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.

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.

Embrace the layoff

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.

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.

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.

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.

The rest of this post is about strategies for delaying your layoff.

The salary catch-22

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.

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.

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.

Know what your job is

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

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:

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 (e.g. internal operations), try to transfer to one that is. If you can’t do this (or simply don’t want to), your next best option is to seek opportunities to reduce costs. Find inefficiencies in the organization, own them, and eliminate them. If your work is visible to leadership (more on that later), it will be considered by decision makers in case you find yourself in the zone of fungibility.

Make friends in high places

Pithy though it is, they saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is a universal truth in the business world. Do not underestimate this fact. You are not smart enough to be exempt from it.

Make friends with your manager, director, VP, CTO, and ideally CEO. They should be aware of your existence and what you do for the company. This is one of your best tools to defer your layoff.

How do you make friends with these people? Proactively reach out to them and provide useful information to them. Literally just ping them on Slack from time to time. If you’re an individual contributor, you have valuable perspective as a person with boots on the ground. You can give them insight that’s obvious to you but perhaps not to them. Good leaders crave high-quality data, as that’s what lets them do their job. When doing this, take care to optimize for signal over noise. Don’t use any more words than necessary and don’t overwhelm them lest you not be heard at all. And absolutely do not be annoying.

How do you differentiate between signal and noise? Consider what you know that they don’t and think they should. That’s it. If you don’t have this information, don’t ping them. If you do, then do. Either way, don’t do this more than about once a week.

The goal of this is twofold: Contribute to the success of the company by disseminating valuable information to those who can do something with it, and establish yourself as more than just a name on a list of fungible layoff options. To be clear, you are just a name by default. You can choose and work to be more. I recommend that you do so.

Visibility beats competence

Competent people make the world go ‘round. Unfortunately, they’re not valued or rewarded by default. Reward comes from visibility regardless of any underlying competence. I imagine you’ve already seen a loud person take and get credit for work that a more competent person did. Perhaps you were that competent, unappreciated person. You will see this again throughout your career.

Books could be (and likely have been) written about why this is. My reductive understanding is that this is a quirk (failure?) of human nature. It’s not going to change and it’s foolish to try and deny it.

Competence is important but ultimately irrelevant without visibility. Advertise your wins, even if it feels gross. Frame your failures as lessons learned. Over time you will be widely perceived as competent, which is all that really matters in the end. You are not granted this perception by default, and that’s dangerous when you’re in the zone of fungibility.

Embrace cynicism, but don’t lead with it

This post is admittedly a little cynical, but it is the distillation of my lived experience and the lessons I’ve learned. I don’t like much of what I’ve shared here, but I’ve found it all to be true just the same. It is also consistent with what I’ve seen my peers go through (many of which are quite successful). No two career experiences are the same, but many of them follow a general pattern. Chances are, you’re in a similar one.

It’s easy to let this cynicism spill over into your everyday demeanor, but this is incredibly dangerous. It is very easy to be cast as “the negative one” and very hard to shake that perception. You should be your authentic self at work, but it’s imperative that you attenuate any cynicism you may develop over time. After all, nobody wants to work with a downer.

Be careful not to overcorrect; being toxically positive isn’t any better. It’s worth being your authentic self, just keep in mind how others perceive you. Perception is everything and it becomes your story. Make sure it’s one that people want to hear.

Surviving is thriving

There are a lot of influencers who want to sell you on the dream of “thriving” (they make money from that message). Take bold risks, launch a startup, be your own boss. Some people are well suited for founding and leading companies, but most are better suited for being employees. There is no shame in this and it’s not some sort of moral failure.

Simply finding and keeping a job these days is success. Reaching your local maximum is an achievement worth being proud of, and you may even find that your ceiling is higher than you thought. If so, you should try to continually raise and reach it. But surviving is a prerequisite to thriving, so start there.

Hopefully this post will help you do that!