[commandlinefan]

Even more anecdata - I counted it up recently and I've had 10 different jobs in a little over 30 years. Half I found randomly through recruiters and the other half were from my "professional network". Consistently, every single "professional network"/"referred in" job turned out to be a complete nightmare and every single "through a recruiter" job turned out to be - well, better than the other ones, anyway. By far my most negative employment experiences have been the ones where I was actively recruited in by somebody I knew from my past.