I got a referral from a friend that was also an early employee at the startup. I joined mostly because the people seemed smart and I thought I'd learn a lot from them and have fun building a cool product.
To be honest, most of it is just luck. My two cents is to just find really smart and hungry people, look for evidence of incredibly fast product velocity and some semblance of product market fit. For first 50, there's a decent number of post series A startups that should have those indicators.
But suppose you were unfamiliar with the code, the 2nd tells you what fields/methods are available for "item", and furthermore most IDEs will use that info to populate autocomplete suggestions and such.
Data structures, algorithms, fundamentals like how compilers/memory/operating systems work likely won't change, programming languages and frameworks are constantly changing.
A question I always had is wouldn't all sufficiently advanced civs use quantum communication which we wouldn't be able to detect with our usual SETI-style methods?
```
for(let j=0; j<5; j++){
}
```
actually got me a pretty linear upward win line for thousands of simulated clicks