[bertr4nd]

Are you me? This is precisely what my life feels like. Honestly, one kid was actually manageable; two sort of hit the breaking point (it didn’t help that my work went to hell at the same time), but then we had twins and life now feels basically untenable with both of us working.

I love my kids profoundly, and I think in the long run I will be happier than if I’d not had them and focused on work instead (work tends not to care about you after you leave. Maybe if you’re Steve Jobs or something). But in the moment, life is pretty stressful.

[scruple]

> Honestly, one kid was actually manageable; two sort of hit the breaking point (it didn’t help that my work went to hell at the same time), but then we had twins and life now feels basically untenable with both of us working.

We have 3 kids, 3 years and under. Our twins are 3 and we have a 1 year old. I'm a Staff Software Engineer and my wife is a Senior Software Engineer II.

I feel like I'm perpetually treading water. There is a tug of war happening between my personal life and my professional life and it's frankly obscene. The professional life will lose if push comes to shove, and that will actively damage my employer, but my management team doesn't seem to give a shit.

I've become very Peter from Office Space about it all: I just don't care. When I feel my work-anxiety levels rising, I let it all out with a heavy sigh and stop caring. Work is work. I get my work done, but I prioritize higher quality and bug-free as much as possible. If work doesn't like this (and they don't, they really just want me to blast through my tasks -- despite the fact that some of them are extremely ambiguous at my level, things like digging through code no one has touched in 8 years to sort out performance problems; "So, you'll have that done by Thursday, right?") then that's their problem to deal with.