Multi-threading programming and parenting processes
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Urbon-Bayes, Pere
Becoming a parent is an step in many people’s life path that will arrive sooner or later, suddenly changing all your priorities. What before was critical might become less important, but what will not change is your need to work.
 Welcome, everybody, for the after lunch presentation and session. So next we are going to have an inter-process communication talk. We'll learn about the FORX system call, as I read from the description. Just joking, we hear something about the parenting process, and I'm very glad we have Pérez here as a speaker, so please give him a warm round of applause. So if you were expecting some kind of multi-threading talk, whatever, you are in the wrong place. This is me, and I'm going to talk about parenting processes, because most of us have FORX these days. I'm Pérez, a software engineer since ever. I've been working in databases, analytics, platforms, science, and the very beginning of my career. I used to do the graph depth room at FOSDEM. Most of you know FOSDEM, it's kind of the big brother of this conference. If you don't know about it, you should go to Belgium, first weekend of February. It's been amazing. It's the best conference ever with respect to FOSDEM, that it's also very good. Obviously, I'm not just coding all the time, I like to enjoy my life with my kids, with my wife. TV movies, series. I used to do a lot of running before when I got more time. That's basically me. Before I start, I always do that kind of thing. I come from Spain, I come from Barcelona, and I've been told by many of my German friends, I'm the fastest speaker they ever met. As Leslie said, once to me, if I speak too fast, just to know if there's something like, slow down, slow down, and I will slow down. Second disclaimer is, we are going to enter a very sensitive topic. Everything that involves kids brings extremely strong opinions. For me, it's like religion, sports, you know. Everyone has an opinion and is very extremely vocal about it. This talk includes my personal experiences, opinions, ideas, and some numbers that might not match 100% of that reality. So welcome to the bias. We're going to be talking basically about what is software engineering today, and what are we doing at work every day. I'm going to provide a few numbers about what actually parenting and having child means. Some of them come out of a poll that I made a few weeks ago, so our contributions mostly from the community. Also sharing, one of the things that really warms me the most is about society expectations. Things that we do because others expect us to do it. We're talking about what startups and company culture means and do for us, and a few tips about what we can do and should do to avoid it. So starting about what software engineering or software in general means for us today, basically we find software everywhere. We find software from our refrigerator, we find software in our computers, in the internet, etc. So a lot of what we do has a strong impact on what other people are actually feeling and doing every day. And for all of us, software is a passion. I've been doing with computers since I was a small child dealing with a CPC, 128, with a cassette and all these things there. And while my brothers were playing football on the street. And most of you might think that this probably said, but for me it was super fun. So it's a passion and what we do as a job is our hobby. One thing that we also find in our industry is change. Things change extremely fast and change every day. So we are kind of required to be learning and constantly learning and improving ourselves every day. So what we just learned at the university 10 years after doesn't mean anything because, you know, when I was at the university, a child was starting. Now a child is here and we even have several flavors of it. Yeah, so we really need to keep up learning everything. There is also one idea that I strongly hate. It looks like that we have to be programming at work and we have to be programming after work because we should have a portfolio somehow because when we face a job advertising, they tell us, what do you do? Do you have a GIT profile? And I find this extremely complicated because especially for me as a human being, I don't just enjoy programming at, you know, eight hours a day. I used to go running, I like to spend time with my kids, I like to play games, etc. So this makes me sometimes the less appealing candidate for some jobs because I don't have an awesome portfolio. But this is how it works. More or less you have to live your programming life from work after work, etc. Yeah, another important stuff that happens in our jobs are our software engineers. This is the distinction between what we call us. We call us developers, we call us engineers. Do we think that our job is craft or is engineering job because this gives to really different company cultures to have. So I like to see that as the difference between alchemy and science. More stuff around what we do every day. Our job is highly rewarding, especially when we fix issues or it is to me at less. When we fix something and make something work, it's awesome. I mean, unless this feeling is something that I like a lot. Maybe this is going to touch some feelings around here, but our company culture used to be driving by ego. We are told that we are ninjas, hackers, whatever, that we are the best, that we are brilliant. We are good people, but when ego is so important in our kind of making us feel special everyone. This is how our jobs usually are. And also our kind of companies are always male centric. We have an extremely low amount of women. What is extremely sad because without diversity we don't have these different opinions. More facts. We love to be focused. If we are distracted, this is very bad. Related to this is the hero culture that I like to define and kind of say. I mean, I guess all of you pull all night to finish work during the university times. You have to meet a deadline and stay probably a long time at work that it wasn't necessary. When I see myself at the university, for example, when I was studying, I've never did this all night shift or kind of hero. It's pointless. If you plan your work properly, you kind of want it. But it's how we work. We work like we have to be long hours there. I don't know the rest of Germany, but I find it crazy in Berlin that this happens a lot. We have a lot of irregular working hours. I see a lot of my colleagues, not now, but when I first moved to Germany, starting work at 10, at 11, and staying at 8. It depends on the company, but especially in the start-ups or at least in Berlin, we have irregular working hours. And last kind of fact about what we do in our job or always our job is working around, etc. Is that we don't have... We