36-year-old employee frustrated at the lack of upward mobility after being stuck in the same job for 5 years due to aging bosses’ refusal to retire: ‘My manager is 71. Been in his role for 19 years.’ – FAIL Blog

As everyone gets more desperate to build towards a future with less and less, more and more people have to work longer and harder in order to make that happen. 

Even after a life of working, one financial upset, health issue, or period of unemployment can still upend your finances and leave you working past retirement for far longer than you ever imagined. Others still, who do have the means to retire, cling desperately to the only life they have ever known, never having learned how to care about anything other than their careers. Their option is either to keep working or to return home and face a family that is very aware that they have always been second to ambition.

So, they carefully shape their departments and their roles and convince those above them, if there even is anyone above them, that they are responsible for and knowledgeable about things no one else is qualified to take on, were they to step down and retire permanently. 

And there is a point to be had here, years of erosion of training and investing in staff have resulted in high turnout to the point where “historic organizational knowledge” isn’t even on the radar. While the old heads have spent their entire career there, there isn’t a chance of that happening in the modern employment landscape.

We end up with people in their 70s who are still occupying management roles in an organization. Whatever the reason, their static, stubborn resistance to leave their role and retire prevents upward movement according to the natural order of things, where the manager replacing them would then need to be replaced themself, causing a waterfall of promotions and upward mobility.

Without this happening, it leaves workers stagnating at the current depth of their career, leaving them no other choice but to leave in order to find growth potential.

That’s exactly what this frustrated employee shared experiencing, describing how their elderly 71-year-old manager was stubbornly holding fast in his role, preventing any opportunity for career mobility. They noted how it wasn’t just them either, and how there were others in their immediate sphere who had the same experience.