Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember, hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're available.

In my experience all my valuable connections have come from me working really hard on the same team as them and being goals oriented and meeting those goals; not wasting time dilly dallying in the hallways. Making meaningful connections in the hallway sounds like a middle manager thing.

Being sociable and taking an interest in other people via hallway convos is also a good way to build connections and/or friendships, but that has nothing to do with my earlier comment.

And before you reply: how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you? Keep in mind that a lot of people in tech (myself included) are literally digital natives who learned to socialize on the internet before adapting to doing it in person.

When you spend multiple hours together with someone day after day, you develop a bond. That leads to being generous and helpful and this connection is sorely missing in a fully remote world.

> how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you?

No setup will work for every single person. But for most of the humans, in-person interaction helps create better bonds. Here are some research papers[1][2]. Yes, there will be a few outliers who do not like meeting people IRL, but that ultra-small minority should not be dictating policies which go counter to human nature.

[1] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1038/s41598-021-045... - "In‑person attendance was associated with greater synchronicity in autonomic nervous system activation at the group level, which resulted in more transformative experiences and contributed to stronger identity fusion."

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321... - "In both experiments, positive affect was higher after in-person support vs. texting."

Lol. Never knew that, time for me to to go into therapy.

Otherwise, they probably just moved on to be another cog in the machine that has no say over hiring.

And if you are under 40 (probably under 60), yes, some of your coworkers will advance to positions of power. Nothing to do with luck, it's just numbers. But you can certainly increase your own opportunities by directing your helpfulness, generosity and competency towards as many people as possible.

Why do you assume he doesn't do that?

That sounds awful, none of your senior or principal engineers offered/provided any mentorship?

I graduated college with significant, real-world programming skills. I immediately went to work writing software. The only thing my first manager contributed was showing me where to find documentation, and even then, books that I found on my own were far more valuable overall.

It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no training, just self-learning and resourcefulness.

I can't even imagine what mentorship software people could need, besides general career or investment advice.

I’ve worked at great companies and awful companies, and no matter what, I have always met talented people in these companies who I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with — across all disciplines.

The most valuable work you can do when in software engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve their goals: code is just a means to an end, collaboration is how we discover what to build.

One man's cynic is another man's realist.

In my opinion, OP's description of office life is idealistic, like a teacher describing the theme of Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland's Opus.

I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with.

I don't know what you mean when you say meaningful professional relationships, but despite having made many work friends, as stated previously none of them have led to career development (OP's mention of networking).

Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with

I STRONGLY disagree with this universal claim.

I think you just had bad luck

I never said that I didn't make friends, I said that I never made a connection that proved valuable in the context of networking, i.e. career growth.

My first decade of employment had zero mentoring and was basically just a gauntlet of abuse and unsafe work practices. Only time it got good was working w big blue, no abuse there. Idealic tbh. After that back into the slums of normie business. Got fired for upholding security standards lol.

Business/work isn't as kind to some of us as it is to others it would seem.

It's no different. American corporate culture has assimilated FAANG 100%. The only thing remaining is the free food and fancy offices (but not for long).