Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to my latest employee, Dave the Duck! Dave is the new head of debugging and took the job to support his out-of-hand caffeine addiction and 72 children (of which paternity tests are still being done on 10). Dave is also wanted in 4 countries as the leader of the popular gang, known as the Dangerous Ducks. Please do no feed Dave, as he is on a strict diet. #DaveTheDuck #ProgrammersTools #ImNotThatCrazy

A logician comes back from paternity leave and enters his shared office.

His colleague: Hey! Congratulations with your newborn, is it a boy or a girl?

Logician: Yes.

Story #1: So I took a month of parental leave. And was planning to extend it a little longer to deal with my final exams. I was planning to spend lots of quality time with my wife and newborn son. Little did I know... It turns out that out of 5 OoO weeks I was looking forward I actually had 3 at most. The rest I've spent working remotely as I was insisted to deploy a brand new and poorly tested feature to PROD 2 days before my paternity leave. So I spent 2 weeks debugging things in PROD. Remotely. Needless to say that did suck.

Story #2: After story #1 I've learnt my lesson. This summer I took 3 weeks annual leave to renovate my apartment. I asked to not to be disturbed unless there's an emergency. And an emergency it was. One of our app users had a planned hi-load batch job lasting for 2-3 months. Hundreds of thousands of items had to be created and processed. It turns out the _processing_ algo had some flaws and was acting out. I was called out and asked to assist. I knew this sort of debugging is going to take a lot of my time so this time I put my conditions on the table: I will assist but I'll extend my leave by 1.5 the time I spend working now. They took the deal. Instead of 3 weeks I had 5 weeks of vacation!

I don't care that much about my salary. I prefer to exchange it for my time off hence I didn't ask for compensations.

Bottom line: NEVER EVER underestimate or undersell your time and effort. You are a valuable asset and if the team/client needs you on your day off -- make it count. Your time off is YOUR time. Never forget it.

Anybody's a father here? My 10 months kid is giving me hard times waking at 2am and not going to sleep till 4am (it is 4 now, here). That's a really repeating problem. I'm loosing my focus at work, tired after few hours of coding, couldnt mange to learn after hours. Makes me frustrated. My PM understands situation (actually he have 5 kids!), tries to help. But can't figure it out how to overcome this. Any ideas fellow dads in code? To make it clear - I really love my son, but if I'll fail to keep my level at job I could loose it one day, don't feel like beeing able to find new decent job with current exhaust level. Also I'm the only one who makes money in our lil family, loosing job for too long means loosing the roof under the head for all three of us. My wife is barely living after beeing there for son whole day, so please dont point at her. Our kid is really demanding on attention and love, and thats like a sweet poison. Love kills.

TL;DR: OMFG! Push the button already!

I've been away on paternity leave for quite some time now. Today is my first day at work since the end of July.

Just a couple of days after my paternity leave started, I was contacted by one of the managers because a tracking and analytics service I had made some months earlier had halted.

Now, I did warn them that the project was fragile and was running of an old box in my office. So they shouldn't be surprized if it came to a halt every now and then.

Well, so being on my paternity leave and all I didn't want to spend time fixing it. I had a child to look after. So I told the manager that the box probably just had shut down. I think there was a power outage the day before, so I probably thought it was the cause. So he probably just had to turn it back on. I also told him the admin u/p in case he needed to restart some services.

Today, the CEO enters my office telling me to get that thing fixed. Because that manager apparently couldn't find the power button.

In 9 months time there is going to be an enormous worldwide baby boom, which will cause panic buying, shortages, and mass maturnity /paternity leave.

And the new generation will be called the coronials.

IT admin on paternity leave since Friday.

Can't access one of our servers, backup person can't find their password.

So... Looks like I'm doing something else for a bit.

It's official. After almost three weeks off and hardly any sleep, I've forgotten how to do my job. This could be a problem.

My first job was at an e-learning firm, and I was a part of the team that made the digital content.

The team had a really good spirit. Often too good, as our team manager often gave up on us and left our weekly status meetings because we were all just joking and having a good time.

Still, we usually did an OK job and delivered on time.

Those were good times. Now I'm just a single dev without a team in a pretty large company. Luckily, I'm away on paternity leave atm.

I really miss my company-issued stand-up desk, and actually going to a different facility every morning: both the drive and the office. I also miss being able to go to someone else's desk, or walking right up to a white board to hash something out at a moment's notice.

This is really my first experience working from home at length, save for 3 weeks I had when my son was born (in lieu of a paternity leave). I have to say, I don't particularly care for working remotely. It'd be different I suppose if i was able to be a digital nomad and work from different locations, but being confined to my own four walls blows. I much prefer working in an office with other devs and being able to collaborate face-to-face, without all the damn giphy's in slack.

!rant

Coworker: *Watching a DefCon talk*

Me: *walks over and notices an image on the slide of a woman sticking a cotton swab in her mouth with text saying "get paternity testing"*

Me: Paternity testing? But that's a woman!

Coworker: *silent for a second* What? Oh! *gets closer to screen, chuckles*

Coworker: It actually took me a second to catch that because I wasn't looking at the video, I was looking at the side "related videos" or the ad and I was like "no... did you mean Penetration Testing?" But even then, this is DefCon, so there aren't any women--or at least less than 3. And then I saw it in the corner and was like "Oh, I see it. But yeah, Paternity.... Oh wait..."

Me: Jeez, it really did take you a while...

Coworker: Yeah. All the while I was thinking "What the heck are you on," and then there was the "Oh, I get it" moment

Me: At least you got there

So, my CS teacher has gone on paternity (?), or rather, parental leave until September.

Awesome.
That basically ruins my mondays and wednesdays.

Actually now that I think of it...
Fuck it, free time.
And we don't even get a substitute teacher.
Heh.

Normal people go for the paternity tests while we developers go for the pattern-ity tests.

So I came back to office after my paternity leave and I've been assigned to a project my brother has been working on for the past 2 months.

Now we are working together :)

Anyone one else been on a dev team where it seems between all the senior ppl, it's non stop revolving door of being out because they're having a baby? Paternity leave for like 2 months....

It's like build something then leave right before it burns down... Or just leaving a need for whoever is left to figure out...