Every company moans about the “talent shortage”.
But most of them are busy pushing out the very people who kept the lights on.
You know — the engineers who survived Windows NT, Exchange 2003, and three CIOs in one quarter.
They’re not leaving because of salary.
They’re leaving because someone in management decided PowerPoint was more important than competence.
🧩 Bug #1. Pretending “Age Doesn’t Matter”
Ah yes, the modern corporate mantra: “We value everyone equally.”
Translated from HR-speak: “We can’t be bothered to adapt our culture for those who actually know what they’re doing.”
People over 40 don’t crave beanbags or TikTok challenges.
They want stability, respect, and a say in decisions.
They’ve seen enough system outages to know what happens when the “move fast” crowd hits production.
Yet companies keep measuring everyone by the same glossy KPI template —
and then act surprised when loyalty evaporates faster than an Azure credit balance.
Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2025 nailed it:
61% of professionals aged 45+ leave not over pay, but over “lack of recognition and influence.”
Recognition in IT doesn’t mean an “Employee of the Month” mug.
It means having the authority to say “No, we’re not deploying this build on Friday” — and being taken seriously.
🔒 Bug #2. Managing Instead of Trusting
Micromanagement is the fine art of hiring a DevOps engineer with 20 years of experience…
and then telling them how to type kubectl get pods.
Senior specialists don’t need supervision — they need trust and context.
If you hired someone who’s been scripting since before Stack Overflow existed,
don’t show them how to do their job — tell them why it matters.
Gallup Workplace Study found that in teams where senior staff are trusted with autonomy, productivity jumps by 25%.
Translation: fewer “status calls”, more actual work.
Autonomy isn’t chaos. It’s what happens when people know what they’re doing and you stop interrupting them.
🧠 Bug #3. Building a “Forever Young” Culture
Today’s tech offices look like adult nurseries: beanbags, neon quotes, and open-plan noise pollution.
Every corner screams “innovation”, yet somehow no one can find the bloody HDMI cable.
The problem?
When your culture is 100% espresso and zero substance,
the people who can actually stabilise your infrastructure quietly walk away.
PwC’s Workforce of the Future showed that mixed-age teams retain 18% more staff.
Because experience and energy are not opposites — they’re redundancy and uptime.
Let the 25-year-olds innovate.
Let the 45-year-olds make sure the database doesn’t explode while they do it.
📚 Bug #4. Assuming Senior Engineers “Know Everything”
Ah yes, the old myth: “He’s 45, he’s done learning.”
This in an industry where JavaScript frameworks age faster than bananas.
Experienced engineers still learn — just differently.
They prefer purpose, reflection, and practice, not “mandatory webinars with inspirational stock photos”.
When you stop offering them growth, you’re not saving budget —
you’re starting a slow internal resignation process.
Upskilling senior staff in zero-trust networks, observability, or FinOps isn’t charity.
It’s your cheapest disaster-recovery strategy.
Office Life Belarus found that companies investing in retraining 40+ employees retain up to 60% of critical knowledge during restructures.
In IT terms — that’s the difference between “minor incident” and “career-limiting event”.
💸 Bug #5. Believing “We’ll Just Replace Them”
The deadliest illusion of all.
Yes, you can hire a shiny new cloud engineer who knows Terraform.
But he won’t know why there’s a PowerShell script called do_not_touch.ps1 keeping your entire finance system alive.
When a senior leaves, you don’t just lose a headcount —
you lose infrastructure memory, informal links, and unspoken rules that keep the system from imploding.
Harvard Business Review (2023) found that companies with high turnover among 40+ staff lose up to 12% productivity
simply from forgetting how things actually work.
An IT department without veterans is like a data centre without backups:
everything’s fine… until it isn’t.
⚙️ What This Means for Tech Leadership
Veteran engineers aren’t your past — they’re your uptime.
They’re the reason you still have an operational ERP after that “cost-optimisation” incident.
They balance risk and change, fix things quietly, and mentor the people who’ll one day replace them — ideally not too soon.
A smart manager sees experience as an asset, not a budget line.
Because in a world where everything updates weekly, reliability is the new innovation.
As Daniel Goleman put it:
“Experience isn’t age. It’s the ability to learn from your mistakes — and survive them.”
💬 Final Ping
In IT we obsessively update systems but forget to patch our management firmware.
That’s why good people leave.
Not for money, not for perks — but because nobody listens to them anymore.
In an age where “young” equals “promising”,
it’s worth remembering: brains don’t slow down with age — only patience does.
☕ Bonus Round: The Legacy Admin Test
If you genuinely believe you can replace your 45-year-old sysadmin
with a “dynamic junior cloud engineer”,
try rolling back production without the person who knows
why the main database is still called old_main_final_v3.sql.
Good luck. And don’t forget to check your backups.
Alex