are not able to generate enough interest on engineering because, you know, I don't... Exactly, I don't really know the numbers in Germany, and especially in Frescon, it's not the right place to say that because we have a lot of kids working around here. And it's amazing, but for example, the number of people willing to go to university in Barcelona and willing to engage in computer science is going down. And this is a fact that happens to all of us, and we have to think about it. Yeah. So these were kind of descriptions, kind of very fast descriptions of what we do at work and how we work. Before we move forward, I would like to think about one thing about what we do and why we do it. We define ourselves by what we do. If we ask our colleagues or we met a person for the first time, we kind of define each other, you know? You are a software engineer, you are a system administrator, both hate each other, I don't know why. Then we create DevOps or you are a fashion designer, you know? You are on IT, you are not technical, you are technical, etc. This is very important. And when we exclude or work on other things, yeah, we kind of lost this definition of ourselves. So after this kind of fast explanation of what we do at work and that work, it really defines ourselves. Kind of short stuff about companies. Our industry and companies are extremely diverse. But usually in all the companies, the culture is defined by the founders. I am very lucky to work at a company that the founders decided to build distributed from the very beginning. And this makes it, for example, I have colleagues working in Japan, I have colleagues working in the USA, and both work in the same team. But some other companies, because of fear, because of lack of trust, whatever, they want you to be in the same office. And even if it doesn't make sense for your work, they want you to stay there. There is a nice article from the BBS about the lack of trust on working remotely. And this really involves your daily life. It is important that if you are in a company and you do that way, it is important to set the right culture. Another thing that happened to me, or that I saw a lot of times in Berlin, or in Barcelona, even also, is when you build a startup and you have no money, you want to work a lot of hours, etc, etc. And this makes sense. So taking the right amount of people to do that, it is kind of stuff. It is important to know, many of you, for example, might know, but working more than giving a month of hours in Germany is illegal. So it is important to know your rights here. Something that also drives me crazy about startups is they are mission-driven. Every startup has a mission. And my question is, are we going to save the world with that mission? So every company has a job that is good money from customers and serves their customers. But all of this kind of helps this hype culture of ego when we want to get a company. And last on the list, we might have different understanding of what productivity means in a company. We actually have, because I'm lucky that I've worked on places that you basically got a task assigned and you were measured for your task and your job done. But I've been in other places that long working hours and you have to be there. And it's still important to know what kind of things you are in. Let's talk about perks, or what do we get at a company? I see some of you here that probably got the child at the university already. And some of you that may right after university. A lot of companies give in Berlin, Clomate, Pia, Akeeker, Ping Pong Table. I've seen very few companies being innovative on this idea, on how to attract people. But it's always provided or subsidized more or less. And at Lez in Berlin, in other areas like Vienna, where I used to do some work a few years ago, it's less common, but host meetups usually run after hours. So this means that you have to stay even longer. And few large companies might have a take care, but very few. Talking about the culture, as I said before, not everyone is used to remote working or working from home. Not quite sure about the rest of Germany for sure, but I know Barcelona and it's not like this. And looking for remote work actually is something that really lets you define your own piece and your own work. And as I said before, this article from the BBC, there is no such thing as flexible work. It's really, really interesting to read because it really tells you that we don't do more remote work because we are lacking trust. So it's really important when you create a company that is important facts. The environment in companies, as I said before, hiring. We used to use this Ninja hacker. I mean, maybe this is attracting some people, but I know this is changing because, for example, at my company, I work for these days, this is kind of improving. But in general, I still see a lot of ads that try to attract people with this ego driving idea. And last but not least, we might not be hiring the right people at certain ages. Because for some people, we ask weird questions. Weird? I mean, we don't hire women at a given age because they might get pregnant. We don't hire men after 45 years because they might forget all the history behind them, but they get the experience. So sometimes I see this in companies and it's very sad. Especially coming out of me, what I like to do, other things, not just living for my job, work-life balance is very important. So I ask myself a lot of times what companies can be do on that area. And most of them kind of ask me the same questions. How much work, how much balance? What does it mean for everyone? And I'm sure that if I ask someone here what work-life balance means, it means completely different for each one of us. For some of us, it might be that my company let me work on open source. For some of others, it might be that I want to do a sports. I'm setting up myself for the next triathlon. Or I want to run Berlin marathon. So I don't know about every company as I said at the beginning, but work-life balance in startups in Berlin or corporate companies in Barcelona sucks. Usually means that, for example, the typical average time that an engineer is working in Barcelona is from 9 to 7 with two hours break. From 9 to 7, it means that if you have one hour commute, you go back at home at 9 p.m. If you have childs, for example, this is no way something that scales. So just kind of a quick gossip thing. Most of my friends, when they go to childs, they start working freelance for international companies in Barcelona. And that's why, because the work-life balance is not so good. So after software companies, a little bit about what actually having childs means, and we do like regular basis. By the way, I have one and I wait another one for December. So I'm busy and I'm going to be extremely busy in December. As some of you who have childs or not, having a