Everyone I know has the same complaint right now, whether they're a second-year student chasing their first co-op, a third-year grinding for an internship, or someone who just graduated and is staring at a job board that seems to stare back. Hundreds of applications. Ghosted by recruiters. And on the surface, the data looks rough too: hiring freezes, AI eating entry-level roles, companies downsizing the exact pipelines that used to absorb new grads.
But here's what I've noticed from being on both sides of this: the people building in public aren't struggling. They're not refreshing job boards. They're not mass applying. They're getting DMs from founders, CTOs, and hiring managers who already know who they are and specifically want them. And the people who aren't? The gap between them and the people who are keeps getting wider, not slowly, but fast.
That's the part nobody talks about enough. The longer you wait to start building in public, the more you're not just "behind." You're watching a separation in raw talent density happen in real time, and it becomes harder and harder to close. The person who started six months ago has a body of work, a network, and inbound interest that compounds every week. You're starting from zero while they're already on page three. Every month you delay, that gap doesn't stay the same size. It grows.
The job market isn't broken for everyone. It's broken for people who are invisible. Building in public is the most underleveraged career move that almost nobody actually does, and almost everyone wishes they had started sooner.
What "Building in Public" Actually Means
Building in public isn't about posting motivational content or sharing your Notion setup. It's not a personal brand strategy or a way to look busy online. At its core, it means making your process visible, sharing what you're working on, what you're learning, what broke, what worked, and what you'd do differently.
It could be a project you're shipping over a weekend. It could be documenting how you approached a problem at work. It could be writing about the thing you spent three weeks learning because you hit a wall and couldn't find a good explanation anywhere. The medium almost doesn't matter, X, a personal blog, LinkedIn, YouTube, GitHub. What matters is that you're showing your thinking out loud, to an audience, before you have anything finished or perfect to show.
That last part is where most people get stuck. The instinct is to wait. Wait until the project is done. Wait until you're more experienced. Wait until you have something worth saying. But that instinct is exactly what keeps you invisible.
Also, side note: Just because you're in your internship or full-time job doesn't mean you can't build in public. You can still share your work, your learning, and your progress because otherwise you're ngmi. All it takes is a week and the next thing you know you're back to square one because your knowledge is outdated.
Why It Works (And Why It Works So Well)
The reason building in public creates this asymmetric opportunity is simple. It compresses the trust timeline. Took me a while to realize this but it's actually pretty simple.
When a hiring manager sees your resume, they see a list. Degrees, job titles, a line that says "built X using Y technology."
Don't say you're not a victim of this because we've all done this, especially in the whole "google xyz resume bullet point formatting" thing.
All in all, the person hiring you has to make that leap of faith. Who actually wrote that code? Did you actually work on it alone or were you one of twelve people with credit? Do you actually understand why it works or did you just follow a tutorial? You get the point.
This is how people end up getting access to the top 0.01% of opportunities, roles that were never posted, companies that reached out before they even considered a job search. It's not luck. It's the compounding result of making your work visible over time, to the right people, in the right places. Especially now that recruiting is shifting to AI, the importance of building in public is only going to increase because the next LinkedIn scrape that happens on your profile, the better your chances of getting noticed.
The Compound Effect Nobody Warns You About
Here's the thing about building in public that takes a while to internalize: the results are almost completely back-loaded.
The first month feels pointless. You're posting into a void. Three likes, one of which is yourself (we've all been there, hopefully I'm not speaking for myself here...). You start wondering if it's worth it. This is where 95% of people quit. And this is exactly why the 5% who don't quit have such a massive edge, because by the time the results start showing up, the competition has already walked away.
The compounding isn't just about follower count or impressions. It's about the body of work you're accumulating. Each post, each GitHub commit, each write-up is a permanent artifact that proves you were here, thinking about this, working on this. A year from now, someone will stumble onto your first project post from back when you had 40 followers, read through the whole thing, and it will tell them more about who you are than any cover letter ever could.
I've watched people go from completely unknown to being on the radar of YC founders and Series B CTOs in under a year, not because they were exceptional out of the gate, but because they were consistent in a way that almost nobody else is. The bar for showing up reliably is shockingly low.
What I Saw From the Other Side of the Interview Table
As a 20 year old, I've been on the other side of the table interviewing candidates, screening interns, co-op applicants, and full-time hires, and I want to be honest about what that experience actually looks like, because I think most people applying have no idea.
Before I was in that room, I assumed the people interviewing me were mostly trying to catch you out. Trick questions, gotcha moments, looking for reasons to cut you. That's not what it is. If anything, interviewers are rooting for you. They want you to be the one. Hiring is exhausting and nobody wants to sit through fifty more screening calls if they don't have to. Explaining what your company does for the millionth time, hearing fake dialect (because let's be real, after a week of actually working in the team, you don't sound at all like the person you were in that interview) and worst of all the fake enthusiasm you have about joining the company. Whether it's a summer intern or a senior full-time role, the feeling is the same: please just let this one be the person we've been looking for.
But here's what actually happens: most candidates sound the same, and most candidates, when you push even slightly past the surface, genuinely don't know what they're talking about. Like you can ask the most simple question and they'll just go blank. Not because they're not smart, they might be very smart, but because they've optimized for sounding prepared rather than actually being it. They've memorized the right words without building the intuition behind them. They can recite what a REST API is but start asking them about tradeoffs in a real system and you can watch them search for something to say (it's more common than you'd think and I'm speaking this from first hand experience while interviewing candidates). Taking their own words and just asking them to explain it a bit deeper and you can see the panic in their eyes. Not like it's some big secret but they just don't know.
