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Another mid-life crisis? Really?!?

· 4 min read
Andy Hawkes
Andy Hawkes

It's been 11 years since I last wrote about a potential mid-life crisis and career change, and as I'm now a mere month away from my 50th birthday it seemed like a good topic to revisit!

Things have changed quite a bit in the last 11 years, as I have:

  • Had 3 subsequent employers
  • Moved from the marketing / advertising agency world to the digital product world
  • Had 6 different job titles
  • Had 10 different line managers
  • Visited 5 different countries for work
  • Visited 4 different countries on holiday
  • Had my father die
  • Brexited
  • Moved house
  • Got married
  • Lived through my first pandemic
  • Had my mother-in-law die
  • Switched to working principally from home rather than commuting into London with monotonous regularity for 20 years
  • Figured out some of the ways that my brain is not "typical"1

But things have also remained somewhat similar:

  • I am still working in the digital technology space
  • I am still a fan of craft beer
  • I still ride a motorbike (albeit less frequently)
  • I still have no real qualifications in anything that I have ever done from a work perspective
  • I still get paid a gratifying amount of money for having spent the last 30 years building on that dubious foundation — specifically a 3rd class degree in lying (Economics and Politics) and an ability to work with both computers and people

As I wrote before:

So far, so… meh. If you asked a good number of people my age the same question you’d probably get a similar story — we do a thing, get good at it, and then start managing and mentoring other people who are less experienced at doing that thing.

And yet I still find myself wondering if there's something I am missing.

If I follow in the footsteps of my father and his father before him, my heart will give up beating when I am 71 — for those keeping count so far, that would mean I have 21 years and change to go.

That leads to some further realisations:

  • If I wanted to have an accurate mid-life crisis I should have been doing it 15 years ago.
  • Given that the state pension won't kick in for me until I hit 67, that would give me a mere 4 years of state-funded retirement after 46 years of working life, which is a pretty shitty return on investment!
  • If I want to retire earlier or have a decent time of it I had better make sure my personal pension pot is as healthy as possible!
  • If I'm going to significantly out-live my forebears and make this a mathematically accurate mid-life crisis then I'll need to live to 100
  • Bloody hell, I really am going to need that pension pot, aren't I?!?

So, with AI snapping at the heels of many office jobs, what am I to do for the rest of my career?

As much as it could be tempting, I'm not likely to retrain as an electrician or plumber.

I was chatting to a friend about our respective career paths recently and he suggested I should pursue a more directly product-oriented focus, as recruitment there seems to be booming while wider tech recruitment is seemingly stalled.

It's something that struck a bit of a chord.

I realised that I have spent quite a lot of my career acting as Product Owner or Product Manager — either because those roles didn't exist yet, or because the project I was working on was generally led from a marketing perspective by the client, so as the developer / Technical Director / insert other job title from my CV here I was the de-facto owner of the "product", even when wew were working on something relatively short-lived and campaign-driven.

So, how does a technologist turned technical manager turned technical director turned senior technical leader re-position and re-focus themselves and their CV / resume / LinkedIn profile through a product lens?

And should they?

Footnotes​

  1. I will write something about this very soon, but the TL;DR version is that I have — at a a minimum, and as far as I currently understand it — multi-sensory aphantasia ↩