[guywithahat]

I'm not sure it's just a network thing. Certainly you need experience to be a great engineer, but I've known plenty of engineers with 30 years experience who find themselves competing with everyone else when they lose their job.

The best engineer I've ever known spent most of his career doing drivers at Qualcomm. When he left his job they offered him significant raises to stay, offered months of paid leave, and then said he could always come back. Later, an OSS project he worked with heard he was free, and they changed their remote work policies to hire him. He's under 30, and despite working remotely at an OSS project makes significantly more than me.

I like to think I'm a good engineer, but when I work with customers they aren't setting linkedin alerts on my name for if I leave my job. To qualify for what this article is getting at, you really need to be the best engineer out of 100's, not the best engineer in your team of 5.