Older tech workers are tapping out early

futuraperdita

I’m not sure why this is interesting. Wealthy people often retire early, and if you’ve spent three decades at Microsoft, you likely could have retired a very long time ago.

throwfaraway4

I'll be hanging up my hat (mid 40s) in a few months after 20+ years working as an engineer. The culmination of having our second child, corporate politics, and the hustle of it all (false urgency/deadlines) led me to take a hard look at what we wanted and our finances. We were fortunate to live below our means and save during our careers and move to a lower COL state prior to COVID. Obviously a lot of the reasons related to family and corporate is normal and expected as a career progresses but I can't help feel like the AI factor has a lot of folks unsatisfied with their jobs. Coding agents have killed the craftsmanship side of the equation; sure you can still write it by hand but you'll drag on the team and fall behind ect. Anyway, it's been a good run and I hope that future engineers still find a viable path to a good lifestyle. I don't want to be the only one that was lucky.

ErroneousBosh

I'm kind of at this point. I'm 52, I have a child, I am not working on things I want to work on, and the place I work for is going in a direction that's taking my job further away from things I want to work on. So recently I thought, fuck it, I'll go back to fixing tractors. The money's okay, and people are *really really grateful* when you drive out to the middle of their field at 11pm to weld some irreplaceable broken part back together.

rekabis

Sooooo… not only are companies kneecapping juniors by refusing to hire them, thereby starving the employee pipeline of future seniors, but now those very seniors are tapping out? Sounds like the entire software dev field is going to implode violently within a few years, causing many companies to go titsup due to a sheer lack of experienced devs. Only those who have a war chest large enough to allow them to pay through the nose will still be standing.

fred_is_fred

Tech workers are lucky that for many of us this is possible. You don't see "older nurses are tapping out early" because financially they can't.

indycliff

30 years at Microsoft. I think he'll be fine. Us B and C tier company employees with low six figure salaries and 5 year vesting schedules will be going as long as someone continues to pay us.

spl757

Car mechanics at dealerships are in shortage. You use a laptop more than a wrench these days, and they want people with tech experience now. If you are struggling to look for tech work, that's a tech-adjacent job market right now, at least here on the east coast of the US.

matrix87

My plan is to just stay in the game as long as possible and bag as much money as possible. Delay family formation (gen z) or buying property so that the money is liquid. Job hop as needed because of all of the consolidation and acquisitions that are happening right now. If the whole industry implodes, I'll probably just go and get another degree or a PhD and try to pivot into an adjacent field. But for right now, I think that staying in tech makes the most sense. The WSJ and these other bootlicker newspapers want people to be uneducated and unable to move abroad or escape the corporate hellscape this country is turning into. More money is more freedom from these managerial cunts who are stumbling over themselves to fuck up everything. I genuinely think that things will not positively change until the educated people start leaving the US en masse and shit up the whole US economy. But I'm wondering if anyone here can chime in with smart ways to pivot where you can apply the same type of skillset that leads someone to do well in SWE. Is statistics a good route?