Older workers aren’t retiring. Should they be forced to?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This message comes from Angie. Tackling a home project, Angie can connect you with pros who do such a good job, you might ask them to be your kid's godfather. Don't do that. Just trust them to get the job done. Find a pro for your projects at angi.com. That's angi.com.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (0:19)
This is Planet Money from NPR.
When I talked to Ryan Hendrickson, he was sitting on a porch in Southern California on his lunch break. The wind chimes are such a nice touch. I feel like I'm relaxing with him.

**Ryan Hendrickson** (0:35)
I hope that doesn't mess up the audio.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (0:36)
On the lake.

**Ryan Hendrickson** (0:37)
Yeah, right?

**Sarah Gonzalez** (0:38)
Ryan is 37, the first in his family to go to college, and he's gotten to work on some cool, cool stuff in his career so far.

**Ryan Hendrickson** (0:47)
Working on a few different missions, when we send a rover or a spacecraft to another place.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (0:54)
So wait, like NASA?

**Ryan Hendrickson** (0:56)
Yes, yeah.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (0:57)
Yeah.
NASA, the dream. And he was crushing it. Ten years into his time there, he'd been promoted three times.

**Ryan Hendrickson** (1:03)
And an opportunity came up for me to move into a supervisor type of position. And they ended up going with someone else for the role.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (1:20)
Which, okay, fine, that happens. But Ryan was bummed and he asked the higher ups what he could do differently next time.

**Ryan Hendrickson** (1:28)
The response I got was, no, you're doing a great job. Just keep doing what you're doing and it will work out. And I was just sort of like, that's what I've been doing. And that didn't work.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (1:38)
So Ryan was feeling a little stuck, like he was doing everything right, everything he should do, but he just couldn't move up anymore. And he couldn't stop thinking about who got the job instead of him.

**Ryan Hendrickson** (1:52)
The person that ended up getting the role had been at NASA for somewhere around like 40, 45 years. And they actually had this same position like 20 or 30 years ago.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (2:07)
The supervisor position that they were applying for, they had already had?

**Ryan Hendrickson** (2:10)
Yeah, they had already had it. Yeah. Frustrations kind of boiled up a little bit.
You know, getting to a point where the role I was going for was filled by someone who was well into retirement age, but also had that exact same role like 20 years prior to that, you know, definitely felt unfair.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (2:34)
Yeah, we're talking about age here, just to name the 800 pound rover in the room. So you said that the person who got the job over you had been at NASA 45-ish years.

**Ryan Hendrickson** (2:46)
Yeah.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (2:46)
So they're like 66, 67?

**Ryan Hendrickson** (2:50)
Yeah. I guess this person also did have their PhD as well.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (2:56)
Oh. So they're like maybe 75?

**Ryan Hendrickson** (2:59)
Yeah.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (2:59)
Uh-huh. If you're being like your most petty self, like what were you feeling?

**Ryan Hendrickson** (3:05)
Yeah, it was definitely really frustrating. But technically, I don't have my PhD.
So on that front, definitely, they were more qualified for sure.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (3:15)
We did reach out to NASA. They said they generally do not comment on personnel matters. But yeah, this person was obviously more qualified, more years on the job, had management experience, a PhD, was maybe even better than Ryan at doing the job. Okay. And there are probably also a bunch of other good reasons why this person wanted their old job back again. Right? But Ryan says he couldn't help but feel like this worker took an opportunity from him. Like, they already had the chance to do this job when they were younger. And Ryan felt like it was his time now, his turn. He was feeling like this implicit agreement between employee and employer that if you work hard, you can move up in pay and position wasn't happening for him anymore.
And Ryan went where any late 30s millennial would go to commiserate, Reddit.

**Ryan Hendrickson** (4:07)
For some reason, I went on to the millennial subreddit and made a post, basically said, has anyone else been noticing senior colleagues at work refusing to retire and making it much harder to move up the ladder?

**Sarah Gonzalez** (4:22)
And there are several similar posts out there, like this one.

**BJ Swami** (4:27)
Boomers won't retire and it's screwing the rest of us. There I said it.

**Sarah Gonzalez** (4:33)
Attention grabbing.

**BJ Swami** (4:35)