As someone rounding off 20 years in this industry, I'll advise you that it is a _lot_ smaller than you think. Some of the people I've met or worked with early in my career are big names now due to blogging, writing, starting companies, etc.

When I interviewed for my current job, it turned out that I had separate, personal, previous-work-experience connections to all four of my interviewers and it only surfaced during each of the interviews.

And this is after changing my role/specialty.

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And along these lines, be careful who you shit on in this industry and be default-nice to everyone. I'll never forget one role I had that was fully remote where I was mentoring a guy who was a bit on the weaker side technically for the job that we were doing. Everyone else was constantly telling him that he sucked and was pushing him to quit.

It turns out that he was learning the ropes to transition to a huge leadership role in the company and no one knew it. He had previously led an entire division of a massive computer manufacturer, but 2008 wiped out most of his retirement and he had to come back to work. The very first thing that he did with his new responsibility once his role was announced was to give me a huge promotion to work directly under him with no interview.

There are parts of our vast industry that aren’t as large, and the “premier” places to work at are only a few big names. Embedded systems comes to mind for me here as does something like chipset design or telecommunications infrastructure, just to name a few examples I can think of

All complex rewarding software jobs but it’s not the same as say, web development, in terms of choices and volume

> How can a handful of names across an entire industry meaningfully affect your career choice?

I've found myself approached by recruiters for the exact large company and sizable department that one of these people has substantial rank in. It's already had an impact on my decisions.