1 in 6 retirees are considering returning to work, and 53% want remote positions | Hacker News Reader

1 in 6 retirees are considering returning to work, and 53% want remote positions

paychex.com

153 pointsmfiguiere130 comments

"For this campaign, we surveyed 930 Americans to explore their retirement plans. Among them, 16% were retired, 22% were still working, and 62% were retirees who had returned to work."

So, 149 of those surveyed were retired. Of those 149, 25 (1 in 6) are considering returning to work. 13 of those want remote positions.

Thank you for extracting the actual numbers. Constructing underpowered surveys with loaded questions is a common tactic for pushing narratives like this. The headline confirms a lot of people’s beliefs that economic conditions are forcing people out of retirement and that remote work is the way of the future, but it really just a survey of a couple dozen people who are “considering” and “wanting” something, which ultimately has little bearing on what people actually choose to do.

These underpowered survey tactics are most frequently used in “__% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck” headlines. That’s why all of those headlines have drastically different numbers, some as high as 70-80% (which is obviously untrue). It really just means that someone was able to get a few random people on the phone to answer some questions in the middle of the day, which isn’t representative of the population at all.

I work in quantitative research. A cell with 13 or 25 respondents in it ought to be used with caution, but is not necessarily underpowered. My "rule of thumb" is that, given a well-represented and properly weighted sample, having 30+ in a given cell when crosstabbing like this is healthy, and 10+ per cell is the bare minimum I will accept - with caution.

Well-represented and properly weighted samples are unusual. As often as it’s used, phone surveys don’t qualify.

I think the standard error for this survey is only like +/- 3%, which imo doesn't change the narrative THAT much. That said, without more details on the survey design, it's hard not to think issues like sampling and response bias make the results difficult to generalize...

IMO it's less about power than the self-selection of the responders. Naive MoE estimates that assume random sampling completely miss that respondents are just a difference species, esp. w.r.t. financial attributes.

It would be shocking if some large fraction of high-earners really were living paycheck-to-paycheck. That a large fraction people who chose to respond to a survey and who stated they earn $xxxK/yr also said they're living paycheck-to-paycheck is ... somewhat less surprising.

There should be half a dozen "among survey respondents" comments to headlines like this, the same way there are a dozen "in mice" comments to every breathless report of medical progress in this-or-that.

No, you just don't understand how statistics works. If you get 80% on sample of 100 people, your 95% confidence interval is +/- 8%. This assumes a random sampling method.

> This assumes a random sampling method.

I would encourage you to explore how difficult it is to actually get 100 responses from 100 randomly selected Americans, and how non-response/self-selection affect your confidence interval.

It is difficult. That is irrelevant to the bad logic I was responding to.

I think this discounts the finding that 575 people, the majority, were retirees that already returned to the workforce. This 2011 study said the rate for this was 15%. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/article/reentering-the-lab...

That's not a "finding". It was their choice to survey mostly retired people who had returned to work.

why is it obvious that that is untrue?

In the parlance of my country, if someone is "living paycheck to paycheck" they're a member of the working poor, people with no savings, desperately fighting to keep their head above water.

Here is a survey saying 36% of Americans making >$200,000 are living paycheck to paycheck: https://www.lendingclub.com/asset/ls/cms/media-center/12th-p...

There might be a handful of people earning that much who are in a difficult financial position - divorced airline pilots with expensive alimony payments, perhaps? - but it is extremely hard to believe that 36% of people earning 4x the US median income are the working poor.

On the other hand, the 36% number would make much more sense if the survey had asked people "Do you depend on your salary to pay for your living expenses?" or "Do you have enough savings to pay for 3-6 months of basic living costs?" i.e. much more expansive definitions of what it means to live paycheck-to-paycheck.

> it is extremely hard to believe that 36% of people earning 4x the US median income are the working poor.

I don't find that hard to believe at all, at least in the US. That income bracket tends overextend themselves and carry too much debt. A shockingly high percentage of people in it will be bankrupt in 5 years.

