The lesson is that prestige works. 'They must be doing something right if X did not fire them for 4 years'. In a sense, this is what we wanted--no buzzwords/te

The lesson is that prestige works. 'They must be doing something right if X did not fire them for 4 years'. In a sense, this is what we wanted--no buzzwords/technologies since it largely does not matter whether I have used your particular stack before. We asked them to hire on 'smarts' and the result is that whatever stack you worked with at MS is much less significant than the fact you worked at MS. As usual, prestige begets prestige. The real question is: if you don't have prestige, how do you obtain it?