Networking is the only reason I’ve been able to land jobs in this market, and I’m not exaggerating. When I first started applying to my first tech job, I got hit with denied, rejected, super denied—over and over. I knew I had the skills, but nobody even gave me a shot until I started asking my network for help. The second I did, I started landing interviews with basically every dream company you can name—Google, Amazon, Meta, Slack—because referrals and real relationships are what actually open doors. In this video, I break down what “networking” really is (and why the term is kind of icky). It’s not walking up to someone like, “Hey sir, would you like to network?”—please don’t do that. It’s meeting interesting people with similar interests, being genuinely curious about what they’re working on, and having a simple oneliner so people remember you. I’m at Atlassian Team ’24 in Vegas to show what that looks like in real life—catching up with Chloe Shih and chatting with Atlassian’s Head of AI about how AI should free us from low-value work, not replace humans. And if conferences aren’t your thing, I also share the exact tools I use: Meetup, Discord communities (including mine), and Blind for anonymous insights and even referrals.