On this site, the null hypothesis is whatever we already believe. When we see evidence of an alternative hypothesis, we find ways to throw that evidence in the trash. Small sample sizes, replication crisis, misleading headlines, research on mice, etc. are all ways to ignore whatever evidence we want.

In short, we are always right, research be damned.

There is evidence that people are pretty good at predicting whether or not a study is going to replicate, so they're not necessarily off Ba(ye)se:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/scientis... https://www.newscientist.com/article/2218843-common-sense-ca...

(in this particular case, I think the fact that this is content marketing is what is causing people to react so skeptically)

This pretty much highlights what I'm saying. Regardless of how strong or weak this research is, it won't be scrutinized by viewers here, because it confirms what they want to believe.

Are we using "considering" with a stronger definition? Otherwise this is meaningless.

On any given week I consider changing job, quitting, early retiring, changing teams, changing projects, etc... My brain will just rapid fire different scenarios and I'll typically conclude that staying put is my optimal move.

What's more surprising to me is that 5 in 6 are NOT considering alternate scenarios.

I "consider" running away to join the circus, at least, once a day.

"Software engineers on Hacker News are discussing joining the circus after mass layoffs" - paychex, probably

That's the research proposal I want a grant for. My work will be going to the circus all the time and asking the acrobats if any of them used to work for Adobe.

...And we don't know their respective jobs.

The only indicator we get is that more than 50% of those who consider going back need money, which probably correlates negatively with jobs that have a low entry barrier for remote work.

Add to this that people above 50 tend to have serious problems getting jobs in tech (and likely adjecent industries).

Is your point that the sample size is too small? Beyond a certain threshold, sample size doesn’t matter as much as you think.

That's true if the sample is random.

25 out of almost 1000 doesn't seem like much to me. My parents are both retired and financially comfortable but would consider employment with a lot of flexibility. The 62% who had already returned to work IS surprising to me. I'd bet most of those are financially motivated

Yeah. I imagine there are (broadly speaking) two groups that are conflated. There's the group that has returned or is considering returning to full-time work because they found they need the money. And there's a group who might do something interesting on the side for a bit of money and because it's interesting.

I would absolutely consider the latter in retirement but would hope not to have to do the former.

There should be a law where you have to state this sample size stuff at the start of every statistical article.

I wonder why they reported 53% interested in remote (rather than 52%, which is 13/25).

My mom retired and then returned to work a year later. To me, not working is amazing. I love it. I was laid off and would love to continue not working (if only I could afford it!). My mom, however, felt differently. She explained it like this: she knows she is getting older, so, after retiring, she felt as if she was just waiting around for death. Yes, she had more time for activities she enjoyed, but she also enjoyed working. She enjoyed being a productive member of society. She enjoyed being relevant. I understand where she's coming from, even though I disagree.

I did a trial run at retirement for a couple of years (2020-2021). And I think I came to a similar conclusion as your mom. I figured I'd learn stuff, work on projects, etc. and I certainly did some of that, but there were just too many choices to make for how to spend my time and at some point that causes a sort of paralysis of inaction. You figure you've got plenty of time to do X so might as well do it tomorrow - lots of procrastination. At some point I figured I might as well go back to work and get paid to do something.

I think my ideal would be to work something like 3 days/week - I could just do that forever if the work was moderately interesting, but there aren't a lot of programming gigs where they let you do that.

Why not just freelance and pick gigs you find interesting?

When client asks why you can only do 3days/week, "I would love to, but my other clients..."

I've almost never found freelance opportunities that weren't in one of these two categories (or both):

- Bargain bin stuff that won't pay the bills unless you're completely debt-free living in an extremely LCOL area and situation (this is the stuff I started my career on, while still living with my mom)

- Full time employment redisguised as "freelancing" for tax and/or department budgeting purposes, with expected working hours/availability, expected tools (Slack or Jira or whatever), and basically everything else that would classify the arrangement as employment.

My dream would be 2-3 days a week of client work, and the rest of my time free to live life or work on patron-funded endeavors of my own imagination's creation. Alas, the market demands ruthless efficiency, so even finding 4-day FTE roles (I've now worked two of them, and would hate to go back but see the writing on the wall about it struggling to catch on) is a challenge, let alone part-time stuff.

