Yes, that's a thing if you have good relationships with coworkers who have hiring power in later jobs. Since I switched to being a founder I've firmly disabused

Yes, that's a thing if you have good relationships with coworkers who have hiring power in later jobs. Since I switched to being a founder I've firmly disabused most previous coworkers of the notion that I'd ever come to work with them, but I used to regularly hear from them, and now I routinely reach out to the people that I liked working with. If you're not experiencing this, you really can't ask anyone else anything, but you can ask yourself what's wrong. It might just be that you haven't made friends with people who have hiring influence; that said, most people can at least refer folks. More likely is that you aren't getting personally close enough with people at work, so they are not thinking of you. Spend more time interacting on a human level with non-engineers, who are way more often to be influential re: hiring at future jobs. It's also possible that you're not considered a solid worker, or you don't get along with people, but in my experience that's a lot less common than merely not making friends with people who are likely to have jobs to offer in the future. Learning to find and befriet those people is a key career skill.