> The people who knew my value weren’t the people who could pay me
This is the key part. You need to think about the money side as well as the skills side.
I agree with the author though, despite regressed skills you can still be more in-demand because of cachet. It does feel quite silly.
wanderingbort · 26m ago
I think this is the part of the article that lands poorly with me. It lacks perspective. Why couldn't the people who evaluated those skills, demonstrated through those projects, pay the author? There are a myriad of possible reasons but some of them are in the category of "the result has marginal value".
I am fine hiring a junior developer that just does what is asked of them at a high level of quality. That is the baseline.
By the time you are a senior developer, I expect you to actively push back if you are asked to spend your time wastefully on marginally valuable things. Product managers should be able to explain to a reasonable person why a feature has value. A senior dev should be able to explain to project management why refactoring to reduce tech-debt pays off over time.
Is it possible that looking at the authors open source projects conveys the message:
"I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."
I hire talent like that... when I have the organizational capacity to see if they grow out of it.
abetusk · 12m ago
> Why couldn't the people who evaluated those skills, demonstrated through those projects, pay the author?
You make it sound like the solution is obvious. It isn't. There are a lot of discussions that try to solve this problem, for FOSS as well as for other fields. Patreon, Gratipay, Crowd Supply and Kickstarter are just a few options that have tried to solve this problem with mixed success. There are many projects that are wildly popular or used in critical infrastructure around the internet that are chronically underfunded.
My opinion is that extracting funds from people online is a high friction event. When combined with FOSS projects that might be used by a large user base but where each individual derives benefit smaller than the friction of a funding payment, the project, or individual maintainer, has trouble with remuneration.
> "I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."
A pretty bad faith reading. Maintaining a successful (GitHub) project means dealing with community feedback, triaging and fixing bugs, writing documentation, popularizing/marketing and managing code contributions, at the very least.
raxxorraxor · 18m ago
> but some of them are in the category of "the result has marginal value".
This is often false and lacks perspective too. Or closer to reality would be that people do use this work and simply don't pay for it. Maybe some complain if there is a security issue in a one-man-show library. In software this isn't unusual.
What you really mean is the "result is marginally monetized". Which itself has value ironically, but that is again a broader perspective.
ChrisMarshallNY · 25m ago
I’ve run side projects for my entire career (over 30 years).
It definitely informed my day jobs, but they never knew (or cared). I did it because I loved doing it. I designed software to help out altruistic organizations, and got some good work done (that no one signing checks ever cared about).
Now, I’m retired, and working on my own stuff. I treat my work as a craft, and really enjoy it.
notepad0x90 · 1h ago
> Waking up at 6am to make some commits, reading documentation on the subway, and coding to dubstep at night wasn’t getting me anywhere. But I was happy.
That's the key friend. put in your 8hrs and do what your bosses want at your job. but if open source work makes you happy, why not do that on your free time? don't do it to get a job or to pad a resume, but because it is fun. pick projects you enjoy and limit your contribution so that it won't affect your happiness.
jebarker · 1h ago
Also do this while you can if it makes you happy/fulfilled. I've found that having kids and just getting older means I have almost no spare time or energy outside of my 40ish hours per week for technical work. I wish I understood in my 20s and 30s just how much spare time and energy I had.
franciscop · 55m ago
> "I wish I understood in my 20s and 30s just how much spare time and energy I had."
Wait I'm in my 30s and it feels like I have a lot less energy than in my 20s, does it get worse? Hey at least I'm mature enough to understand that I should be enjoying now.
layer8 · 40m ago
Energy pretty much gets worse every decade. One can compensate by experience. It would be great to have the twenty-something energy back but with the experience. :)
tuesdaynight · 44m ago
Besides working out and taking care of mental health, I would advise you to make an appointment to check your vitamins and testosterone levels. I had problems with that in my 20s. Sure, your energy will drop with age, but it should not be "a lot less" in your 30s if everything is good with your hormones.
hooverd · 8m ago
If you maintain the same baseline level of activity, not in my experience.
MonkeyIsNull · 51m ago
Yes, especially if you don't take care of your body and your mental health.
pengaru · 36m ago
Life is literally all "use it or lose it". Stay active and fit, and you'll be active and fit.
The strategy works until you get badly injured or sick. Rebounding is harder with age, then you die.
franciscop · 56m ago
> I’ll collect some money and retire in a couple years. Hopefully the open source world stays the same until then.
