[ChrisMarshallNY]

I retired, after 30-some years. Actually, I was forced to retire, by folks that don't think us greyheads should be working. Fortunately, I had the means to retire. Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.

But I have been doubling down on my tech work. Once the knuckleheads were removed from the soup, the flavor improved markedly. I love this tech stuff.

Oh, and I have been using AI. It just helped me to find a nasty crashing problem, and I hope that it will help me to determine the best way to fix it.

[pyrophane]

Yeah, I've realized that the things I don't like in tech have everything to do with the culture and politics. When I've been able to work with a small team of people I really like and respect, I've generally been quite content.

[hylaride]

I've rekindled by passion by working for a startup again.

My previous employer (which I also joined as a startup) ended up in a situation where the head product manager became VP of engineering (it's a complicated story - don't ask). We also had a yes-man director of Eng and together they went all-in on very orthodox scrum, where they sat in the sprint planning/point meeting and overrode every decision of what to take off the backlog and enforcing "themes" of each sprint to ensure that only product work got done. It was very rare that any tech-debt work got dealt with, and security work was only done if it burned down CVEs or other "quantifiable" metrics that were contractually obligated.

I ended up ok as there was eventually an exit, but the core experienced engineering team all left within 6 months.

Now I'm not only allowed, but encouraged to take initiative and while of course I do product work, I can also take a step back before taking two steps forward again.

[xp84]

Good for you. It’s so exhausting dealing with these people who are constantly chasing a fantasy that through some process, or through sheer force of will, we can achieve a system where all the feature work gets done super quickly and we never have to pause or slow down to handle engineering concerns because they simply don’t exist.

[dreamcompiler]

The only thing worse is when they expect you to do all the above after they cut your budget in half. I'm so sick of hearing "Do more with less."

"Yes we want you to build a faster-than-light spaceship. Your energy budget is this candle."

Why do we give managerial control to insane people?

[xp84]

I think they get that control because they promise this nonsense to whoever hires them. Essentially, they're flim-flam men. They low-bid to get the contract and then try to make their underlings make good on the promises they made.

I'd never be hired as a CTO because I'd probably tell them "Yeah, you can have 95% less bugs, just stop trying to ship 100 features a quarter. Maybe do half that. Or you can ship twice as many features as you do now, just put up with way more bugs and instability! Instant "Strong No Hire."

[anonymars]

I think to paraphrase Plato's Republic, who else would want it?

[nwhnwh]

The ERP field is filled with these people.

[skeeter2020]

>> they went all-in on very orthodox scrum

do you mean "unorthodox"? What you describe sounds both terrible and not very scrum-like, at least ideally (I too have experienced when whatever terrible approach you use is labelled "agile" by leadership...)

[ElevenLathe]

I somewhat recently had a conversation about how we were going to start being more "strict" about how we do Agile (with a straight face). And they were right!

[hylaride]

Well, except for the fact that they took over the planning process, everything else was orthodox. From the fibonacci pointing system to the retrospectives where we had to go into detail about how the timelines didn't line up perfectly. But we were "working faster" because we were gradually getting more points into a sprint! (queue eye rolls)

What's worse is that I kept getting written up because my main role was DevOps, which meant I was highly interrupt driven...which isn't something you can point reliably.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

Any tips on finding this again? I had a great situation turn sour in exactly this way once growth and leadership change came.

[skeeter2020]

nothing tactical from me, but I've fostered a strategic approach over the years that's lead to a deep appreciation for the real-time experience. You can probably recognize when it's good (and bad) once you've worked for a while, and you really need to consciously pause and remark "If this isn't nice, what is?"^1 at those times when it is good.

A decade of consulting had me always ready to wrap my engagement at the end of any day, and (for better and worse) I carried this with me to future jobs. I always miss (at least some of) the people, but never the situation when it turns sour and I leave. The good news: you often get a chance to work with the good ones again (even if that's because you entice them away to your next gig).

^1 https://archive.org/details/ifthisisntnicewh0000vonn/mode/2u...

[simgt]

Same here, it has always been a state transition. There's always that snake showing up who forces everyone to watch their back and eventually disband. A tech coop seems like a good option, but it's almost exclusively web dev.

[tasuki]

> [...] nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly [...]

Textbook FIRE strategy.

