Experience range from migrating applications from monoliths to microservices and building new backend services as APIs to building frontend applications from scratch.
I'm doing that right now, one thing I learned after my first child is: do your best to be efficient with some good level of effectiveness and deliver your expected output (which should already be reduced) in less time. E.g. Use the time for errands to think on how to approach a problem for example.
Now on the second one, I'm doing sort of this schedule:
- mornings to lunch is work time, my wife looks after the little one, the older one is at kindergarten
- lunch is not short break, usually from noon to 2pm, time with the wife and with the little one
- 4pm-ish full stop as the older one gets home, I don't accept meetings after this time
- 8pm-ish bed routine, sleep 1hr-2hr or so with them
- wake up, grind some work until hitting a goal
- weekends: I do some prep work for the week, but is 3 hours tops in 2 days
The little one is 1y old now, and this have being going like that for 6m or so, is it healthy? No, you need proper sleep time to be able to give care.
Do I work 8h day? Definitely not, 8h is really rare right now.
I've tried shifting my schedule to start very early, like waking 5-6am but I did not managed to switch.
This does not work on the long term I believe, there were weeks where I fully skipped the night shift and only did the work I could during the day, as I felt that I wasn't able to give care and attention properly being tired.
For noise I recommend a noise cancelling headphone, BOSE QC35 is good at it, sometimes I'm wearing it on without music and it's enough.
We have two kids, 7m and 3y-ish, while the older is at kindergarten I do sync work with others or do focus work for about 4 hours.
When the older is back home I only do one meeting (rare) or push something that really really really needs to be pushed. After they go to bed I catch up on deep work for 2-3 hours.
From one of your replies, I assume you live in São Paulo, I'm from there.
I've debated with the same question in 2016, not about slavery, but about what life I was living there and what I wanted for my future and for my family.
So will share my story and opinion, YMMV.
I decided to take a leap and try to get a job overseas, mainly EU, (software engineer, 10 years of exp) , was the best decision I've made.
São Paulo/Brazil have many issues that won't be solved in the foreseable future or never in my opinion:
- education quality / cost ratio
- housing
- personal safety
- inflation and money value
- population
I'm currently living in Lisbon and if home sickness is not an issue for you, I would recommend checking out opportunities abroad.
You will face problems also, housing for example is awful almost everywhere, but I can pay a mortgage with much less interest than in BR, have a car and not worry being robbed with a gun, walk the dog 2AM without looking over my shoulder and provide a better future for my kids, all that with enough work life balance and a normal salary in tech field.
> Is there a better term to describe this kind of situation other than "literal, actual slavery"?
It's business, you are selling your time for a price and paying a "premium" for where you are able to live.
> What is a fair payment, in your opinion?
Fair is hard to define in my opinion and will vary by too many factors, your perception, the employer perception, your colleagues perception, actual value contribution and so on.
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Hope you find what you want to change about your situation!
I’m doing that for almost 15 years already, and lately I really don’t see value added by it.
Unfortunately I’m still trying to find a way to replace it and get buy in from colleagues and management.
1. It doesn’t really help planning work, unless it’s always the same work. It’s a placebo.
1.1. e.g. team velocity is 20 points , but things are going to work very differently in a sprint with 4 stories of 5 SP and 10 stories of 2 SP. Mainly because the SP includes risk and complexity.
2. Recently saw someone comparing two teams, one doing 80 points the other doing 30. The problem: the former SP range was up to 13, the latter SP range was up to 5, rarely 8. So it still not transferable and meaningless outside it's own context.
3. Not comparable between peers, it doesn't map to the same levels of complexity, amount of work and risk for different people. Mostly people map SP to a range of days or hours and it differs as it's not standardized among peers.
In my team setting I would prefer no estimates and a commitment based approach, but that kinda leaves management without numbers to count besides features and bugs delivered (which is good enough to me).
This is an idea I had since sometime and the first attempt was thrown away due due lack of focus on the goal, this is the second take where it was driven by the whole pandemic situation.
It was fun to build, may not worth nothing besides that it was built and published, which was the main goal.
All feedback is appreciated, if it get any traction I will work more on this as there are lots of room for improvement.
15+ years of experience
Full stack development
Experience range from migrating applications from monoliths to microservices and building new backend services as APIs to building frontend applications from scratch.
Rate: flat, negotiated on project basis.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/felipebn
https://iamfelipenascimento.dev/