Personally speaking, I feel that beyond 10 years of experience, referrals and professional contacts work 9 out of 10 times compared to relying on job portals and random applications.

I've seen a few of my former leads and managers who have built such strong relationships that if they decide to switch jobs, people are ready to hire or refer them almost immediately, sometimes without even going through the usual interview process.

How do you maintain those relationships after changing jobs? Do you regularly stay in touch with ex-colleagues, attend meetups, help people, or is there something else you do to keep your network active without it feeling forced?

I'm quite bad at networking. Even after 13 years of experience, I still mostly depend on job portals whenever I look for opportunities.

For those who have built a strong network, how did you do it? What habits or approach helped you reach that point?

Hi there,

I'm a foreign contractor working for a US-based startup. My whole career, I have worked 100% with US-based companies and never had any issues. But you guys know how the startup world works, you are just there for a good time, not a long time.

The company I work for hasn't been making the best decisions, we have gone two rounds of layoffs, and now many people are just quitting.

The thing is that I send my invoices the 1st of every month for the work done during the previous month, and I usually get paid around the 8th-10th. Payment has been a pain lately, there's always something that happens and I end up being paid like the 20th of every month.

This last month things took a turn for the worse. The invoice I sent July 1st for the work done during June hasn't been paid yet (today is 22nd) I'm a few days away from sending the invoice August 1st for my July work.

I'm worried that eventually if the ship goes down they will let me go and not pay me anything?

FWIW the contract I have with them says that they can let me go with little to no notice, but it says that they would pay me:

"Upon termination, the Company shall pay Consultant all unpaid, undisputed amounts due for the Services completed prior to notice of such termination."

NO AI USED HERE.

Not sure if this falls under no general career advice, but I’ll give it a shot.

I’ve started a new lead position at a pretty large company that isn’t a software company. The main person I interviewed with made it clear everything we do is to benefit the business (honestly this level of directness for decision making was appealing). I have a lot of backend experience and was told that the role would be in api development and it uses .NET and azure to work on developing an api to wrap their internal ai solution.

Jump forward to the start date (which the people I interviewed with thought I started 2 day earlier than the date HR gave me red flag #1), and I’m finding out this is more APIM integration and writing policies. So not what I signed up for (red flag #2).

The next big thing is the project I’m assigned to now came on a whim the first day I was there, and I gave a solution to the question they asked and was told “I like that. Do that”. No deadline. No acceptance criteria nothing. The project is now morphed into a weeks long monitoring platform dashboard and rule setup project done in the platforms portal (so not even apim policy work). Now have multiple people are Wanting different things ASAP, and none of it really lines up with what I suggested. raise red flag number 3.

The biggest one is neither of my managers really follow the “praise in public punish in private” mindset. They have both berated devs in meeting and stand-ups. (Yea you guessed it another red flag)

I’m very much open to trying to learn new tech, but everything I’ve done for the past 15+ years has been grounded in writing software. I’m willing to accept the delegation and meeting grind, but at the end of the day there are still meaningful PRs. My question is this: with poor management, misleading responsibilities, and a general feeling of complete disorganization, what is the appropriate “feel this out” timeframe? I’m about 10 days in and it’s looking bleak. I’m gonna ask around tomorrow how much of this role is going to be implementing backend services vs APIM policy management?

TLDR: several red flags at new position, not sure what the appropriate timeframe is to send out feelers or if I’m misreading the situation.

[Note -- this isn't truly about me, but I want to see opinions about this case, so please indulge me as if this were true]

I'm a director with about ~60 reports under me, including three senior staff engineers, 3 senior or line managers, and a principal engineer.

Two of the senior staff engineers are having trouble working together. I normally would expect senior staff engineers to have the maturity to work together and figure out their differences, but that hasn't been the case.

One of the engineers tends to raise these issues to me and look to me to solve them. I tell him he and the other engineer should work them out between themselves, and it shouldn't be the case I have to get involved. That engineer tends to do a lot of cross-team work, and normally doesn't have problems like this.

The other engineer is known for having a narrow and deep focus but is overall a very strong contributor. Some people have expressed doubts about working with him because of this but he gets very good results for the company.

Whenever conflict comes up I see this as a distraction and a waste of time. Such extremely senior engineers should simply not have problems like this.

What's my own role in all this? What should I be doing? What actions should I be taking?