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.