“Open to the right opportunity” is the most common lie on LinkedIn, and I don’t think most of the people who write it know they’re lying. Mine sat on my profile for two years without a single thing behind it that would’ve made it true if a good offer had actually shown up.
The honest version of the phrase is “I would take a great job if one fell into my lap fully formed,” which is a fine thing to want and does nothing to make it happen. Passive readiness isn’t a feeling you maintain. It’s three boring habits, kept up on a schedule nobody is checking.
The brag document is the boring half of readiness
Julia Evans has written the piece almost everyone eventually finds when they search for this, and the argument underneath it is simple: you forget your own work faster than you think you will, and your manager forgets it faster than you do. She credits a coworker, Karla Burnett, with helping spread the practice at their company, and credits Will Larson — yes, the same Will Larson who runs staffeng.com, small world — with pushing her to actually start one in the first place. Her own cadence is a single marathon session every six months rather than little updates along the way, which she says works better for her than doing it more often. A friend of hers named Dave runs the opposite version: he gets a small group together every couple of weeks specifically to sit down and update their documents together, which strikes me as either admirable discipline or slightly too much structure for something whose whole value is that nobody’s grading it, and I honestly go back and forth on which. Either cadence works. The risk shows up later, when the thing you shipped back in March has quietly stopped feeling like an accomplishment and started feeling like Tuesday, because nothing about it got written down.
You don’t have to try to make your work sound better than it is. Just make it sound exactly as good as it is!
The part that matters for staying passively ready specifically is timing. A recruiter’s cold message gives you roughly a day, maybe two, before the conversation moves to “tell me about your background,” and scrambling through eighteen months of Slack threads and closed pull requests is a bad way to spend it.
A document you already have turns the same day into an edit pass.
I got curious how much this specific piece of advice actually circulates, so I ran it through Hacker News’s search. It’s been submitted at least nine times since 2019, each time apparently rediscovered by someone scrolling for something to submit, rather than reposted by Evans herself. The most popular run pulled 347 points and 78 comments. A five-year-old post about writing down what you did at work doesn’t get resubmitted that often unless the advice keeps being new to somebody.
Recruiters increasingly skip the posting entirely
Gergely Orosz ran a job board and talent collective for two and a half years before shutting it down, and the number that stuck with me wasn’t about why it closed. It was what his own customers did while it was still open. Roughly eighty percent of the companies paying for it never posted a single job. They paid to message people directly out of the collective instead.
Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic EngineerShutting Down My Job Board for Software Engineering Positions After 2.5 YearsNot a puff piece — a shutdown post with the actual numbers on why direct sourcing won, which is the whole reason to read it.Over those thirty months, the collective held about 2,800 candidates, generated 3,600 introduction requests from companies, and converted roughly 1,300 of those into an actual introduction — a little over a third. Nobody in that 1,300 applied to anything. They were vetted once, listed, and then found. Being in the pool did more work than any cover letter would have.
Discoverable beats searchable
Will Larson has a shorter, older post that just says it outright: be discoverable. Write in public, keep real relationships instead of transactional ones, show up and talk at the things you’re already good at. He calls the result a reservoir of prestige, which sounds a little grand until you notice what it buys — once your background reads as credible on sight, second chances get handed out more freely, and interesting opportunities skip the queue that resumes usually stand in.
Will Larson, Irrational ExuberanceSome Career AdviceLarson’s full list runs longer than the two ideas borrowed here — worth the ten minutes for the part on luck alone.Not everyone wants to blog, and plenty of very good engineers never will, so treat “discoverable” as a spectrum rather than a requirement to become a public figure. A well-kept LinkedIn that reflects what you actually did. Three or four people at other companies who could describe your work accurately if asked. A talk you gave once, three years ago, that a recruiter still finds when they search your name.
Small deposits count.
None of this guarantees a recruiter ever finds you — visibility only raises the odds, and plenty of excellent, thoroughly discoverable engineers still go a year without an inbound message worth answering.
Keeping track of which of those deposits actually paid off — the talk, the warm intro, the recruiter DM you meant to answer three weeks ago — is closer to a real job than most passive candidates admit, and it’s the specific kind of mess Vigil exists to keep off a sticky note.
Momentum will decide for you if you let it
The clearest description of this trap I’ve read comes from StaffEng’s guide to interviewing for staff-plus roles, aimed at people well past the point where “good problem, why not” is a fine reason to keep going: “Don’t allow momentum to pull you into a process that doesn’t support your goals.” It’s written for senior and staff-level leadership searches specifically, but the mechanism doesn’t care about your level. Three conversations in, a process has its own gravity, and saying no on round four feels ruder than it actually is.
Will Larson, StaffEngInterviewing for Staff-Plus RolesWritten for leadership searches, but the boundary-setting advice travels down every level — decide your red lines before the first call, because they get much harder to hold by the third.- Whether the interviewers are senior enough to actually evaluate you.
- Whether anyone asks about the actual work you’ve shipped, or only about an abstract whiteboard problem.
- Whether the hiring manager can describe the role in one sentence, or needs three.
None of that takes more than the first call to spot. You’re supposed to be deciding whether to keep going, rather than hoping it works out by round four because you’ve already told two people it was happening.
A brag document nobody reads until the day someone finally does isn’t wasted effort — it’s the whole point of writing it early. The same is true of the intro you kept warm and the talk that one recruiter still finds. None of it pays off on a schedule you control. It pays off exactly once, on a day you didn’t pick, which is the only day passive readiness was ever for.