If you're doing "deep technology work" in a field that's as relatively new as Hadoop, chances are your name will start to make it out there -- and that you'll start to become known to others in the community, including Cloudera staff, because you're bound to be on IRC, asking questions, submitting patches, going to conferences, etc etc etc. I agree that there are plenty of people who don't really know the technology, but who make a habit of commenting on others' blogs and so on, but those people are pretty easy to spot as soon as you start really talking to them about the technology. (Disclaimer: I work at Cloudera.)