[Xirdus]

I'd say it's missing the FI part and the RE part of the FIRE strategy. Even if they did retire early with financial independence, it's never been their goal and they never actively worked toward it. The reason regular saving and regular humble living look a lot like FIRE saving and FIRE humble living is that an average person can only do so much to increase their net worth, so the possible variance between any two people is very limited.

[jimbokun]

> Even if they did retire early with financial independence, it's never been their goal and they never actively worked toward it.

He did work toward it by saving and living frugally.

[Xirdus]

But not actively. At best, they passively worked toward it. They never consciously took any steps to ensure they have FI or can ever RE. It just happened to them while they were working on other goals.

[embedding-shape]

"Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about. I've basically always earned more than I could spend, although I thought nothing about saving money, does that mean I'm doing FIRE too, or just happened to be "living humbly"?

[magneticnorth]

> "Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about.

As someone who has successfully FIREd, I would disagree. If you are fortunate to be in a successful tech career and have a like-minded spouse, you don't need to do anything extreme to be able to FIRE. We only own one home that is comfortable but not impressive; we take care of our cars and drive them 10+ years; we leaned into hobbies that are cheap or money-saving (cooking, gardening, hiking, biking) and didn't get into owning boats or taking trips with first-class airfare and all-inclusive resorts.

I would say we "live humbly" and therefore had savings that covered expenses well before the age of 65. Part of our motivation was early retirement, but you can be doing the same thing without intent to retire early.

If it gets you to the point that you could retire early, then you were following a FIRE strategy, even if you weren't doing it with that goal in mind.

[embedding-shape]

Well, I'm also FIREd, and obviously I'd disagree with your disagreement :)

I do agree you don't need to do anything extreme, personally I basically stumbled upon financial independence, I was just doing what I thought was fun, turned out it was profitable as well, and here we are with 24/7 freetime for ~50 more years or whatever.

But when I talk with peers who are all into aiming for "FIRE", then that's very different from the experience I had actually achieving it, I haven't though about retirement a single time, and obviously don't relate at all to these people who think about "reduce expenses and maximize savings", but I'd still relate to "lived humbly", fwiw.

[sph]

"reduce expenses and maximize savings" simply means spend less than you earn. Live below your means. We call that 'living humbly' in the modern world, when you're not buying the latest phone and watching the latest movie at $50 a pop.

[aurareturn]

The best position anyone can be in 2026 is having financial freedom so you can leverage AI to build whatever you want.

The worst position is working in a company with non-technical and AI psychosis management.

[chrisweekly]

Figuring out what you want to build isn't necessarily easy.

[coldtea]

Being unemployed and unemployable with depleting savings is even less easy however.

So being financial independent even if undecided on what you want to build is still way better.

[jimbokun]

Which is why you need the financial freedom to spend time figuring it out.

[aurareturn]

Absolutely. AI lets you prototype much faster and financial freedom gives you time.

[jebarker]

What does it even mean to say you want to build something but you don’t know what it is?

[VectorLock]

Building is fun, but deciding what to build can be difficult. "Maker ennui."

[nwhnwh]

"non-technical and AI psychosis management" man, I am done... I am so much done.

[RobRivera]

I will admit, when it came to brainstorming sources of crashes with threads, AI has helped me find sources I hadn't considered (as a systems guy, multi threading real experience is something I am sprinting through)

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Basically, my app is a memory hog. I went all-in on performance, and neglected frugality. Lots of caches, local copies, and pass-by-value.

I suspect the best solution will be architectural, which promises to be a pain.

[RobRivera]

Yea, one cant go all in on performance, and then not co soder architecture.

A language choice is a starting point but you have to know the techniques of architecture learned.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

It looks like it wasn't too painful. I just kept a couple of array references too long. The LLM gave me some threaded crap, and I now need to make sure to let go, before another thread grabs the PC.

That's the issue with the new "memory is cheap" model. I cut my teeth with 256 BYTES (not KB or MB) of space for the program, the stack, and the scratch.

But I've gotten sloppy, over the years.

[junon]

Man as a not (yet) greybeard, I wish we had more of them in the teams I've been on in the last ~10 years.

[dlev_pika]

> Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.

Finally some real talk for common folk. Godspeed, friend

[gosub100]

Fwiw we hired a "gray head" earlier this year and it was a huge mistake. guy has solid Linux knowledge but has absolutely zero motivation to get work done. If you don't constantly prod him on his progress he will just sit there and stare at the code. No longer am I going to be dazzled by someones 30 year tech resume.