Balancing Bottles & Models
Co-written with Reem Mahmoud, PhD
If you are a parent, you get it. If not, imagine this: You’re finishing work on a Friday, trying to tweak a model for that glimmer of hope before the weekend. Epoch 5 is showing promise, but suddenly, it all falls apart. You decide to do a bit more work — just 30 minutes — but you wake up, face down on your keyboard, and it’s 2 AM. Your model’s no better, your kernel is dead, VS Code needs an update, and your OS won’t let you update without the latest release.
That’s truthfully a bit like the state of mind you’re in putting a newborn/toddler to sleep. Welcome to parenthood! It’s tough but oddly wonderful.
Now, why are we talking about parenting and AI? Well, first, in honour of Mental Health Day, we want to shed light on the emotional and mental challenges faced by working parents from the perspective of two moms working in this field. Secondly, because our industry is so young, many leaders are young as well. Hence, the moment of becoming an AI/Data Lead often coincides with becoming a parent. This is what drives us to be here with you sharing the beauty and hurdles of navigating raising children while balancing tech lead roles in our industry.
Being a working parent is hard. Being one in a rapidly evolving field that’s reshaping the world can also be very challenging. We’ll share our perspective on what it’s like for us to balance our career and motherhood along with some tips that might help you find your own balance.
Most importantly, we hope to inspire you, parent or not, to address your personal, mental, and emotional challenges in this demanding field and prioritize self-care and a healthy work-life balance.
What does our motherhood look like?
Reem is a stay-at-home mom of 2-year-old Ayla who works a full-time remote role as the Director of Data Science in an early-stage startup.
Maria is an MLOps tech lead in a large corporate organization, working full-time mostly from home. Mom of 2 kids, son Timur (5.5 years old) and a 4-year-old daughter Nina.
Q: Reem, what does your current work-parenting situation look like?
I remember having the luxury of taking a 3 month maternity leave since I was working at my own startup with a team who was great at handling things while I was away. I was also in my last year of completing my doctorate, where I luckily could take a full semester for maternity leave. And yes, I say “luxury” and “luckily” because many women where I live only get 6 weeks of maternity leave (6 weeks!!!!)
I eased back into my work and was finishing my dissertation while having my baby with me at home full time. I personally made a choice to not go for a daycare. Today, my daughter is 2 years old, and I am still working from home while being home with her full time. I love this setup; I’m able to do what I love, do it flexibly, and enjoy my baby all at the same time. This does not come easy though.
In the early stages of motherhood, I struggled with a profound sense of disconnection from my former self. I found myself questioning my choices, my ability to return to my career while caring for a young baby, and my capacity to manage it all. The hormonal shifts that accompany childbirth are substantial, for me emerging at a delay (e.g., around 6 months postpartum). Consequently, I didn’t initially recognize the source of my feelings and blamed myself for not efficiently handling my life. On a deeper emotional level, I was navigating a profound identity transformation. I was no longer the person I had been on the morning of October 1, 2021. Little did I know that, despite the challenges, I was being productionized into the best Reem release yet — Reem v5.0.0.
Adding to the challenges, my cultural background and, in some instances, the expectations of loved ones placed unrealistic expectations on me. I was expected to be a full-time mom, hold a successful career, care for my home, be a present spouse, check in with family and friends, and somehow be presentable through it all. WHAT?! It took me a long, long time to realize that it is OKAY to prioritize and put other things aside. As I adjusted better to motherhood, I was able to slowly better manage my other responsibilities.
Today, my daughter is 2. Some things are a lot easier — sleep, feeds, having more independent play, better communication with her — while some new difficulties arise. Even though hormonal changes and cultural expectations are challenges I have overcome, I still face continued challenges while balancing my mom and career duties.
The guilt and the pleasure of raising my child while building the career I love so much intertwine in a humbling dance that occasionally brings me to my knees. I would be lying if I don’t share that I often go through emotional rollercoasters where I question my choices of trying to maintain this balance.
Every day, during work calls, I feel self-conscious when my daughter interrupts or acts out. I worry about how my colleagues perceive it — do they understand the challenges I face and appreciate my professionalism? The key is having confidence in your team, one that values family. Fortunately, I’m part of such a team.
At the end of the day, it just never feels like it’s enough. But then nothing usually does, no?
