After being laid off from FANG, I feel this essay painfully. One things I've learned is that people in FANG companies are a VERY SPECIAL breed and tend to only

After being laid off from FANG, I feel this essay painfully. One things I've learned is that people in FANG companies are a VERY SPECIAL breed and tend to only have connections in other FANG companies and they are next to useless in the real world. So when things are going well FANG network helps, but when they are going badly like now -- their value from a job perspective is nearly useless. They have hyper narrow network and experience that applies almost entirely to FANG culture, scale and goals. They have very very few real money connections, like VCs etc, and really haven't built much reputation there since they have been with FANG their entire career. They also have a certain enui that really is entirely about "I can never leave FANG even thought I don't like it, because I don't believe I can function anywhere else." It's a bizarre situation. But fortunately I came across a 'hyper node' (people who just happen to have hundreds of high quality connections) and she helped us get to funding conversations and even deep inside some competitors to learn whats going on. So lesson is of me, you might not need the network, but it do need to know the person that does!