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> To be honest, no one cares about your career but you.

Not at every company and/or with every boss. As a young worker, I’ve had managers care for my career. And when I became a manager and later as entrepreneur, I’ve always felt like part of the compensation I could and wanted to provide, was to care about the future careers of individuals working with me. Some components of work would thus be structured and selected to develop resume items, others to develop experiences that would hopefully become useful beyond the current job. — However I never felt this was being particularly altruistic - it made it more likely that good individuals would stay with me for longer. And that helped them, me and the company: win/win/win.

But no one is going to come up and say "you're really smart, and we need you to do smart person job."

I'm sorry but this is just incorrect. I have done that myself, had it happen to me and know that it's a common occurrence. Whenever you hear of someone being "poached" that's exactly what happens.

There are also thousands of recruiters doing exactly this. Not every recruiter mind you but executive and technical recruiters do exactly what you describe for a living.

I think generally though, your advice of "figure out what we want, and make a plan, and go for it" is correct, and generally leads to you being sought out and recruited in the way you describe. You're not going to stand out if you don't want to, so it's a required first step in order to get on that "must have" list of recruits.

Of course recruiters say that, they'll say anything to get you to interview! There was actually a great post about this being the new recruiter form-letter that I'll have to find... it always started with, "I'm impressed by your background, we need smart people like you."

I was talking about the people OP was referring to (company peers/management/HR). Once you're hired and settled, I find the story can often change, and the only thing you can really do then is find another job if the promises of what work you would be doing don't hold up (and they often don't, but it sometimes works out anyway).

I tried to point out explicitly that I'm not talking about standard recruiter fluff like you describe.

These individual efforts happen both within big organizations and outside of them. Go read the story of any big product and you'll see how it happens - all of the major Apple products for example had an internal recruiting effort that pulled people off of other teams. I do this a few times a year myself within my org.

Haha, I think that might have been this article I wrote which briefly graced the front page a few months ago.

I collected all of the emails where recruiters started off with "I'm Impressed...". https://www.iteachrecruiters.com/blog/when-everyone-started-...

Crucially, as you get longer into a coding career ping-pong tables, lunch and "free beer" don't compensate for time, and are no longer novel, and once that revelation drops you often see your job for what it is. It's frequently not as cool as it seemed. Perks can still be fun, but rarely as fun as time / money.

Coding can still be fun, but once you see and know yourself and environment better, you can try to spot the career you actually want more clearly.

Interpersonal culture and power struggles, code quality, work life balance etc. are reasons to move jobs. More than prestige, perks or money alone.