Thought Leaders Who Don't Ship

There's a growing class in tech who built careers talking about building things rather than actually building them.

The Tell

• Speak in absolutes about technologies they haven't used in production
• Advice always high-level enough to be unfalsifiable
• Reference "at scale" without specifying what scale means
• Most recent hands-on work was several years ago

Why It Matters

Junior developers look to these figures for guidance. When that guidance comes from someone who hasn't debugged a production issue in five years, it creates a gap between theory and reality.

The people worth listening to still ship code, review pull requests, and get paged at inconvenient hours.