Frank
The people who talk the most about what they’re building are rarely the ones you want fixing something when it actually breaks.
That’s not a hot take. That’s just what 28 years in IT looks like from the inside.
Tech culture has developed a strange inversion. The louder you are about your work, the more credibility you seem to accumulate, whether or not that work holds up under pressure. Meanwhile, the people grinding through real problems at 11 PM, rebuilding a broken Exchange hybrid connector or debugging a PowerShell script nobody else will touch, are mostly invisible. They’re not posting about it. They’re fixing it.
The Conference Talk Isn’t the Ceiling, It’s the Floor
Go to any tech conference, scroll any LinkedIn feed, watch any YouTube “I built X in 24 hours” video. What you’re seeing is a curated best-case scenario. The production gotchas, the edge cases, the three days you spent figuring out why one thing worked and its identical twin didn’t — that part doesn’t make it into the talk.
I’ve built apps that work in production and would embarrass me in front of any real developer. I know that. But they solve real problems, they run reliably, and nobody’s waiting on a YouTube tutorial before they can use one. There’s a version of competence that doesn’t photograph well, and it’s actually more common than the internet suggests.
The problem is when you confuse the polished demo for the depth behind it. That’s when orgs hire loudly and learn slowly.
Seniority Has Been Detached From Skill
This one’s uncomfortable to say, but here it is: ten years of experience doesn’t mean what it used to.
My default response to any recurring problem is “there’s probably a smarter way to automate this.” That instinct came from years of being under-resourced and having to stretch. It’s not genius, it’s necessity. But I’ve watched people with longer tenures than mine treat the same problem as a permanent manual process, year after year, because nobody ever pushed them hard enough to find a better way.
Tech culture loves the origin story and the credential. It doesn’t do a great job of testing whether the skill is still sharp once someone’s got the title.
The Visibility Trap Cuts Both Ways
To be fair, staying invisible isn’t a virtue either. If you’re good at your job and nobody knows it, that’s a career problem, not a badge of honor. Knowing how to articulate what you do and why it matters is a legitimate skill, and one a lot of technical people underinvest in.
The issue isn’t visibility. It’s the gap between what people perform and what they can actually deliver.
Social media has made it easier than ever to build a reputation before building the underlying work. That’s not new, exactly, but the speed and scale of it has changed something in tech specifically. The feedback loop between talking about a thing and being trusted with a thing has compressed to almost nothing.
What’s Actually Working Right Now
The people I respect most in this field are fluent in their specialty, honest about their limits, and genuinely curious about the thing right in front of them, not the thing that’ll look good explained in a thread.
That combination is rarer than it should be, and it’s also more durable than any persona someone builds online.
Tech culture will keep rewarding noise. That’s not changing. But the actual work still has to get done, and there’s a version of this career where you stop competing for the microphone and just become someone whose name gets mentioned when something needs to actually work.
That’s the ceiling worth aiming for.
