Have you met engineers who are active tech influencers or bloggers?

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EntropyRX@reddit

Tech influencers are just that: influencers. It's not the same profession as a corporate engineer. They hated their 9-to-5, looked for a way out, and needed viewers to buy into the dream so they could avoid doing what they preached.

If you look closely, their background is fancy on paper but not in practice. A degree plus 2-4 years at FAANG isn't impressive at all. They just checked a few boxes to impress the 20-year-olds or those outside of this industry. They're stuck in the "pass interview" narrative, which is the main focus in your early career, but it's what reaches the most viewers, as virtually anyone can be sold the dream.

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potatolicious@reddit

Yeah. A lot of these influencers honestly aren’t all that. People who are extremely effective FAANG engineers are generally not terribly incentivized to be influencers. The actual job pays a lot better, are less demanding than being a public figure, and the influencing carries some career risk.

The ones who do it IMO tend to be the ones who have figured out they cannot or don’t want to do the job long term, and this is their pivot.

Instagram is mostly for facades, for every type of influencer including the tech ones.

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StickyDeltaStrike@reddit

It depends how big you can be as an influencer.
Most influencers don’t make it though.

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potatolicious@reddit

Yeah. You’d have to be *absolutely massive* as an account to start rivaling a FAANG senior comp package. Not impossible but I don’t think I’m aware of a single one.

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ecethrowaway01@reddit

The average staff eng at Google gets roughly 600k from levels. I get the impression that it's quite rare but I thought mainstream influencers made considerably more than that

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EntropyRX@reddit

Not even close. The only way to to make that type of money is to have your own "interview prep" platform, and since it's a winner takes it all type of market, we're talking about a number of "tech influencers" that can be counted on the finger of one hand.

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ecethrowaway01@reddit

So how much would a crypto shill like tech lead make?

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StickyDeltaStrike@reddit

Google “tech lead faang total comp”

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ecethrowaway01@reddit

That found results for how much tech leads at FAANG make, not how much the tech influencer The Tech Lead makes.

Thanks for trying your best to be helpful tho

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StickyDeltaStrike@reddit

I think the problem is that to make good money you need to sell other stuff as well, because you are not gonna be MrBeast doing a few dev videos and articles.

But doing dev stuff is not gonna allow to sell much merchandise or stuff around your videos and articles.

I have an ex-colleague who specialised in the quantitative finance and neurodiversity, which allows her to do coaching.

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pivovarit@reddit

No, the actual job does not pay a lot better.

Good ones can easily make N times more and on their own terms.

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Ok_Recognition3324@reddit

Engineers making 1m/year significantly more common than engineering influencers making the same.

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potatolicious@reddit

Yep. You *really* need to look hard at what follower counts get you to something like $500k-$1m of earnings. And also keep in mind that most influencers in that range have staff costs too. This is much harder than it looks.

The reality is that most moderately successful influencers don’t make a lot of money, and by the time you’re meeting or exceeding a FAANG comp packages you’re a household name in your niche.

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79215185-1feb-44c6@reddit

I know this is really dumb, but what do you think is more "fancy" on paper.

Someone who went to a "top" school, was employed by a FAANG for 2-4 years then "retired" to become an "influencer"
Someone who went to a school, and was employed by a small publicly traded company for a decade with 3-4 pay grades above what they started at. May or may not have had 1-2 other short lived positions (e.g. SWE1/2) earlier in their career.

I have absolutely no idea. The quality of engineers is so random and it's not getting any better.

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EntropyRX@reddit

Obviously the first one. That's what will attract college kids and viewers outside tech, that are the most monetizable and bigger source of views.

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79215185-1feb-44c6@reddit

And this is why the lifestyle of the #1 person will never make sense to me. They are totally different universes.

