Why being a top performer no longer protects your IT job

For a generation, the deal in IT felt simple: be excellent, and you'll be safe. It was mostly true — and in 2026 it has quietly stopped being true. Genuinely strong performers are being let go, and it's confusing precisely because they did everything the old deal asked. The reason is worth understanding, because it points straight at what does protect you now.

Performance and safety have come apart

Here's the mismatch. Performance is measured inside your role — how well you do the work you're given. But layoffs increasingly don't remove under-performers from a role; they remove whole roles, or whole layers of work, regardless of who's doing them well.

So you can be the best engineer on a team and still be sitting on a layer the company is compressing. Your excellence is real — but it's excellence at the thing being automated or consolidated. Being the best at that doesn't save you; in a sense it just means you'll be the last one doing it before it goes.

Why "work harder" backfires now

This is why the instinct to respond to insecurity with more hours often backfires. If your work sits on the repeatable layer — the well-defined, procedural tasks AI now does cheaply — then pouring more effort in makes you more expert at the very work losing its value. You're climbing faster up a ladder that's being taken down.

Effort isn't wrong. It's just being aimed at the wrong target. The question isn't "how do I do this better?" It's "is this the work worth being excellent at?"

What protects you now

Not performance alone — positioning. Safety in 2026 comes from where your work sits, not just how well you do it. The durable half of IT work — judgment, business understanding, owning outcomes end to end, directing and verifying AI-assisted output — is the part machines can't do reliably, and it's where being excellent still translates into being valued.

The move, then, is to take the same drive that made you a top performer and aim it at that durable half. Decide the lane that fits you (deeper technical depth, management, or a process/product specialisation) and shift your excellence onto work that compounds. Seeing which of your strengths already sit there, and where to move next, is exactly what a 1-1 counselling session helps with — and it's the thinking behind the ProThink workshops and The Resilient IT Professional.

Your excellence isn't the problem. Where it's pointed is.

FAQ

Why do top performers get laid off in IT now?

Because performance is measured within a role, but layoffs increasingly remove entire roles or layers of work regardless of who does them well. If your excellent work sits on the layer being automated or consolidated, being the best at it doesn't protect you — it just means you're the last one doing work that's being removed.

If working hard doesn't protect my IT job, what does?

Positioning. Safety now comes from where your work sits on the value chain — the durable half of judgment, business understanding, and owning outcomes that AI can't replace — not only how well you perform. Aim your effort at that durable work rather than becoming more expert at the layer being compressed.

Does this mean effort and skill don't matter anymore?

They matter enormously — but only when pointed at the right work. Excellence on the repeatable, automatable layer loses value; the same excellence applied to judgment, ownership, and business understanding is exactly what's rewarded. It's not less effort that's needed, but effort aimed at work that compounds instead of work that's disappearing.

How do I move my skills to the "durable" half of IT work?

Decide which lane fits you — deeper technical depth, management, or a process/product specialisation — and deliberately shift toward owning outcomes and applying business understanding, not just executing tasks. A 1-1 counselling session can help you see which of your strengths already sit on the durable side and map the move from there.