When you go to work in San Francisco, you emerge from BART and start walking. Fellow data miners are marching to work, bedecked in their company schwag. You see the Affirm backpack, a Zendesk t-shirt, a LinkedIn logo here, a Cloudera one there. People march, clutching their coffee cups. In the evening, they march back -- to Caltrain, to BART. Caltrain is a sea of logos. Advertisers often plaster King St. station in a hiring company slogans, and BART often has hiring ads on the stations and in the cars. It is exciting -- the vibe is that of a gold-rush town, data flowing through the air.

The crowd marches with a determination of an army. It's routes are fixed, like streams -- leaving and returning to the stations. Sometimes I think about physical hiring, where you look at people's t-shirts and start talking to them about their work. Even if they got them at a conference, there's still so much data walking around. None of those logos is random -- each, etched on its carrier, is a connection.

A startup near South Park put out a menu board, with "Now Hiring" written in chalk where the specials usually are. I think of renting a truck, painting it with the current company logo, and driving slowly around the neighborhood. You can have a cool interview loop inside, with the company info and schwag all its own.