[loa_in_]

Assuming that company wants best hires they are glad to give a go to anyone in the possible candidate pool sooner or later, and knowing anyone in same line of work (surely) is a positive bias to viability so they should thank you. What makes you feel like it's about blame?

[noirbot]

Blame is maybe a too-strong word in some cases, but if someone gets hired onto my team and is a bit of a dud for whatever reason, and I know someone influential on another team referred them, it starts to feel more like nepotism than simply "using a referral network".

Especially at a larger company where the hiring process can be a little obscured from the actual team. Where not every, or even most engineers on a team get to meet a new engineer before they're hired.

[loa_in_]

I think nepotism is a pathological case of something that happens just normally anyway. But then it's not nepotism... until it is...

These systemic problems that are only tangential to actual work rarely occur but the common mitigations seem to put a lot of pressure on everyday man, maybe even more than the problem itself... I wonder what's the "correct" solution here.