What's your next career move? What's your exit strategy?

[SussexSeagull]

50 at the end of last year with a couple of years left on the mortgage so that will be the first order of business.

Other than that it remains to be seen if the industry is going through one of it's phases and normal service it resumed in the future or if the UK economy can be revived, and frankly the latter is much bigger than the contracting sector.

The move towards hybrid/remote might have extended my career though. Not sure disappearing in the middle of the night on Monday to visit an outpost all week before coming back on Friday evening would have got anymore exciting as I got older.

[Snooky]

I'm 60 this year, so much closer to the end of my working life than many here. I finally paid the mortgage off last year, I have 3 rental properties still with mortgages on, but they pay for themselves. I'll probably sell one soon. I don't know how much I have in pensions & investments - despite working in financial systems my entire career I'm hopeless at keeping track of my own money. I do know I won't have to eat dog food when I retire, but I also know I won't be cruising the world all year round.

Finally gave up contracting in 2022 and have been permie since then on a decent package, so I'm lurking here under false pretences

I've worked in IT all these years and never really found it very interesting, but having an exciting career was always very much second place to the other things I wanted in life - a home, a family, security, enough money to enjoy life - so I was happy to do it, it's not that hard and I've done far worse jobs in my time. Currently doing lots of data engineering stuff with different databases and Python etc., almost entirely remotely. I'm hoping that'll see me through to whenever I choose to retire, so that's my very mundane exit strategy.

[vwdan]

I'm only 37, so retirement is a long long way away (if ever!), but it's a good question. I'm technical, but my niche has changed unrecognisably over the last decade or so to the point where now roles are close to nonexistent, though ironically the ones that exist are very good and pay well.

I don't know really - I try not to worry too much. My career has taken me into things and roles that I would never have dreamed of, so I guess it's kind of the same old for me. Keep on pushing, keep on upskilling, keep on finding way to stand out from the crowd. It's not a simple fix, and certainly for me it can have the effect of making me a bit of an odd commodity but it's worked til now.

I'm always on the lookout for Plan B's. A few years back I spotted a weird niche and wrote some software that was so insanely specific that even people in my niche would look at me confused, but made a good chunk of change selling it commercially to those whose problems it fixed. If nothing else, again, it's an upskill.

Can't really imagine going Perm anytime soon, I think that's my wind down to retirement plan though. Hopefully find a cushy part time gig somewhere close to home - IT Tech in a school or something. Pocket money, basically. That said, I did have a slight bite of a potential CTO role which I did get quite "into" the idea of.

[Smartie]

Agile ways of working have seen the reduction - at least, in my experience - of the BA's role. Once upon a time, a BA had months to go away and collate the requirements and produce significant artefacts that would go through multiple rounds of feedback and iterations before landing on the perfect document, only to then have to work on multiple change requests as requirements shifted or the business realised what they'd originally asked for wasn't actually what anyone wanted or needed. Now, the BA seems to be shoehorned in between a Product Owner and Developers, and much of my time seems to involve hacking out a few words in JIRA, where detailed lengthy descriptions of how the system should work are no longer wanted or needed, with developers building multiple prototypes until the PO is happy and ready to push into production. As a Business Analyst with a business change focus first and IT change very much second, I find myself feeling threatened.

That's not my experience of the BA role recently.
I've generally been picking up Scrum Master/BA roles, though I also have experience in Project Management which often helps.

Ideally Product Owners need to be at a level which allows them to negotiate with multiple senior stakeholders and if they are then they tend not to have enough time to do the role properly. Acting as a proxy PO has been a significant part of my roles over the past few years which isn't perfect, but does work.

Devs are often not interested and don't want the business conversations and investigations that are really needed to generate good user stories - they usually want to get on and code based on unambiguous requirements. Writing decent stories and indeed acceptance criteria entails more than just 'hacking out a few words in JIRA'.

Getting involved in the business change aspect often means getting into the project early, but there's a lot you can do with an existing product, especially by being (sorry) proactive in going out to the stakeholders to understand what they need and areas that need addressing as part of continuous improvement.

Anyway, I'm in the later stages of my career and have been building up my pension - over the past few years adding the maximum allowed per year. The tax efficiency of this, especially if you're on 'inside' roles is huge.
I still have a significant mortgage but keeping my cash savings in an offset mortgage helps to reduce the term on that and with interest rates higher these days, I'll be aiming to overpay it somewhat. The pension lump sum will take care of any outstanding balance on that and so I'm aiming to be free of the need to work by around age 60.
My current role has been going for more than 3 years though, and is the most interesting and best remunerated I've ever had so if I find more roles like this one then I expect I'll be working for longer, through choice rather than necessity.

[Lockhouse]

I'm 61, retired at 58, went back last year and have done the last 9 months part-time, fully remote. No mortgage, bit of a pension, most of my cash is in our house which we plan to downsize from in 5 or so years time. Once downsized will have no money worries at all.

Going back stops me eating into the pension, I can still do reasonably big-ticket stuff if I want, keeps my brain active and is nowhere near as stressful as full time or in the office. I'm actually enjoying my work or at least the interaction with people on a day-to-day basis. From April, if I want, I can go back outside IR35 as my two year MVL window is up. I still have enough time to do the things I like and I don't have to do them at weekends either.

What I've learned is, you need to have an alternative thing to do - just stopping work doesn't cut it. You do need mental stimulation and a "carrot" even if it's not money. Also you run out of money far faster than you might think and things you took for granted become luxuries.

