7 places to find engineers that aren't LinkedIn

We have written a lot about sourcing passive engineers through GitHub and why LinkedIn Recruiter is not the right tool for finding technical talent. If you are reading this, you probably already agree with the premise. GitHub has 150 million developers. LinkedIn InMail response rates for software roles are below 5%. The best engineers do not update their profiles.

But here is what gets lost in the "GitHub vs LinkedIn" conversation: there are at least seven other places where engineers spend real time, build real reputations, and are reachable by recruiters who know where to look. Most of these channels have near-zero recruiter competition. Nobody is spamming engineers on Hacker News or in the Kubernetes Slack.

This post is about those other channels. Not GitHub (we have covered that extensively). Not LinkedIn. The places that sit between the two and that almost nobody in recruiting is using systematically.

Beyond GitHub and LinkedIn

The reason these channels work is simple. Engineers are not hiding. They are writing blog posts, giving talks, answering questions in community servers, arguing about type systems on Reddit, and posting build threads on X. They just are not doing any of this on LinkedIn.

Each channel below has a different strength. Some are good for finding senior specialists. Others are better for volume. A few only work for specific technical domains. I will be specific about what each one is actually useful for, because "go look at Discord" is not actionable advice.

1. Hacker News hiring threads

On the first of every month, three threads go up on Hacker News: "Who is Hiring?", "Who Wants to Be Hired?", and "Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer?". The "Who Wants to Be Hired?" thread is a goldmine that most recruiters do not know exists.

Each comment in that thread is an engineer describing themselves, their stack, their preferences, and what they are looking for. They are self-selected for being open to opportunities. The quality bar on HN skews senior and technically sharp. Many YC-backed startups have made their first engineering hires through these threads.

How to use it. Go to news.ycombinator.com and search for "Who wants to be hired" on the first weekday of the month. The thread usually gets 300 to 500 comments. Use your browser's find function to filter by technology (Ctrl+F "Rust", "Kubernetes", "distributed systems"). Most commenters include contact info or a link to their personal site.

What makes it different. These are not passive candidates you are cold-messaging. They raised their hand. They described their own strengths in their own words, which is often more informative than a resume. And because it is Hacker News, the density of experienced engineers is high. The person posting "10 years, Go/Rust, distributed systems, open to remote" is probably not exaggerating.

The limitation is volume. You get one batch per month, and not every technology or seniority level is represented. For niche roles, the thread might have two or three relevant candidates. But the signal-to-noise ratio is better than almost any other channel.

2. Conference speaker lists and talk archives

Conference speakers have already been vetted. A program committee reviewed their proposal, decided it was worth a slot, and put their name on the schedule. That is a filter you did not have to build yourself.

The useful thing about conference sourcing is that you are not limited to attending. Most conferences publish their full speaker lineups months before the event and archive the recordings indefinitely on YouTube. KubeCon alone has thousands of recorded talks organized by topic. So does PyCon, GopherCon, RustConf, Strange Loop, and dozens of domain-specific events like FOSDEM, Papers We Love, and Hydra (distributed systems).

The practical workflow. Find the 2 to 3 conferences that map to your tech stack. Go to their YouTube channel or schedule archive. Search for talks on the specific technical problem you are hiring for. Watch a few minutes of each talk. You now know more about this person's technical depth, communication ability, and personality than any recruiter screen would tell you. Their Twitter handle, GitHub, and email are usually in the talk description or their slides.

Past speakers are the sweet spot. Current-year speakers are sometimes being sourced by other recruiters who also read blog posts about creative sourcing. But nobody is mining the 2023 and 2024 speaker lists. An engineer who gave a talk on gRPC performance tuning at GopherCon 2024 still has that expertise. They just are not getting recruiter messages about it anymore.

Local meetups work too. Meetup.com and similar platforms list upcoming and past events for user groups in specific cities. The Rust NYC meetup, the SF Python meetup, the Berlin Kubernetes user group. These groups publish speaker names and often post recordings. A message that says "I watched your talk on X at the Y meetup" gets a response. It is specific. It shows effort.

3. Discord and Slack communities

Developer communities have moved off public forums and into private chat platforms over the past few years. This is great for developers and confusing for recruiters, because there is no directory and you cannot Google your way into a Slack DM.

