Yes, my former boss was mad when she found out how little they’re paying me.
I did that before I retired. If anyone read it, it’s news to me. I put in a lot of jokes which I think I would have gotten some feedback on. I suspect most of the people who took over my code thought they knew better.
Yes, but it is a natural part of the hiring system. When we did salary administration when I was at Bell Labs this happened all the time. New hires get paid in order to get them away from other companies also paying a lot. (In good times, at least.) Current employees are assumed to have a natural hesitancy about moving, and so can get smaller raises and be happy.
Each person brought a pot of money with them, and we tried to move some from highly paid newer people to inadequately paid current people. But you don’t want to screw new people too badly. This was much easier during times of high inflation when the average raise was 10% rather than when it was 2%.
sorry if I possibly missed it in the thread … but at what stage are you in life? … stuff like age/kids/family/housing situation … (if you feel like sharing) …
my point being: I’d persue different things in a job at 35 w/out kids than age 55 w/ 3 teenagers (and asoc. cost)
We’re a non-profit, so we have to make a minimum amount before the company will contribute to our 401ks, and 2% is ‘generous’.
Seven months away from being eligible to apply for Medicare, two years and seven months away from full retirement benefits. No kids, just a wife and cats. I paid off my mortgage last week.
I did that too. I found out later they threw it away unnoticed and unused. if I had entertained any delusions that my contributions were valued (as opposed to valuable), that finished that off.
My advice;
Spend your effort now selling the current boss on how utterly screwed they will be the instant you leave. Just overwhelm that Tampa dev with the mountains of random detail. Not explained so they can decode it, just explained enough to make them aware of the morass of random ad hoc shit you deal with. Once they think they understand something, drop the old “But wait! There’s more!” bomb on them. Repeatedly. Persuade them they’ll need at least a year to learn the domain well enough to write code to do your entire job at a button push.
IMO that’s how you stay employed until your natural retirement. You can spend that entire interval just teaching the dev how to automate the mess you know how to clean up every month.
This got used all the time, so it was valuable. I knew my management didn’t understand it, since they had no software experience at all. But the people who didn’t read my notes were younger and no doubt thought they could do better than this old guy.
A few months later my boss asked me if I could come back to consult on it. I told he he’d have to pay me, and that was the end of that.
My experience is that the way to stay employed is to set things up so that you leaving is more painful to your boss than you staying. Doesn’t always work, but it worked for me. But I second your advice. Except if Tampa has an opening. Then it could be “this is really tough to explain, and I don’t have a lot of time left, but if I was there you’d have no worries.”
You are far wiser in the ways of corporate warfare than I. I’d overlooked that opportunity. Two thumbs up!
ah … ok, then of course any somewhat decent job that helps you run out the clock, while offering “ok or better” quality of life. I can understand that you don’t need a top-dollar job, and are basically transitioning to retirement - and not trying to restart a different career path…
Some of the things you ‘just know’ is that write-off accounts for a certain member get a ‘write-off’ code in the output file. The members tells me which accounts are write-offs, and I add the account numbers to the Easytrieve.
As I said, La Jefa, and El Jefe before her, don’t understand data. The president before them had spent his career with the company, and knew how things worked.
It’s like… I have to deal with members who have better things to do than send me their accounts receivable files. I reach out to members to become new contributors and never hear back from them. BMCRA seems like everyone works from a script, and it takes them forever to do anything. And they’re almost impossible to contact. When I worked there, I answered the contributors within a business day (and wrote Easytrieves to fix their bad data). Then there’s the current president and the previous president (now chairman of the board or something) that only see the data department (down to me) as something to cut and add money to the bottom line (never mind that my data brings in twice what they pay me, plus whatever OBCRA pays us, plus the value to our own products).
If I can get a job where nothing is expected of me but to enter orders and talk to customers for eight hours a day (or heck, be a box boy at Costco – which would eventually pay more than I’m making now), and not have to even think about having to drive 120 miles to the office, and to ‘get out and meet people’ like my wife wants, then I think I’d be good with that. And yeah, have insurance and stuff.
And not be wrangling data at home from a computer that doesn’t play well with the system.
Well… It plays well as long as I can connect to my desktop computer. The new laptop… Easytrieve just won’t run on it. You’d think a modern computer could handle a program that runs a language introduced in 1970 quite easily! 
Yeah, and make punctuation emojis.
From what I’ve seen, many jobs at Costco are quite physically demanding; using a pallet jack or forklift to move pallets around and so forth. Though you might end up with a cashier position.
That’s what my part-time neighbour has been doing forever.
I admit to getting a tiny sense of validation when I texted my boss asking him if he wanted this old work access thing I’d found three weeks after I retired. He immediately (and apologetically) hit me with a short barrage of questions referring to institutional knowledge about construction projects from decades past. I told him my vague recollections and instructed him on where he could find the relevant info. I also offered to drive the ten minutes to the facility and spend the fifteen or twenty minutes it would take to research his questions in the old paper archives for a quick grand in consulting money 
. He laughed and declined, but I figure the odds he actually took my advice and followed though to research an admittedly minor bit of detail is probably near zero 
. And he was a good boss - I’ve had so much worse.
So basically you just want to put in your time until full Social Security? Can you get by on the wife’s income, or that plus early benefits SS if absolutely needs be? Not ideal I realize as it would be a permanent hit to retirement income, but just in case the job search stalls. Age bias (even totally unconscious age bias) can be a bitch to navigate in the hunt for new gigs later in life.
Probably best would be if you could pull off LSLGuy’s thought and convince them you’re too much of a vital cog to cut loose this early. But best of luck, regardless 
.
I have a friend who was laid off as a COBOL programmer a couple of years before he could collect SS and a pension. He got a job stocking shelves at Trader Joe’s to tide him over. He enjoyed it. At first, he had trouble getting shifts he wanted, but as his seniority grew, he got higher in the “pick times” order and he found the actual work, and his coworkers, pleasant. It wasn’t demanding, it was mildly social, and i don’t think it was all that physically stressful, either. He was much happier doing that than he had been the last year on the COBOL job when he had to train Indians to replace him even though management never gave him a timeline, or any honest acknowledgement they planned to can him.
Maybe. Bur my wife has her own business. She charges $55 per visit, or $45 if the patient is a veteran or former nurse. She’s had a heavy week, with five patients per day. Usually it’s three or four. So she’s not exactly raking it in. But she doesn’t have a president who doesn’t understand data. Oh, wait… Anyway, she’s making a lot less than when she was working for a home health company; but she’s much happier.
Thanks. I’m just going to do the FAFO thing.
Did they not understand the format and meaning of your data (understandable) or data in general (infinitely clueless.)
And remember, any job not worth doing is not worth doing well.
I’ve been shopping at Trader Joe’s since about 1986. I’ve heard it’s a great place to work. And I did know some COBOL when I worked for BMCRA.
Credit reports depend on current, accurate data. Inaccurate data is either dropped (so it never gets to the reports), or results in mis-merged credit reports. For example: Bob’s Construction Supply sells products to Bill’s Homebuilding LLC. Bob’s puts the job name (e.g., Beautiful Acres) in their data. So unless it’s cleaned up, Beautiful Acres is assumed to be a DBA of Bill’s Homebuilding… which it isn’t. So if anyone pulls a credit report on Beautiful Acres and Bill’s Homebuilding is delinquent in their payments, then Beautiful Acres gets dinged. I can see this happening with a few of our members who send us their a/r data. La Jefa says she understands that, but she thinks someone (other than me) has a magic wand.