It is VERY worth talking to a professional about this. It's possible to build your savings in a manner they will produce income via dividends, bonds and other methods that give you a pretty great tax advantage and you don't have to sell as many assets during retirement. This is a huge advantage overall, especially in the years the market is bad.
I am not a financial professional but rely on one to guide me.
The title is misleading, they are referring to "Retirement Savings" just counting 401k and IRA dollars only. Personally my "retirement savings" are over 60% in non-IRA or 401k dollars, and I'm retired.
Later in the article they begin to talk about overall net worth including regular savings and investments and the numbers are better but could still be problematic:
>> In terms of the average retiree’s net worth, the Federal Reserve data puts it at approximately $1.2 million for those aged 65 to 74. The average net worth drops to $958,000 for those aged 75 and older.
Pick any industry and this environment we’re experiencing in “CS” is going to occur 3 or 4 times in your working years. No matter if you’re an electrician or a software developer.
Do you like building software? Based on your post I get a feeling (which may be wrong) you’re looking for the $$.
If you like it, stay with it and keep studying. It will pay off.
(Edit: my experience) I left college and started out writing COBOL. Several dot com busts later and I was lucky enough to lead several SaaS teams and have wonderful exits.
You mention not being the person making a purchasing decision, who is? Can you connect with them?
I would encourage you to put together a story that illustrates the pain being caused by this software and get with the purchasers. Not only might it help your organization figure out they need to do something different it could also show off your skills to the orgainization.
Could you collect the time you and other people are spending working on these problems?
How many issues are reported to you?
How many bugs you've filed and have not had fixed by the vendor?
Rolling this up into a real dollar coast it's having on you and the school district users.
> The idea that 5 years of experience is enough to solve most problems is crazy to me. 18 years in the industry, and I’m still very aware of things I don’t know and need to get better at. I know amazing engineers with 40 years of experience who are still learning and getting better.
Recently retired engineering manager here. Manager I all the way to VP of Engineering at several successful startups and a few big companies.
I was continually surprised that fresh and new challenges continually appeared, until I got wise enough to know there will always be something you not run into before.
Be wary of anyone who think’s they’ve seen it all.
If I go a week or so without some real exercise my anxiety starts to creep up. It does this no matter how good or bad my sleep has been over that time.
We’ve switched to only subscribing to a single service at a time. When we get several items to watch on a service and exhausted our current service, we cancel the current and restart the “new” one.
I suspect with Netflix’s recent crackdown on sharing, this will get much more common and their recent gains in membership will reverse.
They just don’t have that much good stuff coming out, nor do many of the services.
Currently really enjoying Hulu on their 1.00/month plan from Black Friday. Many many shows and movies we’d not seen.
Yes. But many Sr. Leaders just see a number so it must also be a metric you can use for measurement. They do not understand it’s real use.
I picture a construction company counting the total inches / centimeters each employee measured every day. Then at the end of the year firing the bottom 20% of employees measured in total units measured in the last 12 months.
Not only do we uncover bugs, it’s a great way to get the whole company learning about the new things coming and for the product team to get unfiltered feed back.
I just shared this story earlier today with my team. This was Cobol insurance claims processing system, shortly before the Y2K issues.
The claims processing system I worked on used a number system that would only go to 4 digits, it would roll over to 0 if we ever processed more than 9999 claims overnight.
Our VP would not listen to us when we said we needed to change that. He said "Claims process fine every night! There is no problem." I had left before they got to that 10,000th claim (thankfully).
That said, anyone need an old COBOL developer?
Edit: now I’m the VP of Engineering. We do work on tech debt regularly.
“ If the goodwill asset becomes impaired by a decline in the value of the asset below the purchase price, the company would record a goodwill impairment. This is a signal that the value of the asset has fallen below the amount that the company originally paid for it.”