A lot of it is cyclical, hit it at the right time and they'll hire any resume that comes across their desk. The other 90% of the time, yeah, get in line behind the guy that knows a guy...

I have no real experience to back this up, but I feel like nowadays dressing up in a full suite and tie for a computer science job interview would be overdressing (if you are not going to work for a bank). I generally go with just suit pants and a button up shirt and that seems to have worked fine for me so far.

Local division of a big name company was always advertising in the paper, I applied but they never replied. Once every 6 months or so they'd do an "open interviews night," so I signed up. Sat down with the floor manager, he took one look at my resume and told me: "you don't want to work here. What's your pay, like X?" he was guessing based on my title and experience, he was within 2% "Yeah, I only get 80% of that and I'm the highest paid guy here. We work long hours and the work is both boring and demanding, long hours, unexpected overtime. Your kind of jobs are at our main facility (up north), down here we're basically a sweat shop.