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by adventured 2241 days ago
That really depends on the specific nature of your bounce around trait, what you need to fulfill that part of your personality. Only you can properly answer that of course. However, a few speculative ideas:

- Consulting can be interesting to feed that. You can expose yourself to a wider variety of projects and you can eventually have a lot of say in what work you choose to take on. You will also have the opportunity to limit the duration of projects you take on to an extent, so you won't be stuck on any given thing for longer than you can tolerate. Difficult to get started, to gain momentum.

- A first line suggestion from HN would typically be side projects. This can help restrain your desire to bounce around, dulling that like a pain killer. You do what you want on your own time, and change it up anytime you see fit, while staying at a job and trying to progress up the ranks. I don't know what your skillset is of course (eg programmer), it's somehwat dependent on that as to whether side projects is an interesting angle.

- If you think you're not experienced enough, focus on trying to leap yourself forward on something you are good at, to open up more opportunities to jump. Push one of your skills well above the market average. If you have some strong center pivot skill, you can bounce more often. You don't have to be Jim Keller to do this, people that are in the top 1/3 in tech at something often bounce around because they can, it's not unusual. As the other person commented, Jim has a core strength and it's why he can jump around. The bottom 1/3 is in a beggar position, they are always in a position of having to take what they can get by necessity (which rarely changes, unless their skill level changes or the labor market is extremely tight); so you have to focus on pushing a skill as high as you can, and you don't need to reach elite levels as an outcome.

- Much like physical exercise (high intensity training), there are paths to gain intense experience in shorter amounts of time with a high payoff in the experience you acquire. These opportunities are rare, although that doesn't mean they don't exist. The work is usually very difficult, the hours are more likely to be long. There is always that trade-off in there. To get what you want in the bounce around aspect, you might have to dial up the intensity for a time until you get the experience you need (after which you can dial it back).