8, 7, and 3 1/2 Either they all go to day care or they all stay home. If they all stay home, I save about $300 a month during the summer, and $500 a month during the school year. Not chump change. I'm in line at work to be promoted to a system architect, the position directly above me is open. I've been promised the job, but I have to "perform". I've been told I'm "doing a great job".

When all 3 kids are home, I'm about 1/2 as productive as I am at work. But conference calls and such are really bad because my kids want to interrupt.

I worked from home 2 days last week, kids at school. I was supposed to get design documentation done. I didn't get as much done as I would like, mainly because my wife had a list of items that needed to be taken care of. I had worked the previous weekend. Now I've got to work some this weekend to catch up. Friday, I worked at the office. At the office, I have two people who work with me that want to "chat", plus I'm training my new maanger. My principal timewaster probably took about 1 hour from my day, the 2nd 30 minutes. I ended up staying late to train my new manager (1 1/2 hours), and take a 4pm conference call (1 1/2 hours). The VP sent everyone else home at 2pm. I left about 5:30pm. In the 7 hours, I was in the office, about 6 hours were taken up in "team leader" activites, and only about an hour was available to design/document stuff.

Part of the problem is that I'm a "nice guy" who doesn't like to brush off people easily. I need "deadlines" to press me to complete things. So far, I haven't been given deadlines, I've been expected to come up with my own.

Part of the problem is that I'm team leader of 4 people, project manager, and the principal architect on the project. I have a new manager. There aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done. I've made my priority to keep everyone working on relevant stuff, but that has push things like "high level design documents" to the background.

I'm frustrated. I have another job offer, but I'd rather do Linux/J2EE/Oracle than .Net and all things Microsoft.

But, I could bail out for about 15% more money.

Glen Austin