I lost a night of sleep to LinkedIn this week.
Someone in my feed — less technical than most engineers I know, by any measure I’d normally respect — was posting photos with ministers. Industry leaders. Rooms I have never been near. And the honest first reaction wasn’t curiosity. It was the small, ugly question: why her?
I’m writing this instead of sleeping because I think I finally have an answer, and it isn’t the one I wanted.
The mistake is thinking there’s one game
My assumption, and I suspect yours, was that the game is: build skill, do good work, and rooms open. Under that assumption, someone in the room with less skill is an injustice, or luck, or connections — some corruption of the leaderboard.
But that room was never ranked by technical skill. A minister cannot read your code. He cannot evaluate your architecture, and he never will. What he can evaluate is whether you show up prepared, whether you can explain what you do in one clear sentence, whether being associated with you feels safe, and whether you asked to be there at all.
She is not beating you at your game with worse skills. She is playing a game you didn’t know existed — and at that game, she is genuinely good.
Skill is what you can do. Legibility is whether anyone who matters can tell. They are separate skills, and the second one compounds faster.
What she actually has
Strip away the envy and look at the mechanics. What does she do that the more technical, seemingly harder-working people don’t?
She is findable. When someone assembles a panel or a delegation, a name has to come to mind. Hers does, because she has spent years making sure it does. Your work sits in private repos; hers sits in public.
She asks. Most of those meetings started with a message that most engineers would consider embarrassing to send. The ask is a rejection risk, and technical people — trained on problems that stay solved once solved — hate rejection risk more than almost anyone.
She translates. She can tell a non-technical person what a thing means for them in thirty seconds. That feels trivial next to building the thing. It isn’t. It’s the only part of your work the room can perceive.
She shows up repeatedly. Trust in those circles isn’t granted for competence; it’s granted for consistency. Third event, fifth event, she’s still there. Familiarity reads as reliability, and reliability is what powerful people are actually screening for — because their risk is being embarrassed by you.
Notice that nothing on this list is fake. This is what stung the most when I wrote it down. I wanted the answer to be that it’s all performance and connections and noise. Some of LinkedIn is exactly that. But the core of what she has is a real skill, with a learning curve, that she climbed while the rest of us were telling ourselves it didn’t count.
Why technical people refuse to learn it
Partly it’s the myth we were raised on — that merit is self-evident, that good work speaks for itself. Good work does not speak. It sits quietly in a repo while someone else speaks.
But partly, and this is the uncomfortable one, invisibility is comfortable. If you never make your work legible, you can never be judged and found ordinary. The engineer grinding silently gets to keep the private belief that he would be recognised if the world were fair. Posting, asking, showing up — these put that belief to the test. Staying invisible isn’t humility. A lot of the time it’s fear with better PR.
What to do — not to feel better, to act
I’m not going to tell you to become a content creator. I’m telling you the two games are not in conflict, and the second one is cheaper than you think.
Write about what you build, in public, in plain language — one post per real project. Not thought-leadership. Translation.
Send the embarrassing message. One per week, to someone whose room you want to be in. The hit rate is low. It only needs to be above zero.
When someone asks what you do, have the one sentence ready. If you can’t produce it, that’s not their failure of depth. It’s your failure of translation.
And when you see her next photo with the next minister — study it instead of resenting it. She is running a free masterclass in the skill nobody put on your roadmap. The people who get angry at the feed and the people who learn from it start in the same place. They do not end in the same place.
I still think depth matters more in the long run. I haven’t changed my mind about that. But depth that no one can perceive is, from the outside, indistinguishable from absence — and the outside is where all the rooms are.