If you sit in front of a screen your job is at risk. That was Robert Sterling’s take in a recent tweet.

Meta and KPMG recently announced they were laying off 10% of their staff. Microsoft is cutting 7%. The expectation is those are just the beginning of cuts triggered by AI.

For older people, the Microsoft “formula” of offering buyouts to anyone with long tenure seemed a particularly ominous sign of things to come.

And what’s coming is that in all likelihood you will be fired before you retire.

The one thing you can do to prepare is build your network. And this is your reminder that effective networking has changed.

You shouldn’t wait. And you shouldn’t be reaching out to friends, colleagues or former associates. Those people are already in your network. What you need is to widen it.

I was laid off from corporate four years ago. The friends and former colleagues I called were sympathetic. None of those calls or meetings however led to much.

Most people will discover they need to build an entirely new network. In part that is because whatever job they are looking for is one that has existed.

You should attend meetups and pop-up events to connect with new people in your field or the industry you aspire to work in.

I was reminded of that when I saw a tweet yesterday by Dylan Patel, who runs the AI infrastructure firm SemiAnalysis. On Sunday morning he tweeted that he was going to be in the coffee shop Dark Matter in New York City from noon to 1:30 pm.

He said that anyone who was interested should drop by.

Fifty people did.

This is increasingly how people convene and it’s the best opportunity to build a new network because you probably don’t know anyone there and the crowd has been drawn based on shared interest, not previous relationships.

What’s new is how people use social media to advertise gatherings. Someone will post on X or Instagram that they’re hosting a dinner or running a breakfast and you DM them to apply. You still need an invite, but the door is open in a way it wasn’t before.

When I was fired I went on Twitter and found Andrew Yeung’s tech parties, Morgan Barrett’s breakfast club for tech founders and Phil Rosen’s Journalist Club. I also was invited to dinners for founders organized by Jacklyn Dallas.

None of these were people I knew previously.

The hardest part for me initially was that I was often much older than most of the people in the room. But that was something I just had to get over.

This is how it works these days.

It’s time to adapt.