Working Past 100? In Japan, Some People Never Quit

Working in a craft for yourself at your own pace is a joy.

Working for others in a corporate environment is hell and will kill you.

Let's make sure people understand that difference.

Some white-collar professionals enjoy continuing their work past retirement age. It can be stimulating, high-leverage, and I have often seen them contributing at key moments without spending much time at the office. The accumulated wisdom and political capital of many decades at the wheel makes a difference. I've also seen blue-collar workers keep at it past retirement age because of their finances or some other compulsion despite arthritis, weakness, bad sight etc and rue every moment. Let's make sure we understand that not every craft is heaven and not every corporation is a hellscape.

I worked for others in a corporate environment and it was often a joy, but the problem is you don't always get that lucky and even if you do, the environment can change around you from year to year and a perfect job can turn into hell. And corporate engineering jobs have become so filled with stupid bullshit that the career I had and thrived in may not even be possible anymore.

I'm not set up to work for myself, my ideal is for others to worry about the business, and give me projects I can work on with freedom.

I definitely would have kept my software engineering career longer if I could have found a decent job like I used to have. But what it means to be and what's expected of a professional software engineer today is so different from how I spent my career and how I like/need to work. So I've retired rather than continue fighting it.

If you're making money from that craft it means you have customers. And bad customers are their own kind of hell.

But in most crafts they are easier to avoid or mitigate.

Agree. In 25ish years I've been part of 3 mergers, 1 divestiture, 1 IPO, and N CEO/senior leadership changes. Each of them has changed my job in some way, usually for the worse. I've been told to relocate or quit, I've had customer-facing travel policy change (told to be on the road 100%), I've been put on-call (even when traveling 100%), and I've had internal culture change the point of hating life. There were some positive ones too, but those stand out because generally it caused me to leave (or get laid-off).

There’s plenty companies around who are doing more or less what they did 20 years ago. Enterprise ERP systems is where you want to look.

I’ve worked at a few startups and one big company in Silicon Valley. Over the last 7 years I’ve had periods where I’m really excited to get to work in the morning when I’m going to sleep. I’ve had stretches of time where I realize how lucky I am and that others would be incredibly jealous if they understood how good I had it.

I also had periods of time where a job was making me miserable. Ruining my time outside of work. Making me question everything.