> Implicit in this argument is that you need to build the right thing and talk to the right people.

Implicit in this argument is that if you build nothing and tell nobody, you chances of building the right thing to show the right people are 0

> I've been to industry events where I've seen people give "career limiting" presentations on something awful they've built.

Well of course. What you can't see are all the people who build nothing and told no one. Because they do not present.

> And I've seen great people stuck in a corner with the worst kind of industry fraudster.

Easy workaround: Don't try to defraud people.

People who don’t “build and show” in their free time do not necessarily have harder time getting hired, nor are they necessarily worse as hires.

Some people have circumstances or attitude where they prefer to get paid to build things. One can find oneself in demand by being good at networking, a capable and creative engineer, able to work autonomously, a good communicator and a pleasure to work with. I know some people like that.

If we are talking about valuable hires landing jobs, relevant qualities seem completely orthogonal to the inclination of building things as a hobby—if anything, the latter may imply a degree of unsustainability and/or tendency to flaunt responsibilities if it results in neglect of one’s personal life or previous job.

Thank you for this. I often feel poorly about myself because I've created so little (especially since leaving school), but between 13 and 31 I didn't have financial stability or basic safety, and even now I'm a disabled person who is the sole breadwinner and caretaker for my also disabled sister, who can't work (I have MS, she has bipolar [which obviously takes some mental energy to handle]).

I've just been so tired trying to feed + shelter myself and escape abuse that my building urge was completely extinguished until the last year.

I always beat myself up for it, but it turns out that I just couldn't get into the flow state needed to build things when I was constantly stressed-out, hungry, cold, and scared.

Not to take away from people building things - I love seeing what people come up with! It's just a pleasure to know that not everybody will consider those decades as me being lazy.

I've met plenty of people who have built nothing, but are good enough at talking to people that they can get jobs.

As for your last point, how can someone tell if they're talking to the right person?

> I've met plenty of people who have built nothing, but are good enough at talking to people that they can get jobs.

Sure. I don't think the author would claim that this approach is the only way to get noticed and/or a job. I certainly won't. But this one is cool, because at the very least you did something and you honed other important skills along the way.

> As for your last point, how can someone tell if they're talking to the right person?

What I meant and could have made clearer was: As the ones building and showing, it's entirely our choice to be honest about it. When it comes to spotting someone who is not, having more experience in doing and showing also helps on that front.

Yeah they know how to build relationships.

That's not how survivorship bias works. Some things really do increase the chances of survival. You might as well dismiss life jackets as survivorship bias, because hey, what about all the people who were wearing life jackets and drowned anyway?

It's only survivorship bias if you're talking about an unrelated factor that doesn't have any influence on the outcome.

If I get GP's argument, a more appropriate analogy would be that some life jackets are filled with lead and you can't necessarily tell them apart. That is to say, presenting yourself to the external world carries an inherent risk as well as the potential for reward.

But as with leaden life jackets, you can tell them apart. The subset of projects and people that are poison pills can be discerned, so "build the right thing" is more like "don't build the wrong thing, and keep building" where the wrong thing can be avoided the majority of the time.

Which is basically the process of gradient descent, aka learning!

There's a difference between necessary and sufficient.

Your argument is that it is necessary.

My argument is that it is not sufficient.

These are two different arguments.

Dismissing things that are necessary because they aren't sufficient is a recipe for failure.

(Not OP) To me it seems they expanded on it rather than dismissing it:

> Implicit in this argument is that you need to build the right thing and talk to the right people.