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Comment by wskinner | Hacker News Reader

1. Make friends with people at work

2. Eventually, some of those people will get new jobs, and they can refer you to their new employer (and vice versa).

3. Repeat for a few cycles and you have a network full of potential job opportunities without ever going through a job board.

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I'd modify #1

1. Make friends with _everybody_ at work.

That includes the guy who brags about himself all the time. That includes the person who you only give the easiest tasks because you don't trust them with anything complicated. That includes the person who doesn't suffer fools gladly.

You never know. I had a constant braggart coworker who everyone else avoided. I smiled and listened politely. He was the one who got me my next job.

Exceptions, obviously, for coworkers that are actively corrosive or abusive. I'm not cozying up to the guy that the female interns refuse to share an elevator with.

4. Never burn any bridges. That boss or coworker you refuse to work with can and will actively block you in future employment possibilities. Also know that if that person is making your entire life hell, you might just need other things happening in your life to make your life more varied. Smile to the end (if you can).

Disagree; stay true to yourself. Try to be nice to everyone regardless, but also don't hold back on honest criticism for fear of reprisals. Doesn't matter how high the other person gets in the chain, you can't hide what you are (neither them, nor you).

It's a difficult balance, isn't it? When you're applying to a future opportunity, leaders there will *often* reach out to people in their network who worked with you previously, whether you declared them on a resume or to a recruiter as an official reference or not. That either happens through looking at common connections on LinkedIn, or you came from SomeCo and they know someone in engineering leadership over at SomeCo.

If SomeCo is a huge company then LinkedIn might find a connection who actually knew you, but just "know someone in leadership at Amazon" wouldn't usually get you a hit. Whenever SomeCo is a smaller outfit, the likelihood someone knows of you increases

If whoever you hit up starts the conversation with, "Yeah, that ghusto, er, they weren't the best engineer we had" or even just "I don't think I can give you reference for that person, sorry", your chances of getting the job plummet.

If one person at SomeCo (a larger company) is not going to say you're amazing then the probability of that person being asked might be quite low. If many people at SomeCo (a smaller company) are going to remember that "honest criticism" more loudly than all your other contributions then that is trickier.

For sure, but it's a great sieving mechanism. If the recruiter / company went with either C-level only, or didn't check beyond with a few people who actually worked with you day to day, then meh, no loss on my end.

Also; I deleted my LinkedIn account and only saw benefits.

Corollary: Don't burn bridges, but if somebody else sets the bridge on fire don't hurt yourself trying to rebuild it. Less snappy but hopefully it gets the point across.

There's an ex coworker that comes to mind. He was the typical wishy washy dude talking a lot and doing nothing all day and then crying to management of how much he was working. I was managing a nightmare team and teaching tech workshops inside the company. We never worked together.

I never liked the dude much but I was trying to get his jokes though his thick British accent and trying to be polite.

Turns out he hated me for some reason and actively stopped a referral I tried to bring into the company. Years later I even offered him a referral out of courtesy which he didn't pick up on. Even more years later I found out he vetoed me from some company I applied years ago with no specific reason.

Sometimes you have to chose which bridge to burn.

Hopefully not, hopefully you're leaving for greener pastures, or because of something systemic that you can critique on exit without throwing anyone under the bus.

But sometimes not. Sometimes you have a responsibility to your peers to honestly describe the problem that prompted you to leave, even if it means burning a bridge.

The alternative is to squander the organizational growth opportunity that your resignation represents, and subsequently burn all bridges except the one with the problematic person.

This can also be extended to:

1. Go on LinkedIn and find past co-workers and friends. Make a list of those people.

2. Prioritize based on companies you want to work for and people who had a good experience with you

3. Reach out to them with a generic opening like "How are things going?"

4. After some back and forth, you can ask "Hey, are you guys hiring by any chance?"

I also wrote a recap of mistakes and lessons learned from trying to find work at a hedge fund here: https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1663668616233885699

It has some more general recommendations as well.

This is going to bite a lot of the hardcore WFH people in the next decade. They just won't have even watercooler-level connections with former colleagues.

Rationalist Ivy-league haters community thinks their resume is all that matters.

According to PG, this is the exact time for them to be hitting it out of the ballpark doing a startup.

Swing harder, people!

While it’s true that it’s harder to form close connections while working from home, it’s actually managed to broaden my network considerably. I now have friends and former colleagues stationed all around the world, instead of just the US.

Make friends with Talent Acquisition. Nothing like having a TA that moves to another company.

Hah, I went this route a few jobs ago. The TA loved the place, but unfortunately their engineering culture turned out to be complete trash.

Cool as a long term strategy, but hardly helpful if you want a job this year.

This.

I haven't bothered with non-word-of-mouth jobs for over ten years. If the job's not recommended to me by someone I already know, I'm not interested. It saves sooo much time.

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