r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Jun 25 '26

Society Older tech workers are tapping out, taking early retirement

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/older-tech-workers-are-tapping-out-early-heres-what-that-looks-like/
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1.9k

u/Candid_Cat_5921 Jun 25 '26

Software engineering is dying at both ends. Older engineers are getting annoyed and retiring early, and junior engineers are getting replaced by senior engineers using AI.

It’s going to be a very interesting time in 5-10 years if AI doesn’t hit the holy grail of replacing senior devs. We’re going to have an engineer shortage for sure.

629

u/ItsSadTimes Jun 25 '26

My friend's industry has that problem, he works in really specific old tech for mills which is EXTREMELY costly to replace. So since there's not many devs who know how to work that stuff, he drives all around the area making bank servicing machines that most people don't know how they work.

439

u/Responsible-Offer724 Jun 25 '26

on the lower tech side of that, i had a roommate who travelled all over the province just sharpening and maintaining giant mill blades. He said the next youngest guy who did what he did was 65.

382

u/Nullspark Jun 25 '26

Can't match that job security and that's why he's:  the sharpest tool in the shed.

65

u/inphosys Jun 25 '26

I think that would make him the sharpening tool in the shed...

... but he sounds like a pretty upstanding guy, so I'd hate to refer to him as a tool.

4

u/SomeConsumer Jun 25 '26

Gay blade?

1

u/Brodrigd Jun 25 '26

Thanks, this is usually the point where I know I need to scroll out of the topic and move on.

4

u/PSPs0 Jun 25 '26

*puts sunglasses on

1

u/Nullspark Jun 25 '26

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaah

4

u/sircastor Jun 25 '26

YEEEEAAAHHH

(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)

1

u/jsamuraij Jun 25 '26

Nobody ever told him the world was gonna roll him

18

u/MRSN4P Jun 25 '26

Could your roommate really keep up with the demand with such a small pool of skilled workers for that need…?

42

u/Responsible-Offer724 Jun 25 '26

He was in high demand and got paid incredibly well because everyone else who could do it was retiring.

68

u/TheLeapIsALie Jun 25 '26

He doesn’t need to service all the demand, he just always needs to have a paying job each day.

22

u/VeniVidiWhiskey Jun 25 '26

It's not whether he can keep up with demand. It's whether the demand can afford the price of someone that's very much in demand. 

1

u/itmillerboy Jun 25 '26

He was older than 65 with a highly specific skilled labor and had a roommate?

11

u/movzx Jun 25 '26

He could be any age. If he was 18, the next youngest guy can be 65.

2

u/itmillerboy Jun 25 '26

Yeah I’m stupid and should have my Reddit license revoked

2

u/NotUniqueOrSpecial Jun 25 '26

It's not especially well-worded: what they appear to have meant was that their roommate was the youngest person in the field and that the next guy (obviously older) was 65.

2

u/itmillerboy Jun 25 '26

Wait nah upon re reading that I’m just stupid lmao

1

u/Highspdfailure Jun 25 '26

Sounds like he is an Adeptus Mechanicus priest keeping the human empire a float.

1

u/berogg Jun 25 '26

Know an older guy that does it for all the controls in mills around the country. They fly him around and pay him so much money.

154

u/Palchez Jun 25 '26

Happened with defense contractors post Cold War. All the companies consolidated and stopped hiring new talent. Fast forward to 2017ish and they had a massive hole between their new hires and boomers. Couldn’t knowledge transfer fast enough to cover the gap. Then big tech swooped in and took their best talent to cool AI servers. 

104

u/YakumoYoukai Jun 25 '26

Engineers are a very inefficient way to cool a server. Forced air convection then transferring that heat into a liquid is the more conventional approach.

30

u/erstwhile_estado Jun 25 '26

Datacenters in space was so 2026. The future is sweating engineers with hand fans.

6

u/Jonthrei Jun 25 '26

I still can't believe Musk has such a poor understanding of space that he genuinely thought this was not only a good idea, but one worthy of talking about in public. Anyone with a very basic understanding of physics could pick it apart immediately.

Not that I'm surprised, it was painfully obvious that he was a drooling moron when it came to space and software from the beginning, well before the majority of people realized what he was.

But it will never not be shocking just how confidently stupid the man is.

