First, a tangent. I've noticed recently that a number of websites aren't letting me do old-school copy-to-clipboard. They're hooking highlight events and only allowing copy according to their own method (e.g., Twitter or whatever). ScriptSafe causes them to hide the article completely. I've found that the "Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy" Firefox extension works with the article for this post, but there may be other extensions that unbreak copy-to-clipboard.
That said, from the article:
> Prioritize near-term income over long-term value.
In terms of one's career, I'm not sure what the author has in mind. I've found that, in the long run, work experience is work experience, and your skill in interviewing plays an outsized role in your future career prospects. If you're getting paid a lot of money to do something, that generally means there's going to be competition for your job, and it's noteworthy that you're the one who got it!
I'm sure there are some exceptions (and in my experience people on social media Internet forums like this one love to point them out), but I'd argue those exceptions are mostly outliers.
In addition, high income early in your career means you can start accruing compound interest earlier. Disproportionate quantities of money in an index ETF in your early 20's is a very, very powerful force function for your entire life. Play your cards right, and you can FIRE by your early-to-mid-30's, at which point you can pursue any work you want without the stress of needing to care about performance reviews, layoffs, toxic work environments, etc., etc., since you can always walk away. Even if you don't end up walking away, simply knowing you can easily walk away can have a significant impact on your overall quality of life.
Of course this can be easier said than done. I spent most of my 20's hardly paying any attention at all to what I was paid, focusing my efforts on the type of work I was doing and my education, and the company I worked for (a faceless Big Tech entity) was more than happy to take advantage of me. I had to spend my 30's catching up on savings. If I could rewind the clock and do it again, I'd aggressively hone my interview skills and spend a lot more time negotiating comp with a lot more companies once I had a year of two of professional experience on my resume.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are fiscally responsible and invest wisely, short-term income can be a form of long-term value.