Agree with the above. Seems to me, the many of us "going with the flow" without a thorough long-term plan, are perhaps applying Agile development principles to our "career" (aka series of jobs) , whereas the author is taking the nowadays-apparently-discredited Waterfall approach , where supposedly you can know where you're going to be at date X. Which of course we now know doesn't actually work out in software. And as for careers, even more so. One cannot predict the overall economy, or who one might marry , how many kids one might have, whether everyone is healthy in extended family, what one might feel like doing to be happy later on etc ;)