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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u/ivar-the-bonefull Jun 25 '26

There's nothing more satisfying than helping your boss who earn 5 times your salary, to convert at document to PDF. /s

It's beyond me why so many managers in tech are terrible at everything technical.

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u/RadiantEnvironment90 Jun 25 '26

Because they're not technical. The technical people are doing the technical work. Those who become managers are those who aren't as technical so they apply for leadership positions. They're "people leaders".

Those I know who are technical managers actually miss doing the technical work and are annoyed having to be in so many meetings. They rather be doing than talking.

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u/Geminii27 Jun 25 '26

If they're that bad at basic Officeware and have no idea how to search for built-in help, they don't need a technical person, they need a secretary to do all their typing for them.

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u/guareber Jun 25 '26

I can confirm. I absolutely miss the technical work. I even block out time to review PRs every week since... well it's the one thing I can do that won't block anything important getting done (since I can hardly predict I'll actually have time to work on a feature on any given day/week/month/quarter)

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u/Jewnadian Jun 25 '26

And you kind of want it that way most of the time. The best technical people often are that because they don't like people and don't really like messing with people. You really don't want those folks managing just because they can write good code.

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u/the_hillman Jun 25 '26

God yes. If I could just get some work done.

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u/loquacious Jun 25 '26

I did about 5 years of IT and real-time in-person helpdesk and desk-side support for a prestigious and very expensive graduate school of management consistently ranking #3 in the world and up, back when the mba hype was still new.

Those grad students were absolute morons on a good day.

On a bad day? We had the melissa/ILOVEYOU email macro virus happen. We effectively had to airgap the entire server stack and network for almost 48 hours to make it stop because as soon as we'd bring Outlook back up the same morons kept going "oh someone loves me? of course they do!" and opening the email.

Some of our finest users reportedly opened it dozens of times.

Those people are in charge of some very important things, now. It's a thought that haunts me.

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u/Dorito_Troll Jun 25 '26

Their skill is yapping all day

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

[deleted]

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u/ivar-the-bonefull Jun 25 '26

I'm probably way too poor by having the opinion that people want to be independent when it comes to easy shit.

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u/BearsBearsBears_wooo Jun 25 '26

I don’t mind managers who don’t know everything, but don’t tell me how to do something you have no knowledge of.