All these challenges are things I navigated over long periods of time. I resolved them by working on developing an internal mental shift, asking for and accepting support, and building effective systems and routines.
I dive here into the challenges to shed light on the fact that going through these things is NORMAL, and it shall pass. The thing is, despite all these challenges, I could not write enough to describe the joy, meaning, and bliss that filled my life with Ayla’s introduction to mine.
Q: Maria, what about you? You have two children. How have you handled work-parenting life since their birth to date?
Becoming a mom changes you forever. You get a completely new personality and have to start discovering yourself all over again. You do not feel like yourself, and on top of that, you need to figure out how to take care of a new human being.
When I was pregnant with my son, I did not realize how big the change would be and thought I could just keep doing what I was doing. My work is part of my personality, I love my work, I love learning, and used to take a lot of online courses to keep up with the developments in the field.
In the Netherlands, you get 4–6 weeks of pregnancy and 10–12 weeks of maternity leave (16 weeks in total). When I was on my pregnancy leave, I thought: oh, finally I have all the time to do the course I wanted, and also be the Udacity mentor, and read the book, and the paper… How wrong I was. In those 16 weeks, I did the course, became the mentor, and read the books, but it would have been much better for my mental health just to take a break. The fear of missing out got in my way. I am sure many moms in fast-paced environments (data, AI, IT) face the same.
When my son was 3 months old, I returned to work (3 days in the office, 2 days at home). He would spend 3 days & 2 nights per week with grandpa and grandma (which is quite unusual for the Netherlands, and I am very thankful to my parents-in-law for their support.) On those days, I could concentrate on my work and spend time with my husband; other days, I would juggle between work and taking care of Timur.
When Timur was 1 year old, I got pregnant with my daughter Nina, and I knew straight away, I would not be trying to do it all anymore and take it easy. I started working 4 days per week, which already made a difference. I also did not plan any activities for myself during the 16-week leave. Even though I was not hard on myself, it turned out not to be easy to have two small kids, one going through the toddler phase (even with having such amazing help from the family.)
Work was always an escape for me, something that gave me energy and a sense of accomplishment. When I returned back to work, I moved to another department, and it did not quite fit my expectations. I was mainly busy with executing tasks and not so much with the big picture, so it started costing me energy. At the same time, sleepless nights, taking care of kids, not feeling like yourself… It takes time to admit something is going wrong, and I ended up being diagnosed with depression.
It has been quite a journey to get out of it. There is no recipe that works for everyone, but what matters the most is putting yourself first. Going through therapy, reading non-work related books, meditating, doing yoga, following a sleeping schedule, and having proper meals. Basic things help. It took me 6 months of sick leave to finally feel better. I ended up switching jobs as well.
Now my kids are 5.5 and 4 years old. They both go to school, have a proper sleeping schedule, they can play on their own, and let us sleep (mostly). Every 2–3 weeks, they spend a weekend with grandma and grandpa. I have now time to concentrate on my work and have more time for myself and our side hustle Marvelous MLOps. I got better at saying NO and prioritizing things that matter.
What I know is that doing my work makes me feel fulfilled and having kids makes me a better person. My career and my family are both parts of me, and both parts make me happy. It is all about finding the right balance. Not sure someone has ever found it, but we all are trying.
How do we navigate our career maze?
Q: Reem, what does your day-to-day look like in your current role, and what are your responsibilities? What are the role challenges that you face and how do you navigate those?
I started my current role a year and a half ago as the Director of Data Science at an early-stage startup. The startup environment was nothing new to me. I could foresee the challenges my role would entail and how exciting it would be to embark on that journey. Despite knowing that working with an early-stage startup (basically starting from an idea) would likely mean handling multiple roles and having limited resources, I seem to have still underestimated the task!
Let me tell you a bit more about what I do with our team before diving into some of the hurdles I had to navigate over the past 18 months. Our team is building an AI-powered video interviewing solution that carries out a behavioral assessment of candidates and recommends the top best fits for a given open role to the hiring manager. What my role essentially means at our current scale is that I’m the person fully responsible for the AI product of our solution. This involves me being the AI strategist, AI product manager, and AI engineer — doing data science work, ML engineering, and MLOps all at once. I naturally also heavily collaborate with cross-team members like our subject matter experts, solution architect, development team, C-level management, as well as clients where needed.