child is, it changes everything. There are no rules applied. And it's extremely different from one child to another one. I know the history that some parents tell me that they don't sleep for a long time. I'm very lucky because after two months, my kid was sleeping eight hours. But sleep is a very challenging thing. So if you have a not list, everyone likes the way they do it and they're extremely vocal about it. They tell you, you have to do these things that way, that other way, and you have your own ideas. And for sure, it's an ongoing process that you are changing every day and you don't know anything. So yeah, it's no time to complain for further. After a while, they grow up, you feed them, and they go to kindergarten. By the way, you have to find one before. I don't know the rest of Germany, but in Berlin, it's extremely challenging. And in Barcelona, it's extremely more challenging. So yeah, it's a big deal after that. And they get sick. So they get sick, you get sick, you have to maybe not go to work, and you have to get them to the doctors. So this means that you have to do a lot of things. And you actually have to devote yourself to be proficient in your work. You have to devote yourself to be good at home, etc. Something that really amazed me from Germany is this picture. I see so many dads in Berlin playing with their kids in the playground, in the cafes, etc. This is not imaginable in Barcelona, for example. It would be crazy that you do that. And that's amazing, because this means that you are more involved in your kids' education, you are more involved in what they do. This is less common in all places than in Germany. It's one thing that everyone has to think about themselves. What do we do? Do we involve more, less, etc. And as I said before, time management, when you get kids, it's kind of crazy. So you have less time, you have to be at work, and if you happen to have these timetables like we have in Barcelona from 9 to 7, it's like I'm a missing parent. One thing that a very good friend of mine told me in Berlin is what they do is they basically introduce the month of hours they work together and they share all the stuff that happens. So, yeah, it's a very important thing. And usually it's so happening that still women are taking all the care and all the load, that what means having a child. But yeah, important thing is time. I usually improve myself a lot about my time management skills after I got a kid because I have to. And in a natural, more or less, someone that's sitting down there kind of highlighted, we discussed once that you are as bad-patterned as everyone else is. And this is very important to understand from the very beginning. And empathy should never be forgotten when you are in all this because empathy for work, because they need you and your teams, and empathy in your work for you that you get a sick kid, etc. Yeah. And after kind of a few things about what parenting is, I'm going to enter the most scary thing in areas of this world, society expectations are. I guess this happens here in Germany like it happens in Barcelona. People expect you to do things one way. For example, we bought for our kid, we went to this IFASHER show in Berlin, and we bought this ear protection stuff. Now we are going on vacations to Barcelona, and we will get this protection stuff because we're going to see fireworks, and some kind of crazy dancing under the fireworks that we do in Barcelona in summer. I'm totally sure that my family will tell me and my friends will tell me, what the fuck are you doing? You're crazy? You don't do that. Here in Germany is the other way around. All people in the IFASHER, even the speaker in the IFASHER show in Berlin, were telling everyone, don't take your kid's ears because this is very loud. Usually we don't do a lot of things. Sorry. We have just a few, so it's easy to interact. It might be. But I find it very nice. What I was trying to explain with this was that society expects you to do stuff. In Barcelona, one kind of stuff and in Berlin, not completely different. For example, school schedules are in Barcelona. You're expecting to have your kid stay at lunch time because it's two hours, and if both of you have to work and you don't have family around, you have to do that things. This is not as cheap as in Germany, but you would expect to do it. Care tasks. I guess all of you found this crazy situation like here. I strongly find that when we do all this caring stuff, it's usually done by women. Even if in Germany or in Berlin, I see a lot of male parents taking these things or getting the kid to the doctor or getting the kid to the daycare and involving in this kind of... that you guys do in the daycare here in Germany. It's very important that everyone is involved in these ideas, especially... Another thing that drove me crazy is the differences when we access parental benefits here. Usually, at least my friend in Berlin takes two months out and women take 12 months because men still get a lot more money. At the end, society is forcing us to women to stay longer unemployed and out of this equation. Computers. This doesn't work now. I cannot be more strong on this sentence because it's not still well known. By the way, if you wonder about this, it's an ad from the Second Republic in Spain that was basically a fight between right-hand people and left-hand people. This says that the labor of a farmer is as important as the salary that the blue-collar worker gets. Here, I think most of us... you should know your rights and force it. You should also know your duties, your responsibilities. I've seen a couple of people doing motor shoots in Berlin, even if that's illegal. I've seen so many people doing elton tight because we can't just have women doing the whole elton tight and we can't go back to work. Awesome. I have to go faster. There is one awesome thing that I know from Berlin or from Germany, it's Kinderkrakengeld. You can get money when your kid is out because you can get out of work, too. I guess this also happens here in Berlin, but it happens a lot more in Barcelona. My congratulations to all these grandfathers, Geroz Elton, who are actually being fathers again because we have to work 12 hours a day. Strongly said, but it happens. In Spain, it happens a lot. Can we do things? Yes. We can encourage remote work. We can work from home policies that are easy and that are not bullshit for people to ask for it. We can have empathy because it's probably... one employee is asking to stay home because he has a seatkid. It's because he has a seatkid. It's not because he's lazy to come to the office. One very important thing is to think about time. When you schedule your meetings at 7pm, probably I will never be there because I have this going to bed to dance that everyone has to do with the kids. And using a schedule properly, recording, planning, and asynchronous