How to Think About Your Career in Tech (A Framework)
The conventional career ladder in tech is increasingly irrelevant. Here is a better way to think about building a career that is both successful and meaningful.
Isaac Paha
18 November 2025
Contents
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. Some questions worth sitting with:
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? What would you do if the financial return were equivalent across options?
The answers to these questions should drive your decisions far more than what is currently prestigious or well-compensated.
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.
Learning how to learn is the most valuable career investment available.
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Kwame Asante
2 days agoThis is exactly the framing I needed. The leapfrog argument isn't new, but the specific connection to M-Pesa and what comes next is compelling. What sector do you think produces the first $100B African company?
Priya Nair
3 days agoThe risk section is what most optimistic takes on African tech skip entirely. The value extraction problem is real and worth a full essay of its own.
Thomas Webb
5 days agoReally well argued. I'd push back slightly on the median age statistic though — demographic dividend requires the right education and infrastructure investments to materialise. What's your take on the skills gap?