I've been doing retirement planning the last week. I'm 40 and I figure that I have
at least ten years left before I could consider retiring so I've been thinking about what the next chunk of my career will look like.
I've hopped around a bunch of different companies in my career -- small startups, big public companies, non-profits -- and all of them seemed to have a distinct lack of "old people" working there. Usually a couple folks in the mid forties, almost none in their fifties. Nobody with white hair or grown adult children.
So, where are the old techies? A few ideas:
- They are clustered into specific companies that were booming back when they were younger and they haven't moved
- It just seems like there's very few of them because there's been such massive growth in the field that it seems young
- Everybody in tech either fails and drops out, burns out, or becomes independently wealthy at a young age
- They've all ascended to management and I don't see them because I'm stubbornly sticking to being an IC?
Seeing that I've already been the token 'old guy' on most of my teams for at least ~five years, I'm curious how this will unfold over the next several years.
I've hopped around a bunch of different companies in my career -- small startups, big public companies, non-profits -- and all of them seemed to have a distinct lack of "old people" working there. Usually a couple folks in the mid forties, almost none in their fifties. Nobody with white hair or grown adult children.
So, where are the old techies? A few ideas:
- They are clustered into specific companies that were booming back when they were younger and they haven't moved
- It just seems like there's very few of them because there's been such massive growth in the field that it seems young
- Everybody in tech either fails and drops out, burns out, or becomes independently wealthy at a young age
- They've all ascended to management and I don't see them because I'm stubbornly sticking to being an IC?
Seeing that I've already been the token 'old guy' on most of my teams for at least ~five years, I'm curious how this will unfold over the next several years.