(Disclaimer: this all comes from a US perspective. I hear in EU, and particularly in NL from some friends, that part time employment as well as part time contracts, are both much more common, but then, workers' experiences in EU almost universally seem to be better than in the US in all categories except pay, so I'm not surprised)

I agree. Almost all of the clients I worked with were in a rush. It was actually even worse than a standard job as the deadlines were a lot shorter.

I think most clients want you to work on their stuff full time because if they weren't in a hurry they probably wouldn't hire someone to work on their project.

The trick is that you never tell them how many hours you're giving them, let alone when those hours are. You tell them when you'll deliver what they're asking for. Anything more than that isn't relevant to them and isn't any of their business.

This can work if you’re good, otherwise you’d lose out to those who would be working fulltime and would deliver faster

But you could also charge less too so maybe that’s your advantage

Heck, I know I’d jump on anyone who’d just come over and work when they’re free and take longer, for a lower price, for home improvement type stuff

"she felt as if she was just waiting around for death."

That's how I feel at work.

Amen, but rephrased as "I'm throwing away my good years till death"

Ding ding ding! 4-day workweeks and (more recently, now that I'm more willing to set aside my quarrels with the interest-bearing capitalist system since my sole protest certainly won't be the thing to topple it) the FIRE (or LeanFIRE, BaristaFIRE, etc.) movement(s) resonate with me for exactly this reason: grinding myself to bits for 40 years in hopes I maybe get to have 10-20 years of retirement on a broken body and decaying mind in my 60s-80s is such a horrible bargain. I want my 20s and 30s for me: when I can still enjoy being alive.

Maybe this feeling is part of the human condition, regardless of age.

I think the balance is, if the job is still doable at retirement ages, and isn’t some physically grueling task, having seniors put in 3-4 day weeks might be a good option. Especially if they do t have hobbies or others to care for.

I've had a lot of different jobs over the past 25 years. All of them in software, some FAANG, some smaller companies. I've hated every day of every one of those jobs. Right now, not working sounds like the greatest thing in the world to me. But I wonder what it's going to be like when I don't have to deal with this shit any more.

> Yes, she had more time for activities she enjoyed, but she also enjoyed working.

My issue is that I believed in the saying "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life". It turned out that doing what I love as a career sucks much of the joy out of what I love.

So there's a part of me that's looking forward to retirement precisely so that I can get back to programming for real, rather than for pay.

But I'm also well aware that this thinking may be yet another trap.

It took my mom a few years to find her rhythm, but she's loving retirement. Crucially, it took her some time to find community that she could meaningfully participate in, but now that she's got that, she doesn't look back.

It would be great if the "1 in 6" number could be compared to previous years or economic conditions. "considering" is also a pretty broad term - it doesn't sound super surprising to me that 1 in 6 retirees would consider working again - if anything it sounds a bit low, compared to the folks I've known to retire over the last 30ish years.

> "considering" is also a pretty broad term

Similarly, "return to work" is pretty broad. Big difference between contemplating applying for another 9 to 5 in the old industry on the old salary with the old commute and downsides and "if I could pick up some consulting projects every now and then" or "a day a week might actually be good for me" or "now if I got a call saying 'please help us with this problem'"

53% that want remote positions need to realize that there’s someone in another country willing to do the remote job remotely for 1/6th of the wage.

My experience as of late is remote workers in India have advanced their language and professional skills greatly in the last 5-10 years.

Be careful what you wish for.

Almost all software engineering jobs can be done remotely. If the only thing you have to offer is proximity, you’re probably not going to be in a good position.

Any foreign worker that's as good as a "native" worker will also successfully find a job paying within 10% of what the "native" worker would be paid.

Once you get into the lower cost workers, and that's why quality dips.

> have advanced their language and professional skills

They haven't made much progress in advancing their time zone difference, though.

If this where true then the labor would be gobbled up by the market regardless of how the labor in the U.S. feels. So the obvious question is, if you're so worried about it, why isn't it already happening?