This was my feeling few years back. But after some years working at companies, it doesn't feel the same to take my keyboard on my personal time and hack away. Sure it's still fun, but maybe there's more to life than that. Thinking that my energy for hacking away all night will return would be naive, though who knows, it'll be a new future. Maybe I will pick up woodworking, which seems to be the cemetery for devs, or renovate some Akiya, which is the equivalent here in Japan.
No comments yet
Doches · 1h ago
> I’ll collect some money and retire in a couple years. Hopefully the open source world stays the same until then.
As someone who explicitly did this and is now out the other side: can confirm, this is the way.
No comments yet
omgJustTest · 1h ago
OP: this is the desired outcome - building stuff happens in the dark and is uncertain to lead anywhere, simultaneously there is a chorus of cheerleaders for doing the aligned thing.
best advice i can give is stay razor focused on the goals - and what allows you to achieve them:
1. don't lie to yourself about the utility of the project - nice to haves are not need to haves - almost every idea is bad and few are good and even fewer are good enough to spend 5 years on, and vanishingly small amounts of them are goldmines (see #4)
2. understand what provides true value - treat it with respect and only allow it to be known, if necessary, & carefully present it when necessary so that others understand its value. if _they_ don't understand the value - they wont pay for it and will not care, you have to speak _their_ language and not burn too much time doing it.
3. be kind to yourself & enjoy life while you're chasing the goals - you need close relationships and satisfaction to sustain you and keep you from ruining yourself.
4. look for lucky opportunities & take them.
j3s · 2h ago
the tone of this post is so weird. someone 5x'd your salary and couldn't do it while working on passion projects. am i supposed to feel bad for them?
ryandv · 2h ago
The point is that society elevates symbols to a level of importance above and beyond the things those symbols are supposed to refer to.
Thus people valuing the symbols of professionalism over actual engineering prowess; LinkedIn profiles over the person themselves; and LLM output over a human's actual thoughts.
Despite this person self-evaluating as having regressed in their engineering skills, all the outward status markers that are supposed to represent outstanding achievement are still there, and project a persona that is not congruent with the author's own self-image.
Worse yet, you must play this game of smoke and mirrors because you are "only seen when [you] do the fake crap like update [your] LinkedIn to celebrate 1 year at $FAANG."
This also reduces the signal/noise ratio when posers begin aping those same status markers in order to represent expertise where none exists. If you want to experience this directly, I suggest you attend some networking meetups and talk to the newer blood in the cybersecurity industry. Not exactly DEFCON 10 any more.
shadowgovt · 1h ago
And a common blind spot around good software engineers is that software is the hammer for all nails.
Someone recently asked me if Mark Zuckerberg was a good engineer. I think the answer is a very, very qualified "yes." He knew enough to bash together a prototype in PHP of a social network site. But he was a very good problem-solver; he managed to find a tool space people found use in, and iterated on it until it got so good it dominated lives and became the primary communication solution for millions of people. He also knew enough about people to hire the right folks to do the hard (and tedious; the tedium should never be ignored) work to turn his prototype into product, scale it, and maintain it. And that's every bit as much problem-solving as implementing a breadth-first search to populate a "People you might also know" list.
He didn't need to have Knuth's Art of Computer Programming memorized to do what he did.
Software engineering (and the software it creates) are tools. They give us pleasure to use also. But the tools and the pleasure can become disconnected from what gives other people utility and pleasure without some heads-up checks from time to time.
dghlsakjg · 1h ago
To put it more succinctly: businesses want to hire people that will help them make money. The ability for a programmer to make money for a business is not as tightly bound to perfect code and passion projects as this person, and many programmers, think.
bee_rider · 49m ago
I don’t like this definition of “good engineer” because it seems degenerate with “good businessman” or “good product designer.”
He was a bad engineer: early implementations of Facebook were buggy, insecure, and not featureful. I agree that engineering is not valued in-and-of itself generally (it is just a tool), but instead of turning it into something inherently valued by changing the definition of it, we should just admit that it isn’t valued in-and-of itself. I mean, in all fields (other than some art, maybe) the end result is valued more by outsiders than the process to get there…
shadowgovt · 37m ago
He successfully pushed a product out that worked well enough to get traction and get popular.
