Pretty much. In a prior role I didn't have a real job any longer but the people making the decisions for a fairly small layoff probably didn't know that. Would have been happy to have taken a decent severance package. Hung out for a while more or less.
I reached a point--somewhat older than that--when I didn't have a real job any longer, but nobody seemed in a big hurry to get rid of me, and they were paying me pretty well. I made it through a small layoff though I wouldn't have minded the good severance. I might have hung around in different circumstances but figured I should optimize the payout up to a point and wasn't really interested in heading somewhere new.
Maybe. It's very situational. Beyond the spreadsheets for a given location, there are times in your life when you want to be able to pickup and move fairly easily and there are times when you want to be able to put down roots and be in a pretty stable situation that lets you tailor things.
I did "reasonably" well for a couple decades and then I did, if not spectacularly, well for a decade+ that certainly set me up for retirement. And I might have even retired earlier absent COVIVD. Not spectacular sums but certainly reasonable amounts given owning a house and modest travel sums.
The other thing I see is that people nearish retirement age and are comfortable, who might have cruised on for a few years, are pretty much going: now is probably the time. Maybe do some consulting though that's tight right now. So, maybe not optimal, but why stay in a non-ideal situation?
I do know various people who left a job with a former employer because they weren't happy and seemingly landed fine AFAIK. I mostly stuck things out for a bit because I was mostly retiring. Otherwise, I'd probably have done the same even if the end-result was retiring a bit early.
Probably not uncommon. My final year at my last employer post re-organization and other changes was cold-hearted money extraction for (generously) part-time work. I was sort of disappointed I didn't get a package when they laid a fair number of people I worked with off. But I took a hard look at my vacation balances, upcoming holidays, RSU vesting, etc. and decided to coast for about the next year which, as it turned out, was just about the point it would have been difficult to continue on with no real job not that I would have wanted to.
On the other hand, you have to guard against being that person who is in a perpetual state of "Benn there, done that. Didn't work the last 5 times we tried it." Because sometimes the circumstances/market/tech ecosystem genuinely are different.
I'm a bit hesitant to describe $NEW_CONCEPT/TECH as just $OLD_CONCEPT/TECH. Echoes of older things in a new context can really amount to something different. Yes, VMware didn't create the idea of virtualization and Docker et al didn't create containerization but the results were pretty novel.
For me, it was very obvious at the end. Technical but not programming. Felt like I was winding down. Circumstances were such there wasn't a lot of mobility within the company. Was somewhat disappointed that I didn't get a package as part of some layoffs but I assume powers that be didn't want to voluntarily lose headcount.
Ended up hanging around for a year effectively working part time. Not sure that was the right idea or not (had lots of vacation which I pretty much all took) but year+ passed by and it was pretty obvious at that point I couldn't drag my feet any longer and didn't have the interest or need to do a job search.
Sort of does. Can't imagine it's a typical experience and makes me wonder what's so unusual in this case. There are always bad experiences with support but usually systematic tire fires indicate some other issues.
Years and years ago, I got a warning because I downloaded some new series or other there was a lot of hoopla about.
It wasn't something I did regularly but it was definitely a wakeup call that if I was ever going to do something along those lines, I needed at least some minimum level of protections in place. Not 100% reliable I'm sure but almost certainly enough to protect against random torrent tracking.
And even a larger company I'm familiar with has been looking very hard at lease renewals and has been walking away from a bunch of them. There's a certain lip service to the energy associated with having people back in the office but, in practice, people are being switched to fully remote if they don't come in and offices are being eliminated or swapped out for smaller spaces.
Getting ready to retire pretty soon and had a handle on a few very part-time things more to keep my hand in rather than to make money. Anecdotally, all that seems to have sort of fizzled away. Nothing was too formal in any case and not a big deal. But I think the message is to focus on things I want to do that don't require getting someone to pay me.
I've been sort of burned out a few times for various definitions of same. A couple were just pretty intense phases of projects--both in tech and non-tech--where I just needed a bit of a break afterwards.
The other was I was just ready to check-out late career. Didn't have the interesting earlier career work any longer. I sort of made it work but really didn't care and timeframes were such it didn't make sense to go elsewhere for a bit.
Stability and long product lifecycles are incredibly important to them. They're pretty much the opposite of move fast and break things or deploy early/deploy often.
One can simultaneously be impressed by the engineering while wondering if this level of custom implementation at what will probably be pretty low scale really makes sense.
Yeah, he presumably put away a nice nest egg working at Google. It's not in any way wrong to remind others that, if they're lucky enough to be in a similar position, they don't necessarily need to work until "normal" retirement time if they/their families don't want that.
Personally, I feel like I got a bit greedy and could probably have called it quits a year or three back and been happier for it. I partly blame COVID for disrupting what might have otherwise been a better transition.
"Rich" is a bit of a loaded term. But, yes, if someone has had a successful 35-40 year career in tech and has managed their finances reasonably, it's not unreasonable that they might decide to pack things in some years early--especially if they're not wild about working at a behemoth company that isn't as much fun as it used to be.
It's not 2001 but it's almost certainly harder for a later career person in particular get hired than, say, 5 years ago. I know quite a few people who presumably feel comfortable financially and have walked away from at least full time involvement with tech.
There are volunteer or more-or-less volunteer things you can do but you need to find the right open source project (or start one), find a channel where people will actually read what you write and do it regularly enough, have connections to people who actually want your advice, etc. Once you're not connected to an organization some of those things are harder than they seem unless you have specific, still-relevant credentials.
>You are planning work every now and then, aren't you?
In the past, I've tried to give key people on longer-term projects I'm working on a heads-up. But I trusted them and it was longer-term. At the end of the day, I'm not going to let the word out before I'm ready if I'm worried it has the potential to bite me financially, e.g. because of vesting.
I don't know the details but so long as its not some top secret IP, taking copies of various work you've personally done seems pretty reasonable. Good idea to do it periodically as you go along though.
Companies grow and they have to change. I was at a company that grew to about 10x the size of when I joined. It was still pretty successful but it was a different company. I didn't have the freedom and flexibility, there was more process, etc. Not as fun but you really can't run a 10x company like you run a 1x one.
Perhaps not popular but, if you're getting paid well, the work is tolerable enough, the grass is often not actually greener somewhere else, you have mouths to feed, maybe you're close to retiring/semi-retiring, etc. continuing to hang around for a while isn't necessarily the worst strategy.
I probably wouldn't do it indefinitely but it can make sense to hang around for a while.
I've mentored someone remotely and it seems to have gone pretty well. Doesn't hurt that they person is very good. And, yes, chat is invaluable.
I still feel you're losing something without in-person (including social) interaction. I know for me personally, I would say I have much weaker connections to many people I've never met in person. That said, there are a bunch of other factors involved with building new connections as well that aren't purely about being virtual.
I've absoluttely been in a position where the ground moved under me. I went from doing (based on evaluations, RSUs, etc.) from doing a very good job to bouncing around a bunch of managers and groups in roles that I wasn't really suited for and didn't have much real interest in. The only saving grace was that I was pretty close to semi-retiring anyway.