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The Hidden Cost of Being a “Top Performer”
What tech professionals get wrong about performance, growth, and long-term career success
Imagine spending years of your career to mastering a technology that’s slowly becoming irrelevant. You hit every KPI, delight every customer, and consistently earn glowing performance reviews — but the world keeps moving. Meanwhile, newer, faster-growing companies are building on modern stacks, leaving your hard-earned expertise behind.
This isn’t just hypothetical. A systematic literature review of 244 studies on career transitions found that true career success isn’t determined just by objective metrics like a paycheck or job title, but by subjective, self-referent outcomes: satisfaction, growth, and alignment with your own long-term goals.
If you define your worth solely by how your employer measures performance — by customer satisfaction, quarterly targets, or annual raises — you may miss the bigger picture: your career story.
Focusing solely on your performance as defined by your employer can often mean working with outdated technologies, taking on daunting operational tasks, or relying heavily on domain knowledge specific to your current company to solve customer or production issues. Employers and managers typically measure performance…
