Three sentences, nine questions, and the two weeks these guides were written for

Fifteen minutes. A conference room nobody told you the purpose of. Somebody slides a document across the table and asks whether you have questions.

The layoff playbook's answer to that room is three sentences.

I understand this is a business decision. I want to make sure I have everything documented. I will need time to review the agreement before signing.

Then nine questions. Then you leave, having signed nothing.

That room is the moment the whole guide set was built around, and it is why the topic list looks the way it does.

What do the twelve guides have in common?

Write the guide for a moment where the decision is expensive and hard to take back. That was the rule. You can read it off the shape of the set.

Three guides are about interviews. Preparation, the technical formats, and an onsite where the panel could not spare eight minutes.

Three are about an offer in hand. Evaluating the letter, negotiating the number, and the red flags that only surface after you say yes.

Three are about losing a job. Severance, the layoff playbook, and the comeback plan afterward.

One is about the resume. Two are general searches, the complete job search guide and the first job out of college.

Two clusters carry spokes underneath. Severance has four, covering evaluation, negotiation, the WARN Act, and how severance stacks against unemployment. The eight minute guide carries a printable scorecard. Seventeen pages, not twelve.

Ten of the seventeen sit inside two specific weeks of somebody's life. The week they get laid off, and the week an offer lands.

That was not a quota. Those are the weeks you sign something.

Where does that rule break down?

On the resume guide. Nobody signs a resume. There is no counterparty, no clock, and nothing you cannot revise on Monday, so the rule that picked the other eleven does not pick this one.

I kept the resume guide anyway. It is the artifact every other guide assumes you already have. A set that skipped it would send its reader elsewhere for the first thing they need. That is a second criterion. It is better named than pretended away.

The same honesty applies to what is missing. No networking guide. No cover letter guide. No LinkedIn or personal branding.

I do not have advice about networking that I could be wrong about in public. Build genuine relationships cannot fail a test. The layoff advice can. Ask this before you leave the room. Sign nothing today. Counter once, with a number and a reason. If any of that is bad advice, a reader finds out and can say so.

Why does a guide exist in only one place?

One registry entry per cluster. Slug, category, card title, description, button label, accent color, date, sitemap priority, change frequency, the artwork's description, and any spokes.

Four surfaces read that entry. The card grid, the sitemap, the search engine ping, and cross links elsewhere on the site. A thirteenth guide is one entry, and it lands in all four.

Artwork paths come from the slug rather than a stored field, because the mapping is one to one and a hand kept copy of a derivable fact drifts.

The description of the artwork is the exception, and it sits beside the cluster on purpose. On 2026-08-21 I swapped the hero images on eighty seven articles and shipped every one of them still carrying the previous picture's description. A sighted reader saw nothing wrong. A screen reader user got a careful account of a picture that was no longer there, and I shipped it without seeing it.

That was possible because the image and the words about it lived in different files, and only one of them got changed.

Now they are one field.

The size of that fix is worth stating plainly. A missing description fails a test, and an unknown slug throws instead of quietly returning an empty string. A description that has merely gone stale on a slug that still exists would pass both. Keeping the words true when the art changes is still a person's job, and that person is me.

One more thing derives from the slug. Each card has a hover clip, and the clip's poster is its own frame zero, never the still on the card. Calling play on a video element clears its show poster flag, and only reloading the source puts it back. A poster showing different pixels than frame zero jumps at the handoff, and nothing fades back over it. On several of these clips the still and frame zero really are different images, so the still would have been exactly that jump.

Why nine cards a page and not twelve?

The grid is three across at its widest, so a page size that is not a multiple of three strands a card alone on the last row. That rules out ten and eleven. It does not rule out twelve.

Twelve is ruled out by what it does to the control. Twelve published clusters against a page size of twelve renders one page and no pagination at all, so the day a thirteenth ships, the paging path runs for the first time in production.

The cost is real and worth saying. Three guides sit behind a click that would not exist at a page size of twelve.

Search over the hub uses the shared engine, never a local scorer. Title weighted ten, description five, category label four, and the slug at two.

The slug is a field because the word vetting lives in a URL and nowhere on the card that URL belongs to.

Every word you type has to match somewhere. The query salary negotiation returns the negotiation playbook even though no title in the set contains the word negotiation, because the description and the slug both do.

Two words that live in two different guides return nothing at all. That is what the strict match costs. The did you mean line under the box is the compensation, and a blank you can recover from beats a page of loose matches you have to read past.

The four suggested searches under that box used to carry a comment claiming each one was a title match, checked by hand. When I checked, it was wrong. Salary negotiation matches no title in the set.

I deleted the claim and kept the searches. A comment that asserts a verification is worse than no comment when it is not true, because the next reader trusts it instead of running the check.

What is in the downloadable index?

At the bottom of the hub sits a JSON file covering the whole set. Twelve guides, one hundred twenty two sections, ninety eight questions answered, fifty one published steps, under a CC BY 4.0 license.

The numbers on the page and the numbers in the file are the same values, because the page imports the file rather than restating it.

The caveat travels with the data. These are the questions the guides answer. They are not a measurement of what job seekers most often ask, and no ranking or search volume claim is made.

Four guides curate blog spokes instead of publishing a step sequence. Those four report zero steps rather than being padded so the table looks even.

What are the salary figures in two of these?

Two guides lean on the salary data. The offer guide and the negotiation playbook.

Those figures are computed estimates. A baseline for the role, adjusted for cost of living, with a deterministic variance for each role and city pair. No wage percentile is looked up when the page renders.

They are not a report of what any particular person was paid, and the pages say so in the body rather than a footnote. The only traceable sources behind the dataset are the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics and the Department of Labor H-1B disclosures.

The pages carry one more disclosure. The dataset covers 3,445 roles served by 513 distinct bands, so most roles share a band with another role. A title is not evidence of a number measured for that title.

Used well, an estimate is an opening anchor for a conversation. Used badly, it is a figure repeated to a recruiter as though it were a quote. The guides are written to make the first easy and the second awkward.

Every guide is free to read in full, no signup and no email wall, and they sit beside Orbyt Jobs. For something shorter than a guide, the interview question generator takes a company and a role and hands back five questions to practice and three worth asking them.

Related reading:

• The career guides hub all twelve clusters and their spokes, free to read in full
• The layoff playbook the three sentences and the nine questions, written out
• The job search guide the general one, for when no offer is on the table yet
• Interview prep five questions to practice for one named company
• Free tools the rest of the surfaces that need no account