As context, I am in my late 30's, I'm a dev with a 3 and 1.5 year old, and I aim to build a side-business leveraging AI in some form starting in January while doing my due diligence and ideation this year. As more background, I did start a startup in my late 20's that failed before marriage and kids and entrepreneurship runs in my family - so I have a strong emotional desire to build again.
I give that context to help you see what I mean that the reason side projects and leet code have taken a back seat to your other initiatives (playing/building a relationship with your kids, time with your spouse, maintaining progression or status quo in your job to make a living) is that you haven't found a way to make it a true priority in your mind.
An analogy I find useful for myself to be honest with my own priorities is to think about your other life initiatives as epics on a Jira board. And during backlog grooming and at the beginning of every quarter and sprint, your team is tasked to re-evaluate competing tasks from different epics - some of which you have committed to at the start of the quarter and need to deliver an outcome by the end of the quarter, and some that are aspirational - like cleaning up tech debt most times. As you know being an sw engineer, some things just end up perpetually in the backlog.
And applying that to family life, with kids, you ultimately ended up with 2 new initiatives, one for each kid (each epic with their own stories and things you'd like to do and you find important). And this, for the first time in most people lives creates a true time constraint because now you can't possibly do all stories for all the epics in your life. So you have to pick and chose wisely.
Emotionally, this is hard to come to grips with and accept - for myself especially on a daily with my strong dive and frustration I can't capitalize on the AI moment now with the speed I wish I could had I not had kids. But in my heart, the Kids epics will always take priority and I derive a lot of personal, non financial, satisfaction from working on them.
So in this framework of thinking of your life ^, you can then begin to do the grinding work of trying to constantly figure out how to do other personally important epics from the backlog by trying to "kill 2 birds with 1 stone" like I try to do by combining kid activities with my backlog tasks - ex. make a morning quiet time routine for the kids to play with each other on the weekends when I have the most energy and clear thought to make progress on ideation and try to think of the next steps in testing my business ideas either by doing or just spending time to think.
This ^ type of constant thinking is only present if you truly value the other epics in your backlog (for you it could be side project or leetcode) and don't find it even more draining to think about. If you emotionally feel drained thinking of doing those tasks, then you won't have clear emotional alignment and as a result, never want to try to squeeze in these tasks into an already fully committed sprint or quarter of epics/tasks related to your family and job.
For many, including myself, leetcode's lack of clear deterministic value to career growth often makes it hard for me to really want to focus on it. Whereas, I have strong desire throughout my life to build a company of my own.
I'll give you an example of how strong my desire to start a company by next year by saying, I purposefully looked for jobs this year that did not prioritize my upward corporate trajectory to director of eng and instead looked for months softly on LinkedIn and just asking around for contract jobs or full-time jobs that paid well (maintained our family afloat and met the requirements of my epic of paying bills) and did not demand more than exactly 40 hours a week where I had to even think about the work during off-hours. And I was fortunate enough to have one show up within 4 months. And now doing this job, I can easily spend 30 hours a week thinking/doing work for that job and now have 10 hours during the week, when the kids are in daycare!, to focus on build.
And as context, a year ago I did not have this strong of a desire because there was not a great new tech shift to make building a company easier, and secondly, I was highly focused on having my 2nd child (our decided last) and just getting him to an age where he could be more autonomous (around 1.25 yrs old I've found for this guy). So my "epic" of starting a company was not a strong emotional desire because the pieces and timing were not there.
I say this in order to maybe help in framing how to make sense of your own prioritization in your heart on these other things you want to do. Sometimes the timing is not right just as it is in the corporate world and why you do quarterly business reviews in Google or other companies to dynamically realign based on the situation around you to make that one initiative seem like it is the right time. If you are a business strategy nut like me, you should read Working Backwards the book for an anecdote on how even Jeff Bezos could not force Amazon Prime to happen. He wanted them to deliver that promise of 2 day delivery but not all the pieces were there and quarter after quarter they tried to "kill 2 birds with 1 stone" by fitting all the pieces needed to make Amazon Prime possible logistically with other immediately impactful initiatives.
This is just to say ^ even in work, companies face the same constraint problem you have with your 3 and 6 year old - they want to do amazing things now but can't because there are 50 other immediately impactful and amazing epics to work on. And depending on how strong a drive there is by leaders to get those done, they can either wither away or be incrementally worked on by trying to "kill 2 birds with 1 stone".
