Waving hands furiously, we might say that everything is more nuänced than can be ex-plained in a tweet or a blog post, and that nothing is absolutely uniform.

Waving hands furiously, we might say that everything is more nuänced than can be ex-plained in a tweet or a blog post, and that nothing is absolutely uniform. We can also say that in the twelve years since this blog post was first written, attitudes towards hiring have changed in many ways. Nobody (for some loose definition of "nobody") cares how we would move Mount Fuji, or how many ping pong balls would fit in a 747. Broadly speaking, though, I stand by the fundamental assertion that the stereotypical "BigCo" values conformity, and values people who value conformity, and that many of the things they lok for are, at a deeper level, social signals. Startups aren't so different. In 2012, we could just as easily have rewritten this blog post to be about a startup wanting applicants to have a GitHub profile because it indicated a certain need to belong to "hacker culture" that the hypothetical startup could exploit.