Not the generic stuff. The specific things that would have saved me years of slow progress if I'd understood them at the start.
I've been in tech long enough to have made most of the avoidable mistakes and to have watched other people make them too. What follows is not motivational. It is specific. These are the things I would tell myself if I could go back to the beginning of my career with what I know now.
The first thing: your job title is not your career. The instinct early in a career is to optimise for the title on the business card — to get to "senior" as fast as possible, to accumulate the credentials that signal progress. This instinct is understandable and mostly counterproductive.
What actually determines your career trajectory is the quality and variety of problems you've been responsible for solving, and the depth of understanding you developed in solving them. A junior engineer who spent three years genuinely owning hard problems — being the person accountable for production incidents, for architectural decisions that mattered, for features that real users depended on — is a fundamentally different professional from one who spent three years executing well-specified tickets. The title might be the same. The capability is not.
