The threat of recession is not luring techies back
Widespread hiring freezes and the threat of job cuts are not the only employment story in tech. Without a doubt, tech companies, coming down from a Covid-led sugar high, are steeling themselves for tough times. Share valuations are down, sales are down and expected to continue to slip as consumers tighten their belts, and the buying-while-bored-at-home bonanza that buoyed information technology, particularly hardware, sales is well and truly over.
Add to this examples of the inevitable results of the sector’s traditional hubris – for instance, Facebook’s decision to reorient the company to focus on the ‘metaverse’ is beginning to look like a mistake – and you can see why cooler heads, which is to say ones who don’t believe in endless exponential growth, may finally be beginning to prevail.
Behind the headlines, however, there is another interesting story: while older workers in other sectors are deferring retirement, and retired workers even dusting off their CVs, tech workers have no plans to slog until they drop.
A study published by global tech recruiters Robert Walters has found that when tech staff go they stay gone. Speaking to The Register, the firm’s Ajay Hayre said: “Generally speaking, we are starting to see more older workers choose to stay in work for longer or consider a return to work post retirement […] Interestingly, where this is the least prominent when looking at professional services/white collar roles is within technology”.
Interesting, yes. Surprising, perhaps less so.
One factor is, as always, cold, hard cash – something the average tech worker, at least above helpdesk level, is not short of. Whereas other workers might, looking at meager pension pots and a rocketing cost of living, decide a few more years of meetings might just be worth it, it seems that many tech workers find themselves in a more secure position.
Interestingly, in the run up to the millennium, retired COBOL programmers were lured back into the workplace to perform well-remunerated remedial work to ensure mainframes were not thrown into chaos by the so-called ‘millennium bug’ (aka the Y2K Problem). Of course, this is precisely the point: COBOL programmers are still well paid because mainframes are still all over the place but there are few enough people who want to get into the area. As a result, bringing back old timers to work on systems that have been built up incrementally over decades makes sense.
It would be a fair bet, however, that the same developers would have no interest in learning a new language simply to return to the workplace.
The prevailing culture in tech says it is essential to keep up with the latest skills and developments if you want to enjoy anything like job security. Is it? Personally, I can think of better things to do with my time, and were I a retiring tech worker with a fat pension and paid-off home, wild horses wouldn’t be able to drag me back to bugfix code.
Alas, that is not likely to be my situation, nor that of many of the rest of us. Still, envy, while natural, is unbecoming, so I say two cheers for the retired and retiring tech workers who intend to stay that way.
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