Kelsey Hightower

I'm making all these prototypes.

I'm kind of moving things forward.

There's a Kubernetes book now, right?

I'm a co-author with Brendan Burns, Joe Beta at the time.

I'm like, you know what?

I'm thinking about my exit.

So in our careers, we do a lot of work to get into this field.

All the certifications, the boot camps, the studying, some of us college.

And then once we get in, we're thinking about career progression.

Dev, senior engineer, principal engineer, distinguished engineer.

And we spend almost our entire lives on that trajectory.

And our field is so young that some of our pioneers are finally like no longer here for the first time.

We're not used to that.

And we're not really used to people retiring.

Like Rob Pike just retired.

The concept of an exit or individual contributor or a leader in the tech space, we didn't have a lot of those.

Linus is still at it.

He's not retired, right?

So we don't spend a lot of time thinking about the exit plan in our field.

If you're a professional athlete, your body will tell you when it's time to go.