Mendalla
Happy headbanging ape!!
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
So here we are. I am 60 and still working. Why? I just didn't feel ready. I am provisionally retiring next year but did agree to take on project management for one more big project that might push me past that.
Or I might jump at the end of this year. You see, a bigwig at our parent company has it in his head that we can save a ton of money by building our own system inhouse instead migrating our current system (based on a Microsoft platform) to the cloud, as we need to do by 2027. The new CTO is a big AI advocate and swears up and down that with help from Claude (his AI of choice right now) his team can recreate the entire system for us. There's a whole raft of things wrong with this idea and I've just sent my boss and my Manager, Technology Solutions (the guy who reports to me and is in charge of our core systems) a 2000 word document dissecting it, comparing it to the current plan of staying on the platform and just moving to the cloud, and recommending staying the course. But what if the CEO sticks to his guns and our execs can't rein him in?
My backup plan is to say f*** it and retire early. I've dusted off my notice that I wrote a couple years ago and added language to make it abundantly clear that's why I am pulling the plug. I did not sign on to manage a potentially disastrous from-scratch rebuild of a system that we have built and successfully used for 20 years, just a migration of and improvements to that system. The stress if it blows up in our faces could be the end of me. If I was younger, I would dust off my resume but the odds of me finding something similar to what I have at 60 are probably slim. IT is a young person's game for the most part and anywhere I go, I am likely to run into similar things. AI is the Great Hope of Mankind (sarcasm alert) and too many are buying the hype.
Too be honest, I would love to be excited about and advocating for this project. But not this way. There's too little time and dick all planning for it at this point. In a better context, where time was not a factor and there was some clarity on some key points that are still up in the air, I might all over this. We built the current system piece by piece and the idea of being able to get off the MS platform and build the whole thing in a new way has its appeal. But that's likely a 2-3 year project and we have 18 months.
Hopefully, saner heads prevail and I don't need to pull the trigger.
(Depression is likely involved, too, but it's this mess that triggered the depression so there's a bit of a negative feedback loop here.)
Or I might jump at the end of this year. You see, a bigwig at our parent company has it in his head that we can save a ton of money by building our own system inhouse instead migrating our current system (based on a Microsoft platform) to the cloud, as we need to do by 2027. The new CTO is a big AI advocate and swears up and down that with help from Claude (his AI of choice right now) his team can recreate the entire system for us. There's a whole raft of things wrong with this idea and I've just sent my boss and my Manager, Technology Solutions (the guy who reports to me and is in charge of our core systems) a 2000 word document dissecting it, comparing it to the current plan of staying on the platform and just moving to the cloud, and recommending staying the course. But what if the CEO sticks to his guns and our execs can't rein him in?
My backup plan is to say f*** it and retire early. I've dusted off my notice that I wrote a couple years ago and added language to make it abundantly clear that's why I am pulling the plug. I did not sign on to manage a potentially disastrous from-scratch rebuild of a system that we have built and successfully used for 20 years, just a migration of and improvements to that system. The stress if it blows up in our faces could be the end of me. If I was younger, I would dust off my resume but the odds of me finding something similar to what I have at 60 are probably slim. IT is a young person's game for the most part and anywhere I go, I am likely to run into similar things. AI is the Great Hope of Mankind (sarcasm alert) and too many are buying the hype.
Too be honest, I would love to be excited about and advocating for this project. But not this way. There's too little time and dick all planning for it at this point. In a better context, where time was not a factor and there was some clarity on some key points that are still up in the air, I might all over this. We built the current system piece by piece and the idea of being able to get off the MS platform and build the whole thing in a new way has its appeal. But that's likely a 2-3 year project and we have 18 months.
Hopefully, saner heads prevail and I don't need to pull the trigger.
(Depression is likely involved, too, but it's this mess that triggered the depression so there's a bit of a negative feedback loop here.)
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