I think that this caveat basically completely transforms the post. Take my admittedly strong opinion with a grain of salt, but I think rewriting this post with

I think that this caveat basically completely transforms the post. Take my admittedly strong opinion with a grain of salt, but I think rewriting this post with that context at the beginning (and from that angle) would really, really elevate it. If you get into a comparison of how risk-adverse versus risk-centric approaches can compare and contrast with career payoffs, I think you get much closer to a more detailed, useful comparison that helps folks think about their careers. With that said, I do think that courting risk as its own reward is flawed. It's risk weighted return that's the powerful part -- if you could make gigantic impacts risk free, you should do that. In fact, to a large extent, I think this is a huge part of what senior engineering is all about. If there are table stakes things to be done that will make a big impact, you want to learn how to communicate that, negotiate implementation against roadmap, and then qualify and quantify the impact after executing. I believe and have observed what makes much of corporate software engineering so lucrative is the value you can add with relatively low risk. So, to court risk is give up a systematic advantage. It seems to be quite backwards to me.