> The "retired" was in quotes

I think that's the point. Actually retiring as in not doing any work is statistically speaking a steep slippery slope to death.

I'm happy for you. This kind of "retirement" would be my end game, too.

What age were you forced retiring? I'm highly concerned because as a millennial, retiring safely seems to be something that can be achieved at 65

55, but I also live like a pauper, and was maxing out my retirement options for 30 years.

Thanks! I am maxing out my retirement options too, but I have a mortgage and that ends at ~63 roughly. Based on my projections if I retire at 65 I'm good, however if I retire before then, I will definitely need to sell the home for a smaller one (which could be fine, if the body allows it)

I'm 55 and still getting interviews... got my last job at 52.

The whole "omg, I'm 40 - no tech will hire me" is a bit overblown...

I was a manager. That was a big problem, looking for an IC job.

My employees were close to my age, and got jobs, but it took years. These were top-shelf C++ geeks.

I was treated pretty badly, and decided it wasn’t worth it.

Wow man - Sorry you had such bad time :-/ Hopefully you got something fun now :-)

I have noticed over the years that interviewing has gotten more onerous and ghosting has gotten more common. There's never any reason to treat people badly/ghost them. Even a thanks-but-no-thanks is better then radio silence.

I'm glad it is like that, I'm concerned for anything at 60+, in the end 5 years of income is quite a bit, hence why I am trying to plan ahead for retirement

sounds like a good plan :-) Trick is to be on the edges - either leading edge or trailing edge. That's where the competition is lowest and the compensation is highest. I do cloud architecture/infrastructure atm, but I figure I'll fund my retirement by being the last living COBOL programmer :-P

That's way harder to accomplish unfortunately. Unless I study COBOL too

Hehe - yeah.. by the time millennials retire I'm not sure what it would be ... Java maybe ?

I thought about that, but Java is also the most widespread language, so I don't know if it will be similar to COBOL (I don't know how widespread COBOL was)

COBOL was very widespread - there used to be more lines of COBOL in production then any other language (Mostly mainframe and (super-)mini computer stuff (banks, govt, insurance, etc.)

In another 20-30 years, Java might be a lot less popular then Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, etc? So lots of Java that needs maintenance and not many people left to do it??

Unpopular stance, but the Fishtank Graph[0] tells the story.

PHP is actually a good bet.

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

oh yeah - Can't believe I forgot about Perl and PHP !!

Those could be good bets too. Always fun to speculate whats still gonna be around in 20-30 years :-D

PHP is a good bet, but it still powers 50% of the internet.

That's A LOT of websites...