According to a recent FCW article quoting David McQueeney, vice president of technology and strategy and chief technology officer for IBM's U.S. Federal Government unit, more than 50 percent of government employees will become eligible for retirement in less than five years. George Mason University’s recent job fair offered OPM the chance highlight the need to attract and recruit college students to careers in the federal government. "In the federal government we have a tsunami coming that I call the retirement wave" said Linda Springer, OPM director. "It's very important for us to have a strong flow of new people into the federal government, to give them the opportunity to work with our very knowledgeable existing force, to have that knowledge transfer," the press release said.
Imagine 100,000 engineers and programmers leaving the U.S. work force every year for the next 18 years, because that's what is going to happen. Some of those people will find other careers, but most of them will be motivated less by money than they were earlier in their lives. Most of them will want to remain active. And once a nerd always a nerd, so I think many of them will gravitate to Open Source.
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But this new generation of retirees started with Pascal, quickly transferred to C, and has been doing object-oriented programming or program management for at least the last decade. Even the retiring Visual Basic programmers, of which there are literally millions, have skill sets that easily transfer into the projects being developed today.
So we're likely to have an influx of talent into Open Source projects, supplanting the mid-20s geeks that have been pushing that business. Yes, they are retired and therefore not inclined to stay up all night, but maybe they don't need to stay up all night, either. There's something to be said for wisdom.
And besides open source, there is still plenty of opportunity for the graying IT worker.
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