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. One of the most impressive people I've ever worked with was a guy who spent a decade prior working on the same team at the same company iterating on a kernel driver for a single specific network card. He clocked in at 9 and out at 5. Predictable promotions. Nothing crazy. During… — Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh) September 16, 2025 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 push organizations to define a formal process with explicit criteria. For both hiring and promotion, decision-makers have a legibility problem. This problem will inevitability lead to a focus on details that are easier to observe directly precisely because they are easier to observe directly. This is how fields like graphology and phrenology come about. But just because we can directly observe someone’s handwriting or the shapes of the bumps on their head doesn’t mean that those are effective techniques for learning something about that person’s personality. I think it’s unlikely the industry will get much better at identifying and evaluating candidates anytime soon. And so I’m sure we’ll continue to see posts about the importance of your LinkedIn profile, or your GitHub, or your passion project. But you neglect at your peril the engineers who are working nine-to-five days at boring companies.