communication helps a lot. I just have a little more time. Fear, but out. This is very important for me because one thing that can happen after you put all this pressure to people is that they burn out. So, they quit your company. They are not happy employees anymore. So you lost an important resource that took you money to train and to be useful. And after some tips, very fast for companies, for you as a parent, I strongly hate when people try to lecture me what I have to do as a parent. But the only kind of thing that I will say is talk to as many people as possible because you can get awesome ideas how to deal with your time challenges. And very quick, a few numbers from this poll that I run on the Internet. So, 91% male answers, 9% women, much as the industry. What else can I say? I would love to get more women, but yeah. By the way, before I forget, this is kind of thank you if Diana is looking to me over the Internet because thank you to Diana Gunther. Basically, she was the master of disaster spreading this poll over the Internet. And thank you to her, kind of, 350 people answered this stuff. Mostly centered around Germany with 56%. 11% from Spain and 7% from USA. This means like Germany is good. Spain is bad and USA is worse. So you get a bit of everything here. Questions about if you took parental leave for how long? The average between one month and six months. I can kind of say here that we kind of put a lot more options, but it basically matches my feeling that most of men takes between zero and two months of absence. If you took parental leave, also your parents took parental leave. I'm kind of worried about this 40% here. Because if most of this is main, this means that women never took any parental leave. Interesting. If your partner took parental leave for how long? This basically shows the 70% of women that everyone who answers this was a male. When going back to work, have you asked to work less hours? Yes, both. 70%. Awesome. It's very interesting when both can reduce hours because both are not excluded toward work. Yes, only me. 11%. Mostly, I guess. A few men and all the women. And no, 72%. Interesting number from this is if you get family nearby or not. I mean, I live in Berlin. My family is 108. 1800 kilometers away. So, you know, it gets challenging. But nearly 62% of people got family nearby somehow. Work environments being kids-friendly. And amazing, 65%. Should be even more. But it's good. I wonder if exactly this number is because most of my colleagues answer from elastic. Employees having remote or work-from-home policy. Nearly 74%. What is amazing? We all should have these kind of policies as we will see later. Access to daycare benefits. 80% of no. Why if it's so challenging? And one thing that I did is I put free text stuff that people can write whatever they want. And stuff that they wrote that is very well done. It's flexibility. Remote work and work-from-home easy. And kids welcome at work. So, if you have a company or have a boss or you are in a management position, doing stuff like this helps that your employees keeps happy and don't burn out and actually quit. What can be improved? A company or connected daycare? I always wonder why if we get people with child and this is a complicated thing, you don't even have to get a daycare like for example, the day in Berlin. You can call your daycare nearby and say, okay, can we make a deal with you? You have happy fathers and mothers who will come back to work and will be calm down because the kid is actually in a good daycare. It's actually the second one is very interesting. The human vein comes after the business revenue. Even if you are doing business, we are dealing with humans. So, when we forget that and especially in Spain, it's strongly forgotten. We are, I mean, we are not good. One that is very interesting to me at least and I got a lot of discussions with everyone is that sometimes kids are not so unhealthy to go to sleep and still moving around, but he is not good enough as a health nurse to go to daycare. Having a room, whatever, that you can actually, like here, here we got this elder and unkinned arbaica plants where they have the daycare things for the conference. And it's awesome. It can work. The kid can be happy. Some more pearls from tell me anything. Why moms need to change their schedule and not that? It's sad, but it happens. The full assumption seems to be full-time young male engineers. Why do we accept that women reduce time but male engineers not? Something that really amazed me is Quebec have a strong maternity plan close to the Gemma one. Even if it's North America, it's kind of super good. And last, I really want to share this because it is extremely important, is the management. My team and company were not as understanding. It was amazingly stressful and difficult. I often wonder if my, I often wonder if I would have been a better parent and my child would have had a stronger start if I worked for my current employee then. Humans realizing that is still me sad. So if you are actually in a position to change stuff, do it. Or if you can talk to your employee or management, whatever, do it. It's extremely important. Just quite quick numbers from the aesthetic agency. Usually in Germany you get 1.5 childs, even we get less in Barcelona. And just to wrap up and finish, we all have been kids who have been parents who have been stressed. I don't want to see more parents who are stressed by having kids because it's kind of a common responsibility. Because at the end of the day, who's going to pay our pensions? Our kids. Yeah. So it's very important. And I stopped talking. 39 minutes. What's kind of good? First of all, thank you very much for your presentation. I'm here to take questions. I don't have prices of my colleague. She got everything for a question. No questions? Even comments. I mean, it's time to see if this actually makes you sad or not. Because it makes me sad. And I want to change stuff. So that's why I actually wanted to do this presentation. Do you think it's destructive to have your kids close to your workplace? It is. And how do you deal with that? I have actually have another room for him to play at home. I'm working now. We have an office in Berlin, but I used to work from home a lot of times. Basically have a room for him and a room for me. But it makes sense that it's destructive. It's challenging. My whole story here is try to improve it because it is stressful. And you might actually lose talent in order to do that thing. Yeah. Anything else? No questions. Oh, you all were sleeping. It was just a time, so. So you're still around this afternoon at the probably at the Elasticz booth? I'm going to be around. If you see one title that actually screams a lot, it's mine. Okay, that's easy to figure out. So once again, thank you very much.
