Originally posted on X on July 23, 2025. Expanded here.
Nobody tells you that the work you do at 11pm on a Tuesday, alone, for no audience, is the work that changes your career.
They tell you to network. To update your LinkedIn. To find a mentor. To apply to the right companies. All of that is fine advice. None of it is the thing.
The thing is quieter. And it takes much longer to show up.
What happened
In recent weeks, I learned something that changed how I think about careers.
I'd been building stuff in public for a while. Side projects, blog posts, random technical experiments. Nothing revolutionary. Just the kind of work you do when you're curious about how things work. I wasn't building an audience. I wasn't executing a strategy. I was just making things and putting them somewhere people could find them.
Then something strange happened. Overnight, engineers with twenty years of experience started reaching out. Not with job offers, but with genuine collaboration ideas. People whose work I'd admired for years were praising projects I'd built quietly over weekends.
Two years after college and working at a startup, I started getting offers for roles that normally require 5/6+ years of experience at companies worth around $200 billion.
The weird part? I hadn't changed anything. I was the same person, with the same skills, working on the same types of problems. But somehow the world had noticed.
The backwards model
Most people think you build skills, then you market them. You get good at something, update your resume, and start applying for jobs. The market discovers you when you're ready to be discovered.
It turns out this is backwards.
The market is always watching. Every commit you make, every technical post you write, every thoughtful code review - it's all being evaluated by people you've never met. Your reputation builds in real time, but the feedback loop is so long you don't notice.
You write a debugging post in January. Someone bookmarks it in March. They mention your name in a meeting in June. That turns into an opportunity in September. By then, you've forgotten about the original post entirely.
This creates an illusion. When opportunities finally materialize, they seem random. You think you got lucky. But luck had nothing to do with it. The work was already speaking for you.
The part that's hard
Here is what nobody tells you about building in public: most of it feels pointless while you're doing it.
You push a project to GitHub. Three stars. Two of them are you and your friend. You write a post explaining something you figured out. Forty views. You share a thought on X. Twelve likes, mostly bots.
The silence is the hardest part. Not the work. The silence.
Because you're doing the right thing, and nothing is happening, and you have no way of knowing if anything ever will. You're making deposits into an account you can't see the balance of. The feedback loop is so long that it breaks the normal human reward system. We're wired for quick feedback. Build something, get a response. Say something, hear a reaction. The public work loop doesn't work that way.
Most people quit here. Not because they're lazy. Because the silence feels like an answer.
It isn't.
What the best engineers understand
The best engineers figure this out early. They don't just solve problems; they document how they solved them. They don't just ship features; they explain their thinking. They treat every piece of public work as a small investment in their future reputation.
This isn't self-promotion. It's something different.
Self-promotion is talking about yourself. What I'm describing is talking about the work. There's a real difference. When you write up how you debugged a gnarly race condition, you're not saying "look how smart I am." You're saying "here is a thing that was hard, here is how I thought about it, here is what I learned." That's useful to someone. That's the thing that gets bookmarked in March and mentioned in a meeting in June.
The engineers I've watched do this well share a few habits. They write short posts when they figure something out, even if it seems obvious. They open-source tools they built for themselves. They answer questions in public instead of in private DMs. They treat their GitHub profile like a portfolio, not a backup drive.
None of this requires a large audience. It requires consistency and a low threshold for what's worth sharing.
The patience problem
The hardest thing to internalize is that the timeline is not yours to control.
You can control the work. You can control whether you share it. You cannot control when it finds the right person, or whether that person is in a position to act on it, or whether the timing lines up with something they need.
This is genuinely uncomfortable. We want to know that effort leads to outcome, and we want to know it soon. The public work loop denies you that. You're planting seeds in soil you can't see, in a season you can't predict.
But here's what I've come to believe: the people who keep going through the silence aren't more disciplined than the people who stop. They've just found a way to make the work itself the reward. They write the post because they want to understand the thing better. They build the tool because the problem bothers them. The sharing is almost incidental. It's just what you do with things you make.
When you get there, the silence stops feeling like an answer. It just feels like Tuesday.
What I'd tell someone starting out
Don't wait until you're an expert. The post you write as a beginner, explaining something you just figured out, is often more useful than the post an expert writes. The expert has forgotten what it felt like not to know. You haven't.
Don't optimize for reach. Optimize for honesty. The posts that travel are the ones that say something true, not the ones engineered to go viral.
Don't measure too early. Give it a year before you decide it isn't working. The feedback loop is long. You're not going to see the results in a week.
And keep going through the silence. The right people are watching. They just haven't had a reason to say so yet.
Your work finds them. You just have to be patient enough to let it happen.