Ask Slashdot: When Is the Right Time To Discuss Retirement With Your Employer?

An anonymous reader writes: As I am sliding down the far side of 60, retirement is something coming up in two or three years.

The usual notice time is two weeks, but I'm one of two people (maybe three if they pull one back in off other projects he's done the past four years) who do what I do, and is fairly important to the company's product. Yeah, we'd be in serious hurt if one of us were hit by a truck.

I'd like to give a lot of notice. It took them six months to find me for this position half a decade ago. But I don't want to be let go before I'm ready to go, either.

Most slashdotters seem to be a lot younger than me, so maybe I'm asking in the wrong place, but has anyone else dealt with this issue?

Comments

Re:No good dead goes unpunished

[networkBoy]

This!
We have a guy at my office much like you.
He gets hit by a truck, we stay in business, but we slip all sorts of deadlines, and likely contractual obligations, and our bug escape count will go way up.

He's a greybeard and greatly valued, but he wants to retire. He gave us a year notice, and he was in a position that if we said "bye" he'd have been fine (bored, but fine). As it is we are grateful for the year's notice and have him advising Jr devs when they get stuck. We're 6 mo in and he's down to 4 days a week (his choice, but good for us as it's driving home the point we need to learn everything we can from him first).

Honestly, if you're that valuable I predict that you will be fine having the "1 year warning" retirement convo, particularly if you approach it with something along the lines of:
"I've loved working here, but as I'm sure you can guess I am getting to the age where retirement is looming. I don't want to leave this team in a lurch, so I was thinking about working out a (1yr|6mo|nn week) transition plan where I can mentor a replacement. What do you think about that?"

This puts you in a position of relative power in that they can say okay, or you can leave and they have no choice but to hold the bag. Naturally if you have some trigger that needs to happen, like stock options vesting, wait till *after* the trigger, just in case.

In a reverse version of this I know a guy who knew his value, but when we were bought by Intel he simply didn't want to work for such a big company. He offered a similar resignation, a transition plan, knowledge transfer/training. He was rebuked and told "If you're quitting then we'll have your final paycheck to you plus some severance".
6 months later we were hiring him on a *LUDICHRIST* contract of $20,000 + expenses and $500 per diem for 4 days of work to crash course a group of devs to get past some roadblock.