Reworking Your Career in Your 40s Is Not Too Late

Most people who come to me with this kind of consultation follow the same pattern: “I want to quit management and go back to being an engineer.” There are quite a lot of them, actually.

Around age 40 seems to be the typical period when people feel a mismatch in their career. Careers come with a sort of generic template that everyone gets placed onto, and of course no template fits everyone, so plenty of people end up feeling that mismatch.

Let me unpack the structure of this generic template as a shared reference point. In your 20s, you work under a senior colleague, learn the job, and gradually start producing results. In your 30s, you spend your most individually productive years, though you also do some management work as the leader of a small team. By your 40s, you’re given a seat as a manager overseeing a mid-sized organization.

The big problem with this extremely generic template is that it says nothing specific about your 50s, 60s, and beyond. The reason is simple: from your 50s onward, the path diverges sharply between those who rise as managers and those who don’t, so no consistent template can hold.

Everyone notices this irrationality. It’s entirely natural to feel indignant and think, “Why am I being put on a template whose future is unclear?” or “Can’t I choose a different template myself?” So some companies have started preparing two separate tracks: a “management track” and a “specialist track.” But at many companies, things don’t sort out so neatly, and plenty of people end up forced into situations like “I ended up doing both management and hands-on work, and now I’m half-baked at both” or “the number of people managing keeps growing, and I’ve completely lost touch with what’s happening on the ground.”

Let’s take a slight detour and think about salary. There are industries where age and salary have no relationship at all (fully commission-based work, or single-year contract salaries), but for most salaried employees, that isn’t the case. At almost any company, new hires get low salaries and veterans get higher ones. You can understand this as a mechanism that arose naturally because society itself has a kind of mutual-aid function built in. As people get older, they start families, have children, buy houses, and take on all sorts of expenses, whereas most new hires, even living alone in a small room, don’t feel much dissatisfaction about their pay. And while you’re still relatively young, “growth in specialized skill” and “growth in salary” move together. You become able to handle a wide range of things on your own, you start opening up new projects yourself, and this becomes the period when you’re most cost-effective for the company. It’s around age 40 that this alignment starts to wobble. There is an option to cap salary growth. And in fact, that is what happens. That way, the company can keep employing, at a reasonable rate, someone whose skill growth has plateaued but who still contributes sufficiently on the job. But most people expect their salary to keep rising even after entering their 40s. From the company’s perspective, that naturally leads to: “In that case, go acquire some new skill that we can expect cost-effectiveness from.”

So the new skill will be “management ability,” if you please.

That’s the reality behind the template. Being assigned management duties is a proposal from the company to extend the relationship between you and the company over a longer term by generating new cost-effectiveness. Of course, some people find management work distasteful to their core. And some people are willing but simply have no aptitude for it at all. In that case, there’s nothing wrong with ending the contractual relationship itself. But turning down the proposal means you need to make a new proposal of your own, because otherwise there’s a real possibility that the relationship between you and the company will fail to be extended.

From this alone, it’s clear that the moment when this “new contract” is being negotiated is an extremely fitting time to reconsider your career.

You could accept the company’s proposal and generate new cost-effectiveness, or put forward your own proposal from a different angle, or decide to accept the compensation situation as it is (keeping in mind that it will eventually start to decline) and hope to maintain the status quo. And here I’ll add a fourth option: changing jobs.

The situation varies by company. Some companies are struggling because they lack middle managers, while others are struggling because they lack engineering leads. Some companies simply lack enough manpower, while others urgently need specialists with particular skills. If you make use of the diversity of the labor market, there’s a good chance your wishes can be fulfilled somewhere. People often say “changing jobs after 45 is impossible,” but that’s only because they’re looking at the thick, mainstream part of the market. Some agents are strong in the mainstream, while others focus purely on niches. Take just one step forward, and you’ll find that the world is surprisingly full of options.

To those who want to “go back to being an engineer,” I recommend moving to an early-stage startup. A startup at that stage won’t propose any career plan or template to you at all. Your career belongs to you alone. Decide freely, and go your own free way.

The contents of this post are part (the original text) of the following book. If you’re interested, please pick up a copy.

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/10/1094/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.