Great question – would someone ask that of my boss please? 😉

We broke out some older games that work for 5 players. A full game of Citadels and several hands of The Great Dalmuti. All card games, all with very simple rules so hardly any time was spent teaching them.

My approach was something like this: for a few years (maybe until all my kids were at least age 3 or 4) I simply didn’t try to push my career forward.

When I was at work I put in plenty of effort, but I didn’t work much overtime, I didn’t do my own software projects outside of work, and I didn’t even spend much time reading programming blogs.

Young children are really overwhelming, if you are going to really parent them!

My career was fine. Career advancement is a marathon, not a sprint. Mmmm… that’s not true – I’ve seen people sprint through the career ladder. But if you want advice on how to do that you’ll need to ask someone else. MY approach to career advancement has been a marathon; keep improving until I am so ready for the next level that it’s really obvious, briefly do enough politicing to secure a promotion, then go back to the self-improvement. For me, the approach worked (I’m a “senior director” level non-manager-track software engineer today.)

When my kids were young I really just focused on them; these days they are in highschool and college and they work WITH me on my outside-of-work person programming projects.