> if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT thing offsets everythin

> if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT thing offsets everything else. So the Manager Tools podcast had a discussion about this I can't be bothered to find. Their advice, as best I recall it, was that you should focus on two things: fixing absolute deal breakers, and honing your strengths. Imagine you come up with N dimensions you want to rate yourself across on a 1 to 5 scale from worst to best. If you have any 1 out of 5's that are clearly blocking career progress, you should focus on that. If you're sitting at 2s and 3's, you should work on getting a 4 or 5, rather than leveling up across the board. You have described scenarios that seem to be absolute deal breakers (likely because those are the memorable stories) but in most cases, I think the latter applies. > Every year, his own developmental goal was to go learn the next C++ standard. And that would have been useless because he was already a great C++ programmer. Well, those don't come around that often. But more to the point -- situation matters. If you're working on a major C++ product that is expected to last decades, the company is in trouble if _nobody_ is allowed to study improvements. Best case scenario the company has some talent management app that you can query to find out two other people intend to master C++20; worst case, every engineering manager focuses employees on short term wins and the mountain of tech debt becomes unclimbable. I fear though, that the worst case is also the average case!