Some of them, though it's hard to become really good friends with a coworker after only three months of a remote job.
At the jobs that I stayed two years at I definitely made lots of friends
> Did you maintain contact?
For a few of them, the ones that I got close to (generally the people that were as geeky as I am about bizarre CS concepts). That was immensely handy to get job referrals, and it's in no small part why I was able to land my current (very decent!) gig.
In most places I've worked, people generally like me ok (I hope), and usually I will develop one or two pretty close friends as a result if I've been there sufficiently long.
> In those three jobs you were laid off from did any of your coworkers also get laid off?
Yes, though in the more recent laid off jobs I sadly didn't know people well enough to get them to give me referrals or anything.
> No matter what story your resume tells, social connections will usually be a louder signal.
I mostly agree, but only to a certain extent. If you can make it to the interview stage, a good referral and social contacts can be great and really helpful, but the problem with short stints is that you're considerably more likely to fail the initial screening by the internal recruiter.
I get it, I don't really blame them, you can't go into super thorough detail on every resume that's submitted, so they have to look for red flags to immediately filter out stuff.
