Change: The Only Universal Constant

Friday, February 14, 2025 (Valentine’s Day), will be my last day working for the organization from which I had hoped to retire.

Once again, change, the only universal constant, comes without warning.

On Monday, February 3, 2025, my employer publicly announced the acquisition of another company in the same sector of the CyberSecurity industry. This organization has been around for a good while and has developed internal tooling that is provides some of the same process orchestration features as the internal product for which I’ve been a Principal Software Engineer for the last 4½ years. My entire team learned on Tuesday that our product will not be part of the merged organization and, as such, our services are no longer required.

So, here I sit. In the final years of my career, faced with finding a new job.

I had really hoped to retire in 1-2 year from this organization. However, I am not ready yet — emotionally or financially — to enter retirement. I still love software engineering and the challenges that it presents. I still need to sock away some more cash before I’m ready to retire.

I’ve spent the last few days trying to get organized. My resume is 5 years old and out of date with my current experience and doesn’t meet today’s standards for a successful job search. Thankfully, an old friend who’s helped others with resume updates has offered to guide me through the process. I’ll be honest, the effort required seems daunting and this is not the kind of thing I enjoy doing. Honestly, I’d rather be slinging code.

Also, I don’t relish the thought of the interview/hiring process. It’s always been nerve-wracking and even more so these days with in-depth tech interviews that put you on the spot to write challenging code on the spur of the moment.

And then there’s the issue of age-ism. I am nearing retirement and am already past the “expected” age of retirement. Despite my many years of experience (45+), I know that most technical organizations want to hire young bucks with fancy degrees and flashy web sites that show their UI skills. Being an old dinosaur who’s been a back-end engineer for the vast majority of his career, I don’t have any flash to show. My skills are in REST APIs and back-end databases (SQL & NoSQL) mostly developed in private, enterprise apps. These are almost impossible to “showcase”.

I will persist in my job search and hope to find a place where I can contribute significantly to the success of a software engineering organization for a few years before the curtain falls on my career as a software engineer.

If anyone has any recommendations, I would love to hear about them.