Think of it less as a friendship network which requires active effort to maintain and more of a collection of people who have experienced first hand your techni

Think of it less as a friendship network which requires active effort to maintain and more of a collection of people who have experienced first hand your technical abilities and can vouch for them. Hiring good engineers is really hard and interview processes aren't all that good at selecting good engineers. So if you are looking for a new opportunity and have a way to broadcast that fact to former colleagues (LinkedIn!) then you will likely be able to get a lot of leads from people you may not have talked to in years and maybe didn't even know that well on a personal level when you did work together. I can think of probably a dozen people I have worked with over the year, haven't spoken to since we parted ways professionally but would nonetheless immediately try to hire (or refer for hire) if they reached and said they were looking.