What are you retiring techies planning on doing?

[austinuni]

What are you engineers, physicists, and scientists planning to do when you retire? If you are in retirement now what are you doing? I am mostly interested in hearing from those who will remain active in their chosen profession.

I am looking at retiring from a computer engineering career in maybe 5 years time, and I was thinking of some things I could be doing to keep myself busy and have fun:
1) Volunteering, in particular teaching or tutoring public school students in STEM.
2) Going back to graduate school for a third degree. Why? Because I enjoy learning.
3) Getting back into tinkering with computers on my own, becoming a "maker" or amateur inventor.
4) Starting my own business.
5) Working part-time or contract when I feel like it.

 

[jedishrfu]

All of the above and maybe reminiscing about my childhood (ie writing about it before I forget) and also writing some sci-fi stories and/or screenplays (ala Saves The Cat style)...

Who knows what the future holds...

Also maybe continue playing with programming using Processing IDE and/or NetBeans / Kotlin for Android apps or even developing a website on programming gems that I've discovered over the years.

I always wanted to build my own working robot using a Raspberry-PI and some motors in some fanciful design like steampunk or something star wars like.

 

[Dr Transport]

who says techies retire...

 

[Mark44]

What are you engineers, physicists, and scientists planning to do when you retire? If you are in retirement now what are you doing? I am mostly interested in hearing from those who will remain active in their chosen profession.

I am looking at retiring from a computer engineering career in maybe 5 years time, and I was thinking of some things I could be doing to keep myself busy and have fun:
1) Volunteering, in particular teaching or tutoring public school students in STEM.
2) Going back to graduate school for a third degree. Why? Because I enjoy learning.
3) Getting back into tinkering with computers on my own, becoming a "maker" or amateur inventor.
4) Starting my own business.
5) Working part-time or contract when I feel like it.

I retired from a technical writing position at a large software firm almost four years ago. Since then I have been teaching part-time at two local community colleges (two-year colleges if you aren't familiar with CCs). At the firsrt school I taught a class in C programming once a year. At the second school I taught a calculus class, a beginning class in C++, and will be teaching a class in computer architecture in the upcoming fall quarter. This isn't volunteer work, but the pay isn't all that much. I joke to people that I would almost do the work for free, since teaching these classes keeps my brain sharp and keeps me up-to-date with programming.

I also spend a lot of time tinkering on my motorcycles (four of them), two of which date from the 1940s. I have enough tools and equipment to do the majority of the work on them, but can farm some work out to a local shop I've done a lot of business with.

 

[tygerdawg]

Ummmm...what is this "retire" of which you speak? Never heard of it.

My family genetics indicate I'll still be annoying people (or robots) into my late 90's or beyond. I can't see any reason why I can't get paid for having fun.

Teaching, running sideline businesses, consulting, volunteering, travelling, romancing the SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed), tending the garden, learning new stuff, being a charming curmudgeon, updating the house, stirring the grits pot...I do all of this now. Why in the world would I stop?

PS: Oh, and add to that "Complaining about Microsoft's latest steaming pile of an operating system."

 

[ModusPwnd]

Retire? Thats a luxury of the rich.

Ill be working till I die. If I cant, Ill make social security work somehow. Enigneering pays well, but not that well…

 

[Dr. Courtney]

I don't really see myself ever not being active in both research and teaching to some degree. I could see slowing down. I could also see changing fields.