In giving this advice is he assuming that the end goal is to garner some kind of senior technical director position at a large company? It seems to me there are a number of potential career goals one might want to maximize for. For example; job title, salary, employer, company size, or cool factor.<p>It's not clear to me that all of these are parallel goals. For example if all you care about it optimizing for salary then getting a job at a small obscure company is likely not the best way to go unless it's all you can swing. Likewise I can think of a few jobs that have a high "cool factor" but make it hard to break out into other areas if you ever want to change paths.<p>That is to say that depending on what you want you might need to go about it in a different way. The bit about learning new things though is solid advice.