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pauseless@reddit

I know this experience is non-US, however all ex-FAANG I’ve worked with in the UK and Germany have been terrible. I know of a guy who signed a contract with NVIDIA based on some vibe-coded something and some viral post about it. So I vibe coded the exact same thing and was about 40% quicker. He is now making videos about extensions to his version and how it makes things faster. My thing is now 35% faster with similar precision. Both being FAANG and/or an influencer gets one jobs, as unfortunate as that truth may be.

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SquiffSquiff@reddit

Generally, most of the 'influencers' I see either have something to sell (sometimes legitimately) or have essentially retired from being full time engineers and this is theirs version of moving into a 'tech adjacent' role

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ChubbyVeganTravels@reddit

Yep. The Primeagen and Theo Browne are examples of the latter.

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TinyCuteGorilla@reddit

Theo... even just thinking of him makes me throw up

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purpuric@reddit

Ugh. Me.

I got into it because I got invited to speak to an audience of people looking to pivot in their careers as my own career trajectory is very unorthodox and nonlinear.
Then they invited me back.
Then I launched a series with the platform.
Then I had to kind of market my series on linkedin and that got some traction, I subsequently continued posting dumbass tech shit on linkedin because of this bs personal branding thing.

I hated it, it occupied every moment of my life when I wasn’t obsessed with my actual work.

I burned out so fast because I was trying to build a brand both within the org and outside it.

I ended up deactivating my linkedin because I absolutely hated the facebook-ification of that space.
It was gross shit but really good for my career.
Being so visible outside the org helped me inside the org.

But the politics around it, the always being on red alert for any compliance issues, being hypervigilant about my image just got so gross and toxic that I quit my job and took a sabbatical.

I hate everything, especially the fact that I left things at the position of “ai evangelist” and “ai trainer” and I just have so much disdain for the state of the industry rn esp wrt genai.

Also: I know other “thought leaders” and “techfluencers” and I do not consider any of them Real Engineers. They don’t build jack shit and spend too much time obsessing over lighting and the latest shiny thing.
I have little respect for people who announce themselves as techfluencers and talk about their follower counts.
When I was those things, I was working 16-20h a day to keep up with everything. It’s hard to be an engineer AND a “techfluencer” unless one is legit working hours like that. And if one is working like that then they are not a good role model at all. This shit is so not normal.

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Miniwa@reddit

Thanks for sharing. When you say "politics", what does that entail?

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purpuric@reddit

Thank you for asking!

So this was around my productivity.

Even though I was hitting all my deliverables, why wasn’t I still spending time and effort towards the org goals instead of my own trainings and such.
So they had me be a trainer on top of my usual engineering work and I had to juggle both.

Then they expanded that to a larger audience and made it weekly sessions, interactive bs that I was doing for my own “brand” if you can call it that.

It’s like my superiors wanted me to do for free what I was getting paid for outside the org.
And if I refused because the workload got too much, they’d just point to a video or post or article or sth and say well you did that, why not this? Where is your loyalty? That sort of thing.

Then there’s the “competition” amongst my peers. I don’t want to say they were jealous but there was definitely some sort of resentment towards me that seemed to stem from nothing.
They’d make comments about how my work is “accidentally good” as if I am not actually competent and just got lucky that my output is good quality, they’d talk about how stuff I did just happened to be high impact as if it’s not something I worked hard on convincing stakeholders about.

It felt like I had to defend every single action and decision to every individual on the team.
It eroded my morale and trust in the team.
I took a break from corporate and focused on my trainings and started my own business using my public reputation.

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bcameron1231@reddit

There's many with skills to back it up, and there are many who don't have the skills. I speak at large Conferences and present stuff online, but wouldn't call myself an "influencer".

In the end, some folks are just trying to make a living and some folks are doing it for the greater good. We all have different incentives. I can't fault them one way or the other.

We're all just at the deep end of the pool trying to stay afloat.

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HedgeRunner@reddit

Met a few PM influencers. All they’ve done is convince me more on the fact that most PMs don’t add any value.

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Key-Alternative5387@reddit

No. Why would anyone want to be a tech influencer? Ew.

