The problem is you think this is somehow normal. That's not how all engineers work. Maybe you work a job and do good work, but then the team disintegrates, peop

The problem is you think this is somehow normal. That's not how all engineers work. Maybe you work a job and do good work, but then the team disintegrates, people quit, you lose track of co-workers because they were just co-workers and not friends (even if you had an excellent working relationship). It's not necessarily normal at all to retain close relationships with past co-workers, even less so to routinely network through them let alone retain them as references. The entire reason LinkedIn exists is because most people, even many very highly skilled people in professional career roles, find it difficult to make effective use of such networks, for example. And if you're an engineer who has experienced a rough patch of employment or worked at a company or in a role or under a boss they hated or experienced a period of burnout or underperformed somewhere due to any of those circumstances the whole thing gets that much more difficult.