Something happens somewhere around your tenth year that nobody warns you about. You stop meeting new people and start meeting the same ones again.
The contractor who sat opposite you in your second job turns up as the architect at a company you are interviewing with. The graduate you trained is now hiring for a team you want to join. A recruiter mentions a name and it belongs to somebody you shared an on call rota with years ago. From inside your first job this industry looks enormous. In practice you spend a career inside a few overlapping circles: your language, your city or your timezone, your sector. Those circles are not large, and in effect they keep tightening, because people change companies far more often than they once did and every move stitches two circles together.
That has consequences worth acting on early rather than discovering at the midpoint.
Most of the good roles you end up in will reach you through somebody who has worked with you, not through a form. Not because the industry is rigged, but because hiring is an expensive guess and the cheapest way to shrink the risk is to ask a person you trust. You will be that person for somebody else sooner than you expect, and you will find it an easy favour to give and a hard one to refuse.
Which makes how you treat people something other than a purely moral question. The junior you were patient with. The tester whose bug reports you took seriously. The vendor engineer you did not talk down to. The colleague you handed over to properly on your way out the door. Each of those is a quiet vote you collect years later, at a moment you could not have planned for.
So keep the thing alive at almost no cost. When someone leaves, get an address that is not their work one. Answer the ex colleague asking what a company is really like, honestly. Take the call when somebody you liked asks for half an hour. Say the good thing about a former teammate out loud when their name comes up and nobody asked you.
And leave well every time, including the places that deserved worse. That last month is the story people tell about you.
Tools and titles churn. The people are the part that persists.
– Asael Shinder
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