I couldn't stand the wall of text on such a wide screen that I have. But the TLDR seems to be not to hire based of trendy skills, which I agree with.
I shouldn't have to make the window smaller in order to be able to read the authors post. If people find the formatting too frustrating, it's their problem as they want to convey a message to me, not the other way around.
Personnaly I use that bookmarlet that help greatly for such pages (found it on a thread here on HN) :
javascript:(function(){var a = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];a.style.maxWidth=630+"px";a.style.margin="auto";a.style.padding="0 15px";})()
That's what Firebug is for. :)
No, the essay is not about skills but about trendy pedigree. The examples of "pedigree" being defined by being at trendy company such as Google/Facebook/Apple instead of a stodgy one like Microsoft. Or the "pedigree" is graduate of top-10 university instead of a 2nd-tier one.
One possible solution to outsmart the flawed thinking about pedigree is a "Moneyball" approach that ignores schools or past employers.