One downside of technical restraint and discretion is that the results don't typically produce artifacts that demonstrate mastery. Because there are no technical artifacts. Perhaps the mastery was in seeing the problem from another perspective or proposing a solution that exploited prior work in novel ways.
This is one of those micromotives/macrobehavior tensions. The feedback cycles for "demonstrates impact through mastery" and "system iterative improvement" aren't on the same timescales.
Mastodon Source 🐘
Incurred future opportunity costs is a hard thing to measure.