In Holland, in my generation, it is a tradition to call the friends of your parents “aunt” and “uncle”, despite the absence of a blood relation. One day, a few years ago, I was talking to “aunt Jennie” who lived around the corner from my parents and my real aunt and uncle in Els Poblets (Spain). “How are you doing, aunt Jennie”, I asked her, “I heard you went to a new dentist, how did that go?” Aunt Jennie responded with a timeless answer: “Ach Jos, you know what it is, this new dentist is younger than my own sons, so by definition he is a whipper-snapper” (Dutch: Snotneus).
In this year of our Lord 2026, both the lovely Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom and I are reaching an age that is a nice round number and that is more commonly associated with retirement and being grandparents (rumor has it the girls are working on it), than with a thriving career in tech. But here I am, every workday morning at 7am either working already or on the bike to the office to put in a day in the hottest field at this time and for one of the hottest companies in that field.
With changes in society, such as greater wealth and improved medical technology, getting older has of course changed drastically. When I was a wee lad, my grandparents were about the same age as I am now and they were (in my eyes at least), professional old people. Obviously, their lives had been much harder and much more difficult than mine, as they grew up in a poor agricultural part of Holland in the first half of the 20th century, lived through the second world war and then struggled through the lean years following the war. My granddad qualified for a disability pension in his late fifties and my grandmother, who had been a housewife all her life, had to take a part-time job to make ends meet.
Compared to my grandparents, my life has been incredibly easy and rather than worrying about how to make it to social security, I am worrying about how to train for Bay to Breakers (after my dismal performance during the Detroit Turkey Trot) and whether the stress I experience at work will influence my blood pressure readings during my pilot’s third class medical exam.
As the Germans so adequately put it: “Deine Sorgen möchte ich haben”, which translates to: I would like to have your worries.
Things do change though as you get older and one of the things to plan for is how to glide from your career into your retirement by means of a post-career.
For most of your working life, you tend to be chasing the next big thing, be it your next job, your next promotion, a bigger project, or some other quantum leap. Your post-career starts when you are still working but you no longer care about any of this as you are “just” doing the job you are doing, without any hopes, dreams, or ambitions. In your post-career, your job is no longer a stepping stone to the next and bigger thing and that takes the edge off of things quite a bit.
I want to differentiate between the concept of the post-career and the American tradition of “retiring” but continuing to work. As a European, that used to be a completely foreign concept to me, because the European concept of retirement literally means that you stop working and start drawing from your pension. In the US, retirement seems to mark the point where you work less than before, but you still work because you have to, which is of course terrible. It’s obviously awesome if you are dabbling a bit in paid work after retirement because you want to. For instance my flight instructor is a retired Facebook engineering director who loves to fly and loves to teach and so pushing slowpokes like me past the checkride requirements pays for his hobby and is a great way to hang out with other people who love to fly. But that is not the post-career that I am talking about. My definition of post-career is that you are still in the workforce because you kinda have to, but you are no longer striving to grow your career, at least not in the traditional way. In my view, the post-career is a great pre-retirement period where you can let go of a lot of stress and a lot of the anxiety of the “winner takes most” world.
My parents desperately needed a post-career because, after owning and running a bar and restaurant for decades, they had no hobbies and no friends. We were particularly worried about my dad, because running the business had literally been his entire life for as long as anyone could remember. Besides that he did, well, nothing. One day, my parents called my brother and me (we were both still living at home) into the living room for a chat and they announced that they were moving to Zeeland (the old Zeeland, which is the one that makes the other one “new”) and that it was not their intention that we would move with them. “Hmm, can Patrick and I stay here?” I asked. “Sure, they said” and so everyone was happy. My parents moved out, creating some distance between themselves and the business and my brother and I stayed put, because living in a bar and restaurant is awesome, especially if your parents are no longer there. After moving out, they started working less and less, until eventually they sold the business and retired to Spain.
I realized I was post-career when, more than a year ago, I was having my first 1:1 with my new manager who also happened to be new at the company. During that meeting, he told me that he hadn’t had time yet to study the career development opportunities and processes at our company so could I please give him some time to get that together? “Oh, that’s easy”, I answered, “I don’t care about any of that anymore. I don’t want to get promoted and I don’t need a new fancy job title. I’ll just do whatever you and the company need me to do.” He was very grateful for that answer…
I slipped into post-career mode almost unnoticeably. I was never one for the big traditional management career, but I have been ambitious for most of my life. Even after I went back from the management to the IC track in 2010, I strove to run bigger and more complicated projects, to get promoted, and to be the über tech lead of a few engineering teams. After the pandemic and during my jobs after that, that urge just gradually disappeared, mostly without me noticing, until the aforementioned discussion with my new manager.
Part of the post-career is that you do the job that you want to do, instead of the job that you think sets you up best for your next job. As it happens, I currently find myself in the role of an individual contributor with significant hands-on responsibilities and without much official tech leadership responsibilities. I must admit that at first I was somewhat miffed about that.
All through my life I have been doing jobs that had at least some hands-on responsibilities. In the 1990s, I was consulting with a large bank where my work consisted solely of reorganizing bits of toner on paper. Eventually I had a conversation with the engagement manager of that gig to tell him I would be looking for something else where I would have to write and compile code every now and then. Said manager was flabbergasted because, in their world, it was all about getting out of hands-on technical work as fast as possible to the world of documents and spreadsheets. He could not believe that I aspired to get back to designing and coding computer programs. “But I like doing that”, I told him. From then on, it was clear to everybody that I was not destined for the board room…
That event notwithstanding, over time, my work moved more and more into the realm of design, coordination, and influence. Always technical, and always with significant hands-on responsibilities as well, but it had evolved into a fun and satisfying mix of different types of work. As an Amazon principal engineer my work was mostly technical leadership, though, to their credit, “senior engineers who don’t write code” is an explicit anti-pattern that people are looking for during performance calibration.
So when during my next job I found myself in a mostly hands-on IC role, I was at first a bit annoyed. To quote Marvin, the paranoid android: “Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? ’Cos I don’t.” It was fun technical work though and gradually I leaned into it and decided that, since this was going to be my last job anyway, to give myself the gift of the post-career.
Your mental state is of course all about framing and I turned my annoyance at doing mostly hands-on work into pride that, almost 40 years into my career, I could still do this like the best of them 🙂. Plus I actually enjoy building things with my bare editor, so why not enjoy that and let go of any anxiety that other, younger, people are pushing ahead of me?
The post-career is not about laziness when it comes to working, it is about realizing that you have achieved probably all that you are going to achieve in your professional career and enjoying doing good work without an add-on agenda of that work having to lead into career growth.