But the communities are real, they are active, and the engineers in them are some of the most engaged practitioners in their respective technologies. Here are specific communities worth knowing about:

Discord: Reactiflux (React, 200K+ members), the Rust Programming Language server (35K+), Python Discord (390K+), TypeScript Community, The Programmer's Hangout, and AWS Community Builders. Each of these has dedicated help channels where experienced engineers spend time answering other people's questions. The people answering are often senior and often reachable.

Slack: Kubernetes Slack (150K+ members), Gophers Slack (Go), Elixir Slack, iOS Developers, LaravelPHP, and Write the Docs. Many of these have a #jobs or #hiring channel where you can post roles. Some have rules about recruiter conduct. Read them.

The rules you need to follow. Do not join a Discord server and immediately DM people about a job opening. You will get banned and you will deserve it. These communities work on reciprocity. Participate first. Answer a question. Share something useful. If you are a recruiter, be upfront about it. Many communities have dedicated hiring channels where honest, well-written job posts with salary ranges are welcome. Use those channels. Be transparent about the role, the compensation, and the company. Engineers in these communities can spot a vague recruiter pitch from a mile away.

How to find them. Ask your engineering team which Slack and Discord communities they are in. Check the README and docs pages of the open source projects in your stack for "Community" links. Search GitHub for topic:kubernetes and look for Discord badges in the repo descriptions. The onboarding is usually a single click.

4. Technical blogs and Dev.to

An engineer who writes a 2,000-word post about how they debugged a memory leak in their Go service is telling you several things at once: they understand the problem domain, they can communicate clearly, they care enough about their craft to document it, and they are reachable (the post has their name on it).

Dev.to and Hashnode are the two largest platforms for developer blogging. Both have tagging systems that make it easy to find writers by technology. Search dev.to/t/rust or dev.to/t/kubernetes and sort by popularity or recency. The top writers in each tag are engineers with proven communication skills and domain expertise. Their profiles usually link to GitHub, X, and personal sites.

Medium is noisier but still useful for specific searches. Personal engineering blogs are harder to find at scale but produce the strongest signal when you do find them. An engineer who maintains their own blog with detailed technical posts is almost always worth reaching out to.

Newsletters as a sourcing index. Technology-specific newsletters curate the best content each week and, by extension, surface the best writers. Postgres Weekly, Golang Weekly, React Status, Ruby Weekly, Node Weekly, and JavaScript Weekly all have archives you can search. The engineers whose posts get featured repeatedly are writing about the exact problems you need solved. They are also almost certainly not getting recruiter messages through these channels.

5. Twitter/X and Bluesky

Technical Twitter is not what it was in 2020, but it is still where a disproportionate number of senior engineers, open source maintainers, and developer advocates spend their time. Bluesky has absorbed some of the technical community that left Twitter, and it skews even more toward senior practitioners.

How to source on X. Build curated lists of engineers in your target technology. Follow the maintainers of the open source projects in your stack. Watch who they interact with and retweet. Search for specific technical terms ("just shipped" kubernetes, "wrote about" Rust) to find engineers talking about their work in real time. Many engineers use X to share blog posts, announce open source releases, and comment on technical decisions at their companies.

DMs work better than you think. X DMs referencing a specific tweet or project get higher response rates than LinkedIn InMail. The reason is specificity. If you DM someone saying "I saw your thread about optimizing Postgres queries, we are dealing with the same problem at [company] and I would love to talk," that is a genuine conversation starter. It does not read like a recruiter template because it is not one.

Bluesky starter packs. Bluesky has a feature called starter packs where community members curate lists of people to follow by topic. There are starter packs for Rust developers, infrastructure engineers, ML researchers, and dozens of other specialties. These are community-curated lists of the most active engineers in each domain. They are effectively pre-built sourcing lists that someone else already vetted.

6. Reddit

Reddit is not a sourcing channel in the traditional sense. You are not going to DM someone on r/programming with a job pitch. But Reddit is useful for two specific things.

