A network of people who will assert you know your stuff, right. Friends will say whatever you want them to say. A guy I worked with, who never shipped anything,

A network of people who will assert you know your stuff, right. Friends will say whatever you want them to say. A guy I worked with, who never shipped anything, had no idea how to code at all, who got black out wasted several times during company events, explicitely propositioned the male CTO (they were both straight), harassed every single women in the company (seriously, like, 100+) in just the amount of time it took to get the paperwork in order to fire him... And he found a new job at a freagin bank as a senior engineer 2 weeks later. Because "a network of people asserted he knew his stuff". (As to how he got hired in the first place...people "asserted he knew his stuff" and I assume he was pretty good at tricking people in interviews. Interview process sucked, mind you, but since people will get fussy if you ask them to code in an interview, well...)