I was working for a company that was moving from remote work to full-time in the office. My former co-worker and I decided to start our own company so we could stay remote and close to our families. I have 7 kids, he has 8 and we both homeschool.

That was almost 6 years ago and I've never regretted it. If you value time with your family, nobody is a better boss than you. It's not unusual for me to shoot an IM over to my business partner that goes something like "Really nice weather today. We're headed to the park for an hour or two."

Well done sir. I plan on doing the same, but I have 2 and another on the way. My daughter's God-father has 8 kids and works as an engineer from home and his wife home-schools. The kids are the happiest you'll ever meet and super smart.

You're the most successful person on HN.

How do your kids adapt to social interactions with kids of their age, spending 24/7 with your family might be tiring and in young age there is a big difference between 3 and 5 year olds, I think they need to interact with kids of their age and different cultures to be better adapt in future life, that's just my opinion, I might be wrong?

I am a former homeschool parent whose oldest will soon be 30.

You are entirely wrong. Homeschooled kids typically have stronger relationships and better social skills.

I'll need to make the decision about homeschooling in a few years. Do you have any studies you can share that support that conclusion?

At face value, it seems more difficult to socialize children than at traditional school with hundreds of daily social interactions from a wide variety of backgrounds, personalities, and teamwork opportunities.

No, I do not have studies. Tokenadult https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult might have something like that. He worked in public schools for many years and ran/runs the website Learn in Freedom, one of the early pro homeschooling sites (http://learninfreedom.org/).

My knowledge of this is rooted in having been involved in the online gifted homeschoolers community. I was briefly Director of Community Life for The Tag Project. http://www.tagfam.org/ So, you can take my word for it as a SME or you can contact Tokenadult and see if he can hook you up.

I do think your assumptions are in error. Good socialization is not about a wide variety of superficial relationships. It is about having positive interactions that teach one what one needs to know. I do know that studies show that kids who go off to boarding school do best if they figure out how to artificially replace the natural family unit with a close group of caring friends. But I don't have links to anything. That is just remembered off the top of my head.

Best.

I suspect keeping kids out of toxic (Jr High) environments totally compensates for them interacting with fewer people.

Not after adjusting for wealth.

I am not quite sure what you mean by that. Care to clarify?

There probably are numerous advantages to homeschooling, but I have a hard time finding convincing evidence. Either it's anecdotes from a small community of homeschooling parents or a study commissioned by an organization that has a vested interest in homeschooling, or authored by a leading member thereof. Significantly, I find that the people who share positive anecdotes are in higher wealth brackets and very well-educated, and I'm not aware of any studies that control for this.

You're not wrong - there are a huge number of homeschool groups, co-ops, classes, etc. Most homeschooling families actively try to socialize their kids with art classes, sports teams, and so on. There tends to be more supervision as well so there's less bullying too.

Why did you have seven kids? Not a ding against you; I'm just curious. (I personally do not like kids and, at this stage of my life, would never do this.)

Having a big family is a lot like owning a Harley Davidson motorcycle - if I have to explain, you wouldn't understand. <grin>

My wife and I like kids and believe children are a blessing from God. They are a joy to be around and I learn from them and from teaching them.

Plus somebody's gotta take care of my sorry self when I'm old.

lol Fair enough!

I don't usually reply, I am lurker but you sir, being the family man then you are a hero! The hero HN needs and the hero that HN deserves!

I once declined a job as it wasn't a good fit.

The company that I did go with had some great childcare attached with the position; Anyhow, upon declining i mentioned that we were planning on having a kid in the future and this childcare was a nice bonus.

The response from the company that I declined? 'If we had known you were going to have a child then we would not have made an offer'.

Bullet dodged.

I can't believe anyone would be dumb enough to say something like that, after you already declined. This is an Uber HR-tier response.

Not HR; CEO.

Jesus. That's haunting. I'm sorry you experienced​ that.

I imagine you won't name the company, but can you comment on its size?

Well funded startup 3-5 million with traction. About 5-10 employees at the time.

Also, it's not like I would be the one doing all the hard work, that would be up to my wife.

wow they're begging for a lawsuit

My anecdotal experience: companies are much more "family friendly" when the CEO and senior managers themselves have families.

