Looking from the outside, for many of these companies: GitHub, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Facebook, and so on, it seems that they torture their hires with ridiculously code challenges. Spend a lot of time on elegant engineering blogs. Write about how many Phds work at their locations, can't stop talking about how selective of the 0.01% Developers they are... But then, internally, everything seems more or less tied up with Shoestrings and Rube Goldberg machines.