Advice from the Top 1% (in Tech) transcript

Most people in tech are playing the wrong game. They obsess over landing the first job, the offer letter, the starting salary, the LinkedIn update, and then they stop. They coast. And 10 years later, they're wondering why they're stuck at the same level while other people, people who aren't smarter, aren't more talented, are pulling in two, three, four times what they make. I'm Phil. I wrote my first line of code at 30 years old.

No computer science degree, no connections. I became a senior developer, then a lead, and now I run my own tech company and mentorship program where over 50 of my students have landed jobs in this industry. In this video, I'm going to walk you through how the highest earners in tech actually think about their career and their finances. Because those two things are completely connected, and almost nobody treats them that way.

Before I get into it, on May 30th, I'm hosting a free live webinar called how to break into tech in 2026. I'm going to cover what's actually working right now to get hired, how the market has shifted this year, and the exact steps I take if I were starting from scratch today. I'll also be taking your questions live. It's completely free. The link is in the description below. Go grab your spot now and then come right back.

I'll be here. All right, let's get into it. Here's what the internet tells you to do. Learn programming language, build some projects, apply to 200 jobs, land a 70K entry-level role. Congratulations, you made it. Except you didn't. That 70K, which sounds great today, is going to feel a a smaller in 5 or 10 years if you never level up. Rent goes up, cost of living goes up. If your skills and your salary stay flat, you're actually falling behind every single year.

And here's what most people miss. A junior developer who stays in that junior to mid-range for 5 years isn't just not growing, they're actively losing ground. The market shifts, new tools show up, AI changes how teams are built. The longer you sit still, the harder it gets to catch up. I see this constantly with people who come to me stuck. They got the job two or three years ago, felt relieved, and then just stopped pushing.

And now they're frustrated because they feel like they've done everything right. They learned to code, they got hired, but they're not where they want to be financially. The reason is simple. They treated the first job like the destination. It's not the destination. It's the on-ramp. Strategy one, build your earning trajectory. Let me show you what I mean with some real numbers. Let's say two developers both start at 70k.

Developer A stays comfortable. Maybe they get a small raise here and there, and after 5 years, they're at 80. After 10 years, maybe 90. Over that decade, they've earned roughly 800k total. Developer B is intentional. They pick up one high-value skill every single quarter. Not five skills, one. First quarter, they go deep on testing. Next quarter, system design. The quarter after that, they raise their hand to lead a project.

Each move is small, but each move raises their value. Developer B goes from 70 to 90, then 110, then 130, then 150 over the same 10 years. Their earnings around 1.1 million. That's 300k more from the same career, same industry, just by refusing to stay comfortable. Now, take that 300k difference and do something smart with it. Put even a portion of it into index funds, retirement accounts, whatever your setup is. Over 20 or 30 years, that gap becomes massive.

We're talking about fundamentally different financial lives. And here's the thing that really matters. Every new technical skill doesn't just add to your value. It multiplies it. A developer who can code and design systems and lead a team and communicate with non-technical stakeholders, that person doesn't get a 10% bump. They get put in a completely different category. Different roles, different offers, different leverage.

That's what happened for me. I went from junior to senior not because I was some genius. I wasn't. I just picked one thing to get better at every few months. And each one stacked on top of my last. My salary went up every year because by the time I walked into a review, I had already built the case. Strategy two, stop wasting your career hours. Now, let me talk about the flip side because earning more is only half the equation.

The other half is what you stop doing. In tech, your most expensive mistake isn't some purchase. It's wasted time. And I see people waste time in the same three ways over and over again. First, tutorial purgatory. You've been learning React for 8 months, but you've never built anything real. You keep watching the next the next course, hoping it clicks. Meanwhile, someone with half your knowledge, but twice your output, is getting interviews because they shipped three projects while you were still taking notes.

Second, optimizing things that don't move the needle. I've seen people spend months perfecting the CSS on their portfolio site. Custom animations, beautiful gradients, and no hiring manager has ever once cared about that. That's months of career momentum you're never getting back. Third, and this is the big one, staying in a comfortable role for too long because it feels safe. Listen, stability is nice, but 3 years of stagnation in tech, the opportunity cost of that is enormous.

It's not just 3 years of flat salary. It's 3 years where your skills could have been compounding into something worth twice as much on the open market. Time is the engine of a tech career. Whether you're starting at 22 or 32 or 42, the years you have left in your career are your most valuable resource. You cannot afford to burn them on low leverage activity. For me, starting at 30 meant I didn't have years to wander.

I gave myself 6 months to be job ready. Some people thought that was unrealistic. But honestly, starting late gave me an edge because it forced me to be ruthlessly focused. I didn't have the luxury of casual learning. Every hour had to count. Strategy three, compress your timeline. All right, so you know you need to keep growing. You know you need to stop wasting time. The next question is, how do you actually speed this up?

