This article focuses on senior civil servants at the end of their careers. It contributes to thinking about the final stages of their careers by shifting the focus from promotion and mobility to the modalities of adjustment, disadjustment, and maintenance in end-of-career positions. Based on cases of inspectors of the Ministry of Culture, former administrative managers, heritage and museum curators, but also dancers, theater administrators, and even architects, the study uses dispositional analysis of professional practices, the sociology of vocation, and that of professional aging to observe the dialectical link between public policy and the social characteristics of state employees. The diversity of forms of adjustment, along with resistance to the institution, which sometimes goes as far as leaving the role, sheds new light on these late professional shifts.