You can find e.g. the name of the CTO of Fog Creek. It's FizzBuzz-level difficulty or less.
You can find e.g. any published work of Thomas Ptacek to bond over. You didn't have to run into him at Black Hat, or even know that he has spoken at Black Hat, to find a video of him speaking at Black Hat.
You may not know who is in charge of Fraud at Square. You know who probably knows? Well, to a first approximation, any engineer there should (or be able to find it out trivially). Can you find any engineer at Square?
We have the good fortune to be in an industry where people are hyper-connected, publicly identified, and Internet routable. Use these facts to your advantage when looking for a job.
I'm talking about official vs. unofficial channels: does it makes sense to have an official (job site / resumes) channel that pretty much funnels into the trash, along side an unofficial one (where the real hiring happens) that rewards insider connections, friends of friends, cyber-stalking, cold-calling, and/or exhaustive research into companies? Is that the best we can do?
Also not arguing that the unofficial channel is ineffective. Clearly that's where all the hiring is going on, but is this the way it _should_ be?
That's certainly true, but it's definitely not helpful to point it out then continue doing what you're doing.
The correct thing to do when faced with a series of silly steps that are 10-100X more effective than the "fair" way that an engineer would design is to learn how to follow those silly steps and follow them.
This pattern hangs engineers up quite often in life. See also salary negotiation, promotions, dating, etc. etc. It's worth taking a step back, looking at how the real world operates, then finding a way to make yourself operate in that real world.
You'll end up a lot happier for having done so.
You can get enthusiastic about one company and get something done about it. Following the Patrick's suggestion, it's some mega project that would take the whole week or so, a couple of focused hours should do the trick. And if you are genuinely interested, you will naturally sound generally interested without any bs covering it all.
Even if the case of just needing a job, following this advice will probably help you get produce a few but high quality applications, rather than sending yet another resume.
I think their point is that applicants should focus more on quality, not quantity. Rather than focus on 30 companies, focus on six, and spend time trying to impress them rather than just throwing your application into the numbers grinder.
I'd turn it around on the company: You're not proposing marriage either. Take a measly few minutes every so often to really look at the stack of resumes you get, and give a few of them a whirl. Don't spend months and months of the company's time and money hopelessly looking for that special snowflake 100% match when there may be many 90% matches lining up at your door. Thanks to lax U.S. labor laws, the decision to hire is not irreversible.