Part of good engineering is knowing what problems to solve. Facebook early version was buggy and insecure and lacked features. And none of that mattered to the target audience enough to not use it; its value outweighed the pain points. A junior engineer can solve today's problems; a senior engineer can build against tomorrow's, and a staff engineer knows what problems should be solved and what shouldn't because time is a finite resource. The further you go up the ladder, the fewer problems can be solved by throwing the right algorithm at it with your programming tool of choice.
A dreamer and a hobbyist can put together a well-crafted site with five users. An engineer keeps working at solving the problems between there and five million, including solving them by building the systems to solve them and finding the people to work in those systems.
bee_rider · 20m ago
Under this definition the best engineers seem to be sales guys.
dgs_sgd · 1h ago
I think the point is that his (perceived) engineering skills were far better when he worked on those passion projects, yet recruiters didn't care. But after grinding leetcode and joining a FANG the recruiters are knocking down his door despite him feeling like a much worse engineer.
spacemadness · 34m ago
Which is funny because I remember when people online swore up and down you needed open source projects online to get your foot in the door. It’s never been true, but if you’re lucky it might help. Part of me wondered if it was the industry itself spreading that around so they can continue to profit off the use of free software.
lesser23 · 2h ago
The post is somewhat strange but I think the point of it is clear. Projects aren’t what land jobs. This is contrary to age-old advice of “build a portfolio to show off” which has been repeated for as long as I remember. At least since 2010 or so.
Instead the writer discovered what we all inevitably do. Companies don’t really care about what you’re capable of. They care strictly if you’ll bend over backwards, give up everything, and grind leetcode to make it through their arbitrary and demeaning hiring process. At least you can somewhat justify it at FAANG given you need an “efficient” way to weed out 80% of the 30,000 applicants you get a year. But this rot goes all the way down to the mom and pop e-commerce startup anymore.
It’s no surprise. I suppose if the writer was a major contributor to a larger project their experience might be different (as you could probably fool ATS and HR using them as experience on a resume). But indeed, no one cares about your toy implementation of a linter.
It’ll only get worse in the age of AI slop, AI slop brained company leadership, and leetcode supremacy.
bee_rider · 27m ago
Although, FAANG is kind of an old acronym. Those companies (other than maybe Apple because they’ve always been weird) are more like Microsoft was, when the phrase was coined. In the sense that they are matured companies that aren’t striking out and building new things in new markets.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve lost the “look at interesting portfolios” muscle and gained the “look at metrics” one.
Most people didn’t work at FAANG back then, right? You worked at FAANG because you were better than people who took the conventional approach, and the really competent growing companies could figure that out.
Not sure who the up-and-comers are now, though.
lesser23 · 16m ago
What I find interesting is that despite, as you said, FAANG doesn't really have the "genius appeal" it used to have they still demand it. You would sort of expect a company that is in the glacial stages of movement to have more capital and more leeway. If anything, the competition for these positions has gotten even worse despite the work not being anything close to revolutionary or novel at all.
forgetfreeman · 1h ago
"This is contrary to age-old advice of “build a portfolio to show off” which has been repeated for as long as I remember. At least since 2010 or so."
The thing is this not only used to work, it was The Way. You could short circuit the entire technical interview process by sending a link to your commit histories on various open source projects or hell even your GitHub account if you had decent amounts of public activity on there. Even better, a company's unwillingness to accept these in lieu of infantile "coding tests" was a great way to weed out bullshit organizations you wouldn't want to work for in any case. Now that none of that is the case I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting a job writing code these days short of leveraging your network to score a nepo hire?
lesser23 · 19m ago
I have spoken to a few people in the "recruiting industry". In particular, one CEO of one. Both were rather frank discussions. Both told me that it is a complete waste of time to submit resumes and do follow up calls. Rather shocking. Indeed, they both suggested that networking and/or being nepo-hired is basically the only way you'll get in somewhere. That isn't a "big company with big goals" somewhere. This is a trend in almost every sector of software. If you're like a lot of people and need remote work due to not living in one of the 3-4 major tech hubs it's even harder.
I do remember a time when projects mattered. I believe my open source work 12 years ago was what got me the job even after I failed their coding test miserably.
