Illegible Nature of Software Development Talent

Summary

Here’s another blog post on gathering some common threads from reading recent posts. Today’s topic is about the unassuming nature of talented software engineers. The first thread was a tweet by Mitchell Hashimoto about how his best former colleagues are ones where you would have no signal about their skills based on their online activities or their working hours. The second thread was a blog post written a week later by Nikunj Kothari titled The Quiet Ones: Working within the seams. In this post, Kothari wasn’t writing about a specific engineer per se, but rather a type of engineer, one whose contributions aren’t captured by the organization’s performance rubric (emphasis mine): They don’t hit your L5 requirements because they’re doing L3 and L7 work simultaneously. Fixing the deploy pipeline while mentoring juniors. Answering customer emails while rebuilding core systems. They can’t be ranked because they do what nobody thought to measure. The third thread was a LinkedIn post written yesterday by Gergly Orosz (emphasis mine). One of the best staff-level engineers I worked with is on the market. …What you need to know about this person: every team he’s ever worked on, he did standout work, in every situation. He got stuff done with high quality, helped others, is not argumentative but is firm in holding up common sense and practicality, and is very curious and humble to top all of this off.…And still, from the outside, this engineer is near completely invisible. He has no social media footprint. His LinkedIn lists his companies he worked at, and nothing else: no technologies, no projects, nothing. His GitHub is empty for the last 5 years, and has perhaps a dozen commits throughout the last 10. That reason that Mitchell Hashimoto, NIkunj Kothari, and Gergly Orosz were able to identify these talented colleagues as because they worked directly with them. People making hiring decisions don’t have that luxury. For promotions, there are organizational constraints that pus...