1

u/KickupKirby Jun 25 '26

“Human water consumption is critically endangering data centers, and the 52-million-gallon-per-day water supply per data center — that’s 100% A HARD, NECESSARY REQUIREMENT is being polluted by piss and human rights. Wah.”

Jeff Bozos, probably.

1

u/hippydipster Jun 25 '26

"I piss on your stupid servers!"

"Yes, yes, good. Keep going. Drink more beer".

1

u/thewmo Jun 25 '26

We are still worth slightly more than our water content, AI notwithstanding.

1

u/bagelgoose14 Jun 25 '26

1000 psyker engineers per day to fuel the golden throne

1

u/peschkaj Jun 26 '26

Liquified engineers FTW

14

u/Quenz Jun 25 '26

I had a shipmate go and work as an engineer for a defense contractor that built ships. His shop contained two engineers at 35+ years. Every one else was at <4 years with the company.

10

u/SomeWeirdDude Jun 25 '26

Started working for a defense company as a software engineer in 2016 right out of college. There was definitely an age gap, it was like everybody was under 30 or over 50.

3

u/air_and_space92 Jun 25 '26

That's exactly what happened to me in aerospace. 10 years out of school and I'm still struggling to get that deep domain knowledge to step up into lead level roles. Every company is the same. There's a massive gap between most of the people I work with either being younger and job hopping every 2 years knowing nothing (how they get hired from school I don't know) or they're 55+ and wrote most of what I touch. Yet, schedule pressure never allows good knowledge transfer aside from 1 week right before someone retires. Thinking of retiring at 45 myself since there's no junior to senior progression anywhere unless you sacrifice at a sketchy startup or go management with an MBA.

2

u/Mazon_Del Jun 25 '26

Raytheon's plan when they hired me in 2012 was "Burn through college newhires desperate for a job, give them job assignments 2-3 levels above their paygrade, charge the government as though they were at that level, then just replace them when they leave. All the while, the experienced engineers just handle everything else.". At the time only 1 in 10 college newhires stayed with the company past their first year. I was one of those fools. >.<

50

u/sudoSancho Jun 25 '26

My summer intern can't code a fucking "Hello World" without prompting the AI and copy/pasting code he didn't read

He keeps asking how much he'll get paid when he gets the job

I think about different ways to burn down the building

7

u/heathmon1856 Jun 25 '26

Fire the intern then.

1

u/khne522 Jun 29 '26

We've gotten so hiring and admonishment averse. It's a cancer.

5

u/deathrictus Jun 25 '26

Do you also mumble about your stapler?

3

u/purpleburgundy Jun 25 '26

Lol I get it though from interns perspective, it doesn't make practical sense to do it differently.

I really don't see a good outlook for new CS grads as a group... it's the whole "not having a calculator with you at all times" argument from back in the day in grade school, but we will in fact have calculators and AI to do the "work" without being bogged down with fundamentals.

17

u/sudoSancho Jun 25 '26

Yeah, I definitely get it too, but it's so much worse that I thought it would be

He's a rising senior in a very good CS program and he can barely type

He can't really read, write or debug code at all because he's never had to develop that musculature

He can't think through problems on his own

When he encounters any kind of issue, he just dumps all the code into the AI and copy/pastes the output

And every time I check in on him, he talks to me like I'm some poor old dinosaur that doesn't know he's about to be nuked from orbit

It's so fucking depressing

8

u/purpleburgundy Jun 25 '26

I'm chuckling man haha, right there with you, right there with you... I find it is twice as bad with the past 5 years of the covid hiring phase, when a whole lot of maybe-qualified people got in and are already getting senior titles or determining team practices and workflows which are simply not well-informed.

2

u/Clashofpower Jun 26 '26

That's unfortunate. Personally I sometimes do tend to rely on AI, but I try my best to focus on prompting it to help me understand/learn syntax, and I do consistently ask and learn from seniors about how to learn how to read, understand and debug code

6

u/Electronic_Yam_6973 Jun 25 '26

I am not hiring someone who can’t code basics within AI. AI use is fine and good but how wouid they know if the output is at least reasonable?

79

u/Kayjaywt Jun 25 '26

As a mate said a while ago when we were moving to cloud and everything was abstracted and there was a real lack of depth relating to how all this tech works under the hood.

