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.
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