Someone on r/devops just asked whether to take an AWS Cloud Support Engineer role for 18 months — trading hands-on building for "AWS internals exposure and the brand on the CV." Both replies told them not to. They're right, but for older reasons than they realize. The "brand on the CV" model worked when hiring managers read resumes top-down for pattern matching: ex-AWS, ex-Google, ex-Stripe. That heuristic compressed signal cheaply when there was no way to see your actual work. It is the thing being replaced first. Built In's 2026 hiring report calls it proof over pedigree — companies replacing brand-screening with skills assessments, portfolio review, and trial work. The same piece notes that take-home tests are giving way to examining what candidates have already built. If the assumption is "they worked at AWS, so they can do AWS," that gate now opens to anyone with a public Terraform repo and an Aurora migration in their GitHub log. That's the macro side.…