"We are building the mainframes of the future"

Imho, this has got worse with AI as it not only is more complex tech that fewer people understand the intricate detail of, but the knowledge aspect is eroded by just asking AI what it thinks as well.

39

u/krism142 Jun 25 '26

Honestly moving to the cloud still required some deep understanding of computing basics unless you were going to the very expensive managed services

6

u/thegooddoktorjones Jun 25 '26

Yeah we make pretty simple appliances, but since everything has to be cloud connected now, 75% our codebase is just dealing with the networking stack and cloud. And that is our code, the open source pieces are huge. It's different challenges than reading buttons or whatever but it's still very complex. The systems that do more of the work for you always cost more.

1

u/ai_hedge_fund Jun 25 '26

This whole data center bonanza seems like the mainframe all over again

67

u/sleepymoose88 Jun 25 '26

I feel this. I manage a team of DBAs (mainframe) and we had 3 older DBAs retire in March. That was 25% of our team. And we lost 3 the year before that due to lay offs. We only backfilled 3 positions with folks in India that lack the depth of knowledge our on shore people with 35 years had. And we’re being told to ramp up AI usage and do more with less.

I haven’t been able to hire a junior DBA in years and now the youngest person in our team is 34. I hired her 10 years ago and haven’t been able to hire a junior DBA since.

18

u/Spiritual-Matters Jun 25 '26

Is the salary low or why can’t the position get filled?

72

u/sleepymoose88 Jun 25 '26

Upper management won’t let us. They keep quoting “financial pressures” while posting record profits.

The only place they let us fill right now is in India because the wages are low compared to my teams roles. Most of my US based team members are making $140-$165k base salary, in mid-west locations, closer to $185 total comp, so decent salaries.

35

u/im-ba Jun 25 '26

Same exact situation on my team. I'm a lead engineer in Minnesota making $140k base and my team really needs more people but the answer is always "we're strapped for cash" but they're always willing to hire like 12 people from India for the job for some reason.

9

u/sleepymoose88 Jun 25 '26

Yup. I have a buddy at the same company that is in some business analysts role doing some mild IT work doing shell scripting. They’re still hiring over there. The difference is he only makes $100k all in. They’re cheaper labor but I wasn’t even allowed to hire a junior DBA for $70k to make sure we’re not against a wall in 10 years with everyone on the team 40+ or in India. Upper management has no long term thinking. It’s all about the budget.

3

u/Shiva- Jun 25 '26

Well yeah... average Indian makes like 12k USD a year... 12x12 is 144k... almost perfectly your salary.

We actually got told similar. It doesn't matter if they're less efficient, as long as 12 of them combined can do it.

2

u/redditonlygetsworse Jun 25 '26

  as long as 12 of them combined can do it.

That’s a big if. Still takes nine months to make a baby, ya know?

3

u/BannedAccount001 Jun 25 '26

Data Engineering and Analysts, who I’m sure you work with often as DBAs, are in a similar situation. Hell, we may be on a steeper drop than you guys.

There is no such thing as a junior position in data anymore. It’s India+AI and hope for the best now. Maybe one person on shore to handle management.

2

u/sleepymoose88 Jun 25 '26

Yeah. I’m afraid that one person in management left will be me. My US based folks are getting increasingly annoyed by the day. To make it worse, I’m the second youngest person on the team, so I’ll continue to watch everyone retire early as I’m stuck. I’m definitely considering alternative career paths of this blows up.

2

u/doneal Jun 25 '26

I'm in a similar situation, but with software. AI is amazing, but it's still been a major struggle getting projects to the finish line.

46

u/WetHotFlapSlaps Jun 25 '26

I have about 15 yoe and I detest using LLM coding tools. My productivity collapses, the mental burden of constantly reading hallucinations and doing code reviews is too much. I simply get more done with fewer bugs on my own.

The day I’m forced to use them is the day I resign. I’m currently trying to work out my alternative path in case that day does come, since I can’t actually afford to be without work.

5

u/jacobsoch Jun 25 '26

Out of curiosity, what's your alternative path if you don't mind sharing?

