consider: age discrimination; or an otherwise very talented person is tied to some location (eg. home, or a rural town, due to dependents, or disability), or has the same name as someone "bad" in the news and thus look scary when googled (eg. "I'm John Tillman the nice Portland engineer not John Tillman the NY rapist!" (name is random contrived example)), or once made an un-PC undeletable post in a public forum, or is non-English-speaking, or simply bad with social skills but otherwise great engineer, etc. Also, much of the modern recruiting/hiring culture is still very oriented towards erring on the side of false negative/rejection, and riddled with irrationality and institutionalized jerky behavior.

If an engineer is Famous (due to several public accomplishments), like yourself, you may not have to encounter any of this. "Who cares where he lives or what he's said or how much money he wants, or age... it's Walter Bright!"