One of my favourite ways to break the ice is simple. I'll just ask what they think about Anthropic vs OpenAI, or what their favourite model is and why. It sounds like casual small talk. It's not. If someone can't give me a real answer, if they go vague or just say "ChatGPT is pretty good I think," it tells me instantly that they don't actually know the difference between the models they claim to be working with. It tells me they haven't been paying attention. In 2026, if you're applying to anything in tech and you can't have a genuine conversation about the AI tools shaping the entire industry, that's not a minor gap. That's a signal that what you know lives entirely on your resume and nowhere else.
The thing that stands out immediately, and I mean immediately, is when someone has clearly been building things outside of class or outside of their job description. Not because they had to. Because they wanted to. You can tell within the first few minutes. There's a specificity to how they talk about problems. They make references to things they ran into, things that broke, decisions they made and later regretted (the best candidates almost brag about their failures, which is a great sign). It doesn't sound rehearsed because it isn't. It's just experience talking.
That candidate is a completely different conversation. And they're rare enough that when you find one, you don't want to let them move on to the next round without locking them down.
Building in public isn't just about visibility. It's about building that specificity, the kind of real, earned understanding that you literally cannot fake in a room with someone who knows what they're looking for. The interview is just where it shows up. The work happens long before.
How to Actually Do It (Without Overthinking It)
Most people make building in public way more complicated than it needs to be. Here's what actually works:
- You don't need an original idea. Seriously. This is the thing that stops most people before they even start. They think they need some unique, never-been-done concept before they're allowed to build anything worth showing. That's not how this works. Look at what people are already building. Find something that interests you, make a spinoff, add your own twist, rebuild it with a different stack, target a different user. You've just unlocked 99% of what everyone out there is doing. Even YC companies are doing this and getting millions in funding so what's stopping you? The best builders aren't always the most original, they're the most willing to start with something real and iterate from there. Nobody cares that your project was inspired by something else. They care that you actually shipped it.
- Pick one thing you're working on. It doesn't have to be a startup. It can be a side project, a course you're taking, a skill you're trying to develop, a problem you noticed that bugs you. The bar for "interesting enough to share" is almost always lower than you think.
- Document the process, not just the output. The finished product is boring. The interesting part is the journey, what you tried that didn't work, why you made the decisions you made, what you'd tell someone starting where you started. This is the content that builds real trust because it's specific and honest in a way that polished final products never are.
- Post before you're ready. Post the half-finished thing. Post the question you don't know the answer to yet. Post the embarrassing v0 that barely works. The discomfort of posting something imperfect is the price of entry. Everyone who's doing this well went through it (and most of them will tell you their best post came from something they almost didn't share).
- Be genuinely useful to one specific person. The best building-in-public content doesn't try to reach everyone. It talks to one type of person, the junior dev who's stuck on the same thing you were, the founder wrestling with the exact problem you just solved, and it gives them something real. Niche is not a weakness. Niche is searchable.
- Do it consistently for longer than feels reasonable. Six months minimum before you start measuring. The people who "tried building in public and it didn't work" usually quit around month two.
The Job Market Isn't Broken. You're Just Applying Wrong.
Some personal experience here, the last three places I've worked at never asked for my resume. Not once. Didn't ask what my GPA was, didn't ask me to walk them through my experience, didn't send me a link to apply through their portal. They already knew who I was. They'd seen what I was building, followed along, and by the time any conversation about working together came up, the decision was basically already made. The "interview" was just a formality, a chance to confirm what they'd already concluded from watching me work in public for months.
That's not a brag. It's just what happens when you're not invisible.
The traditional job search is an adversarial process. You're one of five hundred applicants trying to make a piece of paper stand out in a system designed to filter you out. The odds are structurally bad and getting worse. Building in public flips that entirely. Instead of you chasing companies, companies start to find you. Instead of cold applications, you get warm inbounds. Instead of proving yourself to a stranger in a forty-five minute interview, you're talking to someone who's already seen you work. The hiring process happened in public. The interview is just the paperwork.
The job market for invisible people is brutal. The job market for people who build in public is a different game entirely.
The Honest Part
It's not all upside. Building in public means putting yourself out there before you know what you're doing, and that's uncomfortable in a way that's hard to explain until you do it. You'll post something that gets something wrong and someone will tell you publicly. You'll share a project that you're proud of and it'll land to silence. You'll feel like you're performing and nobody is watching.
That feeling doesn't fully go away. But it does get replaced by something else: a body of work that's entirely yours, a network that formed around your actual thinking rather than your credentials, and an incoming interest in your career that most people only dream about while they're refreshing their job applications.
The people complaining about the job market are mostly right about what they're experiencing. But they're wrong about the conclusion. The problem isn't that there are no opportunities. The problem is that they're competing in the loudest, most saturated channel there is, and calling the whole market broken when really, they just haven't found the back door yet.
If you've read this far, you're probably already convinced. If you're not, then idk. But, all in all, building in public is not as hard as you think. It's just putting yourself out there and I hope this little informative rant has helped you see that.