We Stopped Optimizing for Skills.

We Stopped Optimizing for Skills. Now We Optimize for Looking Skilled.

Here's an observation on how people stopped optimizing for becoming valuable and started optimizing for looking valuable.

These are my raw thoughts. Nothing here is absolute truth. Everything depends on my perspective, observations, and environment. Read with an open mind. Don't follow blindly.

The internet changed the goal.

Earlier, people learned skills to build things. Now, people learn skills just to post things.

I remember reading a post on browser internals in 2023. An engineer casually explained the difference between cookies, sessions, and local storage.

He broke down how storing tokens in local storage makes them accessible to any JavaScript running in the page, including browser extensions with script access.

If an extension is malicious, it can steal that token at any time. The token will typically remain valid until it expires or is revoked server-side.

Cookies are different. They can be marked as HttpOnly so that JavaScript can't access them directly this helps protect authentication cookies from XSS attacks.

However, if a cookie is not properly secured or is leaked, an attacker can impersonate the user as long as the session is valid, not just while a browser tab is open.

Local storage data, once stolen, can be used by an attacker outside of the browser environment even after you've closed your browser or logged out, as long as the token itself hasn't been invalidated.

That was nuance.

That was depth.

(Not a great example, but for a random post, it was worth mentioning.)

Now I see people skipping that depth entirely.

Aesthetic has become the standard instead of substance.

Visibility Feels Better Than Learning

Learning a skill is painful.

It is slow. Invisible. Lonely.

You struggle with your own problems for a long time.

But visibility gives something else.

• Instant likes.
• Validation.
• Followers.
• Fake momentum.

It feels like you are learning everything.

You feel on top of the world. Like you are climbing the mountain.

But in reality, you are not learning much.

You are not going through the pain required to master the field.

Social media is full of performative students, learners, and developers.

• Setup photos.
• Productivity timelapses.
• Day-in-the-life content.

I have posted similar things too.

I am not pretending I am different.

Sometimes it is performative because I am a content creator at heart.

But most of the time, I treat social media differently.

Even when I had barely a hundred followers, I used to say Twitter was only for accountability. I was never there to grow.

I purchased premium mainly to write long posts.

For me, social media has always been accountability, not distraction and not income.

Money is usually the byproduct of doing hard things well.

If you do something difficult long enough, money eventually follows.

• Twitter is no exception.
• YouTube is no exception.
• LinkedIn is no exception.

You can get sponsorships anywhere.

But don't feel jealous of performative people.

Do your own thing.

Treat the internet as accountability instead of comparison.

Indian Tech Twitter Changed My Perspective

I still remember when I first joined Twitter.

In college, I had already learned MERN while most people around me were still figuring out frontend basics.

I genuinely thought I was ahead of everyone.

I thought I would crack Google easily.

Then I joined Twitter during what felt like the golden era of Indian tech Twitter.

People used to call it Indian TPOT.

That space was filled with actual knowledge.

• People were building distributed systems.
• Optimizing Core Web Vitals.
• Talking about React internals.
• Discussing deep performance optimizations.

That was when I realized MERN was nothing compared to what existed beyond my bubble.

I got inspired.

I came from a tier-three college. I genuinely did not know much.

YouTube mostly recommended things I already knew.

ChatGPT did not exist yet.

Twitter became the place that pushed me to learn.

That is one of the reasons I still post today, regardless of whether I get paid or not.

Social media can be an incredible source of learning.

But now there is too much noise.

You have to work hard to find actual knowledge.

Remove that noise from your timeline.

On every platform.

For YouTube, create a separate account. Only follow people in your field.

Train your feed to support your growth, not destroy your focus.

The Internet Rewards the Signal of Competence

The internet rewards the signal of competence faster than actual competence.

• It rewards flashy content.
• High-quality visuals.
• Easy-to-digest information.

It rarely rewards difficult topics people spend months understanding.

I have seen hundreds of people posting backend fundamentals playlists.

I can confidently say barely one or two actually finish those playlists properly.

Most people just start copy-pasting resources.

Even resource sharing became performative.

That is one of the biggest problems in tech Twitter right now.

Learning Became Performance

Social media slowly turned learning into performance.

• People tweet more than they build.
• They document without depth.
• "I learned this today."

Then you open the post and realize it is just AI-generated surface-level content.

• Beginners teaching beginners.
• People copying opinions from bigger creators.
• Learning turned into a content loop.

Some people spend more time curating the journey than actually walking it.

It feels like the camera is doing all the heavy lifting in the gym while the muscles are only posing for the photo.

Social media turned many people into performative individuals.

It is sad seeing first-year, second-year, and third-year students investing more time into low-quality posting than actual learning.

Most of them do not realize how unstable the tech landscape is right now.

• The geopolitical situation.
• The economy.
• The job market.
• The entire ecosystem.

Instead, everyone is chasing cheap dopamine.

I do not hate them.

Most of the time, I just feel sad.

Because chasing cheap things is always easier than chasing actual growth.

