[htormey]

"People who haven't been to college aren't likely to have those kinds of connections. If they do, they're not going to be desperate for work."

It's really not that hard to meet and develop a relationship with someone who works at FB/Apple/Google/Etc. Especially if you live in the Bay area and go to meetups/network a little.

[vonmoltke]

I would drop the "especially". Outside of a precious few areas, networking opportunities are hard to come by outside of the few companies that have offices in your area. Even then, more likely than not those companies have HR policies that require applicants to go through the black hole regardless of where they came from.

The whole world is not the Bay Area. Most of us do not have it so easy as to be able to walk into random meetups and leave with three potential contacts at decent tech companies.

[htormey]

I have been living in the Bay area for the last 8 years but originally I grew up and went to university in Ireland. Hardly the center of the tech universe at the time.

I made a lot of contacts by organizing local meetups, travelling to different conferences in other parts of Europe and fostering relationships online.

I now work as a software engineer at Facebook, prior to that I worked at Apple. Effective networking takes a lot of work and can be achieved even if you are living in a remote area.

[igpay]

> I live in Canada, and can't move for a variety of reasons.

> I grew up on a farm

Not everyone lives in the bay area. I'm sure there are plenty of places where it really is "that hard", and it sounds like derefr might live in one of them.

[htormey]

See my above reply.