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 sig...