For years it has been repeated that to have a good work in technology It was necessary to cultivate a good public personal brand and maintain an updated and complete professional profile. However, more and more voices within the technology sector are dismantling that idea, ensuring that many of the most valued developers They don’t do any of that. They are not going to apply to dozens of job offers or optimize their visibility. “Invisible developers” are simply brilliant at their job.
This invisibility is something that was put on the table Gergely Oroszengineer, analyst and author of ‘The Software Engineer’s Guidebook’ in a recent message in his X profile, in which he pointed out that this profile of “invisible developers” flies under the radar “the only way to find them is through references and specific searches”, assured the expert
Candidates with AI have broken everything. The increase in responses generated by AI to job offers has completely broken the hiring system. They explained it perfectly from the Manfred technological employment platform, where a few years ago they received between 20 and 50 applications a day for each job offer, and now they receive more than 500.
Various recruiters they explained on Reddit that this saturation of applications lowers the average quality of the applications and makes it difficult to detect real talent through this route. The situation is so extreme that, as Orosz indicated in an analysis from the tech job market posted on his blog, “many companies hire most engineers through contacts and referrals.”
Internal recommendations matter more than ever. In this saturated scenario in which true talent goes unnoticed, word of mouth has become the most reliable hiring filter.
It is estimated that around 80% of existing job offers are not made public and are filled internally or through references and recommendations from the employees themselves. In fact, many companies use referral incentives among their employees so that, when a vacancy opens, they recommend their former colleagues and acquaintances as candidates. As Orosz details in his analysis, recruiters increasingly look for candidates more among the pages of their agenda than among the applications that come to them.
The myth of the hypervisible developer. Public attention usually focuses on profiles with a lot of activity on networks or with highly visible projects. However, different examples and testimonies reveal the rising trend of “invisible developers”: brilliant workers at their job with little or no activity on their public profiles. A clear example is found in the message published by Max Spero, co-founder of the AI company Pangram, in which he compares the GitHub contribution profile of an unemployed 22-year-old developer, full of activity and contributions, and that of a prominent Google engineer, with a practically empty history.
In response to that post, Konstantin K, a software developer from San Francisco, confirmed Spero’s message. “The top 1% of engineers I’ve worked with over the past 10 years didn’t have GitHub, LinkedIn or LeetCode, they don’t speak at conferences or publish podcasts. But they built systems that no one else can,” he wrote.
Trust networks between colleagues. Other testimonialsamong which Orosz is also foundreinforce this idea of ”invisible developers” and agree that the most effective way to open job doors in the future is to be valuable to colleagues in the present. “From the outside you cannot know how good an engineer this person is until you ask former colleagues. There are many cases like this,” wrote Orosz in X.
Even academic research suggest that internal networks—those formed by real collaborations, not superficial digital connections—have a direct impact on career opportunities. In other words, the professional prestige that these “invisible” employees generate within the teams in which they participate weighs more than any public presence and their colleagues become their guarantors to obtain a job in the future.
Real contact in a digital setting. It is still paradoxical that, faced with the saturation of digital channels and the implementation of AI-based systems, the technology sector is returning to a classic model: relying on real recommendations to reduce uncertainty. Research reveals that recruiters prefer to spend time on references validated by employees or former colleagues, rather than analyzing hundreds of clone resumes generated with AI.
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Image | Unsplash (Vitaly Gariev)
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