Building Relationships Q&A and Videos

I am good at LeetCode style problem solving and can also manage system design, but I never get interview calls when I apply through the company portals. Also recruiters barely accept LinkedIn requests and even those who accept them do not respond when reached out to for an open position.

Question was inspired by . In it, he talked about how he was able to get his role at Course Hero because it was a scrappy startup when he joined, and was willing to take bets.

Do you have advice on how to find similar startups? And also connect with startup founders (and not get ghosted)?

Some consequent questions:

1. How do you know if a startup is scrappy or if it is shady/dysfunctional?
2. Are there any resources on Taro to connect with founders?

Thanks for any advice or help!

In Alex's case, he met Rahul at Meta and now they're cofounders. How can I build up such deep relationships with other people at Google or any future company I work at?

Hi,

With tons of layoffs already happening and rumors about impending layoffs, is there something one can do to protect themselves? Logically, performing above expectations and being a critical part of the team would make sense. However, recently looking at LinkedIn and other career news, seems like no one can be sure that they’re safe. So, do you have any tips on how to approach this? Does it make sense to stay put within a team where you have great relationship with your manager and skip etc or find a new company to get ahead of this risk? Thanks!

I didn't interact much with people during my school and college years. Now that I'm stepping into a new phase of my life (my first job), I want to improve myself.

I'll have obvious reasons to interact with my teammates, so I'll try my best to socialize as much as possible (any suggestions are welcome). But how should I go about networking with people outside my team? Should I just randomly approach someone to introduce myself? When should I do it? When they are working they would be busy, so should I catch up with people during lunch (and what can I do if my whole team generally eats lunch together)? Will it be okay to go and sit or talk with a bunch of people having some conversation, or should I try to talk with individuals first?

Also, I'll be the juniormost folk there (other than maybe interns), how fine will it be to approach anyone random (since they can be very senior, which I don't know yet)? Even if I know someone senior to me previously (like the people I met during my internship), I find it hard to start a chat and find the right balance between disturbing them and having a conversation. And in general, I won't have much context to talk about the majority of the topics.

I know I'm really clueless, so any answers or resources would be highly appreciated!