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That's why you shouldn't hire "good, ambitious people." I jest, but really. Sure startups want that ambition, but not run of the mill companies. I've worked at a few mega financial firms and what they really want are mildy competent drones that are prepared to idle in their carrier working 9:30-4:30.

You see, the problem with "good, ambitious people" is they want to (1) keep learning new things, (2) work on projects that expand their expertise, (3) continue on a monotonously increasing career trajectory. Sadly 85% of the coding out there is more like "IT" and keeping the lights on, fixing the CRUD apps, etc. Ambitious people are a major flight risk at such companies, and worse, they might bring in some new tech or complicated patterns that the drones that replace them don't understand, and then the firm has to chuck that code and go back to the former, easier to understand but far less performant code. I've seen it happen several times.



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