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Originally Posted by n00b590
You're making a bunch of sweeping and self-limiting generalizations about tech people and the nature of networking in general. IIRC you've mentioned before that you aren't entirely happy with your own career trajectory / pay level?
I mean it's always been a laughably first world problem and after a couple of years of hard work, I'm back on track. Thanks for asking! In any case, we're talking about advice for new grads trying to find their first job. They aren't going to have much of a network. They aren't going to be particularly effective at networking if they tried. They have no idea which jobs they would enjoy. There are hundreds if not thousands of tech startups in the bay area (and I'm sure in many other tech hubs) that aren't really all that different from one another. If the first job doesn't work out for some reason, finding the next job is going to be much easier.
My advice is about the situation at hand and little to do with me - I'm an older guy with a track record and connections and I have never been in a situation where I had to spam resumes to random companies. Networking is more important for me, though again, in tech it's more about the small (people you worked with that can vouch for you) or the large (people you can reach) and only rarely about the medium (people you know but not that well). I saw someone trying this spam-applying everywhere approach and sharing results on this forum and I merely thought it was a relatively effective approach in a job-dense area if you're a desperate new grad (bootcamp or school). It makes perfect sense given the way I know tech companies hire and I don't think there's that much you can do to improve upon it. Tech recruiters and hiring managers generally don't give a **** about your cover letters - they care whether your resume looks like you can code and pass tech interviews. By all means, if there are just three local employers and those are the only places you care about, don't do this and put in more effort per opportunity.
This is good stuff for certain types of people but it's not applicable for most new grads - new CS grads or bootcamp grads don't have much offer to businesses beside their coding skills and the vast majority of opportunities they can get through whatever network they have will be vastly inferior to what's available at good tech companies. I guess Patrick's stuff is useful if you're a decent mid-career programmer who's not quite good enough technically to get a cushy job with their technical skills alone and interested in business/sales/etc enough to try to make it as a one-man consulting shop but for a new grad, it can be dangerous and misleading - you can't even fake it till you make it if it's transparent to everyone you're a nobody.
Furthermore, tech is eating the world right now and the kinds of places where this works are generally worse places for technical people to be (non-tech companies) than the kinds of places where this doesn't work. Also I don't think Patrick himself ever did all that well for himself following his own advice until after becoming semi-famous writing about it. He seemed to have pivoted more towards selling himself as a marketer for businesses run by technical people rather than a technical solutions guy for businesses run by non-technical people. Either way, he's a good writer and writes a lot of insightful stuff but his core skill set is becoming internet-famous.
Also, personally speaking, I'd say my career was hurt by trying to straddle between being an engineer and being a business guy involved in sales, marketing, finance, product and in a way following my own version of a Patrick-lite career - I would have been much better off if I focused a standard engineering career from the beginning. I guess one day some of the skills and experience may come handy when I start my own company but the most important lesson is that you can't be good at everything. Before I was at a real tech company, my outlook was very similar to Patrick's but after seeing how tech companies are run, I definitely feel now that this is a road to mediocrity.