Here's my personal story on the effect of networking in my technical career...
My first major job was working for a subcontractor to a subcontractor on a Defense logistics project. The project was called JCALS. It must have been a big project. When you are young, you don't notice just how big these things are. Anyway, maybe one year into the project, our part of the project came under scrutiny. The main company in the project seemed to want to take control of our piece and leave us out on the street ..not that we weren't doing a good job.. It seems a lot of politics were involved ala fire the football coach when the team doesn't make it to the playoffs.
Anyway, close to 100 engineers on the project eventually scattered to the winds. Most went on to new jobs. Some stayed to work for the subcontractor. I went on to another job that I found in the paper which payed slightly more. The job was as a data conversion programmer for a medical software company. People always tell you to network and maintain your contacts. For me, it's been easier with Internet and email. No one ever tells you exactly what can come of networking.
In my case, I got a consulting gig at the old defense project by maintaining my contact with a DBA friend who stayed on to build his own subcontracting firm there. I got paid 2x more to work there then when I was an employee. Also, I left the medical software firm on good terms. They had been bought out and my job there was not guaranteed. I got a consulting assignment there to work from home to finish up some projects. While back on the defense project, I got a call from another ex-coworker. He hooked me up with a job at a consulting firm in Pennsylvania.
On this job, I spent 5 years working on two major projects for a top two U.S. bank and for the main control center for the electric grid in the Northeast. My salary and technical accumen increased here. I also got them to pay for my Masters Degree. On the electric grid project, I met a salesman for a software company. We became friends and he eventually got me a job as a sales engineer for the software package we were using. Again, I left the consulting firm I was working for on good terms mostly. I still have lunch with those guys and have done sales presentations at their offices.
The sales engineering job gave me a lot of experience doing public speaking with CIOs and other business types and engineers. I also got to see a lot of different parts of the country. I met and worked with a bunch of different folks in the company from different areas. When work at the software company was getting shaky, I was able to land a job with other folks who once worked at that software company. These were people I had interacted with or actually worked with in the past as either their client or as a consultant. I ended working at an Internet e-commerce company and this is where I am today.
I've gotten 2 or 3 jobs through networking. The only cold-call jobs I've gotten were earlier in my career. I've help 3 or 4 friends find jobs in companies that I worked at. I've also had opportunities to interview and do sales calls at places where friends work. Today, I still email, call, play golf, or visit with the people as much as I can. One of them is even my kid's Godfather. We reminisce over our glory days. Staying up all night to hack out some code and meet a deadline. Talking about where our code is living right now. Some of my code is still running after having moved from New York to Maryland and now to Texas. One guy I used to work with goes with me to Java user group meetings. On off hours, we try to build about some of my crazy software ideas. This helps us keep up with skills that are not necessarily used on the job.
Networking has brought a lot of friendship, comradare, connection, and definition to my technical career.
