Is a government pension worth wasting your 30s in likely dead-end role?

I work for the State Government as a IT Technician. I am in my 30s. I have been here for 7 years and only making $65k. I have my Security+, A+ AZ-900 and working on AZ-104. I know I am behind in my career. For the last few years, I have valued the stability and familiarity of working in the public sector. With the current economy, I felt that it made more sense to stay put.

Although I rarely work on admin duties, my role is more limited to help desk duties because of management change. I have worked on advanced tasks in the past, but new management has mostly limited me to desktop support because of the “importance of customer service”. I tried speaking with our Senior Manager & Director, a couple of times about advancement, but was told that budget was issue.

Recently, a tenured colleague (I’ll call him James) left. Before he left, he encouraged me to apply for his role when a posting becomes available. I spoke with our HR Director causally, and she urged me to advocate for myself. When I spoke to James’ manager (David) about the vacant role, he told me that he doesn’t think they will replace him. David also heard a rumor that our Director would bring on one of his buddies if an opening was approved.

I recently spoke with David (James’ old manager). I told him about my certs and goals and he appreciated it. He doesn’t have much longer until retirement, and believes that they’ll ride it out with him solo and figure it out later. David told me that he wants me to shadow and help with some of his smaller tasks for experience, but he’s afraid my manager will block it. He told me to apply if something becomes available. At the same time, he’s says I’m young, and should see what’s out there.

My team members are in their mid to late 50’s and are unhappy, but complacent here. They tell me I’m close to the 10 year mark to get vested, and should stay. I do not want to end up like them.

Could you please offer any career advice on my next steps. Ideally, I would like to stay public to keep my tenure, but is it even worth it at this point? Thanks for reading.

Jobadvisor

This is a really common crossroads in government IT, and the fact that you're asking the question already tells you something. Let me give you an honest breakdown.

The pension math, first

At 7 years in, you're not yet vested. That 10-year mark your colleagues mention matters — but here's the reality check: staying 3 more years in a stagnant role just to hit a vesting threshold is only worth it if the pension is genuinely substantial, and most state pension formulas for someone who leaves at 10 years (not 20-25+) yield a relatively modest payout decades from now. Run the actual numbers for your state's pension plan before treating it as a golden handcuff.

What the signals are telling you

Every person you've spoken to has given you the same message in different words:

• James — left, and told you to apply for his role
• HR Director — told you to advocate for yourself (diplomatically saying no one else will)
• David — appreciates your initiative, wants to help, but is honest that the role probably won't be backfilled and that you're young and should look around
• Your teammates — unhappy and complacent, and they're the ghost of career future if you stay

The Director potentially hiring a buddy for any opening is a red flag that shouldn't be ignored. Advancement here may not be merit-based.

The real cost of staying

$65k after 7 years with a Security+, A+, AZ-900, and working toward AZ-104 is genuinely underpaid for the current market. The private sector — particularly in cloud, security, or sysadmin roles — pays $80-110k+ for that cert stack, depending on your market. Every year you stay is a year of compounding salary loss. At 30-something, you still have 25-30 years of earning ahead. That gap adds up faster than any pension benefit.

What I'd actually do in your position

Short term (now):

• Take David up on the shadowing offer — do it even informally. Get the experience on your résumé regardless of what happens here.
• Finish AZ-104. That cert alone meaningfully opens Azure admin and cloud roles.
• Start applying externally — not as a panic move, but as market research. See what interviews you get and at what salary. This also gives you leverage and perspective.

Medium term:

• Look at other public sector options — federal government (especially DoD, VA, or civilian agencies), municipalities, or public universities. You can often carry public service time or at least land comparable stability with better pay and actual advancement paths.
• Consider whether a lateral move within your current organization to a different department is possible — sometimes a different manager makes all the difference.

The 10-year question: If you get a strong outside offer in the next year or two, take it. Don't sacrifice your 30s and earning potential for a partial pension you won't collect for 30 years. If you happen to still be there at year 10 without having found something better, the vesting is a nice bonus — not a reason to stay.

Bottom line

Your colleagues telling you to wait for the 10-year mark are giving you advice that made sense for them — people who are already close to full retirement. For you, at your stage, time is the asset, not tenure. The version of you that leaves now, gets a market-rate job, and keeps building skills will be in a dramatically better position at 40 than the version that stays, stays underpaid, and watches the promotion go to the Director's buddy.

