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WhyEssEff [she/her] @hexbear.net

how the fuck do you network

active networking is the 10th circle of hell,never in my life have I felt so actively disgusted with myself in a social context. how do you do this without the urge to

or how do you tamp down that urge because oh my god I cannot stomach it, it feels so fucking slimy to do. i can't even do it at events where the sole purpose is networking, my dad pressed me into one and I bailed 15 minutes in after hovering around, it feels so utterly degrading and gross

18 comments

  • I feel like networking is something they made up to pass off having your rich dad introduce you to his rich friends as a skillset

  • I've never had anything but a bottom rung position in my entire life so I've never had to deal with this. Instead, I was just treated as sub human by pretty much every customer for nearly two decades of my life. Fun times

    • Now in the 21st century you need to do a hell lot of networking to nepo your way into that bottom rung postion!

      Really cool and good work is treated like an exclusive country club!

  • memorize a few STAR stories, a few anecdotes about yourself, and some industry relevant questions. people will tend to follow the same patterns when first meeting someone, but these usually vary by industry. walk up to someone, look them in the eye, shake their hand, and tell them your name. from your description, it's a college thing, so they already know you're a student and which college you attend, so they'll probably start off asking what your major or year is. use that as an opportunity to launch into a short anecdote. at this point they either already told you what they do in the introduction, at which point you can ask one of those questions you memorized, or they haven't, so you ask and then use a memorized question. they'll answer, you can nod along, then usually they follow up with a question of their own. use a STAR story or some industry knowledge to respond to this. if you ever end up with an awkward silence, either anecdote, STAR, or part ways. try to slip in a business card exchange at some point, maybe right after the handshake, maybe when parting ways.

  • I network with really long ethernet cables since my router is downstairs. I get a primal sort of satisfaction out of long, tidy cable runs.

  • You can do baseline networking by just going to events in your industry and talking to people. Intentionally networking using a persona can be exhausting. You can get some good mileage by just making yourself known as "a person that does X Y Z without making me hate them" among people you might someday work with.

    Events intended to exactly be for networking are universally terrible. They're for employers to recruit, basically. A job fair. But these things are also good for networking, let's say for people who can program:

    • Hackathons
    • Programming language interest groups
    • A nice open source event
    • Something about a particular kind of data like maps or civic data or academics

    You can go to those things and just hang out and chat and so on and it counts as networking. Some of the people might even be cool.

    Also doing socialist organizing has a component that can act as networking, though I don't intentionally treat it as that because that's gross. Socialists like to work with other socialists. I've had many socialists offer to get me jobs. Socialists are cool.

  • I am a complete and laughable failure at networking in a professional context.

    Interestingly enough, I am a resounding success at networking in a progressive and/or radical context.

18 comments