It's happening very slowly but it's happening. In my Eastern European country tech wages shot up immensely after the Covid WFH boom thanks to American companies hiring here a lot.

In the US 80k+ is a bottom junior wage but here it's a king's ransom considering the lower taxes and lower CoL, so there's talented seniors willing to grind long hours and work on US timezones for that kind of cheese. I assume it's similar in Latin-AM and Asia.

So far it probably hasn't noticeably impacted US wages as there was an endless stream of free money pouring from the sky which enabled tech companies to keep hiring mostly US talent and grow much faster than off-shore talent onboarding could reliably be done, but now that the negative rate money printing bonanza is over, and the companies figured out how to better work fully remote and how to screen for quality off-shore talent, US companies without the massive war-chests that FAANGs have might focus more on talent from abroad to stay profitable.

Just my 0.02$

It already has happened. In the big tech companies I worked for, adding new headcount always seemed to come from outside the US. Even today, many of the senior leaders come from India. Not to mention the people with Visas.

My overlords banned hiring any Americans in 2020 and have whittled the Americans on team to less than the minimum to be successful. Like we have a email security team that has one guy and one consultant. And we keep getting more non-US personnel, "They are cross trained on everything", Yet they don't know how to do basic tasks that users can do and have been around for months at least. I gave them the training docs, but they never bothered to read them. If you're brought on a 'Senior', RTFM. Writing on the wall. This latest RTO push seems to be designed to get rid of as many Americans as possible.

Sounds like so many large enterprises in the US, I can't tell which company you're referring to. Unfortunately, workers aren't actually fungible, in tech and non-tech roles, and whether the worker is an American or not isn't actually important, but it acts as a bellwether for how seriously invested in the role company leadership is and how stringent the hiring process is. Nearly every major company and all the core infrastructure of American society is crumbling slowly as the oldest members of society extract any remaining value through financialization. Everyone under 40 is pretty fucked, and foreigners taking your job is the least of the problem, because even after that happens it continues to get worse because the basic services of society you rely on also crumble as they're taken over by uninterested and unaffected third-parties.

We're clearly a cost center that leadership doesn't care for, but can't make any money without it working, so...

Why do they need visas if they are remote workers?

Agree 100%. 20yrs ago I worked with multiple teams from India, and we always seemed to have language, skill, and expectation gaps ("the work is done" did not always mean it was done). Now, the India teams are very skilled, speak good/great English, and the expectation gaps are much closer.

As you said, "be careful what you wish for"...

A decade ago, I worked on a team that was half in India and half local to me (in the US). There was no problem with skills, language, etc. at all.

But the time difference was a constant and pretty large issue. If you wanted to have a live meeting, it meant that someone was going to have to be working at a problematic hour.

Agreed on the time issue. Even with Israeli engineering teams, their work week starts on Sunday and ends on Thursday. Thus, you are given a 4-day collaboration week.

Your view is far too tech centric. People old enough to be retirees are unlikely to work in tech/SW development but more stuff like law, medicine or traditional engineering where local credentials matter and act as gate keeping, so it's highly unlikely they'll face competition from abroad.

Mostly tech workers are at risk from remote work negatively impacting their wages.

They’re only too old due to age discrimination. I’ve worked with a number of excellent 50+ y/o workers in tech.

> a number of excellent 50+ y/o workers

As an almost-50-year-old, it might be worth reminding you young whippersnappers that folks in their 50's today started college in the 80's, which was about the peak of the computer revolution. You should expect 50+ y/o tech folks to be hyper-competent, rather than being surprised - they learned back when a bit of assembler programming was expected.

And more importantly they had to read manuals and think through solutions instead of copying the first answer from Stack Overflow (source: me, I'm 51 and have been programming since I was 7).

>You should expect 50+ y/o tech folks to be hyper-competent, rather than being surprise

Yeah, tell that to recruiters. The fact you had to learn things the hard way, including assembler and low level hardware, means very little to modern companies who are looking exclusively for experience in modern languages and frameworks meaning you can easily find yourself unemployed if you're lacking the experience that is in demand right now (AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Django, etc) despite you being an ace in C & assembler. Ask me how I know.

