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This feels like getting a job on hard mode. People should be able to find work thru normal processes not needing to be sort of a small business owner after graduating.
This seems like a sign of let’s shut down the Indian IT mills. If companies really needed employees you could get work thru formal processes instead of networking. It seems like there are a lot of people in his situation. Being better at networking changes who gets the job but not the overall need. If jobs are plentiful then companies would hire off the resume pile instead of selecting someone they are already friends with.
Managers will always go for friends (or at least former coworkers/employees they were on good terms with) first if they can. When jobs are plentiful, they'll search the resume pile, but only after exhausting the group of people they know.
The problem with people talking about "networking" is there are some people good at networking, and these people tend to be concentrated in professions such as sales, marketing, and in management in all fields. Whereas other people are bad at networking, and some fields -- certainly including non-management tech -- have a lot of those people. Telling those people to do networking is a waste of breath; at best they might know what networking is (but just as possibly the term may have no sensible referent), but they have no way of doing it.
Which of course is why networking works so well in those fields. You have to do networking to get a sales job, but everyone's doing it; it's a minimum requirement and you need more, or at least to be better at networking than your competition. If you can do networking in tech, you're way ahead of the competition.
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