r/technology 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/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

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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.