Top Engineers Stay Off LinkedIn, Says Ex-Meta Principal Engineer

Michael Novati spent nearly eight years at Meta, climbing to the rank of principal software engineer and earning a reputation as a coding machine. When he sat down on the "A Life Engineered" podcast to discuss the tech industry's recruiting machinery, he made a striking claim: the best engineers in the world aren't on LinkedIn. In fact, they're not on any public platform at all.

Novati's observation cuts against the grain of how most professionals think about career visibility. LinkedIn has become the default stage for engineers to showcase their work, build networks, and signal their availability. But the industry's true elite, he argued, operate under a different set of rules. During his time at Facebook, Novati witnessed this firsthand. The top engineers he worked alongside viewed a LinkedIn profile as a liability, not an asset. Having one would raise questions: Are you looking to leave? Are you unhappy? The implication alone was enough to keep them offline.

The reason is structural. Tech's largest companies have built an alternative recruiting apparatus that makes public job hunting unnecessary for the most sought-after talent. These firms employ senior recruiters—highly paid specialists with deep industry connections—who maintain long-term relationships with the engineers they want to hire. These relationships often begin on college campuses, where recruiters spend time bonding with promising students and their professors. They continue through conferences, industry events, and the kind of informal networking that happens in Silicon Valley's professional circles. Novati called this system the "secret backroom dealings" of the industry, and it works precisely because it operates outside public view.

The engineers who benefit from this system are a rarefied group. They don't need to advertise themselves because the right recruiters already know who they are and what they're worth. Novati painted a vivid picture: "The $100 million engineer is not on LinkedIn with a tagline that's like, #100millionengineer." These individuals operate in a world of special equity grants, private dinners with executives like Jeff Bezos, and direct outreach from CEOs. Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, reportedly compiled a personal list of top AI talent to recruit. Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief research officer, was said to have hand-delivered soup to an engineer he was trying to poach. When OpenAI's CEO called an AI researcher directly to pitch the company, the engineer accepted the offer on the spot.

But Novati was careful to note that this dynamic applies only to a specific tier of talent. The absence of a LinkedIn profile is not a universal strategy for career success. For most engineers, deleting their account and waiting for recruiters to call would be a mistake. The "offline advantage" exists only for those who have already reached a level of prominence and desirability that makes them targets for elite recruiting networks. For everyone else, visibility remains essential.

What Novati's account reveals is a two-tiered system within tech recruiting. One tier operates in the open, where engineers build personal brands, maintain active profiles, and compete for attention. The other tier operates in private, where the most valuable talent is known by name to the people who can afford to hire them, and where the competition for their services plays out in boardrooms and over personal calls from CEOs. The intensifying race for AI talent has only sharpened this divide, with major companies willing to deploy their top executives to secure the engineers they believe will shape the future.