(I'm a dev with 16 years experience) I joined a startup (20+ employees) and it was a great way to grow my career. In 4 years I went from Senior (in a team) to

(I'm a dev with 16 years experience) I joined a startup (20+ employees) and it was a great way to grow my career. In 4 years I went from Senior (in a team) to Lead (for a team) to Technical Lead (shaping technical decisions for all dev teams). Wore a bunch of different hats and got experience in many different areas. Working-from-home was a really good fit for me. I can get hot-headed (not proud of it) and being away from colleagues and communicating in an asynchronous way gives me enough time and distance to cooldown and (most of the time) put forward the best version of my argument that I can. Started contracting around the same time as wfh and in a weird kind of way, it also provided some distance. You just think differently about your relationship with any company. It can be scary at first because you know you're first on the chopping block when downsizing needs to happen but the upside is that you'll probably earn enough to set some aside as contingency. Some people will say not to switch stacks but I've done it a few times (C# -> Ruby -> Node.js -> Python/Go) and I don't think it's hurt my career. My recent switch to Python/Go has really just been me getting bored at work with Node.js and wanting a change. Another side of it is that if you want longevity as a developer, you'll need to be able change stacks a few times in your career to remain employable.