The Cargo Cult of engineers

Remember Red Light, Green Light from Squid Game? You run as fast as you can. The doll turns. If it sees you twitch—BANG. You're out.

The engineering job market is this game right now. 1000 engineers running toward 1 job. The recruiter scanning 5000 applications isn't looking for reasons to hire you. They're looking for reasons to eliminate you.

Badly formatted resume? Red light. Generic projects? Red light. No live demo? Red light. You're dead before you got to explain how good you are.

We tell engineers the same advice: build an online presence, network with people, build side projects, contribute to open source, find a mentor. We all know this. There is no secret. So why are most engineers still invisible?

Because they're following the advice like a cargo cult.

The Straw Airstrips

During WWII, Melanesian islanders watched American soldiers build airstrips and control towers. Planes landed, Food and medicine arrived. After the war ended, the soldiers left. The islanders wanted the cargo back. So they built their own control towers out of wood. They carved headphones from coconut shells. They lit signal fires along runways made of straw. They marched with wooden rifles.

They performed every ritual they'd seen the Americans perform but no planes came. They replicated the form without understanding the function.

This is what most engineers do. They post on LinkedIn because someone told them to. They build Netflix clones because a YouTube tutorial said to. They DM strangers asking for mentorship because a blog recommended it. They perform the rituals. Nothing happens.

The problem isn't what you're doing. The problem is you don't know why you're doing it.

The rituals you perform blindly

Build an online presence

Someone told you visibility matters in a saturated market. Posting online is how you get noticed. So you open LinkedIn. You stare at the cursor. What do I even write about?

You are presented with two options: write about things you already know, or ask AI to generate content and pretend to be smarter than you are. Most go with option two. You'd post generic content, be consistent with your posting schedule, and follow the best algorithm hacks. You squeeze your brain for content, post 10 things and then burn out.

The problem is that you're trying to be a Creator before you're a Doer.

"Do things worth writing about." - Alex Hormozi

If your day is spent fixing minor bugs and attending standups, you have nothing to write about. If your weekend is spent figuring out why your deployment keeps crashing and you actually fix it, you don't need to think of content. The content is the byproduct of the work.

Don't write to be interesting. Do interesting things. The writing writes itself.

Network with people

Someone told you networking is mandatory. So you, a frontend engineer, join frontend Discord servers. Frontend WhatsApp groups. Frontend meetups. Think about it. Why do you network? For opportunities. So when someone thinks "I have this project, I need help," they think of you. You get an opportunity to work on a project. It doesn't matter if it comes with money or not. It's a thing to do.

Now ask: if you only network with other frontend engineers, will this ever happen? Will another frontend engineer ever say, "Hmm, I have this project idea, I want to work with someone else" Will that someone else ever be another frontend engineer? No. They can already do what you can do. 

So the people who require your skills is everyone except them:

• A Backend Dev has a great API but can't make it look good.
• A Designer has a beautiful Figma file but can't code.
• A Founder has a business idea but no product.
• Another Frontend Dev? They are your competition, not your opportunity.

These circles don't overlap. You're shouting into an echo chamber. Go find a founder who's struggling and save them. That's how you get hired.

Contribute to open source

Someone told you you need "Proof of Work". Recruiters love green squares on GitHub. So what do you do? You go to a popular repo. You look for "Good First Issues." You find a README typo. You fix a comma. You add a missing period.

This is "Participation Trophy" engineering. When a hiring manager sees 50 commits but they're all docs fixes and formatting changes, it hurts you. It signals you're gaming the system rather than solving problems. You're optimizing for the badge without doing the work.

When you're building your project and some date picker library crashes on edge cases, don't just switch libraries. Dig into the source. Figure out why. Patch it locally. Submit that fix. One merged PR that fixes a real bug in a library you actually use is worth 1000 typo fixes. It proves you can debug code you didn't write.

Find a mentor

You read in a blog, "You need guidance. Find a senior engineer to mentor you." So you go on LinkedIn and DM senior engineers: "Hi, I'm an aspiring engineer. Looking forward to connect and learn from you."

You just asked a stranger for hours of unpaid work with zero return. You're asking for a job, not a relationship. High-value people don't have time to teach you basics. If you ask generic questions, you get ignored.

When you are actually doing the work, you face specific problems: "I'm trying to optimize this React list that's rendering 10,000 items. I tried virtualization but scroll position resets on re-render. I tried memoization but the parent component keeps invalidating. Do you have a resource or keyword I should look into?" This shows you did the work. Respects their time. Asks for a nudge, not a curriculum.

