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Comment by away271828 | Hacker News Reader

>The primary reason the unemployment has remained low is due to so many people primarily baby boomers, leaving the work force.

I know quite a few people in the tech sphere who, under other circumstances, might have taken some late career job (or just happily continued in their current role) who are taking their vests, retiring somewhat early, and maybe do a bit of consulting on the side. There are fewer opportunities and a lot of work environments are under a lot of financial stress these days.

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Not to mention all the bureaucracy surrounding Jira, Agile and other items, I may end up on that train too.

Years ago, word of mouth directly from the user was good enough. Now, changes have to go through several levels of bureaucracy before it can even be looked at.

Left the "industry" early for similar reasons. It used to be fun when it was looser, more bottom up. I was spoiled perhaps — but I can tell you the job ain't what it used to be.

A lot of companies grew a lot, there's a lot of economic stress/caution, budgets are tight for things like travel, a lot of scrutiny around goals/performance measurement/financial metrics/etc. While there are certainly pockets of interesting activity, I see larger companies certainly battening down hatches. Was talking to someone just last night who is counting down the days to their next vest then they're out. I have to believe a lot of employee survey results at the moment are a train wreck.

I wonder though about the younger engineers who are just entering or have only recently entered the field. Do they even know what it used to be like?

I have met new engineers though that seem to enjoy the current structure of modern software engineering with all its unit tests, code reviews, lint, etc. Perhaps they would not have enjoyed the more freewheeling era that I thrived on.

I suspect a lot of engineers who grew up in a very process-oriented environment would find the way things were often done a couple decades ago to be utter chaos. It depends on the size of the company as well, of course, but a lot of process-oriented tooling like git, ticketing systems, CI/CD, etc. have become pretty widespread standard practice.

Yes, it was utter chaos, and we liked it that way because we were the ones driving the clown car, ha ha.

Depends on company size and culture really

This. It makes me feel like dog shit at work to have to vet everything through a buckshot path of stakeholders. Often, they aren't even stakeholders. Creative? Have ideas? Good luck.

Ladle on top of this working with tight-ass (would a smile or joke hurt?), pedantic burnt out devs (no wonder women don't want to code) and I'm faced with an emotional struggle almost every day. My favorite words seem to be: "fuck this."

> might have taken some late career job (or just happily continued in their current role) who are taking their vests, retiring somewhat early

The primary force pushing people to not cash out tech stock and soft retire is because tech stocks peaked two years ago, and most are struggling to recover. I think working conditions and consulting opportunities are secondary concerns to most people in that position.

As long as someone isn't all or mostly in and holding one or two large tech company stocks, if they've been in non-startup tech for the past few decades, they should be in pretty good shape. But there's no guarantee Facebook stock is going to recover in 3/4/5 years.

The fact is that between the salaries at many companies and stock appreciation the past decade+, many people are in a position to soft retire as you put it and they're doing so. And it's clear from talking to them the fact that their jobs aren't much fun any longer has a lot to do with it.

The combination of a 30 year career in software, being a little smart about money, and not being unlucky about unexpected expenses is usually good enough to soft retire. In your early 50s. A lot of people do it.

I was responding to why some people would choose not to do it. S&P500, Dow, and Nasdaq peaked 2 years ago. I know that's influenced people in my sphere to keep up the grind.

Fair enough. Like many of their companies, people are probably inclined to be a little more cautious in at least choosing the exact timing of their departure. I know one person who was going to leave their job at the beginning of the year but decided to take a few months until their next vest to transition their replacement.

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