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← New Money · Issue 010 · The Sunday Brief
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Sunday, May 10, 2026
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◆ Issue 010 · May 10
New
Money.
5 moves a week to add $100k
to your career this year.
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From the editor
Friday’s BLS Employment Situation hit and almost no one is reading the right column. Four classic entry-level white-collar categories: −14% year-over-year openings. Four AI-augmented IC categories that barely existed in 2022: +41%. Same companies. Same year. Different specs.
I’m writing this from a McKinsey desk between meetings. The view from inside is what I want to pass on this week: the four jobs disappearing and the four replacing them, the $20k most readers leave in their offer letter, three prompts that compress a four-hour deck into twenty minutes, the 90-minute weekend teardown that produced $12k in 72 hours for one reader, and the structural reason entry-level collapsed faster than every model on file.
Five moves, sized to a week, not a year. Run one.
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The 4 jobs disappearing in 2026 — and the 4 replacing them.
Last quarter’s BLS print: four classic entry-level roles — analyst, paralegal, marketing coordinator, data-entry — posted −14% YoY openings. Four roles that barely existed in 2022 — AI-augmented IC, integration engineer, fractional ops, prompt architect — posted +41%. The headcount didn’t vanish; the spec changed. Same teams, fewer “process this”-shaped seats, more “wire these systems together”-shaped seats.
The window to reposition is roughly 12 months — the gap between budget cycles at companies still doing 2022-shaped hiring and the ones that already aren’t.
What to do this week
Pick one of the four growing categories. Write a one-page memo to yourself: what you already do that maps to it, and the smallest concrete deliverable you could ship this month — something a hiring manager could click, not a line on a CV. The memo is the test. If you can’t fill the page, it’s the wrong category.
Read the full play →
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How to read your offer letter for $20k of hidden value.
Four sections of the standard offer letter hold most of the unclaimed money: vesting cliff exceptions, double-trigger acceleration, AMT-aware ISO timing, and 10b5-1 plan setup. None get negotiated up front because nobody on the candidate side knows to ask, and nobody on the company side volunteers. A reader last week (L5 PM at a $4B startup) found $34k by negotiating AMT timing alone — no written policy, just yes the moment he asked.
The 4-question script
1. “If we don’t IPO in 4 years, what happens to my ISOs?”
2. “Can the AMT calculation use my exercise date or the IPO date?”
3. “Do you offer 10b5-1 plan setup, and at what cost?”
4. “What’s your policy on secondary sales before liquidity?”
Read the full play →
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3 prompts that turn a 4-hour deck into 20 minutes.
The chain is Outline → Stress-test → Rewrite-for-exec. Each prompt does a different job to your thinking, which is the point — one pass for structure, one adversarial pass for what’s missing, one compression pass for the audience that has 90 seconds. Tested with 18 readers last week: median time from blank doc to acceptable first draft dropped from 4h 07m to 23 min.
1 · OUTLINE
I’m presenting [topic] to [audience]. They care about [3 things]. Give me a 7-slide outline. Each slide: 1 headline, 3 supporting points. Tone: [tone].
2 · STRESS-TEST
Here’s my outline. Be the smartest person in the room. What 5 questions will get asked? What’s missing? What’s wrong?
3 · REWRITE-FOR-EXEC
Rewrite each slide for an audience with 90 seconds. Cut anything that isn’t a number, a decision, or a risk.
Read the full play →
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The 90-minute weekend teardown that produces 3 productized offers.
The fastest second income isn’t a side hustle. It’s selling a sliver of what you already do at work — productized, scoped, priced — to one buyer who isn’t your employer. A reader last week sold three ETL migrations for $4k each in 72 hours from posting. He still works full-time. The work that paid the $12k is work he’d have done at the office anyway.
The hour-by-hour
Hour 1. List every concrete thing you shipped last week. Not “Python” — “Postgres → Snowflake ETL with dbt, three sources, ran in 11 min.”
Hour 2. For each line, name five buyers (not your employer) who would pay for that exact thing, done once. Can’t reach five? The work is too generic to sell.
Hour 3. Pick the highest-priced. Write a 3-line offer: deliverable, turnaround, price. Post Sunday night, before the Monday inbox fills.
Read the full play →
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Why entry-level white-collar collapsed faster than the models predicted.
Three forces hit white-collar at once. Each was modeled in isolation. The interaction wasn’t — which is the part that matters.
1. AI capex compressed margins. Hiring budget per team shrank even when revenue grew.
2. Reshoring sent net new hiring to manufacturing and skilled trades — different roles, different cities. The white-collar pipeline didn’t get redirected; it got skipped.
3. Tariffs raised SaaS-customer prices. The startups that historically absorbed new grads slowed first.
The 2010–2022 playbook (degree → analyst program → MBA → director) is the riskiest path now, because it spends your most reversible years on credentials in a market that’s repricing credentials down. The new one is narrower and uglier: a public portfolio of artifacts — code, decks, deals, posts — that show up in search and in references, and that compound because each one earns the next.
Read the full play →
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◆ Chart of the Week
The 47-point divergence your career counselor never showed you.
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Entry-level analyst
−14%
wages, indexed Jan 2023
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AI-augmented IC
+33%
wages, same index
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The gap, indexed
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+47 percentage points in 28 months
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The wider this gap gets, the more the old playbook becomes the trap. The divergence isn’t a 2026 anomaly — it’s the new baseline. Plan for it widening, not reverting.
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◆ The Tape
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$30K+
Avg raise from one play
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12 hrs
Reclaimed weekly
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5
Moves every Sunday
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One favour before you go
Reply with one number: 01, 02, 03, 04, or 05 — which play you’d run first this week.
I read every reply. They shape what shows up in Issue 011.
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Go run something. See you next Sunday.
— The Operator
still at McKinsey, still building
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Know an operator who’d like this? Forward it →
© 2026 New Money
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