He is for real, no doubt. Also he is correct. I have seen this depressingly often. Anecdote from the trenches: A dev team of about 15. They are working an an algorithm that did some language-type matching. One guy was regarded as the expert on the subject, came up with the algorithm, wrote a paper on it that was the basis of his Masters thesis, and essentially the whole company bowed down in front of him. When I joined I quickly learned that he looked good, had a smooth talk, and was far from a good developer. His work was chaotic and his software was ill behaved, stupidly resource hungry, and based on a flawed hypothesis (it provably didn't work well, and made mistakes). There were two issues with this. Firstly, it cost us a fortune in providing the resource to keep his software running and available, and secondly it had a real negative impact on people's lives. The other devs' on the team were aware of this, and many had solid ideas to improve. I worked with some devs after hours to built a solr-based alternative that took a week to build and test (as opposed to the countless man-years that went into this guys algorithm), and I organised a presentation to the CEO (I was senior exec there, and was on the highest level management team). The presentation was a success, and by all metrics what we cobbled together was faster, cheaper, and most importantly, better. We were congratulated on our success, but after a few days the CEO declined to implement the change. I know that the person in question spent a lot of time lobbying against us during this period. The next move we made was to find a US based company that made software that did the exact same thing, had a solid US Government track record (which was important to our client base - mostly US banks) and was ridiculously cheap. To compare, they did what we did on a laptop. We had 4 racks in a colo to do the same thing. Annual licensing cost was a months dev wage. That plan was also deep-sixed.

I personally left shortly after that, but I spent a lot of time wondering why two obviously superior solutions to real problems were ignored. The dev in question was charming, handsome, spent a lot of time worrying about his looks and was a smooth political operator.

Look and impressions matter more. This is just one of many stories, and it is the primary driver behind me setting up my own shop years ago. I cannot stand this kind of idiocy.

I think you're staring the point right in the eyes, but are missing it:

> was a smooth political operator

This is it right there. It doesn't matter so much how attractive he was. If he can do politics, it's game over for everyone who can't.

I think the point of his story is that it's easier to be a smooth political operator if you look good.

The GP presented it as if the entire reason that this person was a smooth political operator was that they were attractive, which is trivially refuted, as I've seen attractive people who were bad at politics.

Looking good doesn't automatically translate to being good at politics, but it gives your political success a serious boost, and there is a slew of research that backs this up:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/17/candid... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/health-beau... http://web.mit.edu/polisci/people/faculty/documents/Lawson%2... http://www.macleans.ca/society/science/the-mysterious-power-...

indeed

You are wrong actually. Maybe you havent had the experience of being bad looking, but people will treat you very differently in everything they do.

Objectively, its a big advantage to being good looking, once you get past your own biases of not wanting to believe it.

I have substance. You're completely delusional if you think that being good-looking will ever be anything other than a benefit. An extremely significant one at that.

Those benefits have a cost--financially, emotionally, and time-wise. So the whole question is, is it worth it, past a certain point.

What is the financial cost to being attractive?

Given that the whole point of the post you're responding to seems to be precisely that cosmetics do in fact take you quite far, and substance isn't, in his experience, as important as he was led to believe... I rather doubt simply asserting that looks don't matter is going to change his opinion.

If you are not attractive the likely scenario is that not many will want to be around you long enough to discover substance.