Another way to look at it, is that it's a local maximum. You're right that it is high-paying and fulfilling to keep learning new things. And I felt pretty dow

Another way to look at it, is that it's a local maximum. You're right that it is high-paying and fulfilling to keep learning new things. And I felt pretty down about myself for a while because I was pretty focused on some things that seem lame on HN (FORTRAN, Old-school C++, etc.). But in the last few years my career has matured and now I feel more secure in my 26 years of experience in a pretty narrow field. I really do have lots of fun and fulfillment at work solving hard problems, but to get here I needed the dedicated experience to have enough context to be efficient at what I do. I guess, what I'm saying, is just be careful not to get stuck in an ADHD local maximum where you're getting a dopamine hit for jumping to the next new thing. Sometimes taking the time to become a real expert in something can pay off on a longer time scale. *I'm not saying that it's bad to have 1 year of experience n times, you're probably pretty good at getting up to speed - you have n years of experience of learning new things, and that is also valuable in many contexts. I'm just saying that it can be a local maximum.