Name: Overrated Career Goals
Uploaded: 2025-12-05T20:29:15+00:00
Duration: 10 min 40 s
Description: We explain which attributes engineers tend to over-prioritize—and why doing so often leads to bad career decisions

Overrated Career Goals

We explain which attributes engineers tend to over-prioritize—and why doing so often leads to bad career decisions.

Here are the core points from the lesson:

- We see many early-career engineers chase trendy product spaces (ML, AR/VR, blockchain) without genuine passion, ignoring the high risk that trends fizzle and leave teams stagnant; survivorship bias makes the rare success stories seem more common than they are.
- We highlight a similar trap with technical stacks: engineers often assume “more modern is better,” jumping between new technologies and hurting long-term growth, when stable, proven stacks at strong companies typically offer better learning and career durability.
- We show that over-prioritizing level/title or short-term compensation can backfire, since inflated titles at weak companies and high pay tied to terrible work-life balance rarely lead to long-term career success or well-being; growth opportunities and supportive teams tend to drive compensation naturally over time.
- We stress that compensation is multi-variable (base vs. equity vs. upside potential), and examples like Barnes & Noble illustrate how deceptively high salaries may underperform compared to equity-rich tech roles over a multi-year horizon.

We explain which attributes engineers tend to over-prioritize—and why doing so often leads to bad career decisions