Michael Novati, who worked at Meta for almost eight years and rose to the level of principal software engineer, says: there is a very narrow group of engineers in the industry who are hired «directly» through closed contacts, so they do not need a public profile and self-promotion on LinkedIn.
Michael Novati, who worked at Meta for almost eight years and rose to the level of principal software engineer, says: there is a very narrow group of engineers in the industry who are hired «directly» through closed contacts, so they do not need a public profile and self-promotion on LinkedIn.
In the podcast A Life Engineered, Novati explained that principal software engineer is one of the highest technical levels without moving into management: a person does not just write code, but sets the technical direction, influences the architecture and decisions of the teams. According to him, within Meta, the excessive activity of a top engineer on LinkedIn could look strange and be interpreted as a signal that he was looking for a new job.
Novati describes the «behind-the-scenes» hiring market: large companies maintain long personal relationships with such specialists through recruiters and managers, sometimes for years. As a result, the names of the most valuable candidates may hardly appear in the public field, but they are the ones who are being competed for, especially in AI teams. He also emphasized: this is not advice that «put out LinkedIn and you will be flooded with offers» — on the contrary, this is the exception, not the rule.
For most engineers, LinkedIn and a public portfolio remain a normal tool for job searching and networking. But in the segment of the most scarce specialists with proven value to the business, a different logic often works: not to «show off», but to be already known to the right people thanks to results and recommendations.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Wen-Hsing Huang moved from Taiwan to the United States on an F-1 student visa in 2022. Now the 25-year-old software engineer works at Amazon. After being denied an H-1B visa twice, and in addition to this, Trump’s innovations, the IT professional decided to radically change his professional plans. Now he has a new American dream, which he will realize in his homeland.
