Steve, you and Nelson are absolutely spot on. I'll add one more important reason to network and it's the diametric opposite to what most people think... it helps you find out which companies you DON'T ever want to work for and it helps find out what the worst ways to do some things are. Knowing the right way to do something certainly helps but knowing the wrong way to do something so you can quickly rule it out is a big help, as well.

For example, would you want to work for a company where you heard "Yeah... the CTO likes to buy everything off the shelf and for any in-house projects that may survive, really mandates the use of cursors because they're easy to understand." 😛

By the way... I won't mention the company, but I [font="Arial Black"]DIDN'T[/font] make that up. :hehe: