Great article but I have to wonder.. is it actually relevant today? With the huge demand for engineers and the utter lack of even somewhat qualified engineers, I wonder if people actually are still having a tough time landing a job?
Whenever I hear/read these comments, my first thought is always that the speaker/poster is from The Valley, and assumes that every place is like The Valley (or that everyone with technical skills wants -- or can -- move to The Valley). In other words, "The Valley" isn't the answer to life, the universe and everything.
[Also, there can't be that high of a demand for engineers, because I've been denied jobs for the most trivial of reasons. I was denied a job once for not being able to answer a Python trivia question about something that took me 5 minutes to learn from the Python documentation.]
There are always people in the tech industry who find it overly hard to get a new job. At least in the SF Bay Area it seems like there are always some 'well known problem children' who, perhaps in spite of their qualifications, remain stubbornly unemployed.
There is also the question of where you work, saying that anyone can get hired is fine, but if you're only offer is working in the local office of an offshore company with dictatorial management from abroad, that's not necessarily a fun choice.
I read this as a nice treatise on things that you may not realize are pretty influential in the hiring decision but aren't related to your technical skills per se.
The engineers that do have decent tech skills and don't fall into some of the categories listed in the article aren't having too difficult a time finding work. Some companies can't afford to be too choosy and will hire people with these traits. Most of my clients tend to be smaller shops, where the cost of a bad hire is much greater, so they will be more selective and protective of their culture and environment.
