Comment Planned my Exit a decade Ago! (Score 1) 174
I personally planned my exit a decade ago after a 30-year career in technology. Since I started focusing on a whole different career path that required me to become a teacher, an instructor and a coach along with a referee in a precision sport that requires humans to be involved in every aspect because everything is still running on centuries old proven technologies with almost no changes.
Cert & Lic Up... but in A Second Career
Instead of spending time getting technical certifications that would become irrelevant in half a decade as I kept seeing the acceleration of development of new technologies increase and the breadth of the entire field of technology expand exponentially so that it became impossible to maintain expertise in all or even much of it. So instead, I spend time getting licenses and certifications in that sport and then expand my involvement to build up experience so I could step into it later as a career.
Frankly, my plan was to have this as a secondary career and then transition into it towards my later years in life as I approached retirement, I could spend less time with technical work that was mostly remote now and get involved in this sport more and spend more time with it.
Bad Management -> Early Career Changeover
A bad turn of events caused by exploitive sociopathic gaslighting horrible incompetent illiterate and technically illiterate manager after a forced transferred to a useless and very underperforming team that needed a top-level expert to fix all the problem in the entire organizational tree, blew up my career and caused untold mental damage from having to deal with such a level of ignorance and maliciousness, so I transitioned into that sport career full tilt as a form of early retirement way earlier than I expected.
Knowing that AI is growing and taking over a lot of jobs, everybody says we're in a bubble but nobody can tell us when it's going to pop.
I still like working in technology because I am a technologist I plan to spend some time getting certifications for very specific Niche products that I'm really good at where they have a very high value and are very expensive to run and maintain and support. So I'm hoping to become so specialized that I can take work contracts, part-time hopefully and spend most of my other time in my other career in precision sports.
However, I have a feeling with the upcoming IPOs of the AI companies. There's going to be a reckoning coming with all the private debt and the bond markets and the interest rates and the inflation all hitting a inflection point from which there will be no return and will be in another lost decade of technology and economic growth. I'm not a doomsayer or a predictor because I felt like this for so long.
This is why I started on my path early to build up enough decades of experience to come into it with already a fully developed plan backed by decades of experience and certifications and involvement in networking and social experience.
We shall see what the future brings in technology. Things are not looking good with all of the AI stories. Talking about the young workers not getting the hands-on experience since they have been replaced by AI and existing workers being laid off along with them exiting the industry and retiring early or completely disconnecting and doing the quiet quit along with the silent quit along with the early retirement or a complete career change.