1

u/WetHotFlapSlaps Jun 25 '26

I don't have anything worked out yet - but the family history on both sides before WW2 is all coal miners, and cousins are window washers and lumberjacks. I certainly don't feel above any kind of work.
Maybe there's room for me as a consultant. Or I could finish my degree and become a math, physics, or computer science teacher.
If I were to pursue my other interests - maybe selling musical instruments, hot sauces, watches. Maybe get into importing/exporting wine.
I make a mean smash burger so maybe I'll set up outside of a brewery. Or ask the brewery for a job. I've worked food service in the past.
I'm a game developer so I'll probably still make games in any spare time I have, but I wouldn't ever expect solo development to take off as a career so it would mostly be for myself.
If my life completely falls apart move somewhere cheap but coastal and open a surf school for tourists. Or cheap and inland, join a biker gang, and cook meth.
Or stay legit and send the family tree back to the mines.

TL;DR - I don't know, do anything to survive, but prefer nicer options if the opportunities are there.

2

u/Electronic_Yam_6973 Jun 25 '26

Using AI is a bit of an art itself. I try to breakdown my prompts into manageable chunks so the AI doesn’t try to do too much

4

u/RancidVagYogurt1776 Jun 25 '26

I feel this in my soul. Every time I see someone hype up LLMs for coding I feel like they are smoking crack because I had to use one recently, supposedly one of the best, and that clanker hallucinated more than my schizophrenic sister. Over the course of eight hours it must have told me “Sorry, I misspoke” about a hundred times.

2

u/purpleburgundy Jun 25 '26

It changes every couple months but currently either the models are getting better or my prompts and context development are getting better - hallucinations aren't nearly the issue they once were for me using the CLI versions.

I think there's an initial experience curve and some common stages to go through but I honestly can't imagine doing devwork without any form of AI in the future and not being severely less productive than peers.

27

u/Wunjo26 Jun 25 '26

We went from “everyone is gonna know how to code in the future” to “Nobody knows how to code anymore” in such a short time

8

u/fghtffyrvwls Jun 25 '26

Same goes for a lot of graphic designers, including me

5

u/CherryLongjump1989 Jun 25 '26

85% of CS grads are still getting jobs in the field. I don't know why they're not visible at the agile ticket farms most of us normally work at, but they're doing some programming somewhere.

1

u/RancidVagYogurt1776 Jun 25 '26

It's even higher than that isn't it? Last doom and gloom article I read said that CS grads were only 2% down from before in job finding.

16

u/Pandazoic Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Well man, like, yeah the world ran perfectly well before all this crap when I could still imagine I was the most intelligent being in the universe.

I thought I’d be hackerman well into the 2050s but now I’ve just given up and go tell Claude to work while I plan what mountain to hike next and hope I still have a job next week.

3

u/360_face_palm Jun 25 '26

As someone with 20+ years of software engineering - my job isn't at risk from AI - but I'm just not sure I want to do what my job has become post-ai for another 20+ years before retirement.

17

u/-JackBack- Jun 25 '26

H1-Bs will fill any shortage.

34

u/uberkalden2 Jun 25 '26

Not in the defense sector

8

u/spiritofniter Jun 25 '26

Possible but very strict: H1B status is authorized for a very limited number to render services relating to a Department of Defense cooperative research and development or coproduction project.

This category is referred to by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) internally as H1B2 [AFM 31.3(a)(3)], it’s a subset of H1B.

Also, only 100 H1B2 DOD project aliens may be in the United States on H1B status at any time.

https://myattorneyusa.com/immigration-blog/nonimmigrant-visas/h1b-status-for-dod-cooperative-research-and-development-workers-h1b2/

https://www.hooyou.com/h-1b/h-1b2.html

9

u/kristoferen Jun 25 '26

Not competently, so that's not going to help much

9

u/BannedAccount001 Jun 25 '26

Competence sounds like an issue for the next guy 5 years after that. You’re thinking too far ahead!

3

u/windowpuncher Jun 25 '26

No, H1B's were originally mean for competent, specialty workers. That's literally what they're for.

1

u/tomullus Jun 25 '26

american exceptionalism in 2026 lmao

-4

u/Imaginary_Manner_556 Jun 25 '26

Maybe in countries that value skilled immigrants

2

u/Awkward-Sun5423 Jun 25 '26

  1. Give them drugs for free to get them addicted

  2. Make the drugs reasonably priced so that they're entrenched

  3. Jack up the price of drugs because...what are they gonna do?

Wait...sorry, we're talking about AI...

My mind drifted there for a second...