Stated differently, paraphrasing the CEO that just had their first kid: "holy crap, this is a lot of work!!!!" You have not truly experienced sleep deprivation until you have had sustained, parental sleep deprivation.

I'm not sure having a family by itself is a good indicator that the company will be family friendly. Marissa Mayer might be a good example. She has twins, so she should understand. But...

"If you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed...Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies don't just happen. They happen because of really hard work."

Well, Marissa Mayer can afford to pay someone to take care of her twins. The typical small company or early stage startup exec, not so much.

Not unusual, though, for a lower end CEO to foist off all parenting on their spouse.

Good point.

Marissa Mayer has a nursery next to her office. If she were family friendly, she'd have her kids in the same daycare as the rest of the company.

Startups can't be family friendly by definition IMHO. At least in the early stages - startup is a lifestyle not a job.

Seems about right. My company is HQ'd in (typically family friendly) Utah (I'm in Seattle office) and the CEO is a family guy. The culture has pretty healthy expectations.

I always think this a naive view. There are plenty of ways to be incredibly sleep deprived without a child.

You have to make a serious effort to be as sleep-deprived as a new parent. You could sign up to have the CIA torture you, for example. But unless you're being kept awake by guys with guns, or you have fatal familial insomnia, you've got nothing on the parent of a newborn. Especially a newborn with colic.

I imagine it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, not a blanket statement that being a parent is the only way to become seriously sleep-deprived. More like it's one of the most common ways a regular person will experience significant sleep deprivation, so the experience resonates with a lot of folks.

Also, in my limited experience (two kids), the sleep deprivation part isn't really all that bad, unless you're mom. She usually gets the brunt of it. And in any case the newborn phase is done in less than a year for most kids and you settle into an easier rhythm of just mild sleep deprivation :)

Not to take away too much from what you said, because its valid in some ways, but "family" is broader that that. Families aren't just "having young children" and "family friendly," in a workplace setting, fits in a broader category than "accommodates parents with young children."

(Its also important to have personal time to yourself even if you don't have a family as well)

You mean CEOs and Senior Managers that have kids and actually give a shit about them.

Lots of people get forced into having kids.

Created a throwaway to name my company: Castlight Health. Our company is definitely family friendly. Our CEO threw a birthday party for his son and invited the company and all their family members; it was essentially a party for company kids. Most of our social events are during company hours so you don't feel the pressure of having to hang out with coworkers during your free time. Many company events are family friendly.

More importantly I have seen many colleagues and managers take the 4 pm BART home to deal with kids issues. We also have a much more diverse age set of engineers - half of the engineers in my seating area are over 50. If you've experience Silicon Valley ageism please check us out because we definitely like to hire experienced engineers.

I linger around hacker news and it's weird hearing about toxic company cultures around this area as I've started to take for granted my perks. While I'm somewhat young (30) and without a family, I'm used to (and appreciate) working with folks who started coding before PCs even existed. I like that I can easily take the day off when I have a friend visiting and my colleagues can do the same for a school activity. I appreciate that my free time isn't monopolized through forced company social events and I can have a clear separation between work and play.

I can't imagine ever working at a place where every one looked exactly like me, drank the cool aid, and embraced "work hard play hard" (which usually means just work hard).

I'm working at the most family friendly company I've ever worked for right now (http://planning.center).

We're very remote friendly, which is a big plus. They pay for my whole family's healthcare (even though it's just my wife and I right now). We have a "family week" every year where they pay for our S.O. to come with us to an in-office week (and we're welcome to bring kiddos) for a week in town where they keep them entertained during the work day and do some special events for the whole fam at night. The best thing though is that during the summer we get every Friday off. Paid. So that's a whole day a week for the entire course of the summer to spend with your family (and that's what it's meant for).

There are other companies that offer different benefits that we don't (due to size or whatever), but I feel like we offer an incredible set of benefits for someone with a family.

Can confirm. My cousin started working onsite, but transitioned to remote at Planning Center. Seems like a nice setup.

PS, I'm Kin's cousin!

Probably depends on your friend's location and the number of companies he's interviewing with.

