Jenni Snyder is a Lead Database Administrator at Yelp and a mother of a 15 month old daughter. She is really passionate about her job. As you would gather from her LinkedIn profile, she has over a decade of experience as a DBA, but she just recently became a mother.
I had an opportunity to talk to her about experiences as a professional mother.
In the previous post, we talked how she prepared herself for this responsibility without letting her career fall behind. In this post we talk about how she manages her work responsibility with a child at home.
Q: What was your role in the company when you discovered you were expecting? Did it affect your current work or future assignments?
- Yelp is a pretty flat engineering organization,and my title has been MySQL DBA the whole time I’ve been here, and I love my work.
- I was the first DBA, but the team has grown; we even hired a new team member while I was out on leave!
- When I found out that I was expecting and I told my manager, he was incredibly supportive. We kept the lines of communication open. We planned for me to write up documentation and pass off projects before I went on leave..
- Since we had great team, I was quite confident, and knew that critical work would be taken care of. I knew that everything would be taken care of, and took my maternity leave in peace.
Q:How did you prevent yourself from lagging behind your peers during this time?
- I did know that some things would certainly change while I was on leave. There was a large puppet refactor while I was away that I had to familiarize myself with, but it was a good learning experience, and I’m glad it was done.
- In the grand scheme of things, three months is a very small period of time. We don’t work at a breakneck pace. There isn’t competition between colleagues, and we have reasonable expectations that re-boarding from maternity leave takes a little time.
- As long as communication is clear, everything works out. All of my team knew that I am definitely coming back, they know that I love my job and I wouldn’t be gone for long.
Q: What is your typical workday and weekend like? I bet it would have changed drastically since you have become a parent.
- Engineers typically tend to stay for later hours in the day and come in late in the morning. My standard hours are 8–4. This enables my husband to do morning handoff to our nanny and in the evening I can take over from her.
- I try to manage my inbox and list out the important things for the day. This allows me really focus on 2–3 things and leaves time for interruptions.
- As my daughter is only 15 months old, feeding her is really important. So, I cook something for her around 6 in the evening. In morning we breakfast together, she loves green smoothies.
- Sometimes, I do come in online later. As she gets to bed around 7 PM and gets up around 6:30. I have around 12 hours to myself and my partner.
Q: On a related note, given that you’re a DBA, there would be on call duties associated with it.. Do you find time to get back to work from home?
Actually I am on call today!
But yeah, we are first responders to alerts during the day, and the European operations team takes over at night. So, the shifts are broken up, and that makes it easier. Also, our team follows good devops practices. For the DBA monitors, we have lots of automated responses, and Runbooks for operators to follow when someone does get paged. And, when I do get paged, my my husband is happy to take my daughter out for a walk. He’s in software engineering too, and knows that’s how it goes.
Q: When you have to stay for longer duration in office or have offsites, how do you manage with your family waiting at home for you?
- I try to limit my after hours work activities to one night every two weeks or so. My daughter is a ton of fun, and I want to balance being home with her, special alone nights with my husband, and work activities as much as possible.
- We have one regular baby-sitter, but we maintain relationship with others as well. In reality, sometimes even the regular childcare falls through, and we’re lucky to have my parents and mother-in-law nearby if we need extra help.
- We had a Yelp Moms group lunch at the office once, and my colleague had great advice. She said: “Don’t have one baby sitter, have five”. I’m working on building up that network now.
Q: Do you approve of this divide that we have as a society for working/stay-at-home moms? We don’t see this being a question for dads. What according to you can help us rise over this deep-rooted ideology?
Society does unfairly judge women, even by asking this question. Traditionally, the perception was that child suffers when mom works, but recent studies have shown that children raised in the household with working moms grow up to respectful for women and are more independent.
The intellectual stimulation I get from my work is very fulfilling. I didn’t particularly feel successful when I was home alone with my newborn all day; I was still adapting. The kind of satisfaction I get from having solved a difficult problem is hard to come by from changing diapers, but this is my experience, and it’s different for everyone.
We need to let women decide for themselves whether to work or stay at home, but today there is a lot of imbalance that doesn’t always make it a fair choice.
Q: Given an option to stay-at-home and enjoy being a mom for your kids, would you leave your job?
As I said, I really enjoy my job here — the problem solving, feeling successful, working with others, and growing. Perhaps, when my daughter is older and my time with her is more valuable, I will look for greater flexibility, but it’s fine now.
Read Jenni’s advice on how to prepare yourself to be a good mother.
Originally published at www.pimothers.com.
