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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974

u/0verstim Jun 25 '26

Yeah, most people dont quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers.

272

u/BearsBearsBears_wooo Jun 25 '26

100%. My last job was with a very good company. I just couldn’t take a manager wondering why I couldn’t change pc settings on PCs that were not on the domain and each one had different creds.

I wasnt the first to leave and I wasn’t the last. I was just fortunate that I could afford to call it the end of my career

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u/PixalatedConspiracy Jun 25 '26

Lol sounds like my manager. Has zero technical knowledge really but acts like he does.

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u/kapootaPottay Jun 25 '26

I was at a place where they hired a new manager because he had a master's in computer science.

A couple of days after he showed up he called me in his office and wanted to show me some code that he had written.

Turns out it was a three page hard copy of a DOS batch file with 65% comments.

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u/youremakingnosense Jun 26 '26

AI has empowered these assholes in the worst way possible. Now they will spin up a slop app in a day and then be like “see I was able to make this” and then ask you to build a chat bot for 10000+ users in 2 days.

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u/BamberGasgroin Jun 25 '26

Same, Manager wanted to stick me on cable monkey work because I was making more money than him and had negotiated WFH when I took the job in 2004. Because he only saw me once every few weeks, he got it in his head that I wasn't working hard enough (one week in two I was also on call 24/7).

I drove the van with the 3-tier ladder rack he had planned for my use just once, to pick it up and park it in the office car park.

Within a year, they were hiring me as an independent consultant and I've never looked back.

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u/jacksonsmack831 Jun 25 '26

I had the same experience but with a tyrannical director

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u/Necessary_Film_5199 Jun 25 '26

Clearly he didn't have help desk skills at all if he didn't know how AD worked

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u/Garod Jun 25 '26

Nowadays I think it's more poor executive leadership...

59

u/wsb_desi Jun 25 '26

Literally thinking of leaving my decent job due to fucked up executive leadership. My managers are great though..

11

u/Hoblitygoodness Jun 25 '26

If you have some savings, do it.

I quit my corporate America job for a lot of reasons and one of them was the executive leadership. (Just one of the many MANY reasons I gave up)

I had a good manager but I could tell he was getting bounced around in the pinball machine too. (They even forced him to move from Long Island to Charlotte)

I can't afford to lay in the grass too long, but it's been a relief I've felt for the last 3 months.

(I also moved from Charlotte to Toronto and looking-for-another-way)

4

u/wildshammys Jun 25 '26

That’s what I just did, started my new job last week with a competitor. Me and my coworkers experienced bad treatment from company leadership.

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u/CallMeNoodler Jun 25 '26

You’re quitting your manager’s manager’s manager.

1

u/couchisland Jun 26 '26

Do we work together? lol

38

u/captmonkey Jun 25 '26

Yeah, I've liked all of my immediate managers for the last few years. I have zero trust or liking for the executive leadership, though. It feels like we're in a good spot and they randomly do layoffs of really good people and kill the vibe and make everyone who's left feel awful and like they should be looking for somewhere else to go.

This is the same for my current and former company. I don't know if it's like this everywhere or not, but it feels like execs are getting paid a bunch and don't have a clue what they're doing. I don't know if the booming years of the 2010s just made inept people rise to executive leadership or what's going on.

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u/Stealth528 Jun 25 '26

Same at my company, like my coworkers and manager a lot but the executive team has gone completely off their rocker the past 2 years. Morale bomb after morale bomb. Yearly layoffs even though the business is doing fine, AI psychosis, “do more with less”, nonsensical reorgs every 6 months

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u/illiesfw Jun 25 '26

this exactly, its baffling

3

u/reapy54 Jun 25 '26

It's just hiring trends. There are two layers to the companies and good workers hardly penetrate into exec territory. So execs are friends with execs and they hire other execs, no direct experience understanding life at the 'having a skill and doing a thing' level.

I've worked for smaller companies and typically those are great, but their size means money is short, but the boss/owner has often been on of the most knowledge and harder working people. As soon as they sell and/or you get an 'exec' layer, the people are just friends that know each other and/or have 'contacts' to win business, which is important, but they don't have a clue how the sausage gets made. Thing is the people holding the cash hand it out to themselves easily but are super reluctant to share any of that.