 Welcome, everybody, for the after lunch presentation and session.  So next we are going to have an inter-process communication talk.  We'll learn about the FORX system call, as I read from the description.  Just joking, we hear something about the parenting process, and I'm very glad we have  Pérez here as a speaker, so please give him a warm round of applause.  So if you were expecting some kind of multi-threading talk, whatever, you are in the wrong place.  This is me, and I'm going to talk about parenting processes, because most of us have FORX these days.  I'm Pérez, a software engineer since ever.  I've been working in databases, analytics, platforms, science, and the very beginning of my career.  I used to do the graph depth room at FOSDEM.  Most of you know FOSDEM, it's kind of the big brother of this conference.  If you don't know about it, you should go to Belgium, first weekend of February.  It's been amazing. It's the best conference ever with respect to FOSDEM, that it's also very good.  Obviously, I'm not just coding all the time, I like to enjoy my life with my kids, with my wife.  TV movies, series. I used to do a lot of running before when I got more time.  That's basically me.  Before I start, I always do that kind of thing.  I come from Spain, I come from Barcelona, and I've been told by many of my German friends,  I'm the fastest speaker they ever met.  As Leslie said, once to me, if I speak too fast, just to know if there's something like, slow down, slow down, and I will slow down.  Second disclaimer is, we are going to enter a very sensitive topic.  Everything that involves kids brings extremely strong opinions.  For me, it's like religion, sports, you know. Everyone has an opinion and is very extremely vocal about it.  This talk includes my personal experiences, opinions, ideas, and some numbers that might not match 100% of that reality.  So welcome to the bias.  We're going to be talking basically about what is software engineering today, and what are we doing at work every day.  I'm going to provide a few numbers about what actually parenting and having child means.  Some of them come out of a poll that I made a few weeks ago, so our contributions mostly from the community.  Also sharing, one of the things that really warms me the most is about society expectations.  Things that we do because others expect us to do it.  We're talking about what startups and company culture means and do for us, and a few tips about what we can do and should do to avoid it.  So starting about what software engineering or software in general means for us today, basically we find software everywhere.  We find software from our refrigerator, we find software in our computers, in the internet, etc.  So a lot of what we do has a strong impact on what other people are actually feeling and doing every day.  And for all of us, software is a passion. I've been doing with computers since I was a small child dealing with a CPC, 128, with a cassette and all these things there.  And while my brothers were playing football on the street.  And most of you might think that this probably said, but for me it was super fun.  So it's a passion and what we do as a job is our hobby.  One thing that we also find in our industry is change.  Things change extremely fast and change every day.  So we are kind of required to be learning and constantly learning and improving ourselves every day.  So what we just learned at the university 10 years after doesn't mean anything because, you know, when I was at the university, a child was starting.  Now a child is here and we even have several flavors of it.  Yeah, so we really need to keep up learning everything.  There is also one idea that I strongly hate.  It looks like that we have to be programming at work and we have to be programming after work because we should have a portfolio somehow because when we face a job advertising, they tell us, what do you do?  Do you have a GIT profile?  And I find this extremely complicated because especially for me as a human being, I don't just enjoy programming at, you know, eight hours a day.  I used to go running, I like to spend time with my kids, I like to play games, etc.  So this makes me sometimes the less appealing candidate for some jobs because I don't have an awesome portfolio.  But this is how it works.  More or less you have to live your programming life from work after work, etc.  Yeah, another important stuff that happens in our jobs are our software engineers.  This is the distinction between what we call us.  We call us developers, we call us engineers.  Do we think that our job is craft or is engineering job because this gives to really different company cultures to have.  So I like to see that as the difference between alchemy and science.  More stuff around what we do every day.  Our job is highly rewarding, especially when we fix issues or it is to me at less.  When we fix something and make something work, it's awesome.  I mean, unless this feeling is something that I like a lot.  Maybe this is going to touch some feelings around here, but our company culture used to be driving by ego.  We are told that we are ninjas, hackers, whatever, that we are the best, that we are brilliant.  We are good people, but when ego is so important in our kind of making us feel special everyone.  This is how our jobs usually are.  And also our kind of companies are always male centric.  We have an extremely low amount of women.  What is extremely sad because without diversity we don't have these different opinions.  More facts.  We love to be focused. If we are distracted, this is very bad.  Related to this is the hero culture that I like to define and kind of say.  I mean, I guess all of you pull all night to finish work during the university times.  You have to meet a deadline and stay probably a long time at work that it wasn't necessary.  When I see myself at the university, for example, when I was studying, I've never did this all night shift or kind of hero.  It's pointless. If you plan your work properly, you kind of want it.  But it's how we work. We work like we have to be long hours there.  I don't know the rest of Germany, but I find it crazy in Berlin that this happens a lot.  We have a lot of irregular working hours.  I see a lot of my colleagues, not now, but when I first moved to Germany, starting work at 10, at 11, and staying at 8.  It depends on the company, but especially in the start-ups or at least in Berlin, we have irregular working hours.  And last kind of fact about what we do in our job or always our job is working around, etc.  Is that we don't have... We are not able to generate enough interest on engineering  because, you know, I don't... Exactly, I don't really know the numbers in Germany,  and especially in Frescon, it's not the right place to say that because we have a lot of kids working around here.  