Maybe on average across many fields and job positions? But I definitely don't believe this as a universalism. The "catalog chic", gym culture and dieting trend

Maybe on average across many fields and job positions? But I definitely don't believe this as a universalism. The "catalog chic", gym culture and dieting trend in SV is fairly new. 20 years ago it was graybeard chic. Alan Cox was an icon. Pictures of the Google team from the 2000s are a bunch of poorly kempt nerds. And into today lots of engineering teams don't give a shit about looks and look squarely for competence. Honestly if I see an engineering team of sexy well groomed people it raises at least a bit of skepticism that these people, in addition to driving a culture of being good looking and we'll groomed, might also care about technical excellence. That's not to say that I discriminate. But whole eng teams self selecting to be sexy (and I have company profile links I could post here but I won't) raises questions about where the core emphasis is when hiring.