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Politex99@reddit

because it brings more money that the work itself.

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Key-Alternative5387@reddit

But why would anyone watch them? Who even is a tech influencer?

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Politex99@reddit

All students, people aspiring to be software engineers and people who like drama. in Twitter you have theo, the primeagen, levelsio, thekitze etc. theo is cringe as hell but he makes shitton of money only from twitter posts, which is his smaller income. let alone other ventures as tech "influencer".

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Key-Alternative5387@reddit

But like... Why? It's a job.

Did they make really important pieces of tech?

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Feeling-Schedule5369@reddit

During a gold rush sell shovels

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Key-Alternative5387@reddit

No, I mean tech is a job. Wtf is there to be an influencer about? That sounds uninteresting as a job AND as a tech worker viewing.

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Feeling-Schedule5369@reddit

Just talk on video and earn money. What's not to like

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Key-Alternative5387@reddit

I just mean... It could be literally anything else. Why be a tech influencer instead of... any other kind of influencer.

Why watch it? I don't get it.

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Feeling-Schedule5369@reddit

Domain knowledge

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Key-Alternative5387@reddit

Domain knowledge of what? Do influencers have skills in something?

It sounds kinda like they don't?

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GigiCodeLiftRepeat@reddit

Side stream

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13ae@reddit

$$$

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gnuban@reddit

Yes, quite a few. And they're generally ultra-toxic. They want to present stories for their viewers and end up being yes men in order to get prestigious projects. They also tend to push for changes against the teams wishes for their own or their audiences benefit. I've also seen a lot of making up stories of how great the workplace is for clout. And sometimes the steal glory by presenting ideas from the company through their channels as if it was their own.

Don't meet your heroes.

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VanillaCandid3466@reddit

I took over a role many moons ago from a Microsoft MVP ... he'd published books on some topics. He will remain nameless.

His code was shit.

Untestable, poorly structured uber-slop.

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irreverentmike@reddit

Years ago I made a rule for myself that if I needed to look something up more than once, I'd write a short article about it, to force myself to remember better.

I did that for a while, and also added a mailing list signup form on my site. I didn't check how many people signed up for quite a long while, and eventually I realized I had a couple dozen people on a mailing list. That evolved into a weekly-ish newsletter, which evolved into a career in DevRel at Google and Stripe, which somehow also lead me to founding a YC company.

Two things I got out of writing and publishing on the web which were highly unexpected:

I learned how to be wrong - sharing what I thought was the "right way" to do things often resulted in people from the internet dropping in to (sometimes gently) correct me, and
I got to meet loads of people smarter than me - who really helped me level up along the way.

I never quite hit "influencer" level, but that wasn't really ever the goal. It has been extremely worth it, IMO. There is plenty of room for more people to share and grow their skills online.

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nbxx@reddit

I've done something similar in a smaller scale. I was reading up on lots of loosely related stuff, mostly in the Angular space. Customizing Angular Material, Analog, the newish resource API, signal forms, PWAs, stuff like that. I've created a blog site in Analog and I've written some blog posts on it, about topics I was reading about Extremely surface level and basic stuff, mostly just to reinforce what I've been learning. Later, I've written an article or two about different topics that I had to get a bit more familiar with due to work, but I didn't really touch it for a long time now and it didn't lead to new oppurtunities. That said, some colleges did contact me several times, to thank me for helping them, because some of my blog posts were suggested to them by Google or cited as a source by ChatGPT.

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Special-Dealer196@reddit

This is soo cool. What platform were you posting on? I really want to get into technical writing so I love the approach you took

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SansSariph@reddit

I love that rule. This comment made me stop and think about my own practices for a minute. Thanks.

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irreverentmike@reddit

If you end up adopting it, send me your next post! I'd love to read it.

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Leather_Secretary_13@reddit

they are usually better at marketing than engineering but sometimes they are great at both.

