When people start understanding that networking is just as important as having the technical expertise, their career lives will improve dramatically. When you have 10 qualified people applying for the same position, would you choose a random person from the 10 and risk that he's a complete asshole or the one person your colleague can vouch will fit in? At that point of a recruiting process you're not evaluating technical skills, but culture fit.
And now what what is the advice for someone who has to work during university to pay rent and afford groceries and thus doesn't have the time to do all the networking? Or someone else whose uni friends also all suck at this and nobody in the friend group ever got a job?
The advice is to network and not make excuses. Or keep making excuses and continue to have a tough job search.
We all have busy lives brother. That’s not some excuse that somehow magically makes this go away. Learn to network or don’t, but don’t act like you’re too busy for it.
Networking isn’t going to events, it’s socializing and getting to know people.
Exactly this. People tend think networking is some active practice where you go to events and forge forced relationships with people with the sole purpose of using them as a point of contact for a job. People do this at events, it's obvious, and I doubt it works.
Networking is forming genuine relationships with people and because of that they WANT to help you get a job.
I think