> in demand right now (AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Django, etc)

Not that I would ever do such a thing, but... it's really hard for a prospective employer to determine whether or not you actually used "X" professionally at your last job or whether you learned it on your own while you were looking for a job.

They can figure it out during your probation period when they'll give you tasks and expect output of someone with experience and you'll suck at them because you have no hands on experience on large projects in production as you learned everything on your own off tutorials so you'll either be slow from constantly reading stuff and debugging the codebase to find your way around or you'll be bugging the seniors too much causing them to question your actual experience.

Granted that depends on the company and team and their expectations on your output, but it definitely didn't work out for me. It might work out in large companies/projects where you'll only be a small cog in a large machine.

It’s up to us as engineers to maintain relevant skills (I say this as I’m pushing 40 and still spending 5-10 hours a week reading outside of work and picking jobs based on opportunities for new tech stacks).

50+ aren't really retirees though, they're just older workers.

How many 65+ SW devs do you know with up to date marketable skills?

I work with two developers in that age ballpark who are experts in the field we work in (cloud).

And what does “up to date” mean? Have you seen the kind of tech that insurance companies, etc. use?

To most companies, go is still a verb and rust is still something that happens to metal

I know a fair number of 65+ SW devs that are still working and their skills are as up-to-date as anyone else's.

There are two such engineers on my team right now.

(For the record, I am not a sprightly 20something, but I also am not nearing retirement yet.)

That’s great! What kind of work does your team do?

It primarily develops deep learning vision systems.

They’re all retired, they’ve done very well for themselves and still hack for fun (and have fun associated hobbies like Ham and electronics).

That was exactly my point. Retirees in tech aren't coming back out of retirement to work in flavor of the month framework and modern agile cargo cult.

> modern agile cargo cult.

Hear hear.

> People old enough to be retirees are unlikely to work in tech/SW development

What? There are tons of software engineers at or beyond retirement age. The industry isn't /that/ young.

Remote workers in India isn't the only inexpensive workforce that has improved language skills recently...

Indeed. Computers as well. And the workers in India could leverage them to further close the skill gap.

Its a good thing to wish for: This way, the US labor can also become free to disperse to regions with more sane cost of living and work for similar wages.

Similar wages, because the overseas senior talent wont work for anyone's corp for dimes, in contrast to what some seem to think. They have their own career trajectories, their expectations. If you don't pay them more than what the local corps pay, you wont get them because those local corps come with a lot of perks and the social status. The latter can be quite more important in many regions of the world in respect to the expectations of your family, relatives and friends so the pay difference must be worth losing it.

Yeah, people who think jobs being shipped to other countries is bad should realise that in the long run this increases their own mobility. The quality of life gap between the US and these countries decreases, because higher per-capita income makes everything better. This leads to fewer visa restrictions between those countries. Believe me, India's geographical diversity and cultural openness makes it an amazing place to live provided it fixes its pressing issues and increases its HDI.

Tangentially, this shows why moving jobs to countries with similar values of democracy/pluralism/diversity (e.g. India) is better than authoritarian states, as the latter does not really improve the mobility of your citizens.

I think this ignores the fact that there's not enough wealth to go around for everyone on earth to live at a US level QoL.

QoL != wealth. For example, many Americans live in Europe and more would gladly do so despite significantly lower per-capita income.

Despite continuous cries of "capitalism bad" these days it continues to uplift people all around the world by offering skilled people a fairer chance to compete, while also promoting long lasting world peace. We need more of it, not less.

It uplifts people across the globe while hurting your fellow citizens. We need less of it, not more.

Yeah, this sounds great. Everyone in the world getting access to the tech industry without having to be gatekept by living in a few tech-hubs in the US.

I think at some point we have to turn off the "but any advancement at all will be bad for me because post capitalist hellscape" voice as that's true of everything.

