Power Law Careers
The collapse of tech's middle class in a winner-take-most world
Welcome to Unknown Arts — I’m Patrick, your field guide to the creative frontier. Join thousands of builders around the world navigating what’s next.
A decade ago, I chose tech over the arts. Not because I was more talented at code than performing, but because I watched my creative friends struggle: actors waiting tables, musicians scrounging for gigs, writers churning out words for pennies. I wanted interesting, creative work without the feast-or-famine anxiety.
Tech promised that trade and for years, it delivered. But now those days are ending.
Today’s tech job market feels like it’s drying up: more layoffs, fewer roles, harder to get your foot in the door even with years of experience. Yet compensation for a small elite is exploding—like the $250M+ pay packages for top AI researchers at Meta. Unfortunately, this isn’t a temporary dip. It’s a structural shift in how value gets distributed.
Most people still imagine careers as a bell curve: a few underperform, most cluster in the middle, a handful rise to the top. That model doesn’t reflect reality. Digital economies have replaced it with something more extreme: the power law.
In power law markets, a tiny fraction of top performers takes home a massive share of the rewards, followed by a long tail competing for what’s left. The best don’t earn twice as much as average—they earn 10x, 100x, even 1,000x more. Not because they work harder or are 1000x more skilled, but because they operate with vastly more leverage.
We’ve seen this before in music, sports, and film. The superstars—Taylor Swift, LeBron, Steven Spielberg—capture enormous value from the market while everyone else competes for small returns on the hopes of one day hitting it big. I thought I’d escaped that world by choosing tech. Turns out I just delayed the inevitable.
This reallocation of resources to top performers is already happening in tech. Picture a hiring manager with a $1M budget. Ten years ago, they might hire ten capable engineers at $100K each. Today, that same budget is more likely to go to four senior engineers at $250K or two at $500K.
Why? When your work scales massively, one talented person can outperform a team while also introducing less overhead and complexity for the business. A single engineer who builds the right feature or invents the right model can generate millions in value. It’s economically rational to pay that person accordingly (aka “a lot”). But this results in a predictable outcome: the middle class of tech jobs gets hollowed out.
Power law careers don’t reward steady progression or tenure (typical ways for an average tech worker to prove their value). They reward irreplaceable leverage.
Here’s what that means for anyone trying to build a career right now: being average isn’t enough. Being great isn’t enough. You need to offer something a company can’t find elsewhere. You need to be the person whose unique knowledge, perspective, or capability generates enough leverage that paying you becomes more efficient than distributing the work. In other words, you need to be irreplaceable. If you achieve that leverage, you’ll be paid handsomely. But if not, you’ll be duking it out with the many other undifferentiated candidates for an ever-smaller portion of the pie.
So where does this leave me?
The stability I thought I’d found a decade ago is evaporating, and I’m making peace with it. Not because I like it, but because I see it clearly now. I’d rather navigate this shift with my eyes open than pretend it isn’t happening and I hope you feel the same. The sooner you understand the new shape of the landscape, the better you can position yourself within it. And that’s the most important move any of us can make right now.
Until next time,
📚 Go Deeper
Doug Shapiro: Power Laws in Culture
A crisp explainer on how power laws show up across culture, entertainment, and media and what that means for careers in creative industries.
Andrew Chen: Creator Economy 2.0
Why success in the creator world is now governed by power laws and how scale, platforms, and audience dynamics are reshaping who gets paid.
Why Google quietly uses the power-law rule to pay its superstar employees ‘unfairly’
An overview of how even companies known for standardization like Google make exceptions for top performers because the math demands it.
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Thanks for another interesting cross-disciplinary post! Irreplaceable leverage. Got to figure out how to eat this elephant...without dislocating my jaws :p
What I’m wondering is how this applies across sectors and stages. For example: if someone is early/mid-career (not yet at the point of designing features that generate “millions in value”), can they still build toward that kind of leverage? Particularly in a mission-driven domain (climate/energy/UX) where the “value” may be diffuse and long-term rather than immediately monetisable?