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Yeah, I don't think any of your friends offered you a position because you're they're friend. They offered you a position because they knew you AND they knew yo

Yeah, I don't think any of your friends offered you a position because you're they're friend. They offered you a position because they knew you AND they knew you were smart/talented/a coder/whatever. I got my first foot in the door via an internship on a referral from a friend who had interned there the year before. I had no formal credentials (just taking CS classes on the side of an Econ degree in college), but I had spent all of my math/CS classes studying with this kid. He knew I was smart and put his own ass on the line to get me an interview. You can be successful purely by reading books in a room, writing code alone, and building some brilliant startup. (E.g. look at the CD Baby guy, what's his name). But it's SUPER unlikely. You're way better off being a social human being, building relationships/trust, and paying it back/forward to folks that do right by you when you know you deserve it.

dnautics 9y ago
my contention is not that I got any jobs because I was a friend (or a contact of a friend) but rather that I very likely wouldn't have gotten any jobs if I weren't a contact of a friend. A lot of the SV narratives circle around meritocracy (or other ways of 'hacking the signalling game' even. And when you say "it's SUPER unlikely", I think you're 100% correct. And so challenging the meritocracy myth is important.
- ericd 9y ago
  Your story is the "meritocracy myth" in action. You demonstrating your merit to people who then vouched for you. It'd be nice if we were good at judging people objectively without knowing them for very long, but we're not, especially in very important aspects like trustworthiness.