People Want Outcomes Without Process

Even I sometimes feel tempted to post low-effort content because low-effort content performs.

That is the reality.

But my relationship with Twitter was never about money.

I did not even know Twitter payouts existed when I joined.

I just wanted a place to document long journeys publicly.

I have done hundreds-of-days-long challenges before. Coding journeys. Gym journeys. Learning journeys.

For me, social media was always public accountability.

Nothing else.

I am not saying I am a perfect creator.

I am only sharing my perspective.

I said this when I had 100 followers.

I am still saying it now.

People also want leverage without struggle.

Everyone wants shortcuts.

A lot of people think posting content on Twitter guarantees opportunities instantly.

To be fair, Twitter gave me opportunities too. Even my current job came through Twitter.

Twitter is amazing for marketing.

But terrible as a long-term stable income source.

I have seen growth groups where people coordinate engagement artificially.

"Post daily and we will all like each other's posts."

People reverse-engineered the algorithm.

• Massive engagement loops.
• Growth hacks.
• AI shortcuts.
• Overnight founder culture.

But in reality, nothing meaningful moves.

People want outcomes without process.

For me, the process matters far more than the outcome.

The Journey Was Always the Fun Part

Whenever I achieve something, the journey usually excites me more than the result itself.

I still remember wanting an internship badly.

Grinding for it was the fun part.

Once I got the internship, it became responsibility.

The learning phase was what actually excited me.

That was when I realized I enjoyed learning computer science deeply and implementing things myself.

That gave me an edge.

Computer science became genuinely fun.

But social media turned CS into something strange.

The amount of misinformation around CS is insane.

Computer science is an incredible field if you genuinely enjoy solving problems.

Technology makes solving problems easier than ever.

But most people are stuck inside CRUD apps and fancy UI loops.

Fancy UI alone does not solve problems.

I care more about automation, systems, and solving real issues.

Nobody wants to sharpen the axe anymore.

They only want a better filter for the axe.

Real Skill Is Usually Invisible

Good engineers are often quiet.

They are not farming engagement all day.

They are working on infrastructure, reliability, debugging, maintenance, operations, and systems.

Most people are not interested in those topics.

But those are exactly the people I want to hear from more.

Sometimes I randomly open small accounts and read their thoughts.

Many of them are far better than massive accounts posting repeated content.

I mute a lot of big accounts because the content becomes repetitive noise.

Visibility slowly becomes addictive.

• One viral post.
• One massive payout.
• One big dopamine hit.

And suddenly you are trapped chasing it again.

If the viral thing was meaningful, great.

But if low-effort content rewards you heavily, it becomes very difficult to stop.

I know because I have been there.

I received a payout of around a $1000 dollars.

Then the next payout was around $87 dollars.

That immediately reminded me how unstable all of this is.

Thankfully, my actual job pays well.

So Twitter money mostly becomes learning budget for me.

Likes are dangerous because they feel like progress.

But likes are not progress.

The actual process is:

• What you build.
• What you learn.
• What you understand.

Confidence Became Scalable

A lot of beginners fall into the trap of:

• More followers = more skill.
• More audience = more capability.
• More virality = more correctness.

The internet made confidence scalable.

You can speak confidently while being completely wrong, and thousands of people will still believe you.

That becomes dangerous for newcomers who treat creators like authorities.

I am not trying to act like Mahatma Gandhi here.

This is mostly for people who are new to Twitter and still figuring out how to navigate safely.

My advice is simple.

Use social media for accountability.

Not cheap growth.

Treat it like someone is watching your progress.

Someone who will hold you accountable if you stop doing what you promised publicly.

Nobody Wants Slow Learning Anymore

Everyone wants fast outcomes.

Reading documentation feels boring.

People now build websites that summarize documentation because even reading docs feels too difficult.

Fundamentals feel outdated to people.

• "Who learns TCP?"
• "Who builds an HTTP server from scratch?"
• "What is even the Node.js HTTP module?"
• "I can just use Express."

Many people do not even realize you can build servers in almost any language anywhere.

The speed at which we are losing focus is honestly terrifying.

But there is one upside.

It benefits genuinely skilled engineers.

More noise makes actual depth more valuable.

Shallow work becomes crowded.

Real skill stands out harder.

Once you genuinely understand systems deeply, that difference eventually becomes visible in the workplace too.

Visibility Should Amplify Skill

At the end, visibility is useful.

Balance is important.

Personal branding matters.

But it should never matter more than your actual skill.

Distribution matters.

But not more than substance.

Visibility should amplify skill, not replace it.

Visibility opens doors.

Skill keeps you inside.

Twitter is excellent for networking.

Use it for that.

But do not ruin your first impression with low-quality content.

And no, I am not saying every post needs to be high quality.

That is unrealistic.

Post your personal life too.

That is completely fine.

But understand the difference between personal content and low-quality content.

Personal content has meaning.

Low-quality content is just noise.

At the end, it is your account.

Do whatever you want.

Just understand the difference.