If you left your job tomorrow, how much of your best work would follow you? I asked an engineer that this week, and you know what he told me? Basically none of it. 17 years, all in private repos, he can't share. And that's not unusual. A lot of people's best work is completely invisible.
The strange part is, the better you get, the less visible your work becomes. Early in your career, everything's visible. Small projects, things you can point to. But as you improve, your work becomes complex, more impactful, and more hidden. So your best work disappears.
And this creates a weird problem. Some of the most capable people have almost nothing they can show for it. If they leave, they don't take their work with them. They take their memory of it.
And that's not just software engineers. This is modern work. The more valuable you become, the harder it is to point to what you've actually done. Which is why people feel stuck. Even if they're doing everything right.
