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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

He’s 55, and still learning new stuff, every day.

Looks like he learns, pretty much the same way I do. It seems to be common.

One of the nice things about being retired, is that I don’t have to retire. I just direct my own work, instead of having knuckleheads trying to steer the boat. Since I like learning, I look to do stuff I don’t already know how to do[0].

I don’t think he’s retired, but he seems to be in a place, where he’s free to follow his own muse.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...

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> He’s 55, and still learning new stuff, every day.

Why wouldn't you? I'm not retired, and I still pick up new skills and hobbies all the time, too. It's the spice of life.

55 isn't particularly old either. My mother's partner is pushing 75 and in the middle of diving from scratch into SDR and building out a little mesh network.

You'll also find that people who excel in FOSS communities are typically great self-directed learners and good at picking goals. It's survivorship bias in the sense that FOSS communities are bad at task assignment, so you more or less have to bring motivation and picking-directions skills.

It's why I like to hire from the FOSS community (with some caveats). If you are able to provide and environment where they can stroll around your codebase/product and improve things, instead of staying in their lane, they generally will.

My thoughts exactly.

I retired at 55. I’m 63, now, and learn new stuff, every day.

I think one of the reasons that I learn as quickly as I do, is because I have an enormous baseline of experience on which to draw.

I probably don’t pick up new stuff as quickly as I did when I was younger, but my baseline means that I already have a great deal of background to apply to new stuff, so I don’t need to re-learn a lot.

TL;DR: I probably could “start from scratch,” a lot more easily, when I was younger, but I can “extend my knowledge,” a lot faster, these days.

He's also likely financially independent...

He's wildly financially independent. He had early shares from red hat and geeknet, on top of millions from the linux foundation and corporate work. His net worth is in the tens of millions at least.

When Red Hat went public, they gave those who submitted a bug report or fixes a chance to buy pre-IPO shares. I got a chance despite just a minor bug report and bought some shares and despite some poor timing of selling, eventually made enough along with my work related stock to have enough financial cushion to leave my job to get my masters degree and a career change. And it worked out well because not long after the dot com tech bubble burst and many tech stocks plummeted or went out of business while I was focused on my education.

His work on Subsurface and some other stuff keeps him afloat

keeps him submerged, rather

IBM's linux-themed take on 'learning new stuff' https://youtu.be/x7ozaFbqg00#linuxistenyearsold

Yeah I feel exactly the same way about retirement

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