Here’s a Million-Dollar idea:
Imagine you’re trying to hire a Director of Software Engineering.
Would you not want your ATS to automatically go and scrape every candidate’s posts on LinkedIn, GitHub and Twitter (yeah I ain’t calling it X, Elon) and give useful insights?
Would you rather read a two-page resume, or see a summarized version of two years' worth of posts/projects explaining how they think about system architecture, cloud infrastructure, hiring engineers, CI/CD Pipelines and technical trade-offs?
Which one do you prefer? Claims or evidence?
Your online presence is becoming your resume
We're in a world where your online presence is just as important as your resume.
As AI gets better at understanding text, video, podcasts, presentations, and even GitHub repositories, it will become much easier to identify people based on what they've actually shared publicly.
That's why I think publishing online is becoming a career skill, not a marketing activity.
It doesn’t need to be a movie by Nolan or a book better than RR Martin’s. Most of the people I enjoy following simply explain what they're working on. They write thoughtful posts, contribute to open-source projects, speak at conferences, or answer questions in their niche. Over time, all of those pieces create a public record of how they think.
This demonstrates expertise that is hard to fake consistently.
Write about what you actually know
AI can generate endless amounts of polished content, but it can't manufacture your experience leading a production outage, negotiating with executives over budgets, or rebuilding an engineering organization.
Those stories belong to you.
The internet is already flooded with generic advice that sounds impressive until you realize thousands of people posted the exact same thing last week. The content that stands out usually comes from someone explaining a real decision they made, what happened afterward, and what they learned from it.
One thing I'd be careful about is trying to build an audience around topics you don't actually understand. The internet has a remarkable way of exposing shallow expertise. (This is why I’ll never touch PHP again. Thanks, StackOverflow.)
If you've led product organizations, write about user journeys and customer empathy.
If you're great at hiring engineers, explain what you've learned from interviewing hundreds of candidates.
Depth compounds much faster than breadth because people remember the person who consistently teaches them something useful. Which is why every professional should slowly build a body of work that exists independently of their employer.
Sure, your resume might be great, but I’ve never seen a piece of paper pass an interview.
TLDR: If you want to make lots of money, make an ATS capable of scraping and summarizing online presence and sell it. If you don’t want to bother with entrepreneurship but want a great career, start posting online.
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