Why Knowing People in Your Field Is the Best Career Insurance
Nick from On The Town
If you ask someone how they know their salary is fair, you'll usually hear something like "I got a raise last year" or "I checked Glassdoor." Almost nobody will say they recently sat down with someone who holds the same role at a different company and compared notes. That gap explains a lot about why so many people stay underpaid without realizing it.
Your employer knows what the market rate is for your position. They are never going to share that with you. Even a manager who genuinely likes you has no reason to mention that you could make significantly more somewhere else. So if your company is your only source of career information, you're hearing one side of the story, and it's the side that benefits them.
It goes beyond salary, too. I know people who stayed in toxic work environments for years because they assumed every company operated that way. They didn't realize their manager's behavior was unusual, or that other companies actually let you take vacation without guilt, or that being passed over for promotion repeatedly was a them-company problem, not an industry norm.
The standard advice is to "build your network" but most of the ways people try to do it are borderline useless. Conference happy hours where you stand around with a lanyard making small talk don't lead to the kind of relationships where somebody will tell you their actual comp number. Neither do LinkedIn connections you never message again.
That level of honesty only develops between people who've spent real time together, repeatedly, in a low-pressure setting. A regular dinner with six or eight people from your field, at a restaurant, maybe once a month. The first couple are surface-level. By the third, people start talking about real things: what they're getting paid, which teams have good leadership, where layoffs might be coming.
I've watched people realize in a single dinner that the hours they were working or the promotion timeline they'd accepted was specific to their company, not their industry. They just never had anything to compare it to. Once you hear it from someone who does your exact job somewhere else, it clicks in a way that salary surveys and Reddit threads don't.
People who keep this kind of group going over time develop something like career peripheral vision. They don't get blindsided by lowball offers because they already know what the market pays. They leave bad work situations faster because they can see that other companies don't operate the same way.
When somebody at the table mentions their team is hiring, it comes with honest context about what the place is actually like, which is worth more than any job posting. You end up with a kind of informal intelligence network that makes you very hard to take advantage of.
On The Town exists so you can set up this kind of group without spending all your time coordinating logistics. You pick your industry, set a recurring dinner, and start inviting people from your field. We take care of the venue, the RSVPs, and the reminders, because those are the conversations your employer is never going to have with you.
Clubs you can start today
Tech Industry Roundtable
Monthly dinners for software engineers and PMs to compare notes on comp, culture, and career moves.
Pharma & Biotech Supper Club
Quarterly dinners for scientists and execs making sense of the biotech landscape together.
Finance Professionals Network
Regular gatherings for finance people who want honest conversations about comp, hours, and exits.
Healthcare Leaders Dinner
A dinner series for physicians, administrators, and health tech founders to trade notes.