I am literally into a kind of forced retirement. I mean, I am at a very inconvenient age, and again, being laid off. So far, I do not want to find another similar work anymore.
I was an IT professional for the past 30 years. To begin with, I was not a very good math lecturer in my 20s, a green programmer in my early 30s. Then, an immigrant who desperately needed a way to feed a family. At the time, I would have taken any jobs that offered a five dollar per hour, which was a minimum wage at the time. I was yet a fortunate one. with a help of a very kind of friend (R.I.P), I started being a night-shift system operator for a non-IT company considering I barely spoke English at the time. This job saved me and saved my family, financially and mentally, and spring-started my so-called consequent IT career in Toronto.
Ever since then, my so-called career was always based on Oracle’s software either on Unix/Linux platform or Windows. I was an Oracle DBA for the past 23 years. And, an excellent one, at least I think so. As they say, if one is so good at one’s craft, that one is considered too precious to do anything else. After that long on the same position as a DBA, one has totally fed up with the job. To make things worse, one started feeling fatigue with the entire IT industry. The fatigue came from you-do-the-same-thing-everyday, which was to keep databases running all time, 24×7 without any hiccups. If there were, you would be the first one to be asked (or blamed) as if you were the trouble maker, and your boss might demand an immediate answer, sometimes, not even gave you anytime to analyze the issue , to trace the cause, and to find a proper fix. This scenario was especially worse when one dealt with an ambitious and impatient younger boss, and the worse to the worse, an IT-industry idiot. There were many technically challenged idiots (with or without a MBA degree) in public traded or private XYZ companies. Ouch!
To be honest, it is universally true that the real IT people CANNOT speak plain English well, or French, or Russian, or Mandarin, etc. due to that our brains are wired with different languages : Assembly and C to start with, then Visual Basic, C++, Java, nowadays Python or PHP. In database world, there is also something called SQL. In 1980s, 1990s, and early 21 century, when an older generation was still one’s bosses in general, they might have tried to understand nerdy IT workers. Their educations taught them how to manage different people, even people who could not speak decent English like me. Nowadays, many bosses are ones who need to be understood as “I say so, and you must do it regardless of whether it is technically possible or not possible”. Older IT personnel now have to learn how to coax younger bosses, and learn how to speak plain, or more likely diplomatic English, again ( crap! and sign )
Coaxing technique-idiots puts on too much stress on any older <quote> IT professionals </quote> . In my personally opinion, any 50+ or older IT professionals should consider an early retirement if you do not have a similar case of mine. My case was that I started in IT industry too late as you can see I was not really into IT-industry until my mid-30s, and my start point was low, which was a night-shift system operator of a non-IT company, and in my very case, an immigrant who could not speak English (period). That job only required a high school diploma at the time.
The other key-point of being a life long white-collar worker or non-collar worker like me is due to one’s fear to one’s own ability. Basically, my fear is always that I do not have a skill to produce income in order to support my family and myself. Certainly, an Oracle DBA is traditionally considered a skilled worker, a very sample of IT-professional, and paid decently. Despite it, an Oracle DBA is forever a team-player. For a team-player can never be one’s own boss. In the worst scenario, one is even not allowed to speak out one’s thoughts, and one has to always agree with a team leader in so-called brainstorm sessions.
Back to my topic, I am long way over 50, so mentally and physically not fit for either a DBA nor a system admin. I cannot be on-call 24×7. Five years ago, when I begged to be taken out from the on-call list, I got laid off, and the position was replaced by three shifts in India. This time, I refused (again) to be on-call due to that it was not on my original contract. Thus, I should be out of team-player league. Regardless of how young my face looks like, I am biologically close to Canadian official retirement age. So, you tell me whether I should have seek for a new position as an IT worker who has a ridiculous 30 year or-so experience, or just leave the IT industry entirely to start whatever that one’s heart has long desired to do, such as writing a novel?