Career growth

Promotions, the jump from manager to Director, staying employable through the AI shift, and knowing when your next step is at another company.

October 3, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Why your performance review won't help you get your next job
Deloitte found only 2% of CHROs think their performance management system works. When you leave, your review stays behind: what goes with you is your results and how well you can tell the story behind them.
September 29, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Promote internally or hire an experienced leader?
Promoting your best engineer and hoping they learn to lead makes the whole team part of their training program. The better question is who can successfully run this organization today.
September 29, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Spend 4 months finding the right job, not 4 years in the wrong one
Senior leaders who stay too long fall behind on pay, network and interviewing skills. Four months of focused searching is a far smaller cost than four years in a role where your scope, compensation and learning have stopped moving.
September 21, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti3 min read
12 things keeping you from becoming an AI leader
Courses, certifications and side projects don't fetch you a leadership position: when money is involved, ownership trumps knowledge. Here are the 12 things to focus on, from learning your company's economics to building something that survives a model change.
September 21, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Having AI on your resume won't save your career
Adding AI to your headline doesn't make a senior leader more employable. Big Tech is spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure, and far fewer leaders can say they know how to build the systems AI depends on.
September 20, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Not every AI leader will thrive as AI spending gets scrutinized
When AI stocks fell after calls to slow model development, the real question was what happens when companies stop treating every AI project as P0. Leaders who built, deployed and owned outcomes will have a much stronger story than those whose experience is decks and buzzwords.
September 17, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Can you go from IC to manager during a job search?
The IC-to-manager transition almost always happens internally, because a hiring manager wants evidence you've already managed people. Start behaving like a manager before you apply for manager jobs, and make the move while you still have leverage.
September 16, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Why senior engineers are grieving a job that no longer exists
The job experienced engineers spent 15 or 20 years mastering is quietly changing into reviewing AI-generated code and orchestrating agents. And Director interviews increasingly ask leaders to show hands-on expertise again.
August 29, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
More responsibility is not growth
The average VP of Engineering and Senior Manager of Engineering are both 47, so growth isn't about time served. More responsibilities at the same level is not growth: build a system, scale it, replace yourself, and move to the next level.
August 29, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Stop chasing promotions that don't exist
If there's no clear path up and no intent to put you there, no amount of strategic or cross-functional work will get you from manager to Director. Staying nets 3% to 4% raises, while strategic moves often bring 10% to 15%, and over decades that gap compounds to hundreds of thousands.
August 28, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Two things Directors do that Managers don't
Directors get results from people they don't manage, and they stop solving their team's problems to solve the company's. Both can be practiced long before a promotion is on the horizon.
August 26, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Who is actually layoff-proof in tech?
The layoff-proof leader is the one the business calls when something important needs fixing: they own outcomes, not tasks, and their value doesn't live inside a title or org chart. If your career doesn't look like that, either take more ownership or find a role where you belong.
August 23, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Why every tech leader should start posting online
As AI gets better at reading posts, repositories and talks, your online presence is becoming as important as your resume. Publishing what you've actually built creates a public record of how you think that's hard to fake.
August 2, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
AI is just a tool: why domain experts will get the leverage
A polished AI-written resume didn't get a FAANG Senior Manager Director interviews. AI is shrinking the teams that do the work, and the leverage concentrates around people who know their field deeply and make AI part of their workflow.
July 25, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti2 min read
Who creates the most leverage inside a company?
As AI takes over repetitive work and parts of cross-functional communication, companies will keep investing in hands-on engineering leaders who think in systems, speak the language of the business and have deep expertise in one domain.
July 22, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti1 min read
The telltale sign of leaders with non-linear career growth
Leaders with non-linear growth achieve a major feat and then replace themselves with another leader. If your org can't give you the growth you want, staying turns you from a builder into a maintainer.
June 1, 2026Career growthVarun Kirti1 min read
The AI wave gets you the interview, but not the offer
Three platform and data leaders turned twenty interviews into 5 offers, while seven AI solutioning candidates did about 150 interviews with zero offers. Companies need the people who build what AI runs on: the right data, automated pipelines and a foundational platform.

Career growth

Why your performance review won't help you get your next job

Promote internally or hire an experienced leader?

Spend 4 months finding the right job, not 4 years in the wrong one

12 things keeping you from becoming an AI leader

Having AI on your resume won't save your career

Not every AI leader will thrive as AI spending gets scrutinized

Can you go from IC to manager during a job search?

Why senior engineers are grieving a job that no longer exists

More responsibility is not growth

Stop chasing promotions that don't exist

Two things Directors do that Managers don't

Who is actually layoff-proof in tech?

Why every tech leader should start posting online

AI is just a tool: why domain experts will get the leverage

Who creates the most leverage inside a company?

The telltale sign of leaders with non-linear career growth

The AI wave gets you the interview, but not the offer