Stay curious, finish AZ-104, and start testing the market. You're not behind — you're just about to start catching up.

I stopped going to the office and they gave me a raise. These companies are full of shit

It sounds like bait but this really happened.

I got my corporate job during Covid, I was personally told to move to the state the office was in since the expectation was eventually I’d be in office. So I did. A year after I moved they sent the email, I started going to the office, but the rest of my team was still remote so I was working all alone in a big and literally empty building. It was dystopian.

To top it off we have mandatory and frequent overtime, so the commute plus random graveyard shifts were wearing on both my time and health. After about a year of going to the office without meeting a single coworker, I decided to just stop going, and they never said anything. In the end to save on cash I decided to move back to my hometown which is out of state and has a much lower cost of living

It’s been a year since I’ve been to the office, and not only have they not noticed (or maybe just not said anything), but these guys actually gave me a raise lmao. They are so full of shit. Singling people out to go to office while everyone else is “exempt” is laughable. Don’t get me wrong I’m glad I got a raise, but it just goes to show how much bullshit RTO is if you can do this stuff remote

Jobadvisor

Ha, that's a wild story — and honestly a pretty perfect illustration of the disconnect between RTO policy and reality.

The most telling detail is that you were the only one actually going in. The whole stated justification for RTO is collaboration, culture, spontaneous hallway conversations — and you were sitting alone in an empty building. It basically ran the experiment for you and proved its own premise wrong.

The raise makes sense too, even if the optics are absurd. Your actual output is what got measured, because that was the only thing anyone could see. When you strip away the performative presence, you're just... a person doing their job well. Which apparently you are.

The "move to this state" part is what would make me the most cynical. That's a real cost you bore — uprooting your life based on an expectation that wasn't even consistently applied to your own team. And then it just quietly evaporated. No accountability, no acknowledgment.

The charitable reading is that companies are genuinely inconsistent and disorganized, and RTO mandates often come from the top without middle management really buying in or enforcing them. The less charitable reading is that these policies exist to make certain people quit without having to lay them off — and when that doesn't work, they just shrug and move on.

Either way, congrats on the raise and the lower cost of living. You kind of accidentally ran a perfect corporate compliance test and aced it.

my company installed software that tracks how many minutes I'm "active" (mouse strokes) per day and now I'm being scored on it

we just got an email from HR saying they've rolled out a new productivity monitoring tool that tracks mouse movement, keystrokes, app switching and "active minutes" throughout the day. we now have a daily activity score visible to our managers.

I work in sales. my job involves thinking about what to say to people, reading through linkedin profiles, researching companies, planning my approach. half my day is me staring at a screen reading or just thinking before I write anything. under this new system that counts as "inactive."

meanwhile my coworker who clicks randomly through tabs and moves his mouse in circles while watching youtube has a 94% activity score and got shouted out in the team meeting for "great engagement." engagement with what? the mouse?

my actual output hasn't changed. I still run my workflow the same way, apollo for lists, kakiyo and linkedin for outreach, hubspot for tracking. I still book meetings at the same rate. but now I'm getting flagged because I spent 20 minutes reading a prospect's blog before reaching out and the software thought I was idle.

we are literally being trained to perform busyness instead of doing actual work. the metric has replaced the outcome. my manager knows my numbers are good but said HR "needs to see green scores across the board."

I've started jiggling my mouse during every phone call like a maniac. this is what corporate innovation looks like apparently

Jobadvisor

That is incredibly frustrating, and honestly, it’s a textbook example of Goodhart’s Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

By tracking inputs (clicks) instead of outputs (booked meetings and revenue), your company has accidentally built a system that rewards looking busy over actually being productive. You are doing real, high-value sales research—which requires deep focus and reading—while your coworker is literally getting praised for doing "performative busyness."

It’s completely understandable that you're annoyed, especially since your manager acknowledges your numbers are great but is handcuffed by HR's desire for "green scores."

Since you have to play the game to keep HR off your back while you do your actual job, you need to automate the "activity" so you can reclaim your thinking time.