I'm single, but at my company (at least on my team) the start and end hours are pretty flexible as long as you're getting work done. For instance, I generally get in about 10-15 minutes before 9AM, and then I can usually leave either around 4:25PM or 5PM (depending on which train I'm taking back home) and I'll take a 30-60 minute lunch break.

I know not all companies are so flexible, but I'm sure there are still quite a few that are.

You are doing 9 to 5 and being allowed to eat. Where is the flexibility? That's normal office hours. As a manager I considre flexible to allow people in or out or WFH as long as they put some solid hours every day and deliver. If it works for the project and the company allows it I have no problem with WFH. I've met too many managers who say they have flexible schedules when they mean "sure, go home an hour early today, you can go one hour later tomorrow". Man hour accountants.

Well, not really? A full time day is typically 9 hours with one hour of unpaid lunch and maybe two 15 minute breaks (at least I think that's the California law). What I described is basically an 8 hour day including a lunch break. As far as WFH, I mean, the poster didn't mention that explicitly.

If it comes to that, for my team we can WFH if needed without advance notice and if anything comes up during work hours we're able to leave for the errand or need, even for an hour or two, without being required to "make up" the time per se. As long as we are getting work done, etc.

Not sure what you mean by additional time off, so not sure how to answer that.

While my company doesn't strictly fit several of those things, I do think it's generally pretty good for people with families. Most people in my department are raising families (including the management), and there is some flexibility. But really we're just one office in part of a much larger company too.

It's 8-5, where it's rare that people work overtime (unless they're architects or higher, they tend to work about 45-50 hours), if you need to take a couple hours off here and there it's not usually a problem if you let them know ahead of time. There is a remote work program but it's not a remote culture company, yet. There are a few employees that work remotely, though, including the CTO.

Oh, the healthcare benefits aren't very good though (used to be, until we got swallowed up by the larger company and were forced to switch to their plans). Several people have left because of it. Yeah, nevermind. I'll leave it off this list.

It would be helpful to add a maternity/paternity leave column to your great spreadsheet.

Staggeringly, the United States still lacks a national unpaid leave policy. Plus companies in other countries on your spreadsheet might offer additional leave than what is required.

No, we have a national unpaid leave policy (FMLA). What we don't have, and desperately need, is a paid leave policy.

Amen.

I've been lucky that most of companies (all startups) I've worked for, while not explicitly stating its family-friendly policy, have been very family friendly even without them explicitly saying they are.

First one was 7 people when I first started and grew to ~150 while I was still there. Normal 9-5 work hours, but flexible if I needed to take off early or head in late because of traffic. I ended up working the last 3 years at the company remotely because HQ moved to a different city. At that time, I had a baby, took ~ 3 months maternity leave, come back at 3 days a week remotely, then full time remotely, and as long as I got my job done and was there during 'core hours,' had a pretty flexible day. Yes, it helps that the CEO also had young children at the time, but I think it also helps that he was a decent person and we had decent people as managers who understand work-life balance.

My startup job after that was for a smaller team, still a startup, but still pretty flexible in terms of taking off early to beat traffic, pick up kids, coming in late b/c of drop-offs, etc.

My current company is more traditional, but I still leave at a decent time, WFH a few days a week, and is generally very family friendly.

In general, I think being able to stick up for myself in terms of carving out personal time and setting boundaries or expectations of when I'm working is what's been successful for me. Also, making it clear that if they don't respect that I want to be home to have dinner with my family, I'm not gonna be a happy camper. It also helps that I'm good at my job and IMO a valuable player on the team.

I work as a mid-sized company. My job is family friendly. I have flex time (which is really, really great!!) and my bosses and coworkers understand if personal or family issues come up and don't get upset if you have to leave early to pick up your kids (or friend from the airport, whatever) as long as you get your hours in and work done. Individual accommodations, when reasonable, are met. In general its acknowledged we are humans, not machines, and we have life outside of work. The majority of my coworkers have some sort of family, though we skew older, we only have a handful of people under 30 right now, maybe 6-7. There's also a few people who have moved to 30 hours a week (which reduces your pay proportionately) and two that are part time/semi retired.

I value this over salary.

