The latter consequence of low expectations is the more serious one. It's something that some people may never recover from. The average career of a paramedic is 6-8 years because of the physical and psychological strain the job puts on a person. The career of a physiotherapist is about the same, mainly because they become someone's personal psychologist 8 times a day while treating back pain or a sore knee. The trajectory of a data or software engineer seems to be a bit different: they burn out from the mental stress of working in dishonest and fraudulent cultures that produce unsatisfying work, but the engineer stays in the profession. Only they're a shell of a human. How many developers or programmers do you know who are a little sad all the time? I wonder what caused them to be like that.