And it's amazing, but for example, the number of people willing to go to university in Barcelona  and willing to engage in computer science is going down.  And this is a fact that happens to all of us, and we have to think about it.  Yeah. So these were kind of descriptions, kind of very fast descriptions of what we do at work and how we work.  Before we move forward, I would like to think about one thing about what we do and why we do it.  We define ourselves by what we do.  If we ask our colleagues or we met a person for the first time, we kind of define each other, you know?  You are a software engineer, you are a system administrator, both hate each other, I don't know why.  Then we create DevOps or you are a fashion designer, you know?  You are on IT, you are not technical, you are technical, etc.  This is very important. And when we exclude or work on other things, yeah, we kind of lost this definition of ourselves.  So after this kind of fast explanation of what we do at work and that work, it really defines ourselves.  Kind of short stuff about companies.  Our industry and companies are extremely diverse.  But usually in all the companies, the culture is defined by the founders.  I am very lucky to work at a company that the founders decided to build distributed from the very beginning.  And this makes it, for example, I have colleagues working in Japan, I have colleagues working in the USA, and both work in the same team.  But some other companies, because of fear, because of lack of trust, whatever, they want you to be in the same office.  And even if it doesn't make sense for your work, they want you to stay there.  There is a nice article from the BBS about the lack of trust on working remotely.  And this really involves your daily life.  It is important that if you are in a company and you do that way, it is important to set the right culture.  Another thing that happened to me, or that I saw a lot of times in Berlin, or in Barcelona, even also, is when you build a startup and you have no money,  you want to work a lot of hours, etc, etc.  And this makes sense.  So taking the right amount of people to do that, it is kind of stuff.  It is important to know, many of you, for example, might know, but working more than giving a month of hours in Germany is illegal.  So it is important to know your rights here.  Something that also drives me crazy about startups is they are mission-driven.  Every startup has a mission.  And my question is, are we going to save the world with that mission?  So every company has a job that is good money from customers and serves their customers.  But all of this kind of helps this hype culture of ego when we want to get a company.  And last on the list, we might have different understanding of what productivity means in a company.  We actually have, because I'm lucky that I've worked on places that you basically got a task assigned and you were measured for your task and your job done.  But I've been in other places that long working hours and you have to be there.  And it's still important to know what kind of things you are in.  Let's talk about perks, or what do we get at a company?  I see some of you here that probably got the child at the university already.  And some of you that may right after university.  A lot of companies give in Berlin, Clomate, Pia, Akeeker, Ping Pong Table.  I've seen very few companies being innovative on this idea, on how to attract people.  But it's always provided or subsidized more or less.  And at Lez in Berlin, in other areas like Vienna, where I used to do some work a few years ago, it's less common, but host meetups usually run after hours.  So this means that you have to stay even longer.  And few large companies might have a take care, but very few.  Talking about the culture, as I said before, not everyone is used to remote working or working from home.  Not quite sure about the rest of Germany for sure, but I know Barcelona and it's not like this.  And looking for remote work actually is something that really lets you define your own piece and your own work.  And as I said before, this article from the BBC, there is no such thing as flexible work.  It's really, really interesting to read because it really tells you that we don't do more remote work because we are lacking trust.  So it's really important when you create a company that is important facts.  The environment in companies, as I said before, hiring.  We used to use this Ninja hacker.  I mean, maybe this is attracting some people, but I know this is changing because, for example, at my company, I work for these days, this is kind of improving.  But in general, I still see a lot of ads that try to attract people with this ego driving idea.  And last but not least, we might not be hiring the right people at certain ages.  Because for some people, we ask weird questions.  Weird? I mean, we don't hire women at a given age because they might get pregnant.  We don't hire men after 45 years because they might forget all the history behind them, but they get the experience.  So sometimes I see this in companies and it's very sad.  Especially coming out of me, what I like to do, other things, not just living for my job, work-life balance is very important.  So I ask myself a lot of times what companies can be do on that area.  And most of them kind of ask me the same questions.  How much work, how much balance? What does it mean for everyone?  And I'm sure that if I ask someone here what work-life balance means, it means completely different for each one of us.  For some of us, it might be that my company let me work on open source.  For some of others, it might be that I want to do a sports. I'm setting up myself for the next triathlon.  Or I want to run Berlin marathon.  So I don't know about every company as I said at the beginning, but work-life balance in startups in Berlin or corporate companies in Barcelona sucks.  Usually means that, for example, the typical average time that an engineer is working in Barcelona is from 9 to 7 with two hours break.  From 9 to 7, it means that if you have one hour commute, you go back at home at 9 p.m.  If you have childs, for example, this is no way something that scales.  So just kind of a quick gossip thing.  Most of my friends, when they go to childs, they start working freelance for international companies in Barcelona.  And that's why, because the work-life balance is not so good.  So after software companies, a little bit about what actually having childs means, and we do like regular basis.  By the way, I have one and I wait another one for December.  So I'm busy and I'm going to be extremely busy in December.  As some of you who have childs or not, having a child is, it changes everything.  There are no rules applied.  And it's extremely different from one child to another one.  I know the history that some parents tell me that they don't sleep for a long time.  I'm very lucky because after two months, my kid was sleeping eight hours.  