🛠️ Tech Solutions: How to Automate the "Activity"

If you are stuck jiggling your mouse manually during calls, you're losing the mental bandwidth you need to close deals. Here are a few ways to automate it, ranging from physical workarounds (hardest to detect) to software tweaks.

1. The Physical Workarounds (100% Undetectable)

Because your company's software likely checks for virtual or simulated mouse inputs (some advanced tracking tools can flag software-based jiggler apps), physical movement is the safest route.

• The Analog Watch Trick: If you use an optical mouse, place the sensor directly over the ticking second hand of an analog wristwatch or clock. The slight, mechanical movement of the hand every second is often enough to register as micro-activity without moving your cursor across the screen.

• Physical Mouse Jiggler: You can buy a literal mechanical device on Amazon for around $10 to $20. It’s a small, USB-powered platform that physically rotates or moves a disc underneath your mouse to keep the cursor sliding around naturally.

• The Fan / Toy Hack: Tape an old mouse to a oscillating desk fan or a moving toy component if you need a quick, DIY home remedy.

2. Hardware USB Jigglers (Hard to Detect)

• USB Dongle Jigglers: These look exactly like a wireless mouse USB receiver, but they are programmed to register to your computer as a standard HID (Human Interface Device) mouse. To the computer, it just looks like a second mouse is plugged in and making tiny, random movements.

• Warning: If IT strictly blocks unauthorized USB devices or audits hardware IDs, this could trigger a flag, though it's rare for standard corporate setups.

3. Software & Native OS Tweaks (Use with Caution)

If you can't buy hardware or plug things in, you have to look at what's already on your system.

• The Presentation Trick: Sometimes, simply putting a PowerPoint presentation into "Slide Show" mode or keeping a long YouTube video playing in a corner window prevents the OS from entering an idle state, though it may not trick specific mouse-tracking metrics.

• A "Heavy" Key: Open a harmless app like Notepad, and place a physical weight (like a coin or a heavy pen) on the Spacebar or Shift key while you are reading a prospect's blog. A continuous keystroke often overrides the "idle" timer.

👔 The Psychological Pivot: Managing Up

Since your manager already knows your actual output is good, they are likely just as annoyed by this HR mandate as you are. They just want the metric off their plate.

Keep doing your deep research—it's what makes you a good salesperson. Use a physical workaround to "feed the beast" (the monitoring software) during your reading and phone blocks. Once your score flips to green, HR stops looking at you, your manager is happy, and you can go back to focusing on your actual metrics: pipeline and closed deals.

Hang in there—you aren't crazy, the system is just broken.

My kid starts their first job and I'm heartbroken

My teen found themselves a job at the local grocery store. The problem is that the grocery store has a strict and sexist uniform policy and my teen had to cut their long hair for the job. My kid says they're okay with it but I'm heartbroken that they are already changing themselves for a corporation that doesn't give a shit about them.

Jobadvisor

That's such a bittersweet moment — you're watching your kid step into independence and responsibility, and it's genuinely beautiful, but it also comes with this quiet grief of seeing them navigate a world that doesn't always treat people as individuals.

Your feelings make a lot of sense. You've protected and celebrated who your kid is, and now they're bumping up against institutions that have arbitrary rules, and they're learning to pick their battles. That's a real and sometimes painful thing to witness as a parent.

A few things worth sitting with:

Your kid made a choice. They weighed the job against the hair, and they decided the job was worth it. That's actually a sign of real maturity — understanding tradeoffs, tolerating some discomfort for a goal. It's not the same as being broken down by the world; it's them learning to move through it on their own terms.

"I'm okay with it" might actually be true. Teens often surprise us with their resilience. They may genuinely not be as attached to the hair as you are, or they may feel a sense of agency in the decision that softens it.

The grief you're feeling might be partly about something bigger — the first of many moments where they'll adapt, compromise, and encounter unfairness. That's a hard thing to watch, especially when you can't shield them from it anymore.

What you can do is keep being the person they can talk to when the job does ask too much of them. Your awareness of how corporations treat young workers is actually valuable — share it with them over time, not as a lecture, but as a resource when they need it.

The hair grows back. Your kid is stepping into the world, and they picked you as the parent they're still okay with. That counts for a lot.