An electrical engineer’s big quit

Since he was a child, Brian Johnston has found “joy” in bicycles. At first it was riding bikes, then tinkering with them to figure out how they worked. Later he learned to repair his own bike.

That same love of being “the tinkerer” carried him to a 40-plus year career as an electrical engineer in the semiconductor industry. He found deep satisfaction solving his customers’ most difficult issues, and in the travel that was part of the job. Johnston’s work took him across Asia and Europe.

“I liked going into different labs and seeing how different people work,” he said. “I also liked going into different cultures and seeing how the cultures work. And I would always come home with stories.”

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He’d planned to work until at least 66 and said he was always surprised when people talked about retiring early.

“I'm like, ‘why are you retiring?’” Johnston recalled. “I get a lot out of work and I enjoy work. And, ‘what are you going to do when you retire?’ Retire? That was my mindset.”

But the pandemic made him change his mind. The travel he loved ended, and his job went fully remote. When he could no longer be on site, Johnston said it was a lot harder to see what was wrong. The pressure he felt at work rose sharply.

“I didn’t want a job where I was sitting in front of a computer all day long, and now I was sitting in front of a computer all day long,” said Johnston.

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Retirement suddenly looked attractive, and in December 2020, Johnston, 64, decided to retire from his engineering job more than two years earlier than planned.

By some estimates, the number of early retirements doubled during the pandemic. But the full picture isn’t yet clear.

Most people who report retiring early during the pandemic were forced out of a job. A smaller number have been able to afford to retire early thanks to a robust stock market that fueled their retirement savings plans.

But those ‘retirees’ haven’t necessarily given up the idea of going back to work.

“The pandemic, maybe, has triggered some kind of mass job search. But it’s not that people necessarily want to just throw up their hands and leave [the workforce]. And that seems to be true even of older workers,” said Gal Wettstein, a senior research economist at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

While there’s been “a lot of churn” in employment, Wettstein said, there hasn’t been a rise in claims for Social Security benefits which he said would indicate actual retirement.

“It’s an irrevocable act,” Wettstein said, referring to claiming Social Security, “if you really plan to retire. And we haven’t seen people doing [it] more than usual.”

Research by Wettstein and his colleagues at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College indicates that it may take several more years to know whether COVID-19 triggered “a permanent exodus” from the workforce, or whether older workers are biding their time to return when the pandemic wanes.

Johnston knew he wanted to stay productive in his retirement, and he turned to something he’d always enjoyed: bicycle repair. It was something he’d already begun doing during the pandemic.

In January, he transformed his garage at his home in Lexington, Mass., into a workspace people can easily access with their bikes. He added soundproofing so he could blast his classic rock while he worked without disturbing his wife.

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He calls it his “whistle while I work” retirement job. Wettstein calls it a “bridge job” — work that’s usually less demanding than a full career, and a transition to a retirement without work. Wettstein said such transitions were common before the pandemic and are now likely on the rise.

Whatever it’s termed, Johnston said he’s happy he made the change.

“The engineer in me … you like to solve problems,” Johnston said, “you like to have a special skill. So the more I did this, the more I got skills.”

And aligning bicycles, Johnston said, was a lot like aligning sophisticated semiconductor tools.

Business has grown as people find him through word of mouth, and he speaks proudly of a customer who has returned five times with her children and grandchildren’s bicycles. He gets a kick when he hears people refer to him as their “bike mechanic.”

Johnston believes bike mechanics should always road test the bikes they fix, so his new work gives him even more time to enjoy the thing he’s loved since boyhood: cycling.

“I still want to feel very productive and I feel very productive doing this. I feel like I’m making a difference,” Johnston said.

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