I have loved the privilege of building our product from nothing to where it is today. I also was challenged beyond my expectations, navigating seasons where data was almost non-existent, no resources were available to support me in what I do, and striving through the early stages of our beta product and the many fixes and improvements that had to be done to get to the reliable product we offer today.
Reflecting, I see that most of my challenges were primarily personal and secondly technical. While working with management and stakeholders has been positive, one ongoing challenge for me has been juggling the multiple hats I have to wear in my role. I’m both a maker and a manager, which requires frequent shifts in mindset, from detailed development work to high-level strategic thinking — sometimes within a single day. I have to structure my days delicately to get focus work done in my peak performance hours while handling calls and collaborative work during my more creative hours.
From a technical standpoint, I’m dealing with a complex data science problem related to assessing behavioral competencies like collaboration skills. The challenge lies in the subjective nature of this assessment, where humans themselves can perceive and evaluate the same person differently. It was crucial to have clear and scientifically-backed criteria on which our assessment would be designed. Another aspect that continues to challenge me to date is handling the discrepancy between the ML and MLOps “best practices” recommended by large corporations and what is suitable, reasonable, and needed for us as an early-stage organization. Lastly, the latest technical challenge I am occupied by today is monitoring and ensuring the fairness, privacy, and trustworthiness of our solution.
This has been the most fulfilling career journey to date for me. It has challenged me on all levels — as an engineer, as a team lead and team player, as a creative, and as a human being. I have had huge highs with multiple burnouts along this journey. What supports me most along the way is my team and my family (and yes, the 2-year-old daughter who also constantly challenges me on multiple levels, as you know by now. 🙂)
Q: Maria, can you share with us your responsibilities and challenges faced in your role today? How do you overcome these challenges and focus on maintaining outcomes?
I work as a Manager of ML engineering for one of the largest retailers in the world. The organization is quite complex, we have 19 brands across the world, all with their own leadership. I am leading the central team, where we try to standardize the process of deployment for machine learning models. It is not an easy task to do.
In my current role, I bridge the gap between data scientists and platform teams, and work on tools that help data science teams bring models to production themselves with as little dependency on other teams as possible.
The main challenges I face are people related. Here are some examples to illustrate that. When I started my current role, data science teams and DevOps/ platform teams at the brands had an established way of working. For some brands, it was far from optimal, data scientists were handing models over to the DevOps team to deploy them. The process took ages, data scientists were frustrated. Not speaking about the ML-specific problems that appeared after the initial model deployment and were not properly monitored.
The DevOps team (mainly consisting of constantly changing externals) was not taking complaints seriously, so we wanted to take over the process of deployment. It took many meetings to convince everyone that the current way of working is not following MLOps standards, gain the trust, and finally get the permissions we needed. In total, such a change required the whole year. It was a great exercise in patience and persistence. At the same time at home with two young kids, you have to be patient and persistent as well. This results (sometimes) in 14 hour days where you need mental fortitude.
Now we have built an MLOps framework that supports 6 European brands and 30 machine learning projects. I kind of combine 3 roles in 1: Product manager, Tech lead, and developer. I talk to the stakeholders, gather their feedback, define the roadmap and tasks for the team to work on, promote what we do to get more budget, and also code/ give feedback to other developers. How much time I spend on writing the code varies from time to time; sometimes I mainly code, and sometimes I mainly have meetings/ work on presentations. I like doing both, but juggling all these responsibilities is not an easy task.
It is a challenging role. What helps me when I get frustrated is accepting how things are (yeah, it sounds easier than it is) and trying to focus on what I can do to improve it (and not so much on the things I can not influence right now). And I find that acceptance at work leaves room for needed headspace at home.
There’s no secret sauce
It is World Mental Health Day today. We shared here each of our unique journeys as working moms in the world of data science and AI. We have overcome a lot while trying to achieve this balance. Yet, we know that different stages of our careers and different changes of our children’s development will require us to keep adjusting.
We are not mental health professionals. We merely offer our humble stories to emphasize the importance of finding the right balance between career and family and the resilience required to navigate the complex maze of work and parenting.
It is okay to face challenges, and we encourage you to seek support if you are facing them. Ultimately, we hope that as you navigate your own unique complex maze, you will find personal growth and fulfilment in both your career and parenthood — just as we have.
