I've come to believe that career goals, especially long-term ones, are a net negative for a lot of people in our line of work. I'm sure they're great for some people, but just look at the number of posts in this subreddit from people stressing out over "I should have 'senior' in my job title by now, am I a failure?" and "I want to be a staff engineer in five years, and also, can someone tell me what a 'staff engineer' is?" and "I need to be promoted to management to progress my career, but I hate managing, help plz." Concrete career goals seem to be a source of misery, not of inspiration, in a lot of cases.

Setting career goals and seeking promotions is partly about money, which is fair enough. We all like to get paid. But there seems to be more to it than that: a lot of people, like the ones asking OP this question, seem to have been sold on the idea that they're required to set concrete goals stretching out years or decades simply because that's what one does, not because it's the optimal way to achieve some higher-level outcome.

I don't buy it.

Making enough money for your preferred lifestyle with enough left over to save for the future? Enjoy, or at least don't mind, the day-to-day work and the people you work with? Learning enough marketable skills to land another job if needed? Congratulations, you've won the software development career game and it's a perfectly reasonable "goal" to just keep doing that indefinitely.

I also suspect that certain goals end up being self-defeating prophecies. Thinking back on the people I've worked with, the set of "well-respected staff+ engineers" has very little intersection with the set of "engineers laser-focused on career advancement." Maybe just my small sample size, though.