LinkedIn is full of corporate braggarts. But don’t expect the best engineers to flaunt their success on the platform — or even have an account, according one former Meta employee.
Michael Novati spent almost eight years at Meta, back when it was still called Facebook and hadn’t yet doubled down on AI. He reached the rank of principal software engineer and earned the nickname “coding machine.”
On the “A Life Engineered” podcast, host Steve Huynh asked Novati about his claim that the top five engineers aren’t on LinkedIn. Novati stood by it.
“When I was at Facebook, the top engineers were like, ‘If you had a LinkedIn account, people would be wondering if you’re job hunting,'” he said.
Novati said these engineers don’t need to publicly job hunt because of tech’s extensive recruiting arm, which he called the “secrets of the industry.”
“There are very senior, very highly paid recruiters that work at the top companies who have very strong long-term social relationships with a lot of top engineers,” he said.
How do these engineers and recruiters meet? Novati gave the example of an engineer who spends a week doing campus recruiting at Stanford, bonding with the company’s recruiter in the process.
He referred to these as the “secret backroom dealings of Silicon Valley.”
“These engineers’ names are nowhere, but they are the ones that are the most desirable by these recruiters,” he said. “The $100 million engineer is not on LinkedIn with a tagline that’s like, #100millionengineer.”
Tech recruiting has long been a large, lucrative industry. Big Tech companies both employ in-house recruiters and outside agencies to stay close to key talent.
Meanwhile, talent is becoming increasingly competitive, particularly in the field of AI. Meta shelled out large contracts for its Superintelligence Labs, poaching engineers from its competitors.
Sometimes CEOs even get involved. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly made a list of the top AI talent to poach. OpenAI’s chief research officer said that Zuckerberg hand-delivered soup to an employee he was trying to recruit.
One AI worker told Business Insider they got a personal call from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, pitching them to join the company. They accepted.
Being offline may not be the golden key to tech recruiting, though. These top-tier engineers are a “specific case,” Novati said on the podcast.
“It doesn’t mean that your strategy should be: delete LinkedIn and all the offers will come,” he said.
It’s a rarified class, Novati said, but one that stays away from all semblances of personal branding.
“I don’t know any of those top engineers, who get special equity grants and special dinners with Bezos or whatever stuff like that, who have big personal brands,” he said.
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