[sreed]

My wife doesn't work and I have spent a decent chunk of my contracting income on experiences for the kids.

Pension pot stands at about £300k and I have about £40k outstanding on my mortgage on a home worth about £600k. I have about £140k in savings and share on an inherited property. I will probably live on this for a while and pay as much of my contracting income into a pension.

I don't really have an exit strategy - I am 50 and expect gigs to be harder to come by and lower paid as the years progress. That said I have some great firms and experience on my CV so who knows.

I'm not going to be poor, I'm not going to be rich.

I will probably be serving you in B&Q in 20 years time.

With all due respect, if you're working in B&Q as a 70 year old, it'll be because you WANT to work in B&Q!

Pension pot 300k
Home equity 560k
Savings of 140k
Share of inherited property let's be conservative and say 100k

That gives you a net worth north of £1m, with a significant part of your working years intact and a solid CV with years of invaluable experience. You might not think yourself rich, but in England 2023, your numbers put you bang in the top 10 percentile by total household wealth.

As long as you aren't one of those who spends all they earn, or have a significant other or kids with holes in their pockets that you keep replenishing, you'll be fine!

[PCTNN]

I'm gonna be 40 this year, I enjoy being a contractor but I have hated all the time I've spent on the bench (4 months of bench time in 5 years of contracting). I always think bench time is going to be great and an opportunity to do cool stuff but after 2 weeks I get bored as hell and start looking for jobs immediately.

Starting a new contract next month. It's a 6 months at 600 a day inside ir35. I'll do the 6 months and another 6 if an extension is offered; after that I'll ask the client if they want to make me permanent (I've worked at this client's before and I know I'll like the work and the company environment).

I'm bored and tired of always being on the lookout for new roles; additionally, I stopped caring about my job, I just want a cushy permie job with a nice salary and good benefits that will see me into retirement in 25 years.

I've got a mortgage but I'm on the right track to pay it off by the time I'm 45, so I'm not even money motivated so why do I even need to be a contractor...

[oliverson]

I'll be 57 this year so retirement is increasingly on my mind, especially given the missus is 10 years older and retired. I'm sat there selling my days away one at a time, blocking her retirement!!

Joking aside, I had the same thoughts the OP had and I posted them on here but can't find them now. I got some good advice from other posters on the subject. As a middle-aged developer, seeking to 'modernise' my stack I had become severely disillusioned. I was moving from near top of the ladder at a popular OO language to bottom rungs of the JS world. I was working with and being interviewed by people young enough to be my son. I felt out of place and a fake. That on the back of a decade living away from home mid-week whilst contracting in the London investment banking sector, living in shared apartments like a student. Throw in some extremely destructive bench time and looking back now, it's no surprise I felt the way I did. So what has changed for me?

I no longer do the London banking thing and I'm fully remote, outside IR35, on a good rate and working with some decent guys closer to my own age. Whilst still using current technologies, I've returned to my core dev skills but I'm no longer just a developer. Things have come full circle for me as before I was a contract developer (20 years on 2nd Feb this year as it happens for my first dev contract), I was very UNIX-oriented, working for a high-end niche hardware vendor, providing UNIX technical support (they trained us well). I've also moved across into more of a DevOps / platform engineer type role (Linux, multi-Cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD, IaC, Microservices, etc.). Peaked my interest in technology again it has. Oh, and I've pretty much dumped doing any front-end work, which I never really enjoyed, nor was particularly good at.

My change in direction and the fortunes of my Limited, that I nearly liquidated about 3 years ago, have been very welcome. They've given me what I feel I need to see out my contracting career, which will probably be before I'm 60, whereupon I may seek to retire to my place in the Sun that I'll pretty much own by then. Sell up the UK detached house and I think that will be enough to see my life out. Or I might rent it out, undecided. There's more to life than money.

[KinooOrKinog]

I turned 50 in December and for the first time in my contracting life, I'm tired of it. I've recently been thinking about whether I'd like to just work for a wage again. The kind of job you just execute, no stress, no anxiety, no responsibility. Obviously, those jobs aren't financially rewarding so I'd need to get rid of my mortgage first before that's a reality. Or downsize. I've also thought about trying to go permanent in a similar role to what I do now, in the next five years maybe, although I'm sure that would bring it's own challenges at age 55.

Anyway, for now I'm just trundling on, trying to save and pay down my mortgage as much as I can.

[northernladuk]

I turned 50 in December and for the first time in my contracting life, I'm tired of it. I've recently been thinking about whether I'd like to just work for a wage again. The kind of job you just execute, no stress, no anxiety, no responsibility. Obviously, those jobs aren't financially rewarding so I'd need to get rid of my mortgage first before that's a reality. Or downsize. I've also thought about trying to go permanent in a similar role to what I do now, in the next five years maybe, although I'm sure that would bring it's own challenges at age 55.

Anyway, for now I'm just trundling on, trying to save and pay down my mortgage as much as I can.

Are you tired of contracting or tired of working in IT? Or even tired of working at all? Unless you have had a really bad run contracting, can't find work and the like I am not sure how changing method of getting paid for your work will really invigorate you?

You think you are tired of it then start a perm job and realise you can't be arsed with that as well? I'd be doing a lot of work looking in to exactly what you do and do don't like. What makes you unhappy and what makes you happy. Yes it could quite possibly be the way you work but I'd be willing to bet in many cases it would just be a general tired of working issue and not contracting per se. Big decision so make sure you do your homework.