>> The best insurance policy for your career is to be really good at your job, which means working on your job instead of networking.
This isn't true, in my experience. I have a few pretty good jobs on my resume (System Architect at a Fortune 50 company, Manager of Development at a big ad agency). Last year, when I was looking for work, those titles were pretty much entirely disregarded by the employers I applied to. Almost every one of them told me they never trusted titles from other companies and tried to get me to join as a mid-level engineer.
Every time I had a friend inside the company, however, I was routed to senior-level jobs that actually matched my experience. I've spent time keeping up those friendships with occasional notes and lunches. If I had just assumed that being really good at my job would be my best insurance, I would not have found the opportunities I did.
Yes, seriously, never trust titles from other companies. I've been in places where everybody was the "manager" or "architect" of something. Test manager, release manager, system manager, configuration manager, etc etc. Most titles barely had any responsibilities at all and were given even to fresh grads as they joined the team. Essentially it didn't mean anything and in reality all 15 managers were just plain developers.
This was not even a startup where people get a cto-title just by happening to be there. This was a group inside bigco.
This isn't true, in my experience. I have a few pretty good jobs on my resume (System Architect at a Fortune 50 company, Manager of Development at a big ad agency). Last year, when I was looking for work, those titles were pretty much entirely disregarded by the employers I applied to. Almost every one of them told me they never trusted titles from other companies and tried to get me to join as a mid-level engineer.
Every time I had a friend inside the company, however, I was routed to senior-level jobs that actually matched my experience. I've spent time keeping up those friendships with occasional notes and lunches. If I had just assumed that being really good at my job would be my best insurance, I would not have found the opportunities I did.