guys from that generation (with its past financial opportunities and real estate prices) and of a character required to even work like that - humbly and diligently maintaining a complex legacy code base, very rarely fall victim to financial issues when they retire. those men (and women) are usually very zen and collected. loneliness and suffering from a feeling like no longer being needed is probably the biggest (mental) threat. but the aforementioned personality traits will provide for developing new opportunities like voluntary work or maintaining some open source repo.
don't worry about them ... worry about yourself (if you are young and in IT) and especially about those poor junior devs put in place for this guy.
I'm in medical device software. I'm mid-way through my career (15+ years). I've been on my current codebase (which is 20+ years old) for 5 years. I work with a coworker who's been with this code base for 20 years, but is 45 years into his career. I push back hard when it's suggested that we bring on a fresh college grad (who wasn't even born when this codebase was initiated) and it's suggested to give him/her one of the harder tasks with no supervision. Management: "They have a degree in computer science, why wouldn't that be enough qualification?" Me:"For the same reason you don't name a recent MBA graduate CEO of our fortune 500 company".
Note: I'm all for hiring recent college grads, but they need to be paired with a senior dev, and management needs to understand that you're not speeding up the project this month. Ideally, you're investing in the robustness of your team. The challenge I face is that so many junior engineers are job hopping the first ~5 years. That's not a smear on them. It's good for them. But it's not great for me...
Parent and great grandparent comments are correct. I'm sure the author of the blog had fun with that, but it's fiction. These kinds of pragmatic guys are not the ones you have to worry about, they will be ok. I think they included it to take the steam out of the obvious counter to their snark: Arthur got paid well for his work and did alright, so who cares about the sniping and denigration?
>It’ll take two junior devs and a Keurig to replace him.
Also out of touch. You can throw N juniors at this kind of codebase and without the mentorship of an Arthur type, they will get nowhere. They'll do a "rewrite" with 1/10 of the features.
If you are the kind of person who thinks the future of IT looks bleak right now, imagine what it must have looked like in 2002 when NASDAQ was in a three year death spiral and down 80%, which is an experience this guy lived... and then in 2009 when the stock market was down at levels previously seen in 1997...
If anything, the lesson should be not to worry about yourself because the only way this man could be forced to resort to dumpster diving is if he was given too much to worry about his retirement accounts.
I would dispute that the person that plugs away at a legacy code base, does not necessarily translate to someone that is also good at personal finance.
They can actually be quite opposite, and finances are easy to let slide, ignore as the days go by, while you are zen'd out on some cool technical problem.
don't worry about them ... worry about yourself (if you are young and in IT) and especially about those poor junior devs put in place for this guy.