For me, the single biggest advantage of a writing-oriented culture is that it's more remote-friendly. Even the "road shows" OP mentions don't get to people who

For me, the single biggest advantage of a writing-oriented culture is that it's more remote-friendly. Even the "road shows" OP mentions don't get to people who work in "odd" locations. I was fully remote for years even before COVID, but I was always close to an office. That meant I could go in when there guests showed up (assuming I heard about it in time). However, I could just as easily have worked too far away for that, and there's a lot I would have missed out on. Also, this suggests a type of interview that I've never seen IRL: make someone write text, not code. Give them a topic and a laptop, let them Google as much as they want, and leave them alone for fifteen minutes. For a whole bunch of reasons, I think that's much more realistic than making people write code on a whiteboard in front of people, and candidates who do well at it are much more likely to do well for real. Then again, maybe this is all motivated reasoning because I would have benefited personally from a greater focus on writing (and reading) at companies where I worked. At my last company I feel I was actively screwed because writing wasn't valued at all.