In 17 years, I have been hired 7 times.  Every last one of those offers started with me submitting a resume to a company where I previously knew nobody, or at least nobody with any ability to influence the hiring process.<p>I have also tried the &quot;know somebody&quot; tack.  None of the people I have ever met has ever been able to even get me an actual interview <i>anywhere</i>, with the sole exceptions of my father, who has thrown roughly $1500 worth of business my way over my entire lifetime, and a former boss, who was laid off at the same time as everyone else, yet still managed to toss me $500 in contract work for his one-man startup as the emergency job search stretched out into the second week.<p>On a gross revenue basis, looking good enough on paper to start a conversation, and spamming out those resumes to anyone even considering hiring someone new has been roughly 400 times more valuable than knowing other people.<p>But my entire career has also unfolded far from the SF-Oakland-SJ metro area.  We don&#x27;t exactly get a lot of &quot;meetups&quot; around here.  I&#x27;m not even exactly sure what a &quot;meetup&quot; is.  Maybe like a geek night where everybody talks shop all night instead of having fun?<p>Also, not a single professional recruiter has ever successfully placed me in any job, nor have they even been very good at getting me interviews.  They have been worse than useless, in that every second I wasted on them would have been better spent digging up my own leads and sending my resume myself.<p>All that said, I hate, I hate, <i>I hate</i> the current software professionals&#x27; hiring process <i>and</i> the trends in it that I have been able to observe from my end.