The Modern Tech Career: A Survival Guide | Observe and Report<br>The Modern Tech Career: A Survival Guide<br>2026-08-17<br>Tech is an excellent field to be in, as the compensation-to-effort ratio far exceeds virtually all others. I am not aware of any other career that offers a six figure income at such a low barrier of entry. Even at the low end, you’re nearly guaranteed to make considerably more money than far more difficult and important careers such as public school teaching or waste management. This is great until you start experiencing the capriciousness of tech. The good news is that this capriciousness can be identified, understood, and managed.<br>This is a letter to myself 17 years ago when starting out in tech. It is a post about cold truths and mitigations. It is intended to be illuminating rather than inspiring. My hope is that others find it instructive.<br>Embrace the layoff<br>You will eventually be laid off. That is how jobs in tech end, assuming you don’t leave or get fired first. Practically speaking, there is no concept of staying at one company for decades until you retire. The exception to this rule is company leadership which executes said layoffs as a means of protecting the business. Some non-leadership outliers win the job stability lottery and achieve career-long jobs, but it is unwise to bet on winning the lottery.<br>Given this inevitability, your best option is to own it, plan for it, and delay it. When I start a new job, I think to myself: “I wonder how the layoff for this one will go?” I find out concretely in time, but it usually follows a similar pattern: A few bad quarters and company meetings focusing on lagging sales, followed by the CFO leaving, followed by an unexpected, late-breaking “Company Update” meeting with HR the next day.<br>You can’t choose how to feel about your future layoff, but you can choose how to think about it. You can preemptively strategize around it, both with your personal finances (you do have 6+ months of cash on hand, right?) and your choices as you navigate your job through its untimely end. Those choices are actually more about setting up for the job that follows the current one. Specifically, it’s about crafting success stories you can share from this job in a future interview and building personal connections with which to leverage a future referral.<br>Sidebar: Jobs are only obtained via referrals now. Cold-applies are nearly pointless; employers only hire through their employee network. This is not an absolute truth, but it is a practical one.<br>The rest of this post is about strategies for delaying your layoff.<br>The salary catch-22<br>Having a big salary is great. In tech, salaries can range from underwhelming to obscene. It’s rational to seek and negotiate for the highest salary you can for any given position — you should do this.<br>We all wear a layoff target on our backs. The size of that target is roughly proportional to your salary. You might think that, at layoff time, a company would rationally stack rank each employee’s individual value and simply cull the least valuable employees as necessary. This is not how it works. Layoffs are not about value, they are about cost. The purpose of a layoff is to reduce costs to make the balance sheet make sense at the end of the quarter. Your salary is a cost. If you want to reduce your layoff risk, consider not maximizing your salary when negotiating an offer. I don’t actually recommend doing this (making more money is better than making less), but it’s a tiny knob that’s available to you if you value stability over wealth.<br>It’s not totally black and white in terms of who goes and stays at layoff time. The salary-based survival cutoff is a little fuzzy; leaders can and do make choices of who to keep and who to cut when it’s down to choosing between a handful of people of comparable cost levels. Let’s call this “the zone of fungibility.” You can make choices to put yourself on the better edge of that zone.<br>Know what your job is<br>Most people don’t actually know what their job is. Engineers, for instance, often think their job is to write code, or solve problems, or perhaps even to build great products. This is an illusion. The reality: Your job is to make the company money and please your management chain. That’s it. You could ship the most inane, low-brow slop and still be considered a hero if it results in a noticeable improvement to the bottom line. The seminal piece on this is Patrick Mackenzie’s<br>Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice. If you haven’t already, stop here and read and internalize that essay. Key quote:<br>Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things
It’s in your interest to seek opportunities to create direct business value. Try to work closely to revenue streams. If you’re not in a role that puts you in a position to do this...