This advice remains relevant but I think it misses an important nuance about how career design actually works in practice. The metaphor of "design" implies you're building something from scratch with full control, but career development is more like gardening - you can influence conditions but not force outcomes.

The key insight is recognizing the misalignment between your goals and your manager's goals. Your manager optimizes for team output and organizational needs. Your career growth is a secondary concern - important, but not primary. This creates a fundamental principal-agent problem. The solution isn't to become adversarial, it's to be explicit about your goals and negotiate actively rather than hoping they'll be noticed.

Practically, this means: (1) Having quarterly conversations where you explicitly state "I want to work on X technology" or "I'm aiming for senior by Q3" rather than assuming good work will be rewarded automatically. (2) Building skills outside your job scope through side projects, open source, or internal tools that solve real problems. (3) Being willing to change companies when growth stalls - the biggest salary/title jumps come from job changes, not promotions.

The dangerous flip side is over-optimization. I've seen engineers obsess over "career design" to the point where they won't touch any task that doesn't directly ladder to their promotion case. That creates fragile specialists who can't adapt when their niche technology becomes obsolete. Better approach: have a direction, but maintain broad skills and genuine curiosity. The most interesting career paths come from unexpected opportunities you recognized because you had wide exposure, not rigid planning.