“ But the biggest reason to not hire a retiree is cultural, say 71% of hiring managers. Can these candidates integrate into the current company culture? This concern is followed by uncertainty about their knowledge of industry trends (67%) and whether they still have the skills needed for the job (59%).”

Ageism stated plainly and bluntly.

This is sad.

Politicians want to keep people in the workforce longer by threatening to raise retirement age, but corporate America doesn't want them.

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    Access denied

    What happened?

    The owner of this website (www.paychex.com) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (SI) from accessing this website.

Oh joy...

What country are connecting from?

SI is Slovenia, also not working from a Czech IP, but does work from Germany and Poland. Interesting.

Wonder how many of them were part of the Great Resignation which led to the drop in labor supply in some industries previously.

For tech specifically, wonder if the mass layoffs, coupled with a tech contingent of these returning retirees, will lead to a labor glut that will make getting hired much more difficult.

I've been wondering the same, but my gut says it won't have a huge impact except in the narrow FAANG-style part of the industry.

I suspect that because a lot of the laid-off engineers only know that segment of the industry and will be less likely to seek work outside it for various reasons. And a lot of them will move to a different industry entirely.

You can make stuff up with statistics. I for one am a FIRE early retiree, and have no desire to return to work regardless of remote or not. Perhaps I'm just not motivated...

I want to be a Barista FIRE - meaning, I actually enjoy talking to other humans and performing a task in exchange for money. I don't want that to dominate my personality and I don't want to NEED that job. In my later years, I hope to be lucky enough to work for fun and not to survive.

That's what I'm aiming for. Full-on retirement seems boring.

I used to say "My dream is to work for free."

I'm living the dream.

I was pushed out of the workforce, five years ago (Laid off, then no one would talk to an "old").

It was scary and infuriating, but, I have since found it to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm very fortunate, in having the means to live (fairly humbly), and not need to work.

I love writing code, though, so that's what I do; all day, every day. I found some nonprofit stuff that engages me, and I give them a level of code that they could only dream of.

I guess you are the 5 in 6 then

I’m not even expecting to ever retire. Be it for the fact that I don’t think that the economic situation is going to improve that much, or for the fact that I’d most likely die from boredom.

I’m in my mid-20s.

When you're in your mid-50s and you get crippling arthritis or some other age-related ailment, not being able to retire is going to be a serious problem.

Quite a few people, particularly in the trades, don't get to choose when they retire -- their health dictates it.

Plan to retire, start saving now. Even if you choose to keep working in old age, having a lot of money saved up is a nice thing to have.

> I’m in my mid-20s.

Your mindset changes as you increase your years. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do. I just would rather be sitting on a bucket with a pole in the water.

Who said anything of their desire to return to work?

I'm not worried about competition from returning retirees. I'm "considering" learning another foreign language too. There are a lot of things I consider but end up ultimately not doing, on account of the fact that they take a lot of effort and I don't really have to do them. I don't expect that to change when I'm retired, sadly.

Frankly I'm surprised only 1/6 retirees are considering returning to work. Maybe we all get more realistic with age.

Not surprised. Looking at the polls as to why they're considering going back the vast majority of reasons are financial (even the top voted "Personal reasons" I'd speculate is code for "I didn't plan well enough for retirement and I'm embarrassed").

As a generation, the top 50% of US baby boomer households control 98% of that generation's wealth. That leaves half of the largest generation in American history that likely doesn't have adequate retirement savings. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2019/10/16/the-distr...

I recently had some frank discussions with my parents, and in-laws about elder care. American society doesn't plan appropriately for this and I've seen serious tragedies in our extended family that would have been fairly easy to prepare if we had discussed them regularly.

Things like which sibling is best positioned to be caretaker, and where does the family as a whole want to live(understanding that individual members might choose to go elsewhere).

Funny that after waves of layoffs since we're no longer under ZIRP, the applicant pool gets even larger. This should further lower the pay.

I was going to say "clickbait" but "1 in 6 are considering" is not even very good bait.

I just emailed with a retired (or rather, un-retired) guy who's an expert in Agile & other methodologies, and he said, paraphrasing, "I walk around and people talk to me, and then they send me a check. It's a good gig."