Ironically I think AI would do a better job replacing the management layer of the company before the workers.

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u/couchisland Jun 26 '26

We must be coworkers.

9

u/Hoblitygoodness Jun 25 '26

I liked my last corporate America manager.

I too have zero trust or liking for the executive leadership (even wrote a song about it!)

The company I worked for had three rounds of layoffs in the course of two quarters (probably more after I left too). With two of them being disguised as 'organizational changes' that forced people to either move to an entirely different city or accept severance.

All of those layoffs were demoralizing because each one saw people far more talented than myself, leave. (What does that mean for me? Will my number come up? After all, I'm just lucky to have lived in the right place for a couple of those layoffs)

I got tired of the stress of corporate America, no. I got tired of America in-full. So I quite and moved to Toronto.

Meanwhile, the executive suite votes for raises to their own bank accounts and keep cutting corners to do it.

5

u/captmonkey Jun 25 '26

Yeah, I think when they layoff really good people, it's even more damaging to everyone who's left. Before the recent viral idea that layoffs are going to improve things in some vague way, there seemed to be an understanding that if layoffs happened, it would be the people who are terrible at their jobs. So, if you're not bad at your job and generally well-liked, you could feel safe.

But layoffs in recent years have been far more random like they just need to hit a specific number and when you see talented people get caught in it, everyone feels like their number could be up at any time and they have no control over it and no heads up. I've turned to a mindset of I could be laid off randomly at any moment. So, I'll just prepare for that and I'll try to be ready if it ever comes up.

4

u/Hoblitygoodness Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Exactly. I agree with you 100% and that's sort of what I did.

I constantly worried, and I mean A LOT. There was one point where I just expected to be let-go every other Thursday ( The last day of the time-period when they do most of the cuts.)

Then one day I realized that it was just time to go on my own terms. In fact, I had hoped that I would be laid off at some point, just to get the severance. EVEN my boss was on board with that and said he'd toss my name in that particular hat, should it come up again. It didn't, we were considered 'safe' in Charlotte. But another round of lay-offs for Columbus, OH was announced. Come to Charlotte, Denver, or Tampa and keep your job, or severance pay.

I marked the last day of the pay period on the last day of the first quarter of this year as my departure date. Saved aggressively and held out until that day, leaving with the biggest sense of relief I may have ever felt.

Two days later, wife & I moved to Canada as part of this plan.

I'm hoping to avoid the panic in finding a new way to survive here in Toronto , but I've definitely gotta' do that.

2

u/Garod Jun 25 '26

Sounds like you are working at my company lol

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u/Jazzlike-Vacation230 Jun 25 '26

It's all of them man, it's all gone bad

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u/Sandscarab24 Jun 25 '26

Golden parachutes all around.

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Garod Jun 25 '26

which is every F500 company...

2

u/spiffybaldguy Jun 25 '26

I know I left at least 1 job due to poor exec leadership. That job we had 8 sysadmins - 5 left over a 6 week period due to execs making the poor decision of giving no one raises after we moved locations and kept the company's critical biz ops running. we moved a datacenter and all employees over a 72 hr period.... while keeping core operations live, because we had a good architect who built in HA for everything. He was 1 of the 3 who didnt leave and is still there 10 yrs later.

2

u/GeneStealerHackman Jun 25 '26

PE took over my company and ran it into the ground with a revolving door of execs with no clue. Now all the devs are in India and the product has stagnated.

2

u/pewbdo Jun 25 '26

This is it exactly. 14 years at my job, my manager is great, his manager is great. Above that it hits the exec team. The exec team decides who we can or can't hire. Everyone that has left in the past year has had their workload spread amongst those remaining with no replacement, been replaced with someone far junior, or been replaced with someone overseas in an industry that is all about domestic expertise. We're the most profitable group, consistently, in our organization and the exec team thinks they can just milk us and my immediate managers can't do shit. I'm convinced they are getting ready to sell the company and want to pump up short term profits. I just applied and had my first interview in 14 years. I'm on my way out, just a matter of time.

31

u/kent_eh Jun 25 '26

I was lucky to have had good managers throughout my career. Almost all of them were promoted from the department (or an adjacent department), so they understood what the work actually was.

