It comes in a lot of forms: Publishing novel research. Doing open-source projects. Making tools and libraries. Leadership in general (tech lead/manager roles, and doing it successfully). Mentoring people. Anything that makes other people better. The longer you have had a career, the more leverage people need you to have.

To be honest, the substack is a decent step forward in sharing knowledge if he can fill it with technical articles.

Being a lead/manager requires people skills that some people don't have. Let's be frank: a lot of us are neurodivergent and on the spectrum and that often does not make for good people managers. It's not a failure of career progression to shy away from management.

Well, then publish stuff, do open-source, build libraries people use, or otherwise advance the state of the art. There are lots of ways to impact other people without being a manager.

You also don't have to be a genius to do any of this stuff. There are outsized rewards to just showing up and always being nice and helpful (eg on open-source).

I can get on board with the emphasis on giving back in some capacity.

For the HN crowd it's coming up with the umpteenth JavaScript framework, I think.

I’m more concerned it amounts to “be famous.”