But sleep is a very challenging thing.  So if you have a not list, everyone likes the way they do it and they're extremely vocal about it.  They tell you, you have to do these things that way, that other way, and you have your own ideas.  And for sure, it's an ongoing process that you are changing every day and you don't know anything.  So yeah, it's no time to complain for further.  After a while, they grow up, you feed them, and they go to kindergarten.  By the way, you have to find one before.  I don't know the rest of Germany, but in Berlin, it's extremely challenging.  And in Barcelona, it's extremely more challenging.  So yeah, it's a big deal after that.  And they get sick.  So they get sick, you get sick, you have to maybe not go to work, and you have to get them to the doctors.  So this means that you have to do a lot of things.  And you actually have to devote yourself to be proficient in your work.  You have to devote yourself to be good at home, etc.  Something that really amazed me from Germany is this picture.  I see so many dads in Berlin playing with their kids in the playground, in the cafes, etc.  This is not imaginable in Barcelona, for example.  It would be crazy that you do that.  And that's amazing, because this means that you are more involved in your kids' education,  you are more involved in what they do.  This is less common in all places than in Germany.  It's one thing that everyone has to think about themselves.  What do we do?  Do we involve more, less, etc.  And as I said before, time management, when you get kids, it's kind of crazy.  So you have less time, you have to be at work, and if you happen to have these timetables like we have in Barcelona from 9 to 7,  it's like I'm a missing parent.  One thing that a very good friend of mine told me in Berlin is what they do is they basically  introduce the month of hours they work together and they share all the stuff that happens.  So, yeah, it's a very important thing.  And usually it's so happening that still women are taking all the care and all the load,  that what means having a child.  But yeah, important thing is time.  I usually improve myself a lot about my time management skills after I got a kid because I have to.  And in a natural, more or less, someone that's sitting down there kind of highlighted,  we discussed once that you are as bad-patterned as everyone else is.  And this is very important to understand from the very beginning.  And empathy should never be forgotten when you are in all this because empathy for work,  because they need you and your teams, and empathy in your work for you that you get a sick kid, etc.  Yeah.  And after kind of a few things about what parenting is,  I'm going to enter the most scary thing in areas of this world, society expectations are.  I guess this happens here in Germany like it happens in Barcelona.  People expect you to do things one way.  For example, we bought for our kid, we went to this IFASHER show in Berlin,  and we bought this ear protection stuff.  Now we are going on vacations to Barcelona, and we will get this protection stuff because we're going to see fireworks,  and some kind of crazy dancing under the fireworks that we do in Barcelona in summer.  I'm totally sure that my family will tell me and my friends will tell me,  what the fuck are you doing? You're crazy? You don't do that.  Here in Germany is the other way around.  All people in the IFASHER, even the speaker in the IFASHER show in Berlin, were telling everyone,  don't take your kid's ears because this is very loud.  Usually we don't do a lot of things.  Sorry.  We have just a few, so it's easy to interact.  It might be. But I find it very nice.  What I was trying to explain with this was that society expects you to do stuff.  In Barcelona, one kind of stuff and in Berlin, not completely different.  For example, school schedules are in Barcelona.  You're expecting to have your kid stay at lunch time because it's two hours,  and if both of you have to work and you don't have family around, you have to do that things.  This is not as cheap as in Germany, but you would expect to do it.  Care tasks.  I guess all of you found this crazy situation like here.  I strongly find that when we do all this caring stuff, it's usually done by women.  Even if in Germany or in Berlin, I see a lot of male parents taking these things  or getting the kid to the doctor or getting the kid to the daycare  and involving in this kind of... that you guys do in the daycare here in Germany.  It's very important that everyone is involved in these ideas, especially...  Another thing that drove me crazy is the differences when we access parental benefits here.  Usually, at least my friend in Berlin takes two months out and women take 12 months  because men still get a lot more money.  At the end, society is forcing us to women to stay longer unemployed  and out of this equation.  Computers. This doesn't work now.  I cannot be more strong on this sentence because it's not still well known.  By the way, if you wonder about this, it's an ad from the Second Republic in Spain  that was basically a fight between right-hand people and left-hand people.  This says that the labor of a farmer is as important as the salary that the blue-collar worker gets.  Here, I think most of us... you should know your rights and force it.  You should also know your duties, your responsibilities.  I've seen a couple of people doing motor shoots in Berlin, even if that's illegal.  I've seen so many people doing elton tight because we can't just have women doing the whole elton tight  and we can't go back to work. Awesome. I have to go faster.  There is one awesome thing that I know from Berlin or from Germany, it's Kinderkrakengeld.  You can get money when your kid is out because you can get out of work, too.  I guess this also happens here in Berlin, but it happens a lot more in Barcelona.  My congratulations to all these grandfathers, Geroz Elton, who are actually being fathers again  because we have to work 12 hours a day.  Strongly said, but it happens.  In Spain, it happens a lot.  Can we do things? Yes.  We can encourage remote work.  We can work from home policies that are easy and that are not bullshit for people to ask for it.  We can have empathy because it's probably... one employee is asking to stay home because he has a seatkid.  It's because he has a seatkid.  It's not because he's lazy to come to the office.  One very important thing is to think about time.  When you schedule your meetings at 7pm, probably I will never be there because I have this going to bed to dance that everyone has to do with the kids.  And using a schedule properly, recording, planning, and asynchronous communication helps a lot.  I just have a little more time.  Fear, but out.  This is very important for me because one thing that can happen after you put all this pressure to people is that they burn out.  