My So-Called Retirement
I made it. Retirement! Those decades of contributing to the gross national product have brought me my just rewards. Fishing every day. Hanging at the barber shop playing relaxed games of checkers. Pickleball!!
I don’t think so.
I’ve been one of the clowns in the circus that is software development for a long time and have no plans to stop just yet. I want to be able to say I’ve been at banging away at the keyboard for more than fifty years. The number rolls off the tongue nicely and is a special enough milestone to have its own name, the golden anniversary. I suppose if humans were born with eight digits, I’d be aiming for the sixty-four-year mark. Now we’re talking magic numbers!
I prefer to refer to my situation as ‘a revision of work/life balance’. I avoided using the word ‘retirement’ at work. To my ears ‘retiring’ sounds too much like ‘dead man walking’.
In the movie “About Schmidt” Jack Nicholson plays an actuary hanging up his pencil after a long career doing all the fun, engaging things actuaries do. It wasn’t a particularly memorable film but for one scene. While leaving from a post retirement visit to his long-time employer, Schmidt spots stacks of boxes near the dumpsters containing all the ‘important documents’ he left behind for his successor. Ouch.
I know pretty darn well that the code I’ve written over the years is destined to be tossed out or reinvented. It’s the nature of the business. But please. What harm is there in allowing us devs a tiny delusion of immortality!
My coworkers were not fooled about my non-retirement but neither did their expectations change. Right up until the end I was grinding out product as much as ever. I delivered everything I promised then called it a day.
And so it begins…
As my mom used to say, ‘there’s no rest for the wicked’. Immediately, I dove into the task of firing up my post-career career.
My wife was incredulous but not surprised to see me spending as much time at my computer as I had while working. She’s ok with it since I’m using the time for myself. What am I doing with this time? Getting retread.
My bucket list of technologies to learn is brimming with choices. In the past the decision making process was straightforward.
- Rank the choices by the degree they would make my job easier.
- Pick one from the top of the list.
Without a specific job demanding specific skills, the ranking criterion needs to be tweaked. I’ve new, conflicting goals. I want to bring in some income while at the same time be serious about changing my work/life balance. (Yes, I have a life outside work. 🙂) The optimal solution needs to maximize return on effort while keeping effort low.
And the winner is…
At number 1 on the charts is no-code/low-code development. I’m a fan of the concept and in the past appreciated the occasional excuse to play with proto low-code systems. I vividly remember the time I showed an HCI post-doc how to use ResEdit on a Mac Plus to design screens. His eyes lit up as he shouted, “This is programming!”. The only time I saw a bigger smile on the guy’s face was when I suggested programmers who designed interfaces by themselves should face a firing squad.
Then there were JavaBeans. I’m not talking about Enterprise Java Beans, just JavaBeans. (The phrase ‘Enterprise Java Beans’ still puts shivers up my spine.) I worked on a small project circa Java 1.2 where we used NetBeans’s GUI builder to wire interface actions to custom beans representing endpoints of multi-agent services we’d built. It was fun but, in the end, remained merely an interesting experiment.
My tech news echo chamber has been reflecting no-code/low-code buzzwords long enough now to convince me to learn what the technology can and cannot do. Assuming they perform as advertised; the plan is to then leverage that knowledge into income.
Which lever do I pull?
#1 Become a Consultant
Ooof. If this doesn’t shriek “I’m retired but need the income” then nothing does. I’m biased from having crossed paths with semi-retired ‘consultants’ whose one and only gig was with their final employer.
Putting prejudice aside I see a few hurdles.
— No “personal brand”.
Why did a search of my name on Google have to bring up so many obituaries? There were a couple of authentic hits on the first page. That’s better than nothing.
I’ve started answering questions on Stack Overflow, Reddit and Discord. Try it sometime. It’s a great exercise in humility. Each day there are at best a handful of questions I feel fully qualified to answer. This is a good thing. Composing informative responses can take time.
