On the one hand, I agree that the idea of needing to engage with blogs and conferences in order to succeed as an engineer is way oversold. The whole point of en

On the one hand, I agree that the idea of needing to engage with blogs and conferences in order to succeed as an engineer is way oversold. The whole point of engineering, after all, is to create artifacts that speak for themselves. On the other hand, I think I might know "why we think that": If hiring is the hardest and most important problem facing most companies, which people keep telling me it is, then it pays to hire with an eye toward further hiring. You might therefore put a premium on hiring people who engage with others via writing and conferences, not because these are necessarily the best widget designers, sprocket debuggers, or gadget platers, but because you expect these people are more likely to go out into the world and be noticed by the great designers, debuggers and platers who you'll want to hire next. Obviously this can be overdone, and if you feed this process back on itself you'll end up with a one-dimensional clique of a company - in part because blog posts and developer conferences are a very narrow and biased sample of the universe of competent and potentially-competent people. But it shouldn't be surprising that companies think that "always be advertising" is a characteristic of a "top engineer": The problems of hiring are at the top of management's mind, and are probably the only thing at the top of upper management's mind - in my experience, the CEO could not care less about the glitches in the firewall-configuration system, but she interviews half a dozen candidates every day. Every all-hands meeting is filled with exhortations to blog more, shake more hands, hand out more cards, meet more people.