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LousyGardener@reddit

Many years ago I was on a contract with Microsoft. We were developing an application for them and the owners brought in a guy to staff up a bit. The guy was remote. I assigned him to the rtc portion had him implementing some messaging interfaces, data types, etc. he would make commits that smelled right but didn’t actually work. Having done the work myself in the past I knew it was time consuming and wouldn’t actually work until all the pieces were in place. Well he never actually got it working so we let it go a bit longer than usual. Dude spent like 2-3 months on it before we cut him loose.

Years later I see this dude at a conference introducing himself as a former Microsoft developer. Let me be clear: I don’t even introduce myself as a former Microsoft dev and I had a badge to access their buildings. This dude was never employed by Microsoft and got fired for failing to deliver a single line of working code

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defenestrated_badger@reddit

The people who introduce themselves as "former" x, y, z smell suss to me. Most of us don't identify as our former companies, trying to ride off a career highlight from years ago reeks of desperation.

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mkdz@reddit

We hired a guy who spent 14 years with Amazon/AWS starting in 2002-ish. I've never seen him mention his previous AWS experience unless someone asks what he did before us.

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protean_standee_00@reddit

He might be embarrassed 😬🤣

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Soccham@reddit

The ex AWS people I’ve worked with have all been fucking terrible

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CuteHoor@reddit

We've hired a bunch of them and they've been brilliant.

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mkdz@reddit

I mean the guy I work with is awesome.

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un-hot@reddit

Former barista

Present coder

Future barista

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armostallion2@reddit

this has depth.

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itsthekumar@reddit

Yikes you would hate LinkedIn.

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Wonderful-Habit-139@reddit

Find me someone that wouldn't have LinkedIn.

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eightslipsandagully@reddit

Fortunately you can only find those people on LinkedIn

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ChubbyVeganTravels@reddit

Especially those LinkedIn "AI" influencers whose entire day seems to consist of making stupid infographics.

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ChubbyVeganTravels@reddit

LinkedIn "AI" influencers whose entire day seems to consist of making stupid infographics.

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ccricers@reddit

"I used to be employed at a small no-name company. I still am, but used to be, too."

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BroBroMate@reddit

Yeah, I'm a former COO, had to step back from that into dev when I got sole custody of my five kids - I couldn't be present enough to be effective in the leadership role when kids got sick or had to be picked up from school etc., but at least I could code remotely in between applications of hot water bottles and paracetamol.

And I rarely tell people about the former COO thang, because when you go C-suite -> engineering, people look at you a bit funny.

It'll be relevant when I move back into leadership.

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Yukeba@reddit

Well it does work on HR, CEOs

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sfscsdsf@reddit

how about those ex tech leads, ex SWEs, ex managers?

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sadafxd@reddit

I know one who constantly runs podcasts and conferences.

That guy is not better than average SWE, he is ok, but definitely not better.

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StatusAnxiety6@reddit

yeah I worked in orgs that practically forced us to do this

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lyraelizabeth@reddit

i looked on youtube for some tips on a company i was interviewing with. saw the poster and was like wait i met her at a work event lol. her work and education history is true, but i don’t think its a super huge profile or anything

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laser__cats@reddit

I worked with a tech influencer. Publicly on his content he was a good dude. In the office he quickly became known as a twat.

He def knew his stuff but no one wanted to work on teams with him. He really was that insufferable.

I learned from that experience to be so good they can't ignore you. And on top of it, just be kind and be a good person on top of that. Don't be like that guy.

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random2048assign@reddit

Sounds like theo

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UWThrow69@reddit

Steve from A Life Engineered stopped in the restaurant stopped into the restaurant I worked a few months ago, I was floored. He was cool. We had a good talk where he told me about his dinner with the CTO at Atlassian and that Atlassian had gotten rid of their stack ranking after I got fired for that shit. Was lovely to hear. 🫠

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Bicykwow@reddit

Yep used to work with the guy with "ADHD" in his LinkedIn title (I'm sure you know the one).

He was just as annoying in-person as he is online.

