My work speaks for itself. I don’t need to explicitly build or “force” a network.

In 2025, I would’ve agreed. Networking felt unnecessary, shallow, and slightly embarrassing.

It had never been necessary in my previous job searches. Last year, it was.

I was an L6 at Amazon with 6 years in big tech, but I still carried the mental model from my 2019 job search, where close to 100% of my applications led to screen calls. This time, that dropped to 27%.

What stood out was not the rejection, but the invisibility. I could see a strong correlation between interviews and offers, but most of the time I never got a chance to prove it.

I found myself confused: if someone with my background was not even getting a recruiter call, what exactly was the system selecting for?

I had assumed the bottleneck was being a strong candidate. The data said otherwise. The first bottleneck is visibility.

That forced me to rethink how I approached the entire process.

Your network has two timelines

I reached team match at 4 companies. All through referrals, recruiters, or conversations I initiated. 2 became offers. Each of those paths ran through a person who already knew my name. The question is which people, and when.

Start with people you already know: former colleagues, managers, recruiters, and people you worked well with but have not spoken to in years. A simple “how have you been” is often enough to restart a conversation. If you are job searching, reconnect before asking for anything. If you are not, even better. Just check in.

The rest is built over time in the background: companies you might want to join, people whose work you respect, and conversations that change how you think. Most of this has no immediate payoff. It matters later, when a role opens and someone already knows your name well enough to add context instead of treating you as a cold application.

If you are not searching right now, you are in the best position to build this. There is nothing to ask for, which means every conversation can start with genuine interest rather than need.

What the long timeline looks like in practice

For people currently in a role, this rarely looks like networking at all.

I connected with Coen de Heus (Sr. Manager and Bar Raiser at Amazon with 800+ interviews) after noticing an overlap in how we think about engineering management. We have not met in person yet, but we regularly exchange ideas.

What stood out in a recent exchange with him was how unglamorous in person networking looks in practice.

As Coen put it, it starts small. Say hi to people in the office. At the coffee machine, ask how someone is doing instead of defaulting to your phone. Join internal groups or volunteer. Help new joiners settle in or say yes when teams ask for help.

Most interactions go nowhere, but they create familiarity that builds over time, and a small number add up into something useful.

When networking stops feeling like networking

Late last year, I connected with Aline Lerner (Founder of interviewing.io, author of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, MIT lecturer) after something she wrote. We ended up talking about engineering, careers, and life. We stayed in touch.

She later sent me a signed copy of her book. It mattered because I had shared my original Cracking the Coding Interview from my first big tech interview at Google a decade earlier. I was rejected and left thinking I was not good enough. I kept going anyway. This book felt like a full circle moment.

Some of the strongest professional relationships don’t start with a request. They start with shared context and curiosity.

We still talk, and are trying to meet in person, even across continents.

Closing insight

Skill determines how you perform once you're inside the evaluation process. What gets you inside is different: whether someone already knows your name and can add context to your application. Most engineers only optimise for the first problem.

What’s next

Next, I’ll break down how this plays out in cold outreach and why most messages fail before they are read.

This is part of an ongoing series on how hiring works beneath the surface.

If this felt familiar, it's usually because it reflects something recurring rather than isolated: being evaluated differently depending on how visible you are in the system, not just how strong your work is.

I write about the decisions that shape visibility, access, and career momentum for engineers navigating promotions and transitions.