How to Think About Your Career in Tech (A Framework)

The conventional tech career advice — get a computer science degree, join a big company, climb the ladder, accumulate stock options — was never good advice. In 2026, it is actively misleading.

The Three Types of Tech Career

I think about tech careers in three categories, and most advice conflates them:

The Craft Career: You want to become excellent at something specific. You measure success by the quality of your work and your reputation among peers. Progression means mastery.

The Leverage Career: You want to build something at scale. You measure success by impact and ownership. Progression means scope.

The Portfolio Career: You want to do many things. You measure success by range, flexibility, and the ability to work on what interests you. Progression means optionality.

Most people default to a leverage career because that is what the industry talks about. But many people are actually built for craft or portfolio careers. The mismatch creates a lot of quiet unhappiness.

The Questions Worth Asking

Before optimising your career, you need to know what you are optimising for.

What does success look like to you in ten years — specifically, not abstractly? What are you willing to sacrifice? What are you not willing to sacrifice?

A Note on Learning

The half-life of technical skills is shortening rapidly. The people who will have long, successful tech careers are not those with the deepest expertise in any particular technology — they are the ones who know how to learn quickly and transfer knowledge between domains.