The illegible nature of software development talent

Mitchell Hashimoto's best colleague spent a decade working 9 to 5 on a kernel driver for a single network card at the same company. Nothing crazy. Predictable promotions. From the outside, you would have zero signal about his skills based on online activities or working hours. Gergely Orosz worked with a standout staff engineer who is now on the market and completely invisible from the outside. No social media footprint. LinkedIn lists companies and nothing else - no technologies, no projects. GitHub is empty for the last five years, maybe a dozen commits throughout the last ten. Every team he worked on, he did standout work. Got stuff done with high quality, helped others, was firm in holding up common sense and practicality while staying curious and humble.

Nikunj Kothari writes about engineers who 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. These are the quiet ones working within the seams. You only know their talent if you've worked directly with them. People making hiring decisions don't have that luxury.

This is what Lorin Hochstein calls a legibility problem. For both hiring and promotion, decision makers face organizational constraints that push them to define formal processes with explicit criteria. The problem inevitably leads to 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. Just because you can directly observe someone's handwriting or the shapes of bumps on their head doesn't mean those are effective techniques for learning something about that person's personality.

The industry is unlikely to get much better at identifying and evaluating candidates anytime soon. You'll continue to see posts about the importance of your LinkedIn profile, your GitHub, your passion projects. Articles tell you employers are hiring based on side hustles in 2025. But you neglect at your peril the engineers who are working nine to five days at boring companies. The best talent is often the most illegible.