In general, call me lazy, but I don't want to do unpaid work outside of work. Sorry, but I spend 40 hours a week coding, that's plenty enough. I want to spend my free time doing other things. I don't know the details of what my coworkers do in their spare time but, honestly, I can't think of a single one who I could see going home and spending any significant amount of time free time writing code. Our office talk is usually stuff about video games, vacations, TV shows, family, local businesses, the weather, and weekend actives, not frameworks.

That's not to say they/we aren't smart or good at our job. I am good at my job, I like my job, I like writing code, I get good performance reviews, I have pride in my work, and I do care about the success of our product and our company. I am just not one dimensional. I like doing other things, I like spending time with friends and family, I like traveling, and there's just not unlimited time in my life. Nor do I have unlimited attention span.

I sometimes look at job boards to see if there's an interesting position open. I'm not really actively looking for a new job but if I find a better deal I'll take it.

I haven't.

I am interested in remote work because I live in a fairly small-ish quiet-ish town and I'd like to keep using Java as my primary language. We have industry, large employers, and jobs here in my town but not as much as a big city, and I'd like to expand my options. Remote work I see seems to lean sorta-kind startup-ish. Sometimes their job application/about us makes it clear I'm expected to make work the only thing in my life and I don't apply. Sometimes I get to the application and they are like "give us links to your LinkedIn and Github." I leave these blank, as I don't have a LinkedIn or Github, and I never get a call back. One didn't even get asked for a resume or what my work experience was, just a Github link.

Oh well, I don't want to work somewhere that expects me to do work after work. I'd rather take a non-software job with a massive paycut than spend 90% of my waking hours writing code.

I wonder if they know what they are losing out on by excluding an entire demographic? I mean, my coworkers are, for the most part, bright and good at their jobs. Certainly your life doesn't have to be your job to be good at your job or to be productive?

I think by not at least having some github / remote competence, you are showing remote employers that your aren't in the right mindset.

I'm sure you'd be great at it. But if you want to work remotely, showing you can collaborate on an online interface would probably help!

I work in Sweden and struggle to consider working elsewhere. The paternity leave was amazing and really allowed time to form a strong bond with the kids and didn't affect seniority at work. Flexible hours mean that I start early but can dive away at 15:00 to pick up the kids from day care. If the kids are unwell, I can take care of them without any problem. All the meanwhile having a challenging rewarding tech job. The thing is that the company I work for is just like all the other companies in the area, so it makes for nice work life balance and a pretty happy family :)

I am single but most of my co-workers have kids. I work at a small startup and work hour flexibility is huge for me. Generally, as long as my work gets done and I don't miss meetings I am free to work my own hours within reason. For example, if I know there is a big snow storm coming I'll take a day or two off work with just a day's notice to ski. But then I'll work over the weekend. I think this only works because all of our employees are very dedicated and motivated. Once we grow think might need to change a little.

9-6 is 40 hours/week with unpaid lunch, and pretty standard in US tech jobs as far as I know. Asking the team to sometimes work 45 hours during busy times seems reasonable to me.

I give my team time to learn new stuff on the job. Obviously I strive to hire smart people so that doesn't take forever.

I am not sure exactly what you are asking for. Companies OK with working 35 hour weeks?

> Companies OK with working 35 hour weeks?

It seems reasonable to me to target 35 considering it seems reasonable to you to expect overtime.

It's interesting that there aren't more companies doing 30-35hr weeks. With the amount of sentiment like this on HN alone, I'm surprised there aren't engineers going out and starting shorter-work-week companies.

I know of Treehouse which has a 4-day workweek[0], but I can't think of any others.

I can think of a few reasons why companies wouldn't do this ("leaving money on the table", force of habit, investors, scheduling with partner companies, ...) but it's still surprising there aren't more founders taking a Basecamp-like "think different" approach towards working hours.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/treehouse-ceos-32-hour-workwe...

Well, I do 35. Took me 3 tries to find a job like that :D

You're on HN, the startup community. The premise of startups is that young engineers give their life to create products in exchange for free food and a bit of experience, while the executives and the VC will take all the returns, if any. It's really not family friendly.

As a consultant who works from home with two (young) kids, it's hard to imagine working these kinds of hours. It seems sort of inhumane.