It probably won't get better for a long time. I've been casually looking around for a new gig and even with over a decade of experience in software across the backend stack (bare metal and up) I don't fit a lot of the requirements. They want junior engineer grind, mid level pay, and staff+ level knowledge. As expected, it's a employer market now, and we're probably gonna be waiting for the glut of new CS grads, bootcampers, etc to give up and move on to other things.
owebmaster · 1h ago
> am i supposed to feel bad for them?
He is not asking for that. He is explaining why he feels bad for not being able to continue delivering his top notch work that was done for free before and hoping to be able to do that again in the future. I appreciate that although I have never used his open source code.
hnthrow90348765 · 58m ago
I've never liked the craft aspect of software, but at some point I think you'll turn it around and find the intrinsic value for yourself again to keep going at it.
FAANG will give you the perspective that software is just a hollow-feeling way to make money, which will eventually let you see the richness of what you were doing before.
camcil · 1h ago
It seems pretty simple: we get paid on the perceived business value of what we provide. Some organizations may take a holistic approach to determine that perception (our contributions to other things, and the advancement of the industry as a whole) or not.
taurath · 1h ago
This is about the myth of meritocracy, or at least, the myth that skills matter more than anything. While its /more/ true in software than anywhere else (where what is valued more is social signals, diplomas, other signifiers of possible skill), it has never actually been true in the way that many say it.
In my life I've seen the most brilliant, talented, driven, and effective people be completely unable to find paid work doing what they do best. This isn't even because there is no money in doing what they do best - many of those things are multi billion dollar industries. Its because they put all their points into a single skill tree. The second they start putting points into relationships, and manage to get past the early stages, suddenly their skills become relevant and it starts working, and they're seen for what they can do.
I suspect this is what happened to OP:
> During the day, I worked 8-9 hours for this startup, and until late at night I continued my open source contributions. Surely, they would take me somewhere.
When you play Starcraft at a decently high level, scouting is super important - not even necessarily to see what the other side is actively doing, but the important information to learn is what they cannot be doing. If they have 3 of one building producing units, they can't be building a different type of unit. I shoe-horned that Starcraft analogy to say: if you're spending every waking hour coding, you're unlikely to be building relationships. Especially if your goal is to be paid for doing something useful, relationships with people with money to pay you are necessary.
I'm almost certain I'm not as talented an engineer as the OP. I have my moments, but my attention and desire to work out different skill trees is too high to prioritize time like they have. All this to say: there's a lot of myths out there about what is valued, and if you take some advice literally you will find yourself pidgeonholed into doing exactly that and only that.
sevengraff · 9m ago
>if you're spending every waking hour coding, you're unlikely to be building relationships.
I think this is a critical skill that our industry hasn't done a great job of building, and I think few industries do that well. Engineers have a stereotype of being bad at this by default and there isn't much clear help on how to improve, in contrast to the many freely accessed guides on how to improve with technology.
Also, I love the Starcraft analogy <3
ChrisArchitect · 47m ago
Aside: is using Lemmy to host your own personal blog posts a thing? (suppose this is equivalent to running your own personal subreddit right? Kinda odd but works I guess)
yapyap · 11m ago
I mean yeah, you will (almost) never make it (money) on technical skills alone, someone with decent technical skills but amazing soft skills (social) will go much further than an amazing hermit coder
This is the key part. You need to think about the money side as well as the skills side.
I agree with the author though, despite regressed skills you can still be more in-demand because of cachet. It does feel quite silly.
I am fine hiring a junior developer that just does what is asked of them at a high level of quality. That is the baseline.
By the time you are a senior developer, I expect you to actively push back if you are asked to spend your time wastefully on marginally valuable things. Product managers should be able to explain to a reasonable person why a feature has value. A senior dev should be able to explain to project management why refactoring to reduce tech-debt pays off over time.
Is it possible that looking at the authors open source projects conveys the message:
"I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."
I hire talent like that... when I have the organizational capacity to see if they grow out of it.
You make it sound like the solution is obvious. It isn't. There are a lot of discussions that try to solve this problem, for FOSS as well as for other fields. Patreon, Gratipay, Crowd Supply and Kickstarter are just a few options that have tried to solve this problem with mixed success. There are many projects that are wildly popular or used in critical infrastructure around the internet that are chronically underfunded.
My opinion is that extracting funds from people online is a high friction event. When combined with FOSS projects that might be used by a large user base but where each individual derives benefit smaller than the friction of a funding payment, the project, or individual maintainer, has trouble with remuneration.
