| Would you rather work with (hire for your startup) someone who: 1) Always pleased middle management in a large bureaucracy by moving metrics, then bailed out just before the project collapsed 2) Ignored the noise, fixed real problems and left the project better than they found it? After 20 years of tech career and 3 FAANGs, I know my answer. This article is decent enough advice for the first 5 years of your career, so you get some seniority and money. Once you have those two things, what they give you is the agency and the safety to walk away from bullshit. After that the game changes: it's about credibility and being sought after by your peers, who, at this point, should also hold senior IC positions at companies whose help you need, sit on standards committees, have maintainer rights in the Kernel, etc. Your long-term professional success will come from being an excellent technical peer, rather than pleasing random middle managers you will never work with again. Your personal job satisfaction will come from honing your craft and solving real problems for real customers, not from hitting some arbitrary business milestones. (Obviously those two things sometimes align, but if you're forced to make a choice.) |