I wrote and published my first open-source Python package! That was enjoyable if a bit frustrating at times. The package, jertl, is based on a virtual machine I once designed for performing structural pattern matching. I’ve always been happy with that work.
Will anyone use the thing? I placed announcements on sites recommended in articles on how to promote a Python package. I’ve shamelessly plugged it on some online communities. So far, I’m up to a whopping 70 or so downloads. I’ll keep the project going unless it becomes painfully obvious no-one is interested. You can expect an article on the package on Medium before the end of the year. I may even do a poster about jertl at PyCon!
— An empty Rolodex
Note to younger self. Maintain connections!!! I‘ll swallow my pride and cold call previous co-workers to let them know I’m looking for gigs. Who cares if they shoot me the look they reserve for use at high school reunions when former classmates try to sell them Amway products.
— Very little experience at consulting.
Just something else to pick up. How-to articles are easy to find on the internet. Better yet, there are business associations in town which run mentoring programs for this sort of thing.
Given my history I’ll pitch myself as a low-cost developer of proof of concepts for pre-seed startups. If that niche doesn’t hit paydirt, I’ll just go with the ‘low-cost’ aspect. I prefer not to. With generic development there is a ton of offshore competition to deal with. Hopefully, not too many have climbed onto the no/low-code bandwagon.
#2 Start a Company of One
Medium is packed with folks regaling how their side-hustle became a source of mad stacks of Benjamins. Tempting, yes, but heck if I know what that business would be.
I get the feeling the citizen developer movement is going to be more disruptive than we traditional developers would care to admit. Using products like Zapier to wire up connectors and cobble together workflows is not rocket science. These tools are the IKEA furniture of software. Developers are not required for assembly.
Where do we fit in this brave new world? I figure there will always be a market for niche connectors, visual components, microservices and what not. The available slots will fill up fast.
#3 Flip Startups
Some people flip houses. I could flip startup ideas.
I regularly stumble on blogs whose authors like to brain dump suggestions for new products and services. They’ll use titles like “2023 startup ideas for 2023”. In the way the proverbial monkeys on typewriters have the potential to produce Shakespeare, some of these could be winners.
This is how it would work.
- Snag a good suggestion from some blogger.
- Do sufficient research to make a convincing argument there is a market for said product/service.
- Slap together proofs of concept using world class no-code skills.
- Sketch out a business development plan.
- Put a nice bow on the package and sell the startup on a site like MicroAcquire.
#4 — Work at a University
This option has nothing to do with entrepreneurship. I was a research engineer at a university for about thirteen years and sometimes imagine it would be nice to go back. I got to develop bleeding edge tech and rub shoulders with the best and brightest. There were always interesting talks to attend and libraries packed full of yummy things to learn.
There are tradeoffs. Salaries in academia can be far lower than that of industry. Then there is the unspoken caste system. Professors are at the top, followed by post-docs and so on and so forth. We engineers landed roughly in the middle of that hierarchy.
Post-docs were the best to work with. They’re past the grind of the paper chase but not yet sullied by the Machiavellian politics of departmental life. There are few openings for tenured professorships so competition is fierce. By necessity academics, like sharks, are one of the few species willing to eat their own kind.
In conclusion
I’m the first to admit I’ve been very lucky. My whole adult life I’ve been paid well to solve puzzles. The greatest risk I faced was to find nothing but non-dairy creamer at the coffee station. Best of all I liked what I was doing.
I would be disingenuous if I neglected to raise an important question. If it weren’t that I want to ensure something resembling my current standard of living, would I continue to work? This is an extremely good question. I believe the answer is… maybe.
It took a long time, but I’m at the point where I‘d like to be the one to reap the most benefits from my labor. Anyone can start a business; it is mostly a matter of deciding you can. Not everyone can run a profitable business, but the odds aren’t completely horrible.
I‘m about to find out.