Identifying engineers by their technical opinions. Subreddits like r/rust, r/golang, r/devops, r/ExperiencedDevs, and r/cscareerquestions have active communities where engineers discuss architecture decisions, share post-mortems, and debate technical tradeoffs. The engineers who write detailed, thoughtful comments about distributed systems or database design are demonstrating expertise that you can verify by reading what they wrote. Their Reddit profile often links to a GitHub or personal site.

The hiring subreddits. r/forhire and r/hiring are more relevant for freelance and contract roles, but r/ExperiencedDevs has periodic "Who is Hiring?" threads similar to Hacker News. The volume is lower than HN, but the community skews toward engineers with 5 or more years of experience. Worth checking monthly.

7. Kaggle and specialized platforms

For ML and data engineering roles specifically, Kaggle is the equivalent of GitHub for data scientists. It has over 15 million registered users, and its competition leaderboards are one of the few publicly verifiable signals of applied ML skill. A Kaggle Grandmaster or Master has solved real problems under competitive conditions, with results that other practitioners can verify.

Kaggle profiles show competition rankings, notebooks (working code with explanations), and datasets contributed. For roles in ML engineering, data science, or applied AI, a strong Kaggle profile is a better signal of practical ability than a PhD from a brand-name school. Search by competition topic to find engineers who have worked on problems similar to yours.

Other specialized platforms. For security roles, CTF (Capture the Flag) competition leaderboards and platforms like HackTheBox surface engineers with verified offensive and defensive security skills. For frontend engineering, Dribbble and CodePen host portfolios of interactive work. For DevOps and infrastructure, Terraform Registry and Ansible Galaxy show engineers who publish reusable modules. Each of these is a narrow channel, but for the right role, they surface candidates who are invisible everywhere else.

The common thread across all seven channels is the same: engineers leave a trail of real work in the places where they actually spend time. LinkedIn is where they store a stale resume. These are the places where they are actually building, writing, and teaching. The signal is better because the activity is genuine, and the competition is lower because most recruiters have never looked.

For GitHub-based sourcing specifically, tools like riem.ai automate the most time-consuming parts. We search across 30 million monthly GitHub events, score candidates on contribution quality, and surface the underrated developers that everyone wants to hire but nobody can find on LinkedIn. For the other six channels, the manual work is the competitive advantage. If it were easy, everyone would already be doing it.

Frequently asked questions

Which of these channels has the highest response rate?

Conference and meetup connections tend to produce the highest response rates because there is already a shared context. Outreach that references a specific talk or project gets 30% or higher response rates. Discord and Slack communities can also produce strong responses when you have participated in the community and are not cold-messaging someone who has never seen your name. The worst response rates come from cold LinkedIn InMail to software engineers, which averages under 5% for technical roles.

How do I find the right Discord or Slack community?

There is no central directory. The best approach is to ask your engineering team which communities they participate in, then check the README and docs pages of the open source projects in your stack for community links. Most major frameworks and languages maintain official Discord or Slack workspaces. You can also search GitHub topics and look for Discord badges in repository READMEs.

Is it worth sourcing engineers from Hacker News?

Yes, particularly through the monthly "Who Wants to Be Hired?" threads. These threads attract engineers who are passively open to opportunities but not actively on job boards. The quality bar of the HN community skews senior and technically opinionated. The volume is smaller than GitHub or LinkedIn, but the signal-to-noise ratio is very high. Many YC-backed startups have made their first engineering hires through HN threads.

Can you actually source engineers through Twitter/X?

Yes. Many senior engineers, open source maintainers, and startup founders are active on X. The technical community there is smaller than LinkedIn's but denser with senior practitioners. Following specific hashtags, engaging with technical threads, and building curated lists of engineers in your target technology area makes X a viable sourcing channel. DMs referencing a specific post or project get better response rates than cold LinkedIn messages.

How do conference speaker lists work as a sourcing channel?

Most conferences publish their speaker lineups online months before the event. Past conference programs are often archived on the conference website or on YouTube. Each speaker has been vetted by a program committee, which means they have demonstrated expertise in a specific topic. Watching a 30-minute talk tells you more about a candidate's depth and communication skills than any resume. You can reach out by referencing their talk specifically, which produces much higher response rates than generic outreach.