Forget the noise, can you deliver?

A thread.

Recently someone who leads a large developer group contacted me to seek for devs.
This has happened in the past so I got curious. I decided to ask the person if there were no devs in the ecosystem the person leads.

This person told me that he has looked even within the community he leads to find people for the job but that these people would not be able to deliver. At first I was angry that he concluded on that without really testing these people until I started leading communities.

I got a request too to refer devs for a remote role recently, I honestly tried thinking of someone to refer but unfortunately, couldn't think of someone instantly because I needed to be able to vouch that the person could deliver.

I decided to not assume, so I reached out to some devs. Obviously, the "popular" devs came to mind. I referred one of our "popular" devs but the dev couldn't deliver. I learnt huge lessons.

Personally, I love communities and have been a part of many of them, in fact I have lead communities so I think I have enough experience to say that a lot of events/meetups are for PR, networking and catching up.

It has little or nothing to do with technical skills, you can pick a few things at these events but the hardwork is done outside these events. If you show up for events and tweet and get popular as a dev but don't put in effort, you'll keep falling hands.

The biggest problem here is that if I refer you and you fall hands, you have also tarnished my image, the next time they want to hire they will not ask me to refer, see how you have blocked the way of other awesome people.

Ended up taking another dev who was very new but was hardworking, willing to learn and consistent. It is better than hiring someone who has been in the industry for long but cannot learn because of ego.

Please try not to be that usher in church who wakes people up to listen but doesn't benefit from the church service/mass. If you must be an usher please make sure you benefit from the service/mass. You first. Be selfish with your career

Forget the noise, get real skills! Welcome to my Ted talk