Hey, swyx, great post, and thanks for the shout-out (wrote that paid ads article)!

I've been actually thinking about this exact thing a ton lately.

The same observation, a ton of more senior devs just don't spend their day on twitter/reddit or anywhere.

You do your work and after work go spend time with your family, do hobbies etc.

Yeah, you google, you StackOverflow.

But as a marketer is that all the channels I can use to reach you?

And then I started thinking about connecting it to the idea from Purple Cow by Seth Godin.

tldr: market to talkers -> then talkers will talk to doers.

So the first thought is to go talkers -> the actual talkers at conferences, socials etc.

I think this is partially true and works to an extent.

But the only talkers you should actually care about when thinking about those dark matter devs are people who actually talk to the dark matter devs.

Who are they?

So I think funnily enough those are devs they work with and talk to daily.

Now some of them are also dark matter devs.

But some are not.

Who?

My feeling is that those are junior devs or career/focus switchers (going from back-end to ML Ops for example).

As this is the moment when devs have a lot of incentive to "be out there" build a network, and learn new things.

So then paradoxically when marketing to senior devs you may want to explicitly create content/ads/talks all the stuff for juniors.

As juniors will later talk to seniors at work.

So maybe solving the "dark matter devs dilemma" is similar to how you can see a black hole :)

By looking at things around it.

That was long, figured I'd just "think in public" as it has been on my mind for a bit now but didn't know of anyone thinking about it as well :)

Again thanks for posting swyx!