When I can go "oh neat, jbob99 worked on a foss project I used a few years ago!" it's nice

People often have reasons outside of their control for being anonymous. Others have employment contracts that limit what outside business interests they can be involved in, including open source. That being said, I've been on HN for 2 years longer than you, 2/3rds the karma, and zero job offers so what do I know.

> Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work. I think this is a really important point. Most companies aren't going to hire some anonymous person on the internet with no track record or verifiable background. Most companies can't even legally put someone on their payroll without knowing a lot more about a person. People without a real-name presence on the internet are only going to get a pretty limited amount of unsolicited job-opening contact. And that might be what people like that prefer, which is fine. The minimal cold emails that come in may even be of much much higher quality and relevance. But ultimately they're still leaving a lot on the table, even if much of what's on the table is probably poorly-targeted crap. (Again, that's fine if that's what they want.)