I agree that in many cases it boils down to subjective ideas about whether someone likes you -- and too often, especially in the startup world, "liking you" becomes equivalent to whatever social and status signaling you do in terms of which hip and trendy pieces of tech you choose to affiliate with. It rarely has anything to do with your innate talents. And there are plenty of failure modes having to do with whether you like open-plan offices, alcohol-centric gatherings, dog-friendly offices, and tons of other start-up bullshit.

[0] "Reversing the Extraverted Leadership Advantage: The Role of Collective Employee Proactivity." by A. M. Grant, F. Gino and D. Hofmann

[PDF] < https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:mai... >

Briefly, the paper suggests some evidence that the most disliked type of employee is a subordinate who is introverted and also proactive. Someone who takes initiative, solves problems independently, and is self-reliant, is seen as a problematic and uncooperative subordinate.

Employers say this is the type of employee they want -- someone with a lot of self-reliance, independence, ability to think on their own and needing little oversight. But actually they don't really want that, because the micromanagerial oversight and the need for the manager to step in to direct people is what the management layer uses to justify their compensation and status in the firm. If everyone beneath you handles things without your intervention, it's just a short step to a situation where they claim credit instead of you, and maybe get promoted above you. This makes a lot of middle managers sweat and become paranoid about putting their stamp of micromanagement on everybody's work, which means they need subordinates who require more attention and who reliably can't find the right direction or solve the problem fully independently, and who will be satisfied when given work that doesn't allow for as much autonomy.

High performers and independent thinkers will want autonomy (there's actually a lot of literature about this too), and giving them autonomy would be overall good for the company. But it would be bad for specific gatekeeper middle managers.

That's why they talk a big game about hiring people based on their creative thinking abilities and general aptitude, but in reality they instead focus on micromanagerial things, like how much of some specific Hadoop tool API have you memorized, or how much direct experience do you have in precisely our exact tech stack. These are just status games to protect them from actually productive subordinates.