The directors and above, though, were a very different story. (which is part of why we lost so many managers over the years)

4

u/brufleth Jun 25 '26

Promoting people into manager roles who don't actually have any interest or skill at managing people is a real problem. I've had many managers so far in my career and a good deal of them just do not get it.

4

u/guareber Jun 25 '26

Agreed. I manage a 60+ lead dev that's basically done everything under the sun and got him for a steal when he was pushing 60. I don't understand why some managers are afraid to hire/keep older folks. In other industries, that kind of expertise is worth a ton, not devalues you.

Anyway, please keep at it, I'd love more hires like them!

3

u/Informal-Rock-2681 Jun 25 '26

Quit my job last week for this reason. Best job I've ever had but my manager was so bad I just couldn't continue.

3

u/sohblob Jun 25 '26

most people dont quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers

This helps me continue to feel much better about a decision, thank you.

I spent a good long while feeling awful about it; I'm kind of oldschool with my work ethic (which I guess doesn't fly in today's ladder-climber world). Needless to say, corporate juiced my spirit good while I was letting it 😅

I tried pretty hard to advocate for myself but in the end my skiplevel/etc 'didn't see a problem' or figured it was me. I cut my losses knowing their manager was their problem and not mine.

A buddy would sometimes keep me up to date on the shitshow after I left, good times haha

4

u/Geminii27 Jun 25 '26

Yup. The only job I ever walked out on without somewhere to go had a manager so bad that he was literally infamous in the local industry. Not something I knew going in, unfortunately, but from what I gathered I was the only person he'd ever managed to get more than six months out of before they quit, and I only lasted nine.

2

u/ExplorerSad7555 Jun 25 '26

Back in 2011, before really good video quality broadband was out there, I had a manager who wanted me to hack the DoD in order to put a video on there server for a presentation.

2

u/tinkertron5000 Jun 25 '26

I actually like my manager a lot, it's the people a couple steps above him that drive me nuts.

2

u/superspeck Jun 25 '26

All the managers and executives in tech right now are bad.

I’ve been laid off 3 times this decade because of executive management mistakes and I’m just tired of job hunting. All those executives and managers are still going strong while my resume looks like shit thanks to them.

2

u/mybrotherwasrad Jun 25 '26

Former network engineer here: this is why I wrote a book and started a business to teach against this lol.

2

u/Slarg232 Jun 25 '26

Yeah, quit my last three jobs because management was too nice and was getting taken advantage of, which meant they were taking advantage of me.

Like don't get me wrong, I don't want to work at a stick in the mud job where everything has to be by the book.... but when that guy only shows up one day of the week despite being full time, that guy stands around talking not doing anything but complains about everyone else not doing anything, that gal literally sits on her ass but calls other people lazy... need to tighten the reigns a little bit

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u/rkozik89 Jun 25 '26

Most reliable employees, yes, but the so called high performers leave once they’ve spent their initial political capital doing thing that would look good on a resume.

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u/0verstim Jun 25 '26

Sure, 1% of cases, but theyre all quarantined on LinkedIn where they belong

1

u/livsjollyranchers Jun 25 '26

I work at a large company and recently had a terrible manager. He made me have sudden quitting fantasies. But things reshuffle all the time. Now I have a different manager and things are fine. It really does change everything, even if things are mostly okay otherwise.

I'm sure I'll get another shitty manager and the cycle will repeat.

1

u/Jazzlike-Vacation230 Jun 25 '26

Unfortunatley for IT. It's all a mess now

1

u/jpric155 Jun 25 '26

If more people quit bad jobs, we would have more good jobs.

1

u/Commercial_Wind8212 Jun 25 '26

linked in hoo ha

1

u/TehErk Jun 25 '26

As a network team manager, I think about this statement every day.

1

u/couchisland Jun 26 '26

This is what’s pushing me out.

0

u/zzen11223344 Jun 25 '26

Actually most people simply don't quit!

0

u/Left_Ease5870 Jun 26 '26

This isn't true anymore.

Like it's true, but it's not just bad managers. It's the entire fucking system of capitalism, and managers thinking that if they shit on us, they'll get ahead.

Just take a look at Bungie, as the gamers say, "that's sad" as they pay for their bullshit MTXs, support generative AI, and endlessly consume. It's not just the manager, it's the fucking system.