The Layoff Playbook Nobody Hands You on the Way Out
I’ve been tracking the layoff data closely in 2026, and the story it tells is specific: tech layoffs are up 140% year over year in Q1, Oracle cut an estimated…
The AI Job Data Most Coverage Gets Wrong
The AI and jobs discourse has two modes, and both of them are getting in the way of useful thinking about your career. Mode one is the alarm: AI is…
The Job Title System Is Broken. Here’s How to Navigate It Anyway.
A friend of mine spent years in recruiting before she realized she’d been conducting her own job search entirely wrong. She’d been searching LinkedIn for “Recruiter” and “Recruiting Manager.” Those…
Your Skills Are Worth $150 an Hour. You’re Paid for 40 of Them.
Most employed tech workers have never looked up what their skills are actually worth outside an employer’s payroll. A mid-level software engineer earning $130,000 annually at a tech company is…
Salary Negotiation Isn’t About Persuasion. It’s About Position.
The outcome of most compensation conversations is largely determined before anyone sits down to talk. Salary negotiation advice almost never says this. The person who gets the raise or the…
LinkedIn Is a Search Engine. Most People Are Using It as a Resume.
I spent some time a few years ago watching a recruiter work through LinkedIn Recruiter — not the consumer version most people use, but the paid platform with Boolean search,…
The Degree Was Never About Competence
The skills-based hiring discourse consistently skirts around something: the four-year degree requirement was never a reliable signal of competence. It was a filtering mechanism for scale. Before structured skills assessments…
The Return-to-Office Mandate Revealed Who Actually Has Power at Work
There’s a principal engineer I know — I’ll call him Marcus because that’s what the JLL research calls his type — who works at a Fortune 500 tech company with…
The AI Performance Review Scandal That Wasn’t
Updated July 2026: This post was written when AI-assisted performance reviews were a visible controversy in early 2024. Two years on, the practice has become widespread and largely normalized —…
Nobody Told You the Front Door Was Decorative
Last year I spent some time mapping how people I know actually got their last job. Not the official version — “I saw the posting and submitted my application” —…
