The Insights Desk
Career deep-dives, certification reviews, and salary data — sourced from BLS, Levels.fyi, and the candidates who passed.
Where we'd start this week
Newest off the desk
CISSP adds $35,000 to your annual salary -- but the 5-year experience gate means most people searching this question can't earn the title yet. Here is the full ROI math.
13 min · 2026-06-23
Standalone Prompt Engineer job postings fell 80-90% from their 2023 peak -- yet jobs requiring prompt skills tripled. The 2026 verdict on whether this is a real career path is more nuanced than either the hype or the backlash.
11 min · 2026-06-23
$198K median salary for a role 75% of employers cannot fill -- what an AI product manager actually does differs fundamentally from regular PM work, and most job descriptions undersell the gap.
11 min · 2026-06-23
Editor-selected (live ranking comes online once analytics is wired)
CISSP adds $35,000 to your annual salary -- but the 5-year experience gate means most people searching this question can't earn the title yet. Here is the full ROI math.
13 min · 2026-06-23
Standalone Prompt Engineer job postings fell 80-90% from their 2023 peak -- yet jobs requiring prompt skills tripled. The 2026 verdict on whether this is a real career path is more nuanced than either the hype or the backlash.
11 min · 2026-06-23
$198K median salary for a role 75% of employers cannot fill -- what an AI product manager actually does differs fundamentally from regular PM work, and most job descriptions undersell the gap.
11 min · 2026-06-23
168 articles — filter by track
The honest ROI math on the exam cost, the 5-year experience wall, and why starting at year three can be smart -- or a waste of 200 weekends
13 min · 2026-06-23
Standalone Prompt Engineer job postings fell 80-90% from their 2023 peak -- yet jobs requiring prompt skills tripled. The 2026 verdict on whether this is a real career path is more nuanced than either the hype or the backlash.
11 min · 2026-06-23
$198K median salary for a role 75% of employers cannot fill -- what an AI product manager actually does differs fundamentally from regular PM work, and most job descriptions undersell the gap.
11 min · 2026-06-23
Certifications9 min · 2026-06-22
Certifications11 min read · 2026-06-22
Terraform Associate TA-004 costs $70.50 and shows up in 65% of DevOps job postings -- but prep courses miss that HCP Terraform workspace concepts alone can sink a passing score.
12 min read · 2026-06-22
$172K median US base salary, 20% above DevOps rates, with Gartner projecting 80% of large enterprises will have a dedicated platform team by end of 2026. Here is what they actually do.
12 min · 2026-06-22
$112,590 is the BLS median for all US data scientists. A junior role at a startup pays $85,000-$110,000 -- and most of your day will be SQL and Slack, not machine learning.
11 min · 2026-06-17