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matthkamis@reddit

For sure this is Zach Wilson. The guy seems insufferable. He seems to just chase accomplishments and then brag about it on LinkedIn and then excuse it by saying it’s adhd making him overshare

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ChubbyVeganTravels@reddit

Yep. I'm autistic and really hate when people ostentatiously use it as a badge of honour or a way to excuse shitty or deleterious behaviours.

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Dymatizeee@reddit

Was he legit ? He looks annoying asf

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Bicykwow@reddit

He was legit annoying. Didn't last long, i assume because he tried being an in-work influencer / "thought leader" instead of just doing his fucking work.

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Dymatizeee@reddit

I just checked his LinkedIn and that mfer posted his TC in each of his roles lmao

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Bicykwow@reddit

Yuuuuuup. Literally no shame.

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Mysterious_Roll_8650@reddit

Zach Wilson?

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Great-Gecko@reddit

Who are you referring to? The Primeagen?

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Bicykwow@reddit

No

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KalzK@reddit

I worked with a tech influencer. She is big in linkedin, she posts tech articles frequently and the company used to send her to conferences all over the world. Often it was the tech event organizers who asked her to come. For the company it was excellent PR. As a teammate she was a bit below mediocre, not bad, but absolutely not good.

The things she talked about in conferences often she pulled them out of her own butt or by reading the most recent tech book sensation and explaining the book out loud. She absolutely never used anything she preached about at work. She was never late for her assignments, everything influency she did was on her own time, not company time.

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ChubbyVeganTravels@reddit

There is a lot of that. I know a conference speaker who stated once brazely on LinkedIn that he would make conference submissions on topics he had no clue about, if accepted learn about it beforehand and create slides and then turn up as an expert.

I do speak at tech conferences (much less these days). I only talk about things I have done in part at least. However that seems to be a dying art.

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MyBossIsOnReddit@reddit

I know a couple and they were not particular good programmers, and their material was often factually wrong, especially when they first started out. They tried to sell courses for a while but no one would fork over the money for it. Still, seem to be doing all right now.

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ChubbyVeganTravels@reddit

Most of the influencers who originally did dev courses on Youtube etc. seem to have moved onto AI news reaction videos.

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Western-Climate-2317@reddit

That’s how I feel whenever I see these influencers. I just can’t imagine any of them are people i’d want to work with.

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annoying_cyclist@reddit

I've worked with a few over the years. Social media celebrities, people with semi-popular YouTubes and newsletters and things.

I felt like most were pretty honest with their credentials and work history. Exaggeration and embellishment, but within the realm of what most people seem to do on LinkedIn. There are a couple who I think misrepresent the work they did, but that's unusual (and something non-influencer engineers do, too).

On the job, most were fine. Not remarkably good, not remarkably bad, but within the error bars of acceptable performance. One was really bright and really abrasive, and had a lot of trouble working on a team and accepting consensus that disagreed with their viewpoints. They were fired pretty quickly.

"Influencer", "blogger", "conference speaker" are shorthand for being some mix of personable, photogenic, having a good sense of what to talk about and presenting it well. Those are good skills to have as an engineer, but by themselves don't make you a good engineer (in the same way as going to MIT, working at a FAANG, etc don't by themselves make you a good engineer). So, not all that surprising to see that they just tend to be mostly normal on the job (though I guess it could be to someone who watches a lot of their content and develops a high opinion of them from that).

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gowithflow192@reddit

I've met one guy who not long after became a popular YouTuber. He claims to be a "Kubernetes expert" which is 100% a lie.

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BroBroMate@reddit

I am very lucky to know some people who are active bloggers in the Kafka adjacent community like Kris Jenkins, Robin Moffatt, Gunnar Morling, they're all rather talented people while also being absolutely lovely.

They're, imo, influential, but they're not influencers, if you see what I mean.

