[maheart]

Appreciate the effort the article author put in, but I'll be contrarian here (in the hopes of saving people time) and say that I think this is the wrong approach to take to getting hired (the effort:hire ratio is terrible).

I don't know why, whether it's to be fair or avoid litigation, but in most companies I've worked for or interviewed with, the senior engineers, hiring managers, HR, etc. don't have as much influence over the hiring process as you think. You'll probably still need to go through 5 stages of interviews, including a white-boarding or a take home test. Otherwise you wouldn't have all these "rockstar" programmers on Twitter complaining about the interview process. The best that these "influencers" can do for you, is to tip you off to an opening and maybe help towards the end of the interview process.

The other issue is, how do you know you're betting on the right horse? e.g. is the person that you're getting cozy with really going to help you career? You only have so much time and "connections" to invest.

My advice: instead of going to meet ups, take more interviews and improve your interviewing skills. Instead of spending 2-5 hours/week going to meet ups, take 1 interview instead. Even with no preperation, you'll start to see the pattern in the types of questions people ask. Improve on your answers. Interview again.

[onion2k]

The problem the author of the article is writing about is being so shy that you'll never be able to benefit from "practise" interviews. You should really consider whether or not you understand the problem before you attempt to solve it.

This is a big problem with hiring. So many people think hiring is a simple problem that has a simple solution, but you're dealing with humans. There's so much variety in the way people think and act that there won't be a generalized solution. For some, networking outside of interviews so you can get a recommendation is a valid approach.

[soheil]

I think you're confusing what works in theory vs the current state of affairs. At many companies if you speak of "you're dealing with humans" and "way people think and act" in a hiring process you're automatically inviting interpretations that can be used to justify the reason you didn't hire someone was because of discrimination. Simple as that.

If you really want to see change in the world stop preaching truth to believers, but instead root cause the problem and find solutions that address them. In this case, legislation.

[ZainRiz]

What you're saying is definitely true for the more mature companies (say, 1000+ employees).

I curious if the author has experience with this working for startups and their ilk, which may not have become large enough to have a proper recruiting division.

The challenge networking potentially solves is getting a recruiter to pay attention to your resume, but from that point on your resume has to be impressive looking enough to get you to the interview room. And unfortunately I know (and helped) a lot of engineers who've done impressive work but didn't know how to put that on paper effectively.

That part takes a whole other skill

[jon-wood]

I’ve hired at multiple smaller startups, and the rule has always been that if someone gets referred by an existing member of staff then the referrer isn’t involved in the interview process beyond being a high confidence reference check.

[throwawaythekey]

My experience at a startup is if you get referred you get hired. We are ~50 people and about half are friends/contacts of previous employees.

[ozim]

100% that.

Networking gets you to be exposed to opportunities at those companies, maybe some tips to prepare for something specific for that company. But it is not going to take away hard work that needs to be done.

[soheil]

Agreed. The advice in the article would work if it was about anything, but getting a job. The skills mentioned could be immensely helpful in building a network of people ("allies"?) for the purpose of getting customers for your startup, meeting other founders and even meeting angels and VCs to fund raise.

Please don't use it to get a job. There are objective criteria that companies would like to think they're using to hire the most qualified candidate (reality is probably very different). That's the best way to assure you don't hire non-performers and avoid the huge liability associated with choosing an arbitrary hiring process in many states.

[barrkel]

Even at a big company, having someone pushing for you internally makes a difference. Probably not much on the hiring process, but pushing bureaucracy, ensuring a recruiter / coordinator looks at your CV and schedules your interviewers sooner, and so on.

I actually think it's more useful for a different reason: finding out who's doing interesting stuff, knowing where it's worthwhile applying.