gorf68

I've held a range of positions before I just sort of fell into full time  programming, which I then did for over 10 years.

I've been a Technician, Network Engineer, and Systems Admin amongst others. So I started my current roll as a sort of general IT development resource come consultant, with some third level support thrown in.

This mostly involved patching up legacy code and databases, as well as making some smaller new programs, mostly API stuff. Until the department changed somewhat and I found myself heavily involved with programming projects, mostly C# stuff.

I pretty much want to do what I started out doing in this job!

I still do a bit of that, so maybe I will swing back to that again.

One of my friends has beens a software developer at a major company for something like 30 years. He turned 61 this year and now the company is offering him a voluntary severance pay for the next 1.5 years before he can retire fully. His company has an endless amount of software work to do with big customers waiting, so he's a bit surprised they want to cut him down. Probably they want to renew the staff, combined with that younger talents will accept a much lower salary than his current one. So much for experience in a job where he one knows what you're doing and the demand still exists. He hasn't yet decided if he should take the offer or keep working, as both pay him as much and getting more than one year off work would allow him travel a bit (when the pandemic has eased).

Well they have 10 years on me, but I see it happening a lot now. I don't work for a particularly large or small company, just now, but we do have locations all around the globe, and covid is starting to bite. Causing some weird decisions. I've been told i'm 'safe' but I see a lot of people going around me. It's strange days!