Engineering as a Father: Using System Design to Protect Family Time

The laptop screen glows in the dim room. You're halfway through "Where the Wild Things Are" when your phone buzzes on the nightstand.

PagerDuty. Production down.

Your four-year-old tugs your arm. "Daddy, what happens next?"

Your mind is already debugging. Database connection pool? Cache invalidation? Load balancer?

"Uh... Max goes to the... island..."

Another buzz. Slack. Your tech lead: "Need you on the bridge."

You're physically present. Mentally absent.

Sound familiar?

Here's the uncomfortable question: If we can design systems that handle millions of requests with 99.99% uptime, why can't we design our lives so we're actually present for the people who matter most?

The Problem: High Availability at Work, Zero Availability at Home

Your production system:

• Load balancers distribute traffic
• Circuit breakers prevent cascading failures
• Health checks monitor every service
• On-call rotation spreads the burden

Your life:

• You're the single point of failure
• No circuit breakers (you just take everything)
• No health checks (you ignore exhaustion)
• No rotation (you're always "on")

Result:

• Work system: resilient, scalable, well-architected
• Life system: fragile, overloaded, held together with duct tape

We design better systems than we live.

Life SLOs: Defining Your Non-Negotiables

In system design, we define Service Level Objectives (SLOs): quantifiable targets that matter.

Example SLOs for a web service:

• 99.9% uptime (8.76 hours downtime/year)
• p95 latency < 200ms
• Error rate < 0.1%

What are your Life SLOs?

Not vague wishes like "be a good dad" or "balance work/life." Specific, measurable commitments.

My Life SLOs (Your Mileage Will Vary)

Family Availability:

• Bedtime presence: 5 nights/week minimum
  • Read stories, tuck in, no phone in hand
  • Miss 2 nights max per week (error budget)

Family Latency:

• Dinner together: 4 nights/week
  • Laptop closed by 6:30 PM
  • Phone in another room

Recovery Time:

• Weekend family time: 1 full day without work
  • Saturday or Sunday, committed
  • No email, no Slack, no "quick check"

Personal Health:

• Exercise: 3x/week, 30+ minutes
  • Scheduled like meetings
  • Non-negotiable unless sick

Deep Work:

• Focus blocks: 3x/week, 2-hour blocks
  • For architecture, strategy, hard problems
  • Protected time, no meetings

Exercise: Define Your Life SLOs

That gap? That's your technical debt.

And unlike code debt, this debt compounds with interest: missed moments, resentment, burnout.

Designing Your Week Like a System Architecture

Treat your calendar like an architecture diagram.

1. Identify Fixed Components (Non-Negotiable Blocks)

These are your "infrastructure":

• School drop-off: 7:45 AM (30 min)
• School pick-up: 3:30 PM (30 min)
• Dinner: 6:30 PM (1 hour)
• Bedtime routine: 8:00 PM (30 min)
• Sleep: 10:30 PM - 6:30 AM (8 hours)

These go on your calendar first. Before any work meeting.

Just like you wouldn't deploy a service without a database, you don't fill a calendar without family commitments.

2. Add Flexible Work Blocks

Now map work around infrastructure:

Deep work blocks (high-value, focus-intensive):

• 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM: Architecture, coding, strategy
• 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM: Code reviews, design work

Meetings/collaboration (medium-value, interruptible):

• 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM: Syncs, standups
• 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM: 1:1s, planning

Admin/low-focus (low-value, can be done tired):

• 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM: Email, Slack catch-up, admin

3. Build in Buffers (Slack Capacity)

Every resilient system has buffers.

In your calendar:

• Transition time: 15 min between context switches

  • Deep work → meeting: clear your head
  • Work → home: mental shutdown ritual

• Slack blocks: 30-60 min/day with no commitments

  • For when meetings run over
  • For unexpected urgent requests
  • For thinking time

Without buffers, one delay cascades into everything.

4. Weekly Review and Adjustment

Sunday evening (30 minutes):

• Review next week's calendar
• Check for conflicts with family SLOs
• Move/decline meetings that violate constraints
• Block deep work time explicitly

This is your "deployment planning." Learn more about running an effective Sunday Review: Planning Your Week Like a Sprint.

Interfaces and Contracts: Setting Expectations

In distributed systems, services have clear interfaces and contracts.

Service A tells Service B:

• What requests it accepts
• What responses it returns
• What its availability guarantees are

You need the same clarity with work and home.

Contract with Your Team/Manager

Communicate explicitly:

Availability:

• "I'm available 9 AM - 6 PM weekdays for meetings."
• "I'm offline 7 PM - 9 PM for family time, every night."
• "I check messages at 9 PM if there are P0 incidents. Otherwise, I respond the next morning."

On-call expectations:

• "I'm on-call for production incidents only (P0)."
• "For P1/P2 issues, I'll triage next business day."
• "If you page me for non-P0, let's adjust our severity definitions."

Example conversation with your manager:

"I want to be clear about my availability so there are no surprises. I'm fully engaged 9-6, including staying late if there's a real fire. But I'm offline 7-9 for bedtime with my kids. If there's a production incident, page me. Otherwise, I'll respond in the morning. Does that work?"

Most reasonable managers will say yes. If they don't, that's signal about the company, not you.

Contract with Your Partner

Don't assume your partner knows your constraints.

