Musings on Eventual Retirement

I have been working for a while. It's introspective (and sometimes a bit jarring) to think of one's professional life as closer to retirement than the beginning, but without being too specific, that's where I am at now. In the last few months, I've started to think about what that might look like, even though in reality it's still probably at least a decade or more away. I have thoughts.

First, as my wife observes, I probably would not stop doing something work-related. I've always liked making things, and I don't expect that to stop. If I were independently wealthy, I'd likely fund my own shop, and just build things I thought would be good to have in the world, but for which there is not clear and obvious way to make them profitable enough that any commercial entity would build them (eg: a general OAuth endpoint which was not tied to a corporation, and did not allow PII collection or fingerprinting across different services, but would allow anyone to easily outsource authentication for their app/service). I don't anticipate that level of wealth, though, so that's more of a fantasy than anything.

In reality, I think I would keep working (at least for a while), but my perspective on work itself would change. I'll elaborate... 

In the corporate world, most people (everyone not at the top of the food chains) puts up with a certain amount of corporate garbage (politics, inefficiencies, managerial ass-kissing, etc.), to ensure they can continue to have an income stream. There are always other people doing stupid, annoying, and/or frustrating crap within any organization, and often those people are "above" you in a corporate hierarchy. People find various ways of coping with this, because feeding yourself and your family is more important than telling others exactly how you feel about whatever idiotic headaches they are creating on that specific day; that's the normal and expected corporate sacrifice.

I think what "retirement" would mean to me is: not doing that any more. At the point where I had enough money to walk away from a job and be fine forever, I don't think I would stop working; I think I would just stop feeling the need to put up with an accept everything else that was annoying, frustrating, and/or stupid with corporate life.

Schedule me for on-call arbitrarily, without my buy-in, overlapping with my off-time personal activities? Sure, no problem... I just won't answer the texts. Want me to populate data in some asinine and ridiculously complex work tracking system? Better hope the agentic AI puts in the data you wanted, cause I certainly am not doing that by hand. You want to add a forth daily status meeting to my calendar, for your specific project you think should be top priority for me? Knock yourself out, but don't expect me to show up (and if you ask, I'm going to say "because I didn't judge that it was important for me to attend"). I'm going to work on what I think is interesting and productive, and no longer care about what other people think I should be doing instead.

Will this get me fired eventually? Almost certainly, when I ignore enough demands from enough "important people". Corporations cannot tolerate people who do not fall in line, respect the chain of authority, do what they are told, etc. I might even be direct with my manager when that happens, and tell him/her what I plan to do, and ask them to just to let me know when I've reached the point where I can no longer be employed there. My goal would not be to be surreptitious about what I was doing; my goal would simply be to not do the stuff which made me frustrated and stressed, and only do the stuff which made me happy. Eventually, I'd find myself "retired" naturally, and that would be fine. I don't think I would want any "going away" party, or anything of the sort; I'd want people to just remember the older good developer who just stopped caring about putting up with all the corporate BS, until they eventually had to let him go. That's fine with me, I think.

Of course that's still a bit away, so my opinions might change in the interim... but that's how I'm thinking about it now, fwiw. I like that plan, anyway, and I hope I get to see it through.