Having designed the new IR in Google's V8 is a very strong signal. The problem is that it's vanishingly rare to encounter someone who did that. The much more co

Having designed the new IR in Google's V8 is a very strong signal. The problem is that it's vanishingly rare to encounter someone who did that. The much more common case is companies just giving strong preference to anyone who has worked at Google, or graduated from a top 10 school. Again, these are real signals (the average skill of folks who have worked at Google or graduated from MIT is higher than the population at large). But, it's a very crude signal (there are plenty of bad ex-googlers, and great folks who went to a state school). In fact, because the vast majority of programmers don't have credentials, there are almost certainly more strong programmers without credentials than with. For that reason, we choose to specialize on directly identifying programming skill, without using credentials. tl;dr Credentials carry signal, but recruiters at companies have gone overboard, giving that weight above all else. We push against that.