I have seen people in similar circumstances that have enormous personal blind spots for issues that show up in interviews and with past colleagues. It's much easier to blame AI rather than admit or address those. If you have 20 years of experience and no one wants to work with you again, that is telling.

I've worked primarily with offshore devs. I can't say that's been great for a network and if I'd known how bad of an impact it would have on my professional development due to effectively zero network, I'd have avoided it entirely. Healthcare IT is dominated by offshore so beware.

i got words of encouragement but no one had leads

Consider that that is what most people tell past co-workers who they don't want to refer

You likely need blunt feedback from someone you can trust in the industry

4 or 5 of them told me they were in the same situation, highly regarded people i never thought that could happen to

Many people only look at LinkedIn when they're on the job market themselves. Or do so infrequently enough that they only see the message weeks/months later, at which point it feels awkward to respond.

I guess you missed this part: "manually messaging EACH of my 250 linkedin contacts asking if they had any leads"

I did read it. What did I get wrong?

You said you went via contacts network. Is this not his contacts network?

Did you mean something else, as in LI itself is fruitless and to reach out directly to past colleagues?

Yes, correct. I went to my contacts, not only in LI. And he writes he PMed all of his ones, and it didn't work, which is surprising to me.

What if you're not the type to maintain relationships w/ former coworkers?

Anyone I once had the personal contact info of - which could now be stale - is also a contact on LI. It just seems like a less weird venue to hit up someone you haven't spoken to since you last worked some position. That's also been largely the case when old coworkers reach out to me.

The key thing is he did hit up what could be defined as his network and got nothing.

I guess you missed the 3rd sentence of the 3 sentence post.

I saw it. "no reaction for personal messages" - presumably, reaching out to contacts means sending personal messages.

Please explain to me like I'm five what point I'm missing here.

>"no reaction for personal messages" - presumably, reaching out to contacts means sending personal messages.

Yes, and culebron21 read that in the article and found it surprising that they did that with no success.

To be frank, I do too. I think my network could shake out a few jobs.