Behavioral Science for Ambitious Tech Professionals:
How to Get Paid More, Promoted Faster, and Taken Seriously
Decisions about your pay, promotions, and work conditions follow psychological patterns documented in decades of research.
Learn to recognize them and use them in your favor, from a software engineer with a PhD in behavioral economics.
Being Good at Your Job Isn't Enough
You do good work. You ship, you solve problems, and you step up when it matters. And still, someone else gets the raise, the promotion, the interesting project, the better job.
That's not bad luck. What counts isn't just the work, but how it's perceived, and perception follows rules of its own. You've probably seen it: capable people get written off, while mediocre ones build a reputation for brilliance.
Most people respond by working even harder and hoping the right people notice. It rarely changes the outcome.
The Rules Aren't a Mystery
Researchers have studied how people make judgments for decades, and their findings are used every day. Negotiators know the first number on the table shapes the final deal. Marketers know the same facts land differently depending on how they're framed. Product teams design every button, default, and notification to steer what users do next.
The people deciding on your raise, your promotion, or your next job offer are subject to the same effects. They believe they're judging your work objectively. But like everyone else, they rely on mental shortcuts, and those shortcuts follow predictable patterns.
No guarantees, but better odds
Human behavior doesn't come with guarantees, and I won't pretend otherwise. But once you understand the mechanisms behind the decisions that shape your career, you can stop hoping for a fair assessment and start shifting the odds in your favor.
Hi, I'm Fabian.
You might know me as a software engineer. But before that, I did something quite different. I studied mathematics and philosophy, then did a PhD in behavioral economics, which, simply put, is psychology applied to economic decision-making. I spent years researching and teaching it.
That background usually leads somewhere else. Companies hire behavioral scientists to shape how people decide, whether that's what users click or how long they keep scrolling. Some of that work is aimed at employees instead: designing pay, retention, and promotion processes so that people accept less, stay longer, and wait patiently.
I chose not to go that route. But the knowledge didn't go away, and at some point I realized it cuts both ways. These mechanisms affect everyone, including the people on the other side of the table.
It's given me an edge ever since. The clearest example: I've changed careers twice. Both times, my previous experience barely counted, and I had to convince people to take a background seriously that looked nothing like what they usually hired. Both times it worked, because I understood what the people deciding were responding to.
Every interview, performance review, and salary negotiation in your career is decided by people responding to the same things. Most never learn how that works. I'll show you, so you can stop leaving those decisions to chance.
PhD
Behavioral Economics
10+ years
Teaching
7 years
Research