Hope this framing helps you find your drive and filter through your personal emotional priorities to find a productive path forward on your current backlog initiatives of "side projects" or "leetcode for career development or job security"
Feel you 100. When I was a startup founder, I tried holing myself in my apt for a week thinking I would be productive. By day 3 I noticed I was not as sharp and mentally wandering. So I went to get a coffee and the exchange with the cashier boosted my endorphins.
And I reflected on that experience a decade ago realizing I put myself into solitary confinement - a prison punishment - and covid did that to billions of people who didn’t realize that social interaction is at the center of what gives us energy. So I deeply empathize.
True of bad managers. And in large orgs they are not isolated, usually a group under a bad director or vp of a division.
And totally agree on the work being visibly the exact same output if not more in my case.
But one example I can give is how for certain folks who want to build a professional career or want to grow, they need to know who in what group they can connect with. And in office it looks like you sometimes seeing a person many gravitate towards and ask about them and find out they are a somebody. In slack there are no similar strong signals and you have to browse many channels and who knows if they would accept your zoom invite to connect. And in most orgs, driving this kind of connection building is nearly impossible remote - asking an introvert to go be social is hard enough in person let alone ask them to browse slack channels.
And as a byproduct most people stagnate, feel alone. How do you try and make friends? How do you try to find people like you? Productivity is there but feeling of any other benefit from work is gone and lets be honest, not all software work is meaningful and clearly adds to the bottom line. Adding unit tests to a codebase is a lot more tolerable when you have people you chit chat with on your breaks or go to lunch with. Again.. big corp type work situations. But I know it is also true of non high growth startups or medium sized companies as well. The KtLo work (keep the lights on) is needed but not super invigorating.
If you have enough leverage to know you don’t need relationships to be safe, to get promoted, to do what you want to do, more power to ya!
I speak of large orgs where not all people and teams can be like that. And unfortunately, large orgs cannot say “team a you stay wfh team b you come in since you need to gel with team c in office” due to fairness. So a one size fits all will be applied like Apple is doing.
Managers like ourselves make the mistake thinking our close relationships with our folks means the relationship between our folks and others are equally close. That is because as managers people publish their info to us and are incentivized to do so where as two peers are not. And in large orgs, how do you gain visibility as an IC or build good professional connections or connect multiple young engineers together, the introvert to other introverts? To replace in office collisions at lunch or at the vending machine is equivalent to finding and randomly zooming folks in chat groups which is hard since calendars are hard to get on. Lots of friction.
But I speak of large orgs here, not 100 person startup where some of these things can be more easily managed… but still I know these companies do a lot of offsites to make up for the lack of connection in office.
Short answer - relationships cannot be made via zoom. Thus, interactions are transaction based. I can provide a million examples of why this is a fact in as simple as online dating where you always want to end up meeting the person and digital correspondence is not sufficient to cross the boundary of trust between 2 humans.
…and trust is the one thing that gets you promoted, gets you the benefit of the doubt when you need to leave the office and inconveniently make your coworkers pickup your slack, provides a social barrier via awkward convo when your manager has to let someone go and is debating who vs the simplicity of 3 clicks to removing even a more productive person with whom they have no relationship with by just removing a person on slack and zoom and your jira board. Do you let go the person you know that has 2 kids and you met their kids and they do ok work vs the solo ic who does not seem to want to talk about anything but their work and go home? Surprise surprise most managers would easily coach the ok person they feel closer to vs even the most productive person who they cant get a read on and assume they may even leave some day. Humans being humans.
Trust also forms camaraderie, your tribe in an office, the people you can gripe to with trust in their silence vs someone can easily record or back talk you with your manager via zoom. In office, you can see where people move and who they talk to and thus their relationships.
Therefore, you cannot solve building better relationships via more technological solutions. Humans grasp many small pieces of meta data via in person contact.
Small companies may want whatever your solution is, but large ones where divisions need to scale and trust needs to scale already know this truth and will not buy into it. They would rather wait for covid to be less fearful amongst their constituents and bring them in office which is already happening at banks and apple and soon to be many other orgs next year.
BUT! For the fully remote small companies where work is distributed amongst maybe 20 people in different geos, maybe some small tools will work.
Just remember, a bunch of startups tried to build products to address this at the start if the pandemic and failed learning this truth that human relationships need in person contact.
And as you solicit more advice, notice how the proponents of wfh typically are in roles that are more transactional in nature or accept the risks of or want a more transactional relationship with their work. Most people, especially young ones without enough background understanding how human orgs work, will think they want wfh but in fact want in office with some flexibility to get their outside work life tasks done more easily. And it is not until peoples heads are on chopping blocks or they are passed up for a promotion that they will realize the mistake of wanting 100% remote work.