I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.

Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.

They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.

I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.

My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.

In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.

One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"

Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:

"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."

I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:

"Isn't that what you hired me for?"

I got an HR meeting a couple of years back where they selected me to be laid off because I wasn't closing as many tickets off as the rest of the team. Every single ticket had been through another engineer first and they had failed to resolve it.

I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.

I knew a person like you, two decades ago, in a laptop repair facility (my boss).

He was hired full-time (at like 4x my hourly rate) simply because he was the last person working there familiar with how the DOS-only headless terminals were installed (simple, but vital infrastructure). I didn't even understand what he was doing, but knew if I learned it I would have a lifetime solid-six-figure tech support job (two decades ago).

Bossman mostly just sat around and played WoW (seriously, half his hours "on the clock," waiting for next disaster)... but whenever a smug new vendor came in pedaling latest & greatest... he was often the saver of many times his salary. Nobody really liked him (I did — we'd smoke weed together and attend irregular heavy metal shows), but everybody knew he was important technically (e.g. no purchase orders could go through without his machine upkeep — multimillion dollar budgets).

People would literally turn away from him in the hallways so-as to not attract his comicbookguy inquisitions — particularly if you were a network troublemaker / idiot.

I miss his expertise / guidance / wisdom. Favorite bossman ever.

I can be found around heavy metal shows as well hahaha.

I try not to be comic book guy these days. I was in the past. I just want to learn together with people. That is all.

Is your son a drummer, too, H?