Would a Northrop Grumman engineer with a GitHub full of cool projects really be overlooked in a recruitment process? Not once, that can always happen, but regularly?
Same goes with profiles from Cisco, VMWare, Intel, Synposys, IBM, and pretty much all the big companies that were pinnacles of business and your career at one point, but they are not considered hip anymore.
Looking at Github profiles, however much people talk about it, also doesn't regularly happen. It's a chore to type it out in the browser, if you're looking at a paper resume or if it's not hyper-linked. And again, if you worked at NG, what possibly interesting things you could have done? It's not Pinterest or Uber.
When you're reading resumes you go into awful zombie mode (I do this too). If you're writing one, pretend your audience is a braindead zombie that needs to be spoonfed everything. If you have cool projects, list them and describe them concisely in a way that makes clear that they're interesting and a big deal. And link to each project if possible to increase odds of click.
Since I work in and around Github and open source, usually someone's Github will tell me what I really want to know about them (not always, but really good candidates have a Github profile that stands out).
Applicant: Well, I wrote a code to optimize a UAV flight path to avoid enemy radar and minimize fuel consumption, and debugged another controls code to prevent people from dying. Did some debugging on a computational electrodynamics code for radar simulations...
Recruiter: Oh. You know what's cool? Photo sharing.
[1] At Raytheon, if you were the one developing radar avoidance algorithms[2] and code, that was probably your title.
[2] "Algorithms", another word that has slightly different meaning leading to major misinterpretation.
At my company, you're permitting to choose a public title of either your job description (e.g. Lead Data Scientist), your "engineering rank" (e.g. Lead Scientist/Technologist/Developer/Engineer) or your consulting rank e.g (Lead Associate). All of these are equivalent in rank and promotion opportunities, but it does give you some flexibility on what you can place on your resume.
I'm sure it happens sometimes. I just haven't personally seen it with the roles "Software developer", "coder", and "programmer". That is effectively the same thing everywhere I've seen it. Now if I'm a programmer and say I worked in primarily QA or database position we have a problem, but there's no real nuance between those three titles.
People extoll the virtues of a solid university COS degree, not because it explicitly teaches skills for industry, but because it creates a background to help new and novel problems. Certainly your previous work background provides a similar advantage.
If you can perform those tasks, certainly whatever the consumer-focused needs you can learn. As Aristotle said, "For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing."
"I saw the best minds of my generation... writing spam filters." — Neal Stephenson, Solve For X
A lot of these positions are highly competitive and involve a great deal of skill and education. Around here, they're still seen as major resume builders.
Anecdotally, I haven't had trouble securing interviews with West Coast firms even though my background is with a major East Coast company.
Maybe that's because I ran a funded startup for a few years, or maybe it's just the demand in my field, but "hipness" seems like a very bad metric for evaluating previous employers.
As for the interesting things they are executing at these firms, trust me, there are plenty of very innovative products, even in the commercial spaces such as healthcare. Machine learning, big data, practical cryptography, and basic research problems abound.
Look through some unclassified materials and talk to some people about their civilian work experiences and one can hear all about many fascinating technologies, all of which certainly trounce Pinterest in terms of interesting projects.
Rogue nuclear weapons location intelligence, international fugitive management tracking, and human trafficking are primarily targeted by highly sophisticated machine learning pipelines at sub-second analysis speeds.
Water basin management, flood gauge tracking, flood inundation maps, roadway construction modeling... Your average mid-senior developer from one these companies has expertise in a variety of fields: data analysis, civil engineering estimation (hydrology, hydrodynamics), physical simulation, DevOps, embedded software, and low-level machine architecture.
If the National Guard ever rescues you from a flood, you'll be grateful for their HEC-RAS's software, the government contractor who created the estimate flood plain in using GIS, and the civil engineer who verified the estimates at the local level.
The "hip"-ness of previous employers is a bad metric. Maybe the employee would need to adjust to the business culture of the West Coast, but in my experience people generally adapt to new working environments quite well.
Disqualifying someone over working at a major East Coast tech firm is a heuristic with a very high false negative rate.
Also, you'll find many people from those firms looking to make a fresh start, work for less to get started, and a lot of them are refugees looking to escape the bureaucracy of their current positions, which renders them extra-motivated as a new hire.
From all the H1-B stuff I had gotten the impression they were more of an overseas firm.
I'm also in the Valley.