Kris' YT channel: https://youtube.com/@developervoices
Robin's blog: https://rmoff.net/
Gunnar's blog: https://www.morling.dev/

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PoopsCodeAllTheTime@reddit

I got hundreds of updoots once in HN, does that count?

I don’t really have a personal brand tho, that influencer thing isn’t my thing, and I’ll post an article every 12 months if that’s the frequency at which I believe my contributions are valuable

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Recent_Science4709@reddit

Never worked for FAANG or any tech companies really, but I’ve met plenty of people who got A’s in school and just can’t do the job. Never understood it because I’m the opposite, didn’t do well at school but I’ve been decent at the job.

My feeling is that they’re just leveraging their education in any way possible besides going to work for a boss and being an engineer.

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Tiktoktoker@reddit

I am the same- my high school and college GPA were not impressive but I have excelled career wise (18 years) and see kids out of a top college that’s hard to get into who are now low performers. It’s interesting.

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SuspiciousCry5228@reddit

Yes. I interacted with a well known tech youtuber for a few months. Turns out he only knew surface level stuff and couldn't solve complex problems. He only learns surface level shit enough to make a video to jump on the latest hype cycle. He grouped up with some ex-FAANG employees and they were using it to market their brand. A bunch of average joes that got lucky once and instead of pursuing things and getting better at them decided to exploit quick ways of getting rich.

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Candid_Bad3551@reddit

I know a few who try to be influencers to market their app. They are cringe irl.

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SequentialHustle@reddit

I worked with someone who became a tech influencer a couple years after I worked with them. Their whole thing is "ex microsoft" girl now lol.

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Whitchorence@reddit

I'm going to be honest -- a lot of times the skills to be one of those guys are not the ones you want at a job. Like, those guys are great at quickly getting up to speed in the tech of the week and building a toy showcase -- which is wonderful and what people go to their blogs for. But that's actually not what you want when the job is, say, working on a ten-year-old Java app.

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meisangry2@reddit

I worked with a guy who still has a relatively large tech blog/newsletter. He gave (and probably gives) talks etc, and was actually a good tech lead.

He is now a CTO of a mid sized company and he still posts about engineer management stuff.

To be clear though, his blogs were more about people and processes, not necessarily the latest and greatest tech stack or whatever.

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TheGoodBunny@reddit

Every influencer I have worked with has been below the bar and just a poor developer. Sample size of between 8-15 I think.

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SikhGamer@reddit

I hope to god to never Nick Chapsas. Anyone who ever mentions his videos or talks about him like he knows anything I instantly tar with a brush.

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TopSwagCode@reddit

Yes. Some of them, their job is just as other online influences, to sell services or them self as contractors, workshops, cources, etc. So its not as much about being able to making working software / production code, as much as making a bunch of interesting demos.

Having "badges" saying I was at Google, etc. Is worthless. Some might actually have gotten good experience working places, but its not automatically a good thing.

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account22222221@reddit

It’s really easy to lie on the internet.

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notfulofshit@reddit

I have never met SDE influencers but I have met bloggers. Tech bloggers that I follow in substack are people who have genuine knowledge to share. Influencers on the other hand are pure garbage. It is now too big online to not notice. AI and content monetization brought all the grifters and snake oil salesmen together and gave them incentives and a platform. Not sure how it is in other countries but as a millennial who grew up in US, socially it was a super dorky thing to be a know it all geek in the 2000s. So the people who liked computers were socially very introverted. A majority of us didn't really do very well with making new friends or being inspirational. So anyone that is an influencer today is either not from that category of people or they are too young for me to connect with. I don't mean in a negative way, they are just not in my network of friends.

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Tricky_Math_5381@reddit

What's with say molley rocket / casey?

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csgirl1997@reddit

My company would fire them. I actually ran across a comedian on TikTok who got fired from my company for his content even though he never named them lol

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newtonium@reddit

I knew one before she became a prolific influencer. She was a decent engineer but nothing extraordinary. You couldn’t tell by the posts though.

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Aromatic_Scallion_20@reddit

I know of a few and one in particular I used to work with.

