¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Dan Moore, Career Leverage as a Developer:

But one insight that came out of the discussion is that this applies to your career as well. If you focus on undifferentiated scary problems, then you have a lucrative career ahead of you, because the problem is important to solve (because it is scary) and transfers between companies (because it is undifferentiated). If you focus on differentiated problems, such as a scary area of the code base that is unique to the project, you’ll be tied to a particular company. If you focus on safe problems, you can switch between companies but you’re unlikely to make a lot of money, because the problems you are working on won’t be that important.

Big Tech is full of “differentiated problems”. See golden handcuffs¹.

It also helps you avoid being a cog. Every employer wants fungible employees, but every employee should resist being fungible. Don’t be “Java Engineer 2” or “React Developer with 3 years experience.” Be someone people want to work with. The goal is for people to say, “I want to work with {your name},” not “I want to work with any React developer.”

I am blessed enough to have been conditioned towards this path in my entire life, though it’s fairly biased of myself to say so :-)