I explored the business idea of "engineering blog in a box" and talked to a couple of companies about it. The idea was that, just like a drip campaign for customers has value, so does a drip campaign for engineers. You provide good content, an easy way to subscribe, and periodic calls to action (around a role) and you'll get conversions (aka hires).
Didn't go anywhere, but it seems that engineering blogs are an unoptimized recruiting channel. If anyone here wants to chat more about this idea, my email is in my profile.
I like the idea, but I think the reason it didn't stick were related to the bell curve of engineering competence in the wild. And probably the tendency of companies where IT isn't the main game but an enabler not wanting to expose the wild stuff going on to sustain the facade.
If every company blogged about how the magic happens then you'd get a couple of side effects.
1. It'd be a coup for the open source security researchers.
2. Companies would lie, or only blog about there flagship stuff.
3. Companies who are honest would probably scare away engineers with blog posts like, How we support our 30 year old credit card system running on Mainframe hardware we source from ebay.
4. Companies would use this to value signal to each other to open a new front of competitive advantage to the detriment of everyone else. Remember when K8 was just for large web scale companies.
I think the harder sell is that you can't get immediate ROI (it's a months long play).
And that the optimal customer (fast growing tech company) for this type of service quickly grows out of it and wants to insource it (or blogging gets tangled in PR/markcom).
I don't think anyone blogs about all the warts of their systems (not even Cloudflare etc). Everyone wants to put their best foot forward.
Didn't go anywhere, but it seems that engineering blogs are an unoptimized recruiting channel. If anyone here wants to chat more about this idea, my email is in my profile.