jobs as well. And I know whenever you're working remotely and you have your baby with you, then there's probably sort of a lot of overlap and back and forth with that shift. Um but I don't even know that I have just kind of a specific question other than just do you have general thoughts on being a um a mom who who is also working full time and splitting those duties with your with your partner and kind of that second shift in general?

Speaker 1: Probably no tips that haven't already been spouted. Communication is key like figure out what responsibilities you want to divvy up. If you're both working full time and and you can afford it and you both agree to uh getting help for non-baby related activities or baby related activities uh and paying for it even if it's short term and you're like okay we'll do this for the first year and and then not do it afterwards can be insanely helpful. There was actually a study. Oh there was actually a study that uh was done recently where I think they paid people um forty dollars versus just paying for them to have

Speaker 1: forty dollars for takeout or just paying for takeout or paying for someone to clean their house for them and the people who had the uh had the service or the takeout or the house cleaned um were happier with it than the people who just got the forty dollars. So the conclusion that they drew from that and all studies are unreliable is that people undervalue uh how much they would appreciate having some type of service like that. I feel a little weird actually recommending that because so many people have different circumstances and you know that's not possible for a lot of people. But if you're both working full-time then that

Speaker 1: and you can that's something I know. There are a lot of people, aren't there?

Speaker 4: Yeah, I know. You don't have to be shy. It's okay. I just wanna thank you so much for sharing your personal story with us. I think it's really brave and it It's just awesome that you have the confidence to do that. My question about uh uh being a new parent and trying to work at the same time ha is Have you noticed that you've come up with more creative problem uh pretty creative solutions to problems in your work now um being a parent and has it impacted your creativity? Um

Speaker 1: Um maybe being forced to take some more breaks has helped with that. Sure. Also because I've been taking sleep more seriously uh because I don't have the option to make it up with caffeine. That may be contributing as well to me being more creative. I think I undervalued, or actually I know I undervalued the importance of sleep before I had a child.

Speaker 4: Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you.

Speaker 1: You want to say something? I think that people are waiting for the next one.

Speaker 5: Okay, then that's it. And thank you very much.

Speaker 1: Thank you all very much.