I decided to go back to work. I’m going back to Airbnb to do a similar role as before, with similar people, but working on something new (insurance). This is a little bit sooner than I was hoping for (I had been hoping to make it another year), but there were a few factors that made right now make sense. I was able to skip interviews since I was returning and had multiple strong internal advocates. Airbnb is permanently remote so it gives flexibility for ongoing work-life balance. Returning to the industry might get really hard if I waited too long. I had at least hit my goal of taking one year off, and was somewhat near my stretch goal of not working until my younger daughter could go to school. And finally, returning to work would give a bit more structure to life, which I wonder might have the counterintuitive effect of creating more space/time.

Here are a few reflections and learnings from this time, and some hopes for this time around.

  • I’ll remember running to put Hazel to sleep, sometimes all the way from our home in South Seattle down to the waterfront and Seattle Center, sometimes stopping at the Seattle Aquarium and the Pacific Science Center. There were times I’d run way longer than I planned, since once Hazel fell asleep, she’d typically stay asleep as long as I kept running.
  • I’ll remember riding the light rail with Hazel and seeing where we’d end up (Beacon Hill, Westlake), not even bringing the stroller. I’ll remember the walks on the upper trails of Seward Park. The Arboretum. Luther Burbank. Redmond Town Center. Sam Smith Park. Around the neighborhood.
  • I will remember the nice (well, sometimes too hot) summer weekdays when I’d park right outside of Seward Park and run up and then back down Lake Washington Boulevard. And then I’d head over to Caffe Vita afterwards to read a book and drink drip coffee, still sweating profusely and with my glasses all fogged up.
  • I’ve realized how much working a job gave me structure and direction, something to work on that mattered, and a team to be on. It felt like I had discovered the “problem of retirement”, that I didn’t really care to do my hobbies every day, and it was scary to try to take them more seriously. No one cares if you’re slow when running is just a hobby, but if you actually care about getting fast, then it feels like you should be fast. My problem of retirement was further complicated because I was still in a very liminal state - I wasn’t a true stay-at-home parent, but I wasn’t on sabbatical either. I was trying to get a break every day, but also trying to give Suzi a break. I was trying to take Hazel as much as I could, often when she exclusively preferred Suzi. Traveling was unappealing because it felt like just as much work without fewer resources. And whenever I had free time, it was rarely without fatigue.
  • I think some people could be really happy without working a 9-5 type of job, but I think a lot of my weaknesses were amplified without a job. I lacked discipline, accountability, and some overarching vision or compelling goal I cared enough about to work towards (especially when things got tougher). I was overly sensitive to Suzi and wouldn’t want to inconvenience her, so we lost a lot of time waiting to react to each other’s needs, rather than just doing stuff that we wanted to do.
  • Suzi and I tried formal scheduling to split up the weekdays and designate who would be taking free time and who would be parenting by the hour. We iterated. Sometimes, we scheduled a small bit of personal free time each day. Sometimes, we scheduled entire free days for each of us, once a week or every other week. We did some coaching/counseling. Suzi did a show, joined a workout group. Those were all things that we wouldn’t have done outside of a break like this. You know, even back in the first year of Hazel, Suzi could barely get any sort of break - her leaving the house and running an errand by herself for as long as it takes was not a normal thing because of how attached Hazel was to her.
  • I learned how to meet new people and not talk about work. I didn’t realize how weird people in tech can be when they first meet someone, though saying “I’m a stay-at-home dad” isn’t the best conversation starter either.
  • I learned it’s tough to be a stay-at-home parent, and that if you’re out of the workforce for some amount of time, it can quickly become hard to regain momentum and confidence. At the very beginning, I took a long break from writing code, but eventually, I came back to it (partly because I enjoy it, but I think largely because I wanted to be able to re-enter the workforce).
  • I learned that taking care of kids is mentally exhausting and it can be hard to know when you will get a break - and when a break does come, you’re often forced to choose between rest and a hobby, which may require mental energy you don’t have. Taking care of a house or prepping meals can also be exhausting, taxing, and relentless.
  • I hope that when we get into Seattle summer, that I’ll take time off of work and just hang out with Hazel and go on adventures like old times.
  • I hope I’ll be able to work without it slowly taking over my life and thoughts. When I was last working, I remember the mornings I would wake up with the kids, but just be thinking about work until I actually started working. I remember retreating to my den for a couple of hours on the weekends just so that I could finish a task and remove it from my mind. I remember defaulting to work on weeknights and how there were times it was more gratifying than cultivating my marriage. So I hope that I’ll be able to draw some clear boundaries and avoid overthinking about work, and I hope going into an office more regularly will help reinforce that. I used to spend a lot of time working on social impact and maintaining relationships… that was a pretty rewarding part of my first Airbnb experience, but I’m a bit uncertain as to how much of that I’ll prioritize this time around, since all of those meetings have a way of adding up.
  • I am optimistic about this. Going in to an office, cutting down on my time spent commuting, the flexibility of still working remote so Suzi can keep doing some of the things she’s been doing, working on something new where I don’t know anything, working with a geographically distributed team, yet working with some key friends I trust and enjoy working alongside, working on tech I should be fairly comfortable with, a company culture that I still think centers around belonging…
  • I’m looking forward to owning more of my time again. For riding the bus more, hopefully working from and reading in coffeeshops, and listening to a lot more music. And getting access to the espresso machine again. I’m also really interested in how the company has done in its engineering initiatives (the multi-year projects that had been in motion when I left), and how AI or LLMs have reshaped how engineers work. I hope I’ll do a better job of understanding the work and articulating the value of it. It’ll be nice to just get onto Slack and see what people are even talking about, I’ve been that disconnected.