Sit down and map:

• Which evenings you're guaranteed home by 6:30
• Which mornings you can handle school drop-off
• What "on-call week" means (and how often)
• What recovery you each need

Example conversation:

"I'm committing to being home for dinner Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. Wednesdays I have a recurring late meeting, so I'll be home by 8. Every third week I'm on-call, which means I might get pulled away, but I'll communicate as soon as I know."

Clarity prevents resentment. For more strategies on boundary-setting, read Saying No Without Saying No: Boundary-Setting Scripts.

Visible Signals: The "Offline" Contract

At home, create clear signals:

Laptop closed = I'm present

• No "one more thing" while your kid talks to you

Phone in another room = I'm unavailable

• If you need to check for P0s, set a specific time (e.g., 9 PM after bedtime)

Weekly "no-work day" = full family focus

• Saturday or Sunday, pick one, honor it

These signals help you context-switch completely. And they help your family trust your presence. As leaders, our off-hours behavior sets team culture—learn more about Leading by Leaving: No Emails After 7 PM.

Failure Modes and Incident Response

Real talk: life doesn't follow a perfect architecture diagram.

Deployments fail. Incidents happen. Deadlines compress.

You will miss bedtime. You will work weekends. You will be paged during dinner.

The question isn't "Will there be incidents?" It's "How do we handle them without breaking the system?"

Incident Playbook for Life

When work intrudes (production incident, critical deadline):

1. Triage honestly

• Is this truly P0? (System down, revenue-impacting, security breach)
• Or is it P1 dressed up as P0? (Important but can wait 12 hours)

2. Communicate immediately

• To family: "I have a production incident. I'll be offline for 1-2 hours. I'll be back for bedtime if possible."
• To work: "On it. I'll update in 30 minutes."

3. Contain the blast radius

• Fix the immediate issue, defer the root cause analysis
• Get it stable, then hand off if possible

4. Recover intentionally

• If you miss bedtime Tuesday, protect Wednesday
• If you work Saturday, take Monday afternoon off
• Don't let incidents create permanent availability drift

5. Debrief and prevent recurrence

• Did we have the right on-call coverage?
• Was this truly P0 or was our severity calibration off?
• Can we prevent this class of incident (better monitoring, circuit breakers, etc.)?

Family Incident Debrief

When you have to step away:

Later (not in the moment), circle back:

"Hey, I'm sorry I had to jump on that call during dinner. We had a production issue. It's fixed now. I'll make sure I'm here tomorrow night."

With kids (age-appropriate):

"Daddy had to fix something at work that was broken. I'm sorry I missed story time. How about two stories tomorrow?"

Don't over-explain. But do acknowledge.

Kids (and partners) can handle occasional disruption. They can't handle chronic unavailability without explanation.

Long-Term Architecture: Career Choices with Kids in Mind

Your career is a 30-year system. Kids are only young once.

Different career phases have different trade-offs.

Role Choices

Individual Contributor (Senior/Staff/Principal):

• Pros: More control over time, less meetings, deep work
• Cons: On-call burden (depending on team), can be heads-down isolating

Engineering Manager:

• Pros: Fewer incidents pulling you in directly, schedule flexibility
• Cons: More meetings, people problems don't respect work hours, emotional load

CTO/VP Eng:

• Pros: Set the culture, influence team norms
• Cons: High responsibility, harder to disconnect, always "on" in some sense

My pattern:

• Kids 0-3: IC role (predictable, technical, limited travel)
• Kids 4-7: EM role (more flexibility, but more meetings – traded deep work for schedule control)
• Kids 8+: Open to senior IC or leadership (kids more independent)

Your pattern will differ. The point: make it a conscious choice, not a default.

Company Stage and Culture

Startup (0-20 people):

• Reality: Constant fires, long hours, high uncertainty
• Family fit: Hard with young kids unless you have strong support or are okay with tradeoffs

Growth stage (20-200 people):

• Reality: Still intense but more structure, on-call rotations forming
• Family fit: Possible with boundaries, but requires active protection

Established company (200+ people):

• Reality: Processes, defined roles, reasonable hours (usually)
• Family fit: Easier to carve out family time

Remote vs office:

• Remote: More time flexibility, no commute, but risk of "always working"
• Office: Clear separation, but commute eats time
• Hybrid: Best of both if you control the days

Choose companies where your manager and skip-level have families and model sane behavior.

If the CTO brags about 80-hour weeks and no vacation, run.

Closing: Your Family Is Not a Side Project

You wouldn't design a production system with:

• No redundancy
• No monitoring
• No capacity planning
• No incident response plan

So don't design your life that way.

Your family isn't a feature you'll "get to later."

Your health isn't technical debt you'll "pay down someday."

Your presence isn't a nice-to-have when things calm down (they won't).

Design your life like you'd design a system you're responsible for.

One-Week Experiment: Life SLO Sprint

This week:

1. Define 2 Life SLOs

• Pick one family commitment (e.g., bedtime 4 nights this week)
• Pick one personal commitment (e.g., exercise 2x this week)

2. Design your calendar accordingly

• Block family time first
• Map work around it
• Add buffers

3. Communicate your constraints

• Tell your team your availability boundaries
• Tell your partner your commitments

4. Track and review

• Sunday evening: Did you hit your SLOs?
• What broke? What worked?
• Adjust next week.

Treat it like a sprint. Review. Iterate.

You're already a systems architect.

Now architect your life with the same rigor.

Your family will thank you. And so will the version of yourself 10 years from now.