When I'm on a team and there are multiple engineers and data scientists, many of them come from Big Tech: Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. I don't get any points with them for implementing a one-liner that does whatever Google implemented but they get very excited if I did. I get a "Oh wow, I know someone who worked on that at Google, I am really glad it's useful!"

This extends to suggesting huge licenses like from Salesforce. The Marketing and HR teams are ecstatic that they can purchase another license of their favorite software, they can go shopping! If I had implemented a free and more efficient CRM, there would be no networking effect.

This all builds systems that are vastly more expensive (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars), slower, and much harder to fix. YCombinator financially benefits from this and it's all very corrupt. Most of the time, I have to really gain the "soft skills" to activate the networking (nepotism) effects.

It's not about what you know, it's about who you know.