How do those numbers compare with historical averages? Presumably many people have retired to discover their savings is insufficient to support the lifestyle they had imagined. I could believe many people feel lost without work and want the external valuation.

Speaking for myself, being able to work from home eliminates 80% of the things I hate(d) about working. Commutes. Having to appear to be not goofing off. Time away from family. Remote work, especially part-time remote work which is what I have been doing for the past five years, is vastly preferable to not working at all. I work when I am at my most productive, and the rest of the time I do whatever I want. It's the best of all worlds.

Seems low to me considering market performance and inflation over the last few years.

3.227% total return, inflation adjusted from Feb 2020 to Feb 2023. Not too bad, actually. See https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ . Perhaps people got used to the 11.883% inflation adjusted total return from Feb 2010 to Feb 2020. Feb 1871 to Feb 2023 is 6.878% .

Yeah. Market performance is fine, but people were complaining even at the peak in 2021.

That title sounds as though it assumes that all the retired are white collar office workers whose jobs are amenable to remote working.

Sounds to me like the sample is not representative of the general population.

> That title sounds as though it assumes that all the retired are white collar office workers whose jobs are amenable to remote working.

It sounds like 1 in 6 are?

It's hard to read into this without knowing what responses were in the past (especially the recent years pre-pandemic).

So all the crypto bros that retired at 25 now have to re enter the workplace and they want to do it remotely.

>Why are you considering returning to work

>Feeling lonely 43%

Damn... Right in the feels. That's sad.

I was shocked how expensive it is to vacation in Florida now. $300 hotel rooms, $100 car rentals.

What's better for the economy, a retiree boomer working as a walmart greater, or one that spends their savings in Florida.

Not sure how many can afford that without having to Maid themselves at the end of the vacation, the way they do in Canada.

I suspect people are going back to work, because they can't afford much of a retirement.

> Not sure how many can afford that without having to Maid themselves at the end of the vacation, the way they do in Canada.

I'm assuming you mean MAID as in "Medical assistance in dying". You should do some research as it's a very serious thing and obviously not used to end one's life after an expensive vacation. Pretty gross to make fun of people that consider MAID. Do better!

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assi...

It's a lot of different things for different people. For some people its a way to get organs. For others it's to escape poverty.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/10/13/medical-assistance-de...

It's been offered to people depressed and Vetrans, and now is getting pushed to young people.

The gross part is that it's been pushed as a way for government to save money. IF you don't think thats the over riding incentive you haven't been paying attention.

Do you have examples of people that actually made use of MAiD. You're example didn't have to follow through luckily. I hear "some turn to it as an alternative to poverty" but I never actually see any numbers.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/11/16/ontario-medically-ass...

> What's better for the economy, a retiree boomer working as a walmart greater, or one that spends their savings in Florida.

The economy serves the people. That is its purpose: to make everyone's life better.

To do that the economy needs to actually produce and provide something. People not doing any actual work and instead just competing for limited economic output is not helpful.

So yeah: Boomers actually working would be better for everyone. Them just spending money and merely competing for resources is detrimental to everyone else.

your country has fucked up big time

5 of 11 of the reasons are related to money and health.

What a "shithole" country.

If they hate retirement so much their assets should be seized and given to the younger generations that actually need it.

You mean the assets of the people who have contributed most to society should be given to the people who have contributed the least?

An interesting idea but it doesn't scale.

Open up more management positions. Assign one manager to one individual contributor. The manager's job is to be that individual contributor's friend and ally and mentor. The manager will be evaluated on how many of the IC's parameters get boosted over time, in all areas of life that the IC is open to receiving management and training and mentorship on.

Make it a secretary instead of a manager, and I might consider it. :)

It'll sell better if you use the modern vernacular, but certainly.

“Personal assistant” would be the closest modern term to what I imagine, I guess. In the context of taking it seriously as a respectable profession requiring nontrivial competency, I find “secretary” a more preferable denomination, because it de-emphasizes the subordination.

Front Desk Relations Artist?

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