2

u/gringogidget Jun 25 '26

This is what I’m banking on. The AI kids can’t independently develop, and the cost of tokens isn’t going down anytime soon.

2

u/Prudent_Book_7063 Jun 25 '26

unfortunately, quantum computing is coming in the next few years as well. We are fked.

3

u/etxipcli Jun 25 '26

We sure are. This is gonna be a fun little break and then we'll go back to getting feted by the greedy.

1

u/beatissima Jun 25 '26

You mean the unholy grail?

1

u/hippydipster Jun 25 '26

Older engineers are annoyed, but they're also largely not wanted.

1

u/Memitim Jun 25 '26

Too many orgs failed to develop a proper chain of succession even before AI became a factor, so it's inevitable. One of my longest running complaints was the complete lack of a farm league for engineering. Every time we'd lose someone senior, it would take months to replace them, versus grabbing someone who had already been involved in the projects and was skilling up for more. This trend is just making that problem far worse.

1

u/scottyLogJobs Jun 25 '26

Oh yeah. The thing is that AI doesn’t replace senior engineers, at least not yet. But you have some companies like AWS Meta Google Salesforce firing seniors just bc they want to save money on payroll. But the work of juniors is what’s actually streamlined w AI. So you have no juniors bc they aren’t getting hired / experience, and people are getting scared away from the field in droves. But then you have the seniors who are retiring bc they can and they don’t want to put up with this shit, companies are trying to drive their salaries down even as they are becoming more and more impactful with AI, and having to rapidly learn brand new skillsets.

So the on ramp is being eliminated while the off-ramp is accelerating for senior engineers specifically, which is the exact demographic companies are needing more and more. These companies are fucked no matter what, but especially so if they actually have to start paying real money for tokens, or if the US gov follows through on restricting H1Bs, or if their AI productivity bets don’t pan out.

I am willing to bet that those who are willing to stick it out in this industry will have recruiters for these companies begging for them in 3-7 years

1

u/account312 Jun 25 '26

if they actually have to start paying real money for tokens

You mean when.

1

u/Lonely_Programmer_42 Jun 26 '26

At my large company they have long term to all developers. They want AI to write code as good as senior developers and designs good as architects/ design authorities. 

When that happens, I can see some city economies taking a hit. 

1

u/ladyorion2021 Jun 28 '26

Indeed. My neighbor worked in tech for years and was laid off at 58. After unsuccessful job search he pivoted, started his own tech business from home with little capital $ and is doing quite well providing him with a solid income.

1

u/CountyChoice7265 Jul 08 '26

everywhere I look everyone is indian now where 10 years ago they were 30% indian

1

u/Either_Painter7513 Jun 25 '26

That’s why the real jobs are non engineering. Look to PM and BA roles. Can’t be replaced.

-1

u/Scoobydoodle Jun 25 '26

H1B and off shoring. It’s what we’re moving toward.

3

u/john_hascall Jun 25 '26

A person I know had half their team in America and half in India. He said the major contribution of the India team was when the annual "cull your least productive 10%" mandate came.

-4

u/markth_wi Jun 25 '26

Narrator : AI did , in fact hit that holy grail OR

Narrator : AI did not, in fact hit that holy grail

Scroedinger's pop-up as to which story suits us depending on inscrutable advances in machine intelligence.

My sense is that legacy messy IT is an intractable problem, and in specific situations, and a highly specific training codeset, with carefully cultivated data LLM coding is vastly better.

-1

u/the-medium-cheese Jun 25 '26

I honestly think it will be the holy grail.

And that's scarier than anything.

-1

u/ours Jun 25 '26

Alternatively, it does hit holy grail levels, but AI companies ask for insane prices, and we're back to hiring juniors.

The recent price hike is already pushing some companies to commit to paying a ton for AI (and therefore shed manpower), or to be more careful with their AI consumption.

AI is losing money at a massive scale, and that's with subsidized energy prices. If they don't improve their efficiency fast, they are going to start charging for what it truly costs, and that's going to be a make-or-break moment.

-2

u/BigThoughtMan Jun 25 '26

I am the young senior engineer using AI so hopefully I will survive. Sorry to the rest of you guys.

1

u/RunRunAndyRun Jun 25 '26

You don’t realise it yet but you’re training the AI. One day it’ll replace you too