I've got three approaches that work. The first, set a baseline, then stretch beyond it. Figure out the core skills your current role demands, your baseline. Once you've got those locked in, everything beyond that should be invested in the next level skill. Don't keep polishing what you already know. Push into what scares you a little. Second, block non-negotiable learning time. I'm talking 5 to 10 hours a week, minimum, that you treat like a bill.

Not optional, not if I have energy. When I was coming up, I was at my desk at 6:00 a.m. every morning, 2 hours before my kid woke up, before my day job started, for 2 years straight. People asked how I found the time. I didn't find it. I carved it out. Third, escalate your investment over time. Start with one new skill per quarter, then add a real project, then add a mentor, then start writing about what you're learning or speaking about it in a community.

Grow the amount of energy you put into your career development as your capacity grows. Treat it like progressive overload. You don't start at the heaviest weight. And I'll add one more thing that's specific to right now, 2026. Developers who learn to work effectively with AI tools are operating at two or three times the speed of developers who don't. Every month you delay getting good at AI augmented development is a month of career advantage slipping away.

This isn't a trend, it's a permanent shift. Strategy four, spend money on skills that pay. Okay, this is the part most people don't want to hear. If you want to change your financial life through tech, at some point you're going to need to spend money on getting better, faster. I know it's uncomfortable. Free resources are everywhere. YouTube, free CodeCamp, documentation, it's all there and you absolutely can learn from free content.

I did early on. But here's what free content cannot give you. Someone looking at your code, your resume, your specific situation and telling you exactly what's missing. Let me put this in concrete terms. Let's say you're currently earning 40K a year in a non-tech role. You spend two to $5,000 on focused mentorship. Not just video content, but real feedback from a real person. Within 6 to 12 months, you'll land a 75K tech job.

That's a 35K per year raise from a one-time investment. Over 10 years, that's 350K in additional income. Over a full career, it's a completely different life. And here's what the highest earners do. They take part of that new surplus and reinvest it. Cloud certifications, system design training, leadership coaching. Each reinvestment opens the next door. Think of your tech skill set like a path you're trying to build across a river.

You need the HTML plank, the JavaScript plank, the React plank, the system design plank, the interview skills plank. If you bought a course on React and still can't land a job, React wasn't a waste. You just got gaps in other spots. Maybe your portfolio doesn't show impact. Maybe your behavioral interview answers are weak. Maybe you've never practiced live coding under pressure. Keep filling the gaps. The path works when all the pieces connect.

I know why people resist this. First, the fear of spending and getting nothing back. That's real. Second, the pride of saying I'll figure it out myself. And you can figure it out yourself. The question is whether the timeline that takes is acceptable to you. I'd rather learn from someone who's already solved the problem than rediscover the solution from scratch over 18 months. When I was coming up, I spent on resources that gave me human feedback, not just lectures.

And actual eyes on my code, my projects, my resume. That feedback compressed months of wandering into weeks of progress. Now I've seen it from the teaching side. I've mentored over 160 students. The ones who progress fastest aren't always the most naturally talented. They're the ones willing to be bad at something, ask for help, and act on the feedback immediately. Over 50 of them are working in the industry right now.

There's one more piece to this that I think is actually the most underrated. Giving your time and knowledge to others. In my Discord community, I've noticed a pattern that repeats every single cohort. The students who spend the most time helping other students, answering questions, reviewing code, explaining concepts. Those are consistently the ones who land jobs first. Every time. It's not a coincidence. When you explain something to someone else, you understand it twice as deeply.

When you review someone's code, you see patterns you'd never encounter in your own work. And when you're known as the person who always shows up to help, opportunities find you. Job referrals, introductions, advice from people further ahead. The highest performers in tech at every level, from junior to CTO, are almost always the most generous with their knowledge. Not because they're saints, because they figured out early that generosity creates a network, and networks create careers.

If you've got the time right now, and if you're watching this video, you've got some time. Give it to other people who are on the same path. Help someone debug their code. Review someone's portfolio. Answer a question in a form. You'll learn more from that than another tutorial. I promise you. Let me bring this together. The highest earners in tech treat their career and their money as one connected system. They don't stop growing after the first job.

They don't waste their years on activities that feel productive but aren't. They compress their learning timeline by investing time, money, and ego into getting better as fast as possible. And they build around themselves a community of people who push each other forward. Whether you're starting at 20 or 30 or 40, the age doesn't matter. The age doesn't determine the outcome. What determines the outcome is whether you treat your career like something that compounds or something you just show up to.

Remember that free webinar on May 30th, how to break into tech in 2026? If anything in this video resonated with you, that's where we go deeper. Link is in the description. Go sign up if you haven't already. And if you want to start surrounding yourself with other people on this path today, my free Discord community is also linked below. Developers at every level helping each other daily. Hit subscribe if you want more of this every week.

I'll see you on May 30th. And remember, if I can do it, you can do it, too. Coding saves lives.