> "I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."
A pretty bad faith reading. Maintaining a successful (GitHub) project means dealing with community feedback, triaging and fixing bugs, writing documentation, popularizing/marketing and managing code contributions, at the very least.
This is often false and lacks perspective too. Or closer to reality would be that people do use this work and simply don't pay for it. Maybe some complain if there is a security issue in a one-man-show library. In software this isn't unusual.
What you really mean is the "result is marginally monetized". Which itself has value ironically, but that is again a broader perspective.
It definitely informed my day jobs, but they never knew (or cared). I did it because I loved doing it. I designed software to help out altruistic organizations, and got some good work done (that no one signing checks ever cared about).
Now, I’m retired, and working on my own stuff. I treat my work as a craft, and really enjoy it.
That's the key friend. put in your 8hrs and do what your bosses want at your job. but if open source work makes you happy, why not do that on your free time? don't do it to get a job or to pad a resume, but because it is fun. pick projects you enjoy and limit your contribution so that it won't affect your happiness.
Wait I'm in my 30s and it feels like I have a lot less energy than in my 20s, does it get worse? Hey at least I'm mature enough to understand that I should be enjoying now.
The strategy works until you get badly injured or sick. Rebounding is harder with age, then you die.
This was my feeling few years back. But after some years working at companies, it doesn't feel the same to take my keyboard on my personal time and hack away. Sure it's still fun, but maybe there's more to life than that. Thinking that my energy for hacking away all night will return would be naive, though who knows, it'll be a new future. Maybe I will pick up woodworking, which seems to be the cemetery for devs, or renovate some Akiya, which is the equivalent here in Japan.
No comments yet
As someone who explicitly did this and is now out the other side: can confirm, this is the way.
No comments yet
best advice i can give is stay razor focused on the goals - and what allows you to achieve them:
1. don't lie to yourself about the utility of the project - nice to haves are not need to haves - almost every idea is bad and few are good and even fewer are good enough to spend 5 years on, and vanishingly small amounts of them are goldmines (see #4)
2. understand what provides true value - treat it with respect and only allow it to be known, if necessary, & carefully present it when necessary so that others understand its value. if _they_ don't understand the value - they wont pay for it and will not care, you have to speak _their_ language and not burn too much time doing it.
3. be kind to yourself & enjoy life while you're chasing the goals - you need close relationships and satisfaction to sustain you and keep you from ruining yourself.
4. look for lucky opportunities & take them.
Thus people valuing the symbols of professionalism over actual engineering prowess; LinkedIn profiles over the person themselves; and LLM output over a human's actual thoughts.
Despite this person self-evaluating as having regressed in their engineering skills, all the outward status markers that are supposed to represent outstanding achievement are still there, and project a persona that is not congruent with the author's own self-image.
Worse yet, you must play this game of smoke and mirrors because you are "only seen when [you] do the fake crap like update [your] LinkedIn to celebrate 1 year at $FAANG."
This also reduces the signal/noise ratio when posers begin aping those same status markers in order to represent expertise where none exists. If you want to experience this directly, I suggest you attend some networking meetups and talk to the newer blood in the cybersecurity industry. Not exactly DEFCON 10 any more.
Someone recently asked me if Mark Zuckerberg was a good engineer. I think the answer is a very, very qualified "yes." He knew enough to bash together a prototype in PHP of a social network site. But he was a very good problem-solver; he managed to find a tool space people found use in, and iterated on it until it got so good it dominated lives and became the primary communication solution for millions of people. He also knew enough about people to hire the right folks to do the hard (and tedious; the tedium should never be ignored) work to turn his prototype into product, scale it, and maintain it. And that's every bit as much problem-solving as implementing a breadth-first search to populate a "People you might also know" list.
He didn't need to have Knuth's Art of Computer Programming memorized to do what he did.
Software engineering (and the software it creates) are tools. They give us pleasure to use also. But the tools and the pleasure can become disconnected from what gives other people utility and pleasure without some heads-up checks from time to time.