He’s now some sort Microsoft MVP, has a seemingly popular podcast. The works.

When I worked with him 8 years or so ago, he was the single most obnoxious know it all developer I knew. He once told a customer he was an idiot (or to some degree or other). I had to tell him he couldn’t do that… obviously….

Every slight inconvenience he’d get angry and smash his keyboard. He was responsible for introducing docker to the company (good at the time I guess?) but would get angry when anyone asked him questions about it.

I wouldn’t trust him to hang a picture in my house never mind build mission critical software. He’s a blithering idiot.

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Fragrant-Brilliant52@reddit

My coworker is relatively popular on YouTube (200k subs). He mostly vlogs his travels since we’re fully remote and he’s permanently doing digital nomad laps around the planet. The funny part is he’s openly anti-LinkedIn and subtly anti-corporate in all his videos, always hinting at how fake and spiritually dead corporate culture is. Then before standup people on our team will casually be like “hey man just caught up on the new video” while we all sit there in a Jira grooming session

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Altamistral@reddit

You can hate the race but still have no good alternative than participating in it.

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DeterminedQuokka@reddit

I interviewed a guy for a vp position who was a self styled tech influencer. Although it was a LinkedIn thing. I didn’t know him before hand. And I’ve mostly avoided him post interview. He keeps trying to invite me to events.

I’ve met a few people with very influential side projects. But they aren’t ever talking about it much. You always stumble upon that by accident.

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titpetric@reddit

I got a blog as for active, depends on solar flare activity. I find myself not wanting to write what nobody wants to read, don't want to preach in either direction on AI unless I am getting paid to touch it. Some people liked and supported my ideas, and I hope a lot more people learned and moved on.

My main red flag is I dont have a media manager / editor / content repurposer. How do I give proof of work when people only look at the CV? Someone made hiring impersonal due to bias of the day, making them look at europass CVs without getting anything across.

I don't know what your way of demonstrating value is, escpecially remote, but speaking at conferences is a good way to reach a few hundred or thousand, or just the right people. Learning never stops, and neither does the coffee.

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O-juice89@reddit

The people I’ve seen have had issues with keeping work confidentiality and being influencers (small sample size though)

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Spiritual_Broccoli37@reddit

It’s like saying i am MIT computer science graduate when in reality I took some basic HTML class lol

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OrangeBagOffNuts@reddit

Met 2, one I worked with and kinda saw him becoming the influencer he is today over the years, amazing guy and amazing work ethic, best coder ever? No but clearly someone with the spark to explain, teach and deliver - The other one was pretty big in the Google experts program, joined a company he worked and everyone hated him apparently he was all talk no bark, reviewed some of his old stuff merged and it didn't seem bad at all,, never actually worked with him but our interactions in the community were always class so I have a feeling this is the standard, being an influencer doesn't make you the second coming of the savior but also doesn't mean you're terrible at the Job

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boboshoes@reddit

Yes I have and they are socially awkward in person. You would have no idea they are a big influencer

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on_the_mark_data@reddit

I hate the term "influencer" but I technically count as one, so maybe I can give some insight.

For my credentials, yes I do have them but I prefer not to lead with them because people bias on the credentials rather than the ideas I present. This creates bad echo chambers where your ideas aren't properly challenged.

For my engineering skills, I recognize I'm not a crazy 10x engineer and I just lean into it. My strength is a) 0 to 1 R&D work, and 2) communicating and teaching complex technical concepts. My tech career has been exclusively in early stage vc-backed startups, so this skillset is highly valued (and probably a result of this work environment).

For work-life balance, I don't have any and I'm working 80+ hours a week between my startup job and my own business. My vacations from my day job are used to deliver major projects for my side business. With that said, I was like this well before I even posted on LinkedIn. My life right now is legit just work and hanging out with my wife and dog at home. I personally enjoy it because I love building and writing, but I wouldn't recommend it to others.

