It strikes me that much of the advice in "Don't Call Yourself A Programmer" is more actionable than the counterpoints in "Do call yourself a programmer". While

It strikes me that much of the advice in "Don't Call Yourself A Programmer" is more actionable than the counterpoints in "Do call yourself a programmer". While there may well be advantages to working for 10+ years in one company, it can be difficult to engineer your (programming) career to achieve that these days. Companies go bust, get acquired, go through re-orgs and cost-cutting rounds of layoffs and it's not easy to select a company at the outset of your career that will be unusually safe from such events. Over the course of my career I've seen many good engineers laid off for reasons having little to do with their engineering ability. I've also seen companies go bust with very little warning for the employees, people who were happy with their jobs re-org'd into positions that made them miserable and engineers who weren't laid off but did make friends with their co-workers see many of their close friends laid off and often as a result move away to another city/country. I think even if your ideal outcome is a long career at the same company working with many of the same co-workers you'd be well advised to plan for not having that option and to be prepared for finding other work at any time if your circumstances change due to external events.