An essay on ambition and fatherhood: when work competes with family

Nicholas Charriere, a software engineer and founder, has published an essay on his personal blog titled "Being ambitious and being a dad", describing the tension between an ambition-driven career in technology and the time that raising children demands. The piece is a personal account rather than research, but it addresses a question that rarely appears so directly in engineering blogs.

Starting with a confession

Charriere recalls that while going through Y Combinator he did not mention his seven-month-old daughter to anyone. A few years later he has two children, a dog and a packed schedule. His work, he writes, used to be his life; now his life competes with it. His starting point is a quote from Paul Graham's essay "Having Kids": children make you less productive, and if your working habits were already in order, you simply have less time to apply them.

What the biographies show

The author, who says he has read many biographies of founders, arrives at what he calls an uncomfortable conclusion: most of the builders he admires were poor parents. He cites Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, Edison, Ford and Ferrari, and notes that between the lines of many founder biographies lies the story of a bad parent. In a footnote about Einstein he adds that it is not clear whether his child was abandoned or died young.

A different choice

Charriere writes that he knows many ambitious parents, and that most of them make a choice he refuses: delegating parenting away. He rejects the "quality time" theory and says he believes in maximising the quantity of time spent with his children, arguing that there are no diminishing returns there. The difficulty, he writes, is that children need that time most when they are small — exactly the period that coincides with the prime of his career. Comparing his output as a parent with what he produced without children shows him a visible gap.

Redefining ambition

Unlike Paul Graham, who wrote that having children "may make one less ambitious", Charriere says he is not less ambitious — he is also ambitious about being a great father. He acknowledges that a good father and a great achiever rarely coincide, though rarely is not never, and names Paul Graham, DHH, Jeff Dean and Mark Zuckerberg as figures pressing on both fronts. His method is plain: stay focused, avoid wasting time on trivia, keep improving execution, guard his health and set firm rules — dinners with the children on weekdays and weekends reserved for family. His closing line addresses himself and the reader alike: "Be ambitious enough to be an ambitious dad."