> Once you secure a spot in the workforce it’s pretty easy to hang onto it as an average contributor without much objective measure or comparison against your peers.
There's also the weird "success path" that goes from developer to manager. It's as though the end goal of learning to be a concert pianist was becoming a conductor, or perhaps a concert hall manager.
If your "success metric" is earnings, then "The force of competition at work" for knowledge work doesn't necessarily drive you to practice your Rust development "scales" every day, or to be the best Javascript dev in the team - it is probably a better use of your time to be "good enough" at your developer job, and hone your schmoozing and office politics skills to make the jump to better paid non development roles like "chief architect" of "VP in charge of {whatever}" or ultimately CTO or something.
There's also the weird "success path" that goes from developer to manager. It's as though the end goal of learning to be a concert pianist was becoming a conductor, or perhaps a concert hall manager.
If your "success metric" is earnings, then "The force of competition at work" for knowledge work doesn't necessarily drive you to practice your Rust development "scales" every day, or to be the best Javascript dev in the team - it is probably a better use of your time to be "good enough" at your developer job, and hone your schmoozing and office politics skills to make the jump to better paid non development roles like "chief architect" of "VP in charge of {whatever}" or ultimately CTO or something.