I wish both you'z gents all the best and that you find what you are looking for.

Dont focus too much on the $$ aspect, just do something that you'll love and hopefully gives you a good reason to get up in the morning. If these gen z fuckers can do it, i don't see why we elder millennials/gen x cant do it. We all pounded in our hours to get ahead, start a family, achieve status, etc, etc.

But now that we are here, it's all just water underneath the bridge, and it's time to focus inward. Do what makes you happy bros.

i dont wanna be like my shrivelled old hag of a secretary who comes into work so that she can get social interaction.

WTF you are 46? I thought you were white. Aren't you supposed to look like a grandpa at 46? :badpokerface:

he porked one too many of our women and somehow inherited the anti-aging gene from them

Shit... didn't realize 68style is older than me. When we met I thought he was younger than me... :pokerface:

Maybe it's just me and I don't mean to sound insensitive or disrespectful but I can't help but feel like what you are looking for might be a pipe dream.

Without knowing specifics of your background and specializations, generally from what I've seen tech/PM roles are oversaturated with supply vs demand.

Finding employement income of $125k - $175k where you can work independently and not participate in too many intense conversations seems kind of impossible to me in this economic environment, and in that particular field.

I could see someone with a professional designation (doctor, lawyer, engineer, something like that) could charge out that hourly rate just to read documents all day without requiring a ton of meetings with people.

But other than that, I think you might have to lower the salary expectations to something that's more of a desk job/administrative role?

That said, I am rooting for you and am super sorry to hear about your illness.

if you want no social interaction but make that kinda money, you can always join either marine industry or rail industry.

Conductors start at 70k (more now with their new contract) so probably 80k and you dont talk to dick squat all anyone other than your crew. Its just the hours are rough initially. Once youre past the 3 year mark you'll break 100k with a steady job

Deckhand on a tug also pays around that and once you do a few years of that, you can easily break 100k. Try seaspan they are always looking for people. Or hell check out the port of vancouver jobs, we always hiring

46style

Hot take but what if you just...Retire?

Without knowing further details about your financial situation, whether your house is paid off, if your spouse works, kids ages, Investment returns etc. I can only assume you are in a really good financial situation given your past salary and saying you only need another 500K (Gross?).

I'm sure you've heard of the whole FIRE movement - Financial Independence, Retire Early which you might not want to do but has become quite trendy as of late. There's also subtle variations of this like LeanFIRE, BaristaFIRE, FatFIRE. You can google these if you're not familiar but basically the jist of it is, are you able to pare down your living expenses you might find out you have enough to live off of indefinitely.

But I don't mean to say to just kick back and move to a retirement home. Keep working if you must but I don't see how even taking on a PM role, let alone a principal PM role would give you the autonomy and lack of meetings that you are seeking. It's not executive level stress for sure but an entirely different stress with deadlines, issues and higher ups shitting on you. Sound like what you need is some routine, creative work that is more or less customer facing. Instead of Product Management how about a part time consulting role with a focus on sales support for smaller companies which might be more up your alley. Just my 2 Cents.

But yeah I'm rambling a bit now, so look into how much you REALLY need to live off of. Calculate your yearly expenses and multiply it by 25. Do you have that much in cold hard cash? If Yes then you're good, kick back and take whatever comes your way and don't stress about trying to make a 6-figure salary for the next 5 or whatever years.

Is this the official RS retirement plan? Work late, hang out in parking lot to talk about cars, eat hot dogs till we puke and then maybe get some work done?

honestly i've thought about when i retire hopefully fairly early, just working some really casual low paying job to supplement my retirement. basically hobby money. obviously it would have to be something that would be somewhat fun or social, not something soul sucking where your manager yells at you every day.

This. :fuckyea:

Good luck with that, even teens and students can't get menial retail jobs these days. Because of *ahem* a certain demographic coming to Canada. Unless something drastic changes what makes you think they're going to hire some geezers like us when it's our time?

Best we can hope for is they still take volunteers to talk to even older geezers so we still get that social interaction

Just thinking about how many work hours over the past 22 years I've spent reading RS.......

Like right now lol.

RS is my career. I've worked at 8 companies in 22 years but there's only one RS. :heartsmile::heartsmile::heartsmile:

i was thinkin something similar, over $100k who no stress and little social interaction is like hitting the jackpot.

engineers making over $100k IMO is rare and the level of responsibility and outward facing interaction is high. Either Sr PM, business dev engineering, or management. High stress and long hours.

my suggestion would be to lower the salary expectation and stretch out retirement. using engineering again as an example, $75k you could find intermediate engineering roles that would perhaps fit the bill better balancing stress and interaction, though engineering as a whole is stressful :lol

lol dude this is so depressing to read but you're probably 100% right

Oh, I've spent way too many work hours reading shit on RS :lol

Whenever there's no new posts, I'm sometimes bored af.

Half of the cashiers at my local Save On Foods look like they are past retirement age. TBH it kind of saddens me because I assume they still need to work for financial reasons.

That said, there's still hope if you want a job like that, haha.

i always wondered if it's due to not having medical coverage and to cover cost of medication, which can be expensive in itself, which if true would be real sad.

lol i was thinking more home depot like the other old guys. working for 'fun' is so different than working because you need the money, so my standards are pretty low for that. of course a strong argument could always be made to just work an extra 2 years at a higher earning potential and then you would prob make more money than you would in the next 10 years of working part time at home depot, but yeah..

TIL

My grandpa is 86 and still working. Marshall at the golf course. Fucking loves his job, keeps him busy, golfs for free. He's killing it. Got his third hole in one a few weeks ago. I love to see it.

i mean i think it's tough maybe i'm wrong lol
i should caviat i'm not talking about SW engineers that make over $100k out the gate or whatever, that industry i don't understand anymore.

my wife yells at me when i say in front of the kids being an engineer ain't that great i should have gone in to business :lol
i dunno, imo it's not as cracked up as asian parents make it sound... unless you're really passionate about the industry, maybe it's the gloomy weather, but i feel like it can be soul sucking lol

What kind of engineering? I'd be surprised if regular Electrical/Mechanical/etc Engineers aren't making over 100k/yr down there.

Not insensitive or disrespectful - fair points. Intensity is all relative - I'm not looking for none or little, I just need to lower it from what I experience now. Talking company budgets, preparing for a board meeting, having "I'm gonna fire you" convos with directs, negotiating with fellow VPs/C-Suite - those are all more draining and intense than "We gotta ship this next week" or doing a ranking of priorities in a team meeting. That stuff is pretty easy for me and I can do it at a level far above the level of pay I'm looking for.

(Semi)-retirement is certainly possible - we could maintain our current pretty comfortable lifestyle with me only making $50-60k/yr. That could be as little as a couple consulting gigs a year or some desk job somewhere. I ultimately just have a short term cash flow problem b/c I'm sitting on a future payout (high 6 figures) in a few years that will pay off the house completely and leave me sitting pretty.

This has been a really helpful convo as I think I just assumed that I should just grab some smaller job and call it a day but there really are other options for me and ways of thinking about things I hadn't considered. You all have got my wheels turning a lot and I'm really glad that there's a group of folks like that I can talk this out with.