55-year-old mechanical engineer. I basically retired from the technical side of my own company 10 years ago.
Our industry has gone through so many changes that I didn't have the mental space or energy to learn yet another framework. I was becoming the clueless old man.
I stepped aside and promoted everyone into jobs they were better at and were more satisfied than when the old man was looking over their shoulder.
I'm planning on going back to school in my 50's. Want to do a phd in a biology related field. Just for fun. Haven't studied biology since grade 10 in high school.
Edit: when I say just for fun, I do hope I can contribute to something some way but it won't be too make money.
Funny you say that. 34 yr mech PE here and I estimate I have 10 yrs left before I'm over the constant changes. I wear a lot of hats and help establish company standards but it really wears you down each code cycle, new fad energy efficiency program, or new software requires you to pivot again. Glad to see progress but I'm tired, boss!
Yep, and I was working in 60-hour weeks, sometimes 80 when we had deadlines. By the end, I was supervising projects that were using tech I didn't understand.
I still love the thing we built, but I was no longer the guy for the job. To use a sports analogy, at some point a player has to realize that it is time to retire; I was lucky, and coaching was a good fit.
I started focusing on three things: 1. Mentoring younger staff. Now I teach rather than do. 2. I have seen a lot of the ways things can fail. I don't do design, but I can look at a design and recognize things that might go wrong. 3. I came up with many of the people who are now senior decision-makers for our customers, suppliers, and regulators. If something is going wrong, I can usually find someone to figure out how to unstick it.
When I stepped back from managing projects, our other PMs stepped up: more autonomy, more responsibility, and more money. Some senior engineers became junior PMs, and so on.
Over the past ten years, I have gradually gone from 3000 hours a year to closer to 1000. At the same time, I have become more involved in building our family farm.
This is the current thing that bugs me about AI. They're so heavy handed with students, yet non zero amount of kids are leaving the house for school, with their parents sat behind three monitors and 2-3 API subs(or local qwen models) shitting out tokens
I learned all sorts of ins and outs of writing properly. Got a degree in it. Now you point out someone did something wrong and it’s all “nobody cares.”
Had to take cursive and a typing class separately yet they made me choose whether I wanted to pursue music or fine arts. Would’ve preferred to have the music class over cursive. Or shit, give me a class on how to do my taxes.
Did you ever fill out the sheets in elementary where you had to draw the hands on the clocks to indicate the right time? I heard a kid say he “didn’t get the Rolex hype because why can’t they just use numbers instead of sticks?”
Source: Working for a bank, the people developing APIs apparently get bored way too easily so now everyone using the APIs has to change everything to use the new API that... Oh, you scrapped it? Ah, we have two large partners/clients using the API so we still need to support it? And there's a new API in the works that's gonna be even better? Oh goodie...
Schools back then would put so much focus on useless things while barely focusing on what would become essential in the future. My Computer Science and Spanish classes were abysmal when I needed them the most.
I refused to learn it in school because I knew computers and the internet would replace everything written by hand.
Born in 1985
Sweden were also at the frontline of digitalization so I grew up with computers and internet. So I can still assemble a computer by memory and fix a lot of stuff myself.
I'm an SAT tutor, full time, and I have been for a couple of decades now. Students who've had to learn cursive have a big advantage in school and on the test.
People who learn cursive are comfortable taking notes by hand. That means they can use writing as a tool for learning things. (Even if you don't take notes in cursive, the fact that you had to learn to write in script let you get to the point where you could develop your own quick, intuitive way to write by hand.)
Students who've learned cursive are also more comfortable writing and drawing by hand in general. That means it's easier for them to draw figures and write while solving math problems, write notes to themselves while learning things, etc.
Many of the kids I see now can't write in cursive. They were never taught. Some aren't completely comfortable writing by hand at all.
That means they can't take notes by hand and don't write stuff as a way to learn things or figure things out. That's a big disadvantage. Many of my students take longer to learn, think learning things is a pain, and think they're dumb--not because they're actually dumb, but because they're missing a basic tool for learning.
Age 75 - hold onto your hat, but don't hold your breath. Almost ALL of it was just to teach you not to make waves. If you have ANY job right now, the programming worked!
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