....Or from personal sacrifice. There *aren't* 50 local companies agitating to hire me anymore. I'm free to change jobs any time I want, but I'll likely need to move to do it.
I'm sure that you've seen it. Lots of IT is now commoditized. Making computers work used to be akin to witchcraft, now my toddler is designing video games on some internet side he visits.
The "witchcraft" is still there, but it's a lot more specialized, and it changes much more rapidly. Or, one can take the route that I've taken....embed myself at a company that's too small to deal with the big outsourcers. I'm not under any delusions of irreplacability. I could be gone next week (or, frankly, later today) ... but its less likely to happen than at a big place like IBM, where they whack people 10,000 at a time. At least in the small company, I'm more likely to see it coming.
And, I've got a direct line to the CIO (my office is next to his). Went out for beers with the owner and the CFO last week. That doesn't happen at the big firms. Michael Dell and Sam Palisano rarely took my calls while I worked for them. :-)
I too worked for Sam, as IBM bought a company that I sold for and when they did my stock options at $ 4 were worth $18 so I've got no complaints about IBM.
You are correct, while I had access to all of the senior executives at the company {we were a billion dollars company, not peanuts, but just about 1% of IBM} that IBM bought, access to senior execs at IBM was, because of company size, very limited.
I do miss the thrill of the deal, but retirement has many benefits, like any time is tee time.