Fuck that. I make a living wage too, tyvm, and I like my career. Why shouldn't the dad be the stay at home parent?

I used my winnings in the dot com explosion to be a stay at home Dad while my less financially successful wife worked. It was awesome; I think men in general need to try harder than women to forge a really strong connection as parents, so stay at home Dad => parenting equality, all else being equal. I was part time for few years also. Work of course hated it and it was hard to re-enter. I don't regret it of course, and kids are older and my time at work is creeping back up. Now I can do tech work sitting next to them doing homework. The kids tell me their problems and at least listen to my arguments for being the person that knows the most math in the room, regardless of career.

There were sacrifices but a lot of the worries I see expressed about work life balance don't really worry me. With the strong connection to the kids, I can feel how they are doing: I have that mother's sense of can I work late tonight or do I need to focus on the people. I feel the parenting skills also have made me more effective at work, both in cutting out useless activities because my time is sacred and in seeing the non-verbal emotional sides of people. The idea of how people can have trouble saying certain important things and how to respond to that happening is essential when dealing with kids and useful when dealing with engineers. So I highly recommend staying at home for men that have the capacity for it. (It is hard and you have to be almost totally self driven; no one will thank or notice what you do).

You qualify for my personal Real Manly Man Award (TM). ;)

My father was a two time veteran and purple heart winner who never changed the diapers of any of his own kids, but stayed home to care for his first born grandchild when my brother got divorced and got custody.

My family of origin is really, really big on the idea that kids need a full time caregiver. Not so much on the "it needs to be the mother," which is humorous because my parents' marriage was so very old fashioned for so long that no one would have predicted that grandpa would stay home while grandma kept working.

#yougoguy #fistbump

Maybe more men should consider it, "especially if their [wives] make a living wage."

How insulting. Choosing to work rather than spending 24 hours a day with your children isn't always all about money.

No it isn't.

Yes it is.

Agree with the others, it doesn't have to be the wife who stays home. Obviously every family is different, the spouses have different goals and skillsets, etc -- but the decision can certainly be made along goal + skillset lines rather than gender.

I'm not employed so I don't have an employer, and I don't work hourly rates, I work fixed price contracts specifically for that reason.

I also can't even imagine working 9 hours a day 5 days a week for the best 30 years of my life, for someone who doesn't give a shit about me. It's not just about kids.

You should at least get the same amount of overtime off after the crunch.

How much work actually gets done after about 4:30pm or so? If your position is a mixture of dev and support, I can see it being a bit more productive after most of the office gets quiet. But otherwise it seems that not much really gets done then.

Now, doing a burst of work from home on a weekend or at night can be really productive. But staying up too late makes the next day at work kind of hard.

I worked at Aflac for over five years. I was not in the IT department, but they do have one. From what I gather, they are pretty cutting edge, tech-wise, for the insurance industry. They have a good track for being family-friendly and generally diverse.

I don't work there or have a ton of details, but twitter has paternity leave and I was unofficially told that "untracked PTO" was more like "5-6 weeks". Which as an american seems perfectly generous.

Add Splunk. Super friendly.

When the company is sitting on pile of cash

What does "family friendly" mean? It's unclear from your post. Does he want to work fewer hours but get paid more money, or does he just want more flexibility to schedule his hours?

I interpreted to mean that the company's policies take into account the needs of people with families, i.e. husband/wife/partner and potentially children.

Generally I would expect this to translate to a meaningful commitment to work/life balance, flexible hours, adequate paternity/maternity leave, the ability to occasionally (or primarily) work-from-home, and some benefits and incentives that make sense for people with families (such as employer contributions to life insurance and disability insurance).

the way you phrased your question "Does he want to work fewer hours but get paid more money" includes a lot of implicit hostility, by the way. I'm not sure if you meant it that way but that's how it reads.

If you look at the spreadsheet, it lays out some of the criteria: Work time Family services "Flexible (yes/no)" Additional time off (yes/no) "Allow remote (yes/no)" Mandatory hourly presence (in hours per day) "Weekends off (yes/no)" "Kindergarten in or close to company offices (yes/no)" "Can you bring your child to your work place (yes/no)" "Company doctor (yes/no)"