Married technology pros find life is full of late-night calls from India, travel and tech talk at home.
For Doug and Ellen Chick’s 13-year-old daughter, spending an evening in a server room doing homework on the floor is not unusual. As the child of a pair of network managers, she’s had to come along for the ride more than once when an emergency calls one of her parents back to work after hours.
“My daughter has written her name on the underside of some of the most expensive equipment in the world,” jokes Doug, the 43-year-old director of IS for Katsur Management in Orlando.
That’s one of the downsides to being network managers in love – both partners are always on call. This can mean priorities at home take a back seat; the dog doesn’t get walked, the school play is missed, an algebra assignment is done behind a server rack.
Life’s no easier for Jeff and Andrea Westerinen, a pair of product developers who both work for technology companies. When laundry doesn’t get done at the Westerinen household because of crazy travel schedules or long evenings at work, Jeff, a 48-year-old architect at Microsoft, suggests the family just buy new underwear. His wife, Andrea, an architect at Cisco, doesn’t react quite as breezily. “When we’re really busy, who worries about dinner and the laundry?” asks Andrea, also 48. “That’s probably my domain.”
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It’s not that demanding travel and long hours are unique to technology professionals, but Andrea feels this industry puts more pressure on employees than most. “You’re expected to be on e-mail, to be accessible, to do your phone calls with India at bizarre times of the day. In the high-technology business, you bring your work home with you,” says Andrea, who spends two weeks a month away from the family’s home in Seattle at Cisco’s San Jose office, in addition to other travel.
When Andrea and Jeff’s travel schedules collide, the couple calls in reinforcements. They have flown in family members from other states to take care of their 11-year-old daughter when they’re both on the road, and often rely on neighborhood kids to feed their pet snake, tortoise and fish when they’re working late and their daughter is staying with a friend.
Most frustrating for her is when travel makes her miss her daughter’s concerts. “That’s the worst,” she says, “when you feel maybe the industry is costing you too much.”
Family vacations at Comdex?
The Chicks, who occasionally attend industry conferences together, have been known to bring their daughter to local events, but have stopped short of turning work-related travel into family travel. “I don’t think our daughter would be too happy if we announced that this year’s family vacation was going to be at Comdex,” says Ellen Chick, a network engineer with a network consulting company also in Orlando.
Managing home life can be particularly challenging when both partners begin the second part of their workday after dinner. Such is the case for Lakshmi Sailaja, a senior consultant with software development outsourcer Sierra Atlantic, and her husband, Balaji Gangishetty, who is a principal consultant with the same company. The couple met at Sierra Atlantic’s Indian office in Hyderabad and two years ago moved to Fremont, Calif., to work for the company’s U.S. operations.
Both need to be in contact with the company’s Indian office multiple times a week, which because of the time difference means calling overseas at about 10 p.m. “I’m sitting in one room of the house on the phone, and she’s sitting in another room on the phone,” Gangishetty says. “Some days you get into calls that go until 12 at night . . . you come out of the call, and your mind is still on it for the next half an hour.”
The couple has set a few basic rules to keep work from swallowing up their lives: no talking about work over dinner and no working on the weekends.
Allowing for work-related chatter at home can be both good and bad, says Ellen Chick. “There have been times when [Doug] has been telling me about a particularly frustrating encounter with an end user, and I find myself living it and getting frustrated too,” she says. “Sometimes it’s like, ‘I’ve already lived one day at work, I really don’t want to come home and live another one.’ “
But it also means partners can vent without having to provide context. “Let’s face it, any IT person coming home to a non-IT person is not going to get to have a 30-minute conversation about the new server they just racked,” Ellen says.
“It is fantastic to have someone with enough commonality in the type of work I do that she can understand and relate to the situations and problems I encounter at work,” echoes Jeff Westerinen about Andrea.
But the Westerinens also know what it means to be too close to their spouse’s job; they worked together at IBM, NCR, Intel and Microsoft before Andrea was hired by Cisco.
“Then it was harder to talk about work. It’s hard when your spouse likes somebody and you hate them,” says Andrea, who has vowed to never work for the same company as her husband again. “It got almost incestuous: You couldn’t vent to the other person because they knew the situation.”
So after a long day at work, who fixes the home network when it’s on the fritz? “Somehow I’m always the one playing IT administrator when things go wrong with the [home] network or computers, which I absolutely hate,” Jeff Westerinen says.
Leaving management of the home network to her husband is one of the secrets to limiting arguments, Ellen Chick says. “Having two people manage the same network is like two people cooking the same meal . . . in one pot . . . in a camper,” she says. “I don’t mess with it.”
