Thirty-Eight Years at One Company: A Retirement Note

Macquarie’s got a new CEO. Greg Ward, in the door since 1996, taking over from Shemara Wikramanayake, who joined in 1987 and is stepping down after eight years running the place. Nobody outside finance Twitter will remember this in six months, and yet I’ve been turning it over for a couple of days now.

The thing that actually stuck with me wasn’t the succession, or the pay packet, or the muted scandal around remuneration strikes and cultural scrutiny that was apparently about to get an airing at the AGM before the announcement conveniently landed first. It was the length of her tenure. Thirty-eight years. One company, from graduate to the top job, through a couple of recessions, a pandemic, and whatever internal politics happens at an outfit that size.

I’ve had six employers in twenty-odd years in IT. Some of that was ambition, some of it was redundancy, some of it was just boredom setting in around the eighteen-month mark. The idea of staying somewhere for nearly four decades feels almost foreign now, like reading about someone who owned one car their whole life and just kept replacing the tyres.

There’s a genuine tension here I don’t think I can resolve neatly. On one hand, job-hopping has been good for my pay packet and probably good for my sanity. Staying too long somewhere can calcify how you think; you start assuming your employer’s way of doing things is the only way. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for depth over breadth. People who’ve been somewhere thirty years have seen the place through actual cycles, not just the highlight reel. They know where the bodies are buried, so to speak, and sometimes that institutional memory is worth more than a fresh perspective parachuted in from outside.

Macquarie isn’t a company I have any particular fondness for. It’s a bank that’s grown into something closer to a global financial conglomerate, and reading that it’s apparently in the business of lending against GPU stockpiles for AI data centres gave me a small, specific shudder. That’s a very modern kind of risk, betting the house on hardware that depreciates the moment a better chip comes out. Jack Welch left GE looking like a genius and Jeff Immelt spent a decade cleaning up GE Capital’s mess. I don’t know if that’s what’s happening here. Nobody does yet. But it’s the kind of thing that makes you go, hm, right when a long-serving CEO decides now’s the moment to hand over the keys.

What I keep coming back to, though, is less about Macquarie specifically and more about what work looks like for people my age versus people coming up now. My daughter’s generation isn’t going to get the thirty-eight-year single-employer story, and I don’t think most of them want it. Job security in the traditional sense has been quietly dismantled over the last twenty years, replaced with a kind of managed precarity dressed up as flexibility. Contract work, gig platforms, “restructures” that are really just cost-cutting with better branding. I don’t say that with any confidence about what should replace it. I genuinely don’t know. Loyalty used to run both ways; now it mostly runs one way, and everyone just quietly accepts that as the cost of doing business.

None of this is really Wikramanayake’s fault, and I don’t think she owes anyone an apology for having built a career and a very large share portfolio inside one company for four decades. Good luck to her. I just find myself a bit envious, and a bit sceptical of my own envy, because I suspect if I’d stayed at any one job that long I’d have gone spare well before the finish line.