Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?
Well, time for the politically incorrect, yet reality based, &quot;dad pill&quot;.<p>First of all most people social status signalling are liars and the few who aren&#x27;t are very unusual from unusual situations.  There aren&#x27;t that many book authors or operating system kernel authors.  So debating the engineering operations of lightning strikes and lotto wins is kinda pointless nonsense.  What if my project takes over the world?  Well it won&#x27;t now stop daydreaming and work on real issues that are important.  As for the liars you just have to read the books they talk about a little more than they do, which might mean as little as a light skim or getting to page 2 instead of giving up on page 1, or experiment with the new flash in the pan software for an hour instead of their five minutes.  You&#x27;ll still be ahead of 90% of the population.<p>Secondly give up on careers, ignore upward mobility, if you&#x27;re not happy where you are today, daydreaming about being one of the very few who make it to the top of the pyramid is a bad life strategy dooming you to unhappiness in later life.  Anyone over 30 is probably working with tools in a field that didn&#x27;t exist when they were 20 and if they claim they got their via conscious effort they&#x27;re just liars and status signalling see #1 above.  If they&#x27;re over 40 ageism is about to remove almost all of them from the field so since you&#x27;re going to get kicked out anyway may as well have fun having kids along the way, because you aren&#x27;t going to &quot;win&quot; and thats OK.  The difference between a guy unemployed by ageism at 45 without kids and a guy unemployed at 45 by ageism with kids is the unemployed guy with kids is had more fun, had a better life.  Merely not having kids doesn&#x27;t mean the &quot;agism fairy&quot; will not wave her wand on you ending your career.  Sometimes the rate of change is crazy, I spent my early 30s in a field that didn&#x27;t exist when I was in school.  If you think you can plan that and apply a timeline for a career against it, you&#x27;re merely lying to yourself or others.  Nothing wrong with having general goals, but specific tasks of &quot;XYZ at 40&quot; is for losers.  Even worse there&#x27;s survivorship bias where random lotto winners think they have ESP but actually just won the lotto and thinking they have ESP leads to very bad life decisions.<p>Thirdly a super politically incorrect &quot;dad pill&quot; is depending on demographics about half the kids out there are growing up with no dad, so having you around and out of jail and providing and guiding and playing with them occasionally immediately puts the kids in the upper half or even upper quarter of society even if you do the worst bad job as dad in the country, which you probably will not sink to.  Actually doing anything with the kids already puts you in elite territory.  Another way to phrase it is there&#x27;s a lot of political indoctrination that kids only need 1.00 parents that being the mom of course, so if you&#x27;re feeling bummed about taking time for yourself or career you&#x27;re still providing 1.75 worth of parents which is 0.75 more than society claims is necessary or even ideal.  Just like the kid who gets a Ferrari for his birthday from dad doesn&#x27;t necessarily turn out better in life than the kid who got a Ford from dad, when you&#x27;re far enough into the corner of the bell curve of doing anything at all, the specific ordering and timeclock measurements don&#x27;t affect rank as much as paying attention and being there and not being a dirtbag and actually parenting the kids as opposed to being their big person friend roommate and &quot;skills&quot; in general.<p>Fourthly related to &quot;no one is gonna make it to the top of the pyramid&quot; just learn at work like everyone else does.  Well, actually some people don&#x27;t even learn at work.  If you&#x27;re not a quick learner, its important to learn how to learn first.  You&#x27;re not really competing against people who claim to have infinite time to learn because they have no kids, you&#x27;re competing against people who never learned in college or refuse to learn post college.  You&#x27;re gonna do fine.<p>Fifth relating to liars telling lies, decades ago when I was a young single guy it sounds very self serving to express lies about how all I ever did was work on technology because I had no kids, but mostly I drank and watched sports and chased girls and had sex and breakups and interpersonal drama and listened to music and watched TV.  Well the dad pill is you might want to think about growing up, and when you cut all that waste of time junk out that doesn&#x27;t really matter in the long run anyway or you&#x27;ve outgrown binge drinking or you got a wife so dating is probably over for awhile, even when you add back in &quot;dad duties&quot; you still have plenty of free time because you&#x27;re not being a drunk bastard every weekend night, or if you&#x27;re doing that instead of parenting, you suck so fix that at which point you&#x27;ll have plenty of free time again.  So grow up, man up, dad up, whatever and put down the beer bottle or switch off the TV, in the long run parenting the kids is going to be most important, then all this &quot;work for free for the boss at home&quot; stuff a distant second, and you&#x27;ll still have some time to goof off anyway.<p>Believe it or not when farmhands worked the fields sunup to sundown or dads worked in factories six twelves a week or when dads fought in war deployments for years at a time, they still fathered their kids reasonable better than the current crop of kids.  You got it easy now.  Just put some effort into it and you&#x27;ll be fine.  So thats the &quot;dad pill&quot;.  Not as cool as the red pill or blue pill but more masculine and useful in the real world.