Let me tell you about someone in a group I'm a part of. A junior engineer wanted his resume reviewed. Fair request. I posted an image with specific advice, clearly written. I asked him to figure out what that image is trying to say.

His response: "Could you tell me please? It would be helpful." The answer was literally there. Written in the image. He didn't bother reading it. He wanted someone to spoon-feed him.

Would I ever hire this guy? Absolutely not.

Not because he asked for help. Because he demonstrated he won't do the work even when the answer is right in front of him. This is what cargo cult behavior signals. You're performing motions without understanding the point. You want the outcome without the effort.

Employers can smell it.

Why you're invisible

The enemy isn't the job market. The enemy isn't AI taking jobs. The enemy is undifferentiated effort.

When a thousand engineers all have the same Netflix clone, the same "Passionate about technology" headline, the same mass-applied resume, you're not a candidate. You're noise.

The cargo cult fails because it optimizes for the wrong metrics:

• You measure output (I built 5 projects) instead of outcome (I solved a real problem).
• You measure activity (I post every day) instead of impact (someone found my post useful).
• You measure connections (500 LinkedIn contacts) instead of relationships (3 people who'd vouch for me).

The market doesn't reward effort. It rewards visible, differentiated value. And that's why most engineers are invisible and identical.

How to become visible?

Medium is the message

If you're a frontend engineer, your resume isn't a form you fill out. It's a product you ship. A demonstration of your core skill: presenting information clearly. You don't need to be a graphic designer but if your resume has bad typography, inconsistent spacing, you're telling me you're bad at your job. If your resume is a wall of text, you're telling me that you do not understand User Experience. You are asking the user (the recruiter) to do the hard work of parsing the data. If you can't make a Word doc look good, why would I trust you with CSS?

This applies to every engineer. Your GitHub README. Your portfolio site. Your LinkedIn profile. These are demonstrations of how you communicate. If they're sloppy, I assume your code is sloppy.

LinkedIn gurus tell you to "add numbers to show impact." So I see resumes that say "Reduced load time by 23%" or "Improved test coverage by 47%." No engineer tracks metrics like these.. You're busy building stuff with deadlines looming. You hate updating JIRA. Heck, you barely log your work. You want me to believe you calculated bugs before and after your contribution, then computed the precise effect of your work?

Bullshit! When I see those numbers, I know the resume is fake. Instant rejection. You performed the ritual without understanding the why.

Outcome over output

Nobody cares about your portfolio of Todo apps. Thousands of engineers have built the same Netflix clone. That's output. It proves you can follow a tutorial. Visibility comes from outcome.

Don't tell me you built a blog. Tell me you improved Lighthouse score by 40% and how. Don't tell me you know Docker. Tell me you reduced build time from 10 minutes to 2 and why it mattered. When you go to meetups or write posts, stop sharing tutorials. Share stories.

"How I debugged a memory leak that was costing us money in AWS bills" is interesting. "How to use useEffect" is noise.

Niche down to pop up

If you position yourself as a "Software Engineer," you're a commodity. Competing with everyone. Visibility is high when competition is low.

Attach a domain to your skills:

• Don't be a "Backend Engineer." Be a "Backend Engineer specializing in high-throughput event systems."
• Don't be a "Frontend Engineer." Be a "Frontend Engineer specializing in complex data visualization."
• Don't be a "Data Engineer." Be a "Data Engineer specializing in real-time fraud detection pipelines."

When a company needs a specific thing built, they skip the 10,000 generic engineers and look for the 50 people who talk specifically about that problem. You win by shrinking the pool.

Debug in public

"Build in public" is a cliché. Everyone shares their journey. Most of it is noise. Instead debug in public. Don't write a tutorial on "How to use X." ChatGPT does that better than you.

Write about "How we scaled X and it broke, and how we fixed it." Write about the obscure error message that took you 6 hours to solve. Write about the architectural decision that seemed smart and turned out to be a disaster. When a senior engineer searches for that exact error message and finds your article solving it, you've gained the ultimate visibility: Proof of competence.

The challenge in front of you

You can keep running with the herd. Keep building Netflix clones. Keep posting AI-generated content. Keep networking with people who can't help you. The doll will keep shooting you down.

Or you can stop performing rituals and start understanding them. Do interesting work. Document the hard problems. Connect with people who actually need what you offer. This approach is harder. It requires solving real problems before you write about them. Networking outside your comfort zone. Being honest about what you've actually accomplished instead of inflating metrics.

You need to move the conversation from "How do I get seen?" to "Is what I am showing even worth looking at?" But it's the only approach that works when a thousand people are competing for one spot. The cargo cult is comfortable. The cargo cult is also why you're not getting callbacks.

Don't be invisible.