"The world is a prestige whore."... ...you said it. If you have lots of funding you can afford to pay the price premiums for people with resumes with prestige

"The world is a prestige whore."... ...you said it. If you have lots of funding you can afford to pay the price premiums for people with resumes with prestige shwag on them. If you don't have that kind of funding and need to pay lower rates and are outside of the valley, you are better off being able to identify great programmers in other ways (which has been written about much). I am a startup founder, http://shellshadow.com http://shellshadow.com. I'm in Shanghai. Even if I had the funding to throw at prestige resumes, the supply of such isn't available in Shanghai. I have to rely on the fact that I maintain my own deep programming skills as a 40 year old programmer and therefore have the ability to identify and manage top developers without the aid of keywords on a resume. But hey, if you've got the cash, go ahead and pay the price premiums...it can't hurt, right? ;)