This article is typical of early career success people. These people are generally in their career prime right out of college in their 20s. They are healthy, and they have no other responsibilities. They can easily shut out every thing else and come out with all their guns blazing.

The gravy train can look perpetually arriving from this vantage point. In reality this will barely last. The wisdom is in understanding this is a phase.

Also I'd say How to waste your career, one false sense of discomfortable year at a time

During the last 2008 recession, In Bangalore, I know a fair amount of people who hopped jobs often, got laid off, and were unable to find jobs for like 2 - 3 years, even the jobs they got later weren't all that nice. Reason, simple. When you are cash strapped you want to hire serious people, not some one whose replacement have want to hire just 3 months from now. It gives a vibe of a non serious person, who will barely stay for weeks without contributing much.

I personally did this for my first job and promised my self I won't do it again, having said this I was changing career streams(Call Center to Programming). Even then my Dad, used to tell me I won't go far in life, if I was not serious about what I was doing.

Quitting often is a giant red flag of a non serious person, unwilling to undergo even minor struggles to build valuable things. Eventually it will show and cripple you when you have to put up minor quarrels in a marriage, or a back pain in the gym, or a hard monthly installment for your home loan. Life is 90% of the time putting with non attractive things.

>>Since I left Apple, its stock has almost tripled while Uber's stock has been... I probably would be better off financially had I stayed.

>>If you are an average 30 yr old engineer, let's say you want to retire reasonably by the time you are 60.

Its hard to take any one who writes this seriously. If you are a 30 year old engineer your are 8 - 10 years away from being aged out of prime opportunities. You are also close to getting old to the point of fatigue, you will get married, you will have responsibilities, your parents will get old. You yourself are likely to get obese, catch a sedentary disease or two. If you haven't already, you risk catching one with this kind of all-night leetcoding lifestyle soon.

The true wisdom is in understanding no matter who you are things come to an end, eventually. The idea is to plan for that day. Stay lean, make a alternate source of low effort recurring income, work on your relationships, and work on your health. Sure learn by reading books and doing projects, but know where the real priorities are.

If you are a 40 year old, your resume has a life of 10 years at the very best. If you are a 50 year old your resume as a net value of ~0 years. You are closer to the end, so might as well plan and work for it. This is not exactly a linear climb in any way.

>>If you are ambitious and want to build a good reputation for yourself in the valley, if you don't want your talent to go to waste - treat complacency like cancer.

>>Anytime I score 40% or under, alarm bells go off. It's a sign that my job isn't meeting my metrics and that I need to stop and evaluate.

>>I was curious to visualize what the wasted time breakdown looks like in my 8-ish year long career so far

The remainder of this post looks like classic busy-ness trap and thirst for resume dressing. No matter how busy you are or likely to get, or what ever senior senior something blah superman you are, it won't pay your bills, it won't set you up for a retirement, it won't keep your healthy.

Lastly I would like to say.

These days complacency is to hop jobs often as its easy to hop jobs often. The hard thing is to stay, embrace the suck and build the hard things that actually matter in life. Not optimizing pie charts that shows your trello/asana/gtd usage. Or recruiter emails that come due to LinkedIn updates. Quitting hard situations is complacency today.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name

~ Confucius.