What's my goal? I want to build my own vc-backed startup and having an audience is insanely helpful for raising a VC round and early go-to-market motions. Distribution is huge and social media is crazy cheap once it's established. Spent the past 3 years working under a CEO who translated his audience into a $7M seed round and a $20M series A round. Since we go after enterprises, our focus with content is a) building and maintain trust, and, 2) understand our target enterprise customers problems better than anyone else. I think these two goals prevent us from creating the vapid influencer content that most people hate.

Happy to answer other questions if interested.

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SpinachFlashy2542@reddit

I've met \~5 developers from my stack community. They're all super nice people and have great knowledge. However, they're not the usual 'influencers' who post weekly (even monthly) and spam with reels/tiktoks/etc. They're the type that have personal 'dev blogs' where sometimes there are 8 posts in a month, sometimes it's only 1 post in a 4-5-month timespan. All of them mostly do that when they have something that's considered worth sharing. A few tried to extend that type of info, also in a 'demo' for YouTube, but without great results. Most of the small things are posted on X.

I've also watched a few of the tech influencers, and I think 99% of them are just average programmers who are preparing for a video similar to how you'd prepare for an internal presentation for your company.

For those with awesome backgrounds (FAANG/MIT/etc), I think sharing 'inside' informations/practices is their ramp, and for sure they're above average, but I feel like after some time they'll expect to be validated only because they're ex-something.

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Tall-Introduction414@reddit

I met a guy at a tech meetup who was a somewhat well known security researcher/blogger/rf hardware hacker. We talked about reverse engineering the firmware in traffic blinkies. Pretty smart guy.

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Low_Promotion_6648@reddit

I’ve met both types honestly.

Some genuinely are extremely sharp people with strong execution ability, deep technical understanding, and very good communication skills. Those people usually stand out even when the camera is off.

But I’ve also seen cases where the online image was much stronger than the actual day-to-day capability. Good content creation and good engineering are related skills, but they’re still different skills.

One thing I noticed is that people who are consistently handling real production pressure, team coordination, difficult stakeholders, scaling challenges etc. usually have less time and energy to maintain a polished online presence all the time.

Doesn’t mean influencers are fake. Just means social visibility and operational depth don’t always grow at the same pace.

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Reasonable_Working47@reddit

I worked with one, and his project was a disaster.

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mattgen88@reddit

I work with one, though i wouldn't say he set out to be an influencer. He's genuinely a great engineer. Actually I've worked with a few prominent people in the industry, outside of faang/ai/etc. only one I can think of set out to be an influencer first, and he wasn't the best of engineers but did have important things to say.

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hibikir_40k@reddit

I know quite a few. Some were actually very good once... but the most time you spend actually promoting yourself, the less time you spend doing the actual work. So it's either someone that has no life whatsoever, or they are going to be weakening.

There are other disadvantages for influencer devs. At work they will be thinking of content, so you might find, say, some really weird thing being developed because it'll be cool for a talk, and it kind of sucks on a day to day. Or they might be outright misrepresenting the day to day. For instance, one of the largest microservices evangelists back in the day was CTO of a startup that wasn't doing well at all, and all the microservices were upping the development costs quite a bit: Quite harmful for this startup. Most of the senior tech staff waas unhappy about how it was going down... but do you really think you are going to take microservices out of a company where said CTO is selling them, 25-30 conferences a year? Of course not.

Every second you are dedicated to your brand is a second you aren't dedicating to your work being any good. It might be good for you, as the networking is invaluable to find the next job, but they rarely make great teammates in my experience. And yes, I've not work with just one, or two, or eight. And it's no different if it's instagram/twitch influencing, book authors, or people doing the conference circuit.

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spez_eats_nazi_ass@reddit

Closest I can think of is some of the more well known .net guys and Brent Ozar. I have actually hired/worked with professionally. None of the modern faang bullshit though. Anyone who has time for that and it's not part of their job selling either a consulting or product is generally going to be full of fucking shit.