Part-time Jobs in Retirement in the IT field

[Tuirc]

I know nothing about the IT field but I have heard of quite a few people taking multiple IT work-from-home jobs and making several hundred grand a year. Don't know how that is possible if all IT jobs are well over 40 hours a week.

Pretty sure I had a guy that was trying to do this. I fired him 6 months after he started. #talesfromthepandemic

 

[Tuirc]

I retired from 30 years of IT, and stress was the motivator in making the final decision. Even as a manager in my final years, it was all hands-on-deck 24/7/365 when something went sideways. With all things Internet, required uptime, compliance, security, and so on, the stress levels are exponentially higher than decades before. All that being said, after three years of retirement I wouldn't mind a parttime job, but it won't be in IT.

IT was my 3rd career (and longest, 26 years) after Infantryman and Lawyer. I have a hard time thinking of IT as stressful after those other jobs.

That said, having been a consultant for 14 years in IT, and going into many organizations of all types, I can see the truth of everything you recite above. Having spent the last 12 years at a true "dot com" (think of the last 10 commercials for something dot com and it is one of them). It doesn't have to be that way, it really doesn't. Your life doesn't need to be a series of stressful fire drills one after the other. It can be if leadership or your peers are not of sufficient quality. Not to say we never have an issue that's "all hands on deck," but compared to when I started here 12 years ago, those occasions are rare. Building in blue/green resiliency, Active-Active data centers with global, automated load balancers were two of the best things we did to alleviate the stresses that you're talking about.

 

[G-Man]

What's your area of IT? The world has changed since many of the commenters on this thread were in the IT. There are certainly part time and contract work which are less than full time (if you are in the right part of IT for that). We'll see what the recession does to this. Companies in tech are more adaptable than a lot of other types of companies. A couple of quarters is usually all it takes to begin changing policies.

At any rate, my area is Cybersecurity. I have noticed that there are gigs for "part-time CISO's." I don't think I'll need/want to do that but if I do, I'd definitely head that route. Obviously, these are smaller companies that can't afford their own full-time CISO or mistakenly believe they "don't need no stinkin' CISO"....lol. There are companies that manage the sales, contract, and administrivia of this deal and you just do the work. May or may not be a 1099 type deal depending on the company.

I'm a generalist with knowledge in a number of IT areas (network, server, Cybersecurity, R&D laboratory IT system integration with laboratory instrumentation, etc.).

 

[money4wells]

I put part time and Remote into Indeed, and there were 28 pages of listings and still going before I stopped. I saw several that were mentoring on IT careers and only 5-15 hours a week, going to check them out.