So, they quit your company.  They are not happy employees anymore.  So you lost an important resource that took you money to train and to be useful.  And after some tips, very fast for companies, for you as a parent, I strongly hate when people try to lecture me what I have to do as a parent.  But the only kind of thing that I will say is talk to as many people as possible because you can get awesome ideas how to deal with your time challenges.  And very quick, a few numbers from this poll that I run on the Internet.  So, 91% male answers, 9% women, much as the industry.  What else can I say?  I would love to get more women, but yeah.  By the way, before I forget, this is kind of thank you if Diana is looking to me over the Internet because thank you to Diana Gunther.  Basically, she was the master of disaster spreading this poll over the Internet.  And thank you to her, kind of, 350 people answered this stuff.  Mostly centered around Germany with 56%.  11% from Spain and 7% from USA.  This means like Germany is good.  Spain is bad and USA is worse.  So you get a bit of everything here.  Questions about if you took parental leave for how long?  The average between one month and six months.  I can kind of say here that we kind of put a lot more options, but it basically matches my feeling that most of men takes between zero and two months of absence.  If you took parental leave, also your parents took parental leave.  I'm kind of worried about this 40% here.  Because if most of this is main, this means that women never took any parental leave.  Interesting.  If your partner took parental leave for how long?  This basically shows the 70% of women that everyone who answers this was a male.  When going back to work, have you asked to work less hours?  Yes, both.  70%.  Awesome.  It's very interesting when both can reduce hours because both are not excluded toward work.  Yes, only me.  11%.  Mostly, I guess.  A few men and all the women.  And no, 72%.  Interesting number from this is if you get family nearby or not.  I mean, I live in Berlin.  My family is 108.  1800 kilometers away.  So, you know, it gets challenging.  But nearly 62% of people got family nearby somehow.  Work environments being kids-friendly.  And amazing, 65%.  Should be even more.  But it's good.  I wonder if exactly this number is because most of my colleagues answer from elastic.  Employees having remote or work-from-home policy.  Nearly 74%.  What is amazing?  We all should have these kind of policies as we will see later.  Access to daycare benefits.  80% of no.  Why if it's so challenging?  And one thing that I did is I put free text stuff that people can write whatever they  want.  And stuff that they wrote that is very well done.  It's flexibility.  Remote work and work-from-home easy.  And kids welcome at work.  So, if you have a company or have a boss or you are in a management position, doing stuff  like this helps that your employees keeps happy and don't burn out and actually quit.  What can be improved?  A company or connected daycare?  I always wonder why if we get people with child and this is a complicated thing, you  don't even have to get a daycare like for example, the day in Berlin.  You can call your daycare nearby and say, okay, can we make a deal with you?  You have happy fathers and mothers who will come back to work and will be calm down because  the kid is actually in a good daycare.  It's actually the second one is very interesting.  The human vein comes after the business revenue.  Even if you are doing business, we are dealing with humans.  So, when we forget that and especially in Spain, it's strongly forgotten.  We are, I mean, we are not good.  One that is very interesting to me at least and I got a lot of discussions with everyone  is that sometimes kids are not so unhealthy to go to sleep and still moving around,  but he is not good enough as a health nurse to go to daycare.  Having a room, whatever, that you can actually, like here, here we got this elder and unkinned  arbaica plants where they have the daycare things for the conference.  And it's awesome.  It can work.  The kid can be happy.  Some more pearls from tell me anything.  Why moms need to change their schedule and not that?  It's sad, but it happens.  The full assumption seems to be full-time young male engineers.  Why do we accept that women reduce time but male engineers not?  Something that really amazed me is Quebec have a strong maternity plan close to the  Gemma one.  Even if it's North America, it's kind of super good.  And last, I really want to share this because it is extremely important, is the management.  My team and company were not as understanding.  It was amazingly stressful and difficult.  I often wonder if my, I often wonder if I would have been a better parent and my child  would have had a stronger start if I worked for my current employee then.  Humans realizing that is still me sad.  So if you are actually in a position to change stuff, do it.  Or if you can talk to your employee or management, whatever, do it.  It's extremely important.  Just quite quick numbers from the aesthetic agency.  Usually in Germany you get 1.5 childs, even we get less in Barcelona.  And just to wrap up and finish, we all have been kids who have been parents who have been  stressed.  I don't want to see more parents who are stressed by having kids because it's kind of a common  responsibility.  Because at the end of the day, who's going to pay our pensions?  Our kids.  Yeah.  So it's very important.  And I stopped talking.  39 minutes.  What's kind of good?  First of all, thank you very much for your presentation.  I'm here to take questions.  I don't have prices of my colleague.  She got everything for a question.  No questions?  Even comments.  I mean, it's time to see if this actually makes you sad or not.  Because it makes me sad.  And I want to change stuff.  So that's why I actually wanted to do this presentation.  Do you think it's destructive to have your kids close to your workplace?  It is.  And how do you deal with that?  I have actually have another room for him to play at home.  I'm working now.  We have an office in Berlin, but I used to work from home a lot of times.  Basically have a room for him and a room for me.  But it makes sense that it's destructive.  It's challenging.  My whole story here is try to improve it because it is stressful.  And you might actually lose talent in order to do that thing.  Yeah.  Anything else?  No questions.  Oh, you all were sleeping.  It was just a time, so.  So you're still around this afternoon at the probably at the Elasticz booth?  I'm going to be around.  If you see one title that actually screams a lot, it's mine.  Okay, that's easy to figure out.  So once again, thank you very much.
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