He was a bad engineer: early implementations of Facebook were buggy, insecure, and not featureful. I agree that engineering is not valued in-and-of itself generally (it is just a tool), but instead of turning it into something inherently valued by changing the definition of it, we should just admit that it isn’t valued in-and-of itself. I mean, in all fields (other than some art, maybe) the end result is valued more by outsiders than the process to get there…
Part of good engineering is knowing what problems to solve. Facebook early version was buggy and insecure and lacked features. And none of that mattered to the target audience enough to not use it; its value outweighed the pain points. A junior engineer can solve today's problems; a senior engineer can build against tomorrow's, and a staff engineer knows what problems should be solved and what shouldn't because time is a finite resource. The further you go up the ladder, the fewer problems can be solved by throwing the right algorithm at it with your programming tool of choice.
A dreamer and a hobbyist can put together a well-crafted site with five users. An engineer keeps working at solving the problems between there and five million, including solving them by building the systems to solve them and finding the people to work in those systems.
Instead the writer discovered what we all inevitably do. Companies don’t really care about what you’re capable of. They care strictly if you’ll bend over backwards, give up everything, and grind leetcode to make it through their arbitrary and demeaning hiring process. At least you can somewhat justify it at FAANG given you need an “efficient” way to weed out 80% of the 30,000 applicants you get a year. But this rot goes all the way down to the mom and pop e-commerce startup anymore.
It’s no surprise. I suppose if the writer was a major contributor to a larger project their experience might be different (as you could probably fool ATS and HR using them as experience on a resume). But indeed, no one cares about your toy implementation of a linter.
It’ll only get worse in the age of AI slop, AI slop brained company leadership, and leetcode supremacy.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve lost the “look at interesting portfolios” muscle and gained the “look at metrics” one.
Most people didn’t work at FAANG back then, right? You worked at FAANG because you were better than people who took the conventional approach, and the really competent growing companies could figure that out.
Not sure who the up-and-comers are now, though.
The thing is this not only used to work, it was The Way. You could short circuit the entire technical interview process by sending a link to your commit histories on various open source projects or hell even your GitHub account if you had decent amounts of public activity on there. Even better, a company's unwillingness to accept these in lieu of infantile "coding tests" was a great way to weed out bullshit organizations you wouldn't want to work for in any case. Now that none of that is the case I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting a job writing code these days short of leveraging your network to score a nepo hire?
I do remember a time when projects mattered. I believe my open source work 12 years ago was what got me the job even after I failed their coding test miserably.
It probably won't get better for a long time. I've been casually looking around for a new gig and even with over a decade of experience in software across the backend stack (bare metal and up) I don't fit a lot of the requirements. They want junior engineer grind, mid level pay, and staff+ level knowledge. As expected, it's a employer market now, and we're probably gonna be waiting for the glut of new CS grads, bootcampers, etc to give up and move on to other things.
He is not asking for that. He is explaining why he feels bad for not being able to continue delivering his top notch work that was done for free before and hoping to be able to do that again in the future. I appreciate that although I have never used his open source code.
FAANG will give you the perspective that software is just a hollow-feeling way to make money, which will eventually let you see the richness of what you were doing before.
In my life I've seen the most brilliant, talented, driven, and effective people be completely unable to find paid work doing what they do best. This isn't even because there is no money in doing what they do best - many of those things are multi billion dollar industries. Its because they put all their points into a single skill tree. The second they start putting points into relationships, and manage to get past the early stages, suddenly their skills become relevant and it starts working, and they're seen for what they can do.
I suspect this is what happened to OP:
> During the day, I worked 8-9 hours for this startup, and until late at night I continued my open source contributions. Surely, they would take me somewhere.
When you play Starcraft at a decently high level, scouting is super important - not even necessarily to see what the other side is actively doing, but the important information to learn is what they cannot be doing. If they have 3 of one building producing units, they can't be building a different type of unit. I shoe-horned that Starcraft analogy to say: if you're spending every waking hour coding, you're unlikely to be building relationships. Especially if your goal is to be paid for doing something useful, relationships with people with money to pay you are necessary.
I'm almost certain I'm not as talented an engineer as the OP. I have my moments, but my attention and desire to work out different skill trees is too high to prioritize time like they have. All this to say: there's a lot of myths out there about what is valued, and if you take some advice literally you will find yourself pidgeonholed into doing exactly that and only that.
I think this is a critical skill that our industry hasn't done a great job of building, and I think few industries do that well. Engineers have a stereotype of being bad at this by default and there isn't much clear help on how to improve, in contrast to the many freely accessed guides on how to improve with technology.
Also, I love the Starcraft analogy <3