In a world full of personal brands, be a person who builds.
There is something strange happening in the dev world lately.
More and more engineers are starting to post contents in social media (especially in LinkedIn) like they’re auditioning for a brand deal. You know what I mean.
Perfect lighting, loud captions, every other sentence ends with “this changed my life”.
Crazy part is that, somehow they are always “grateful” and “humbled” to announce.. whatever.
It’s not even annoying, it’s just confusing.
This post is actually a discussion I had with one of my mentees. He was curious about these LinkedIn influencers (I call them LinkedIn Yappers, btw). He wanted to become one. Asked me how to become one.
I was laughing my a__ out. Because that’s the same question I asked my mentor in my past, lol. Here I’m explaining my mentee why that’s not worth it.
Back to the post.
When did we starting thinking the best way to standout as engineers was by looking like influencers?
I remember that building something cool is used to be enough to stand out. You’d share a project, maybe post a snippet of code as a gist in Github or write a blog post about how the f’ you figure out how dependency injection works. That was real. That was helpful. That was gold, IMO.
But, now. It feels like you need to do a photo shoot before pushing to Github.
Honestly, I know a guy who completed a project but took almost 2 weeks to push it. Not kidding. Because he was preparing a very good looking Readme file and all that shit.
I get the appeal. Getting likes feel good, getting noticed feels great. Here’s the thing, when you try too hard to “look impressive”, you often stop being impressive.
That’s not a “personal brand”. That’s a “working internet brand” which “changed” your personality.
Because yeah, building a personal brand sounds productive. Might help you land a big job, find a good client and all that stuff. But if all you’re doing is turning yourself into a higlight reel, it’s going to catchup with you.
Especially in tech, you’re not judged by how many impressions your last post get. You’re judged the things you built.
I’m not again saying, don’t post. Please do. Share what you’re working on, write a tutorial of something or even upload a video of you sharing some tips. But if you’re online presence starts looking more like a curated feed, less like an actual dev’s journey, it might be time to pause and think.
I’d rather follow someone who is in mid-project and sharing what they learned so far, just some honest stuff.
Tech doesn’t need more lifestlye influencers. It needs people who care about the work.
You don’t need a thread to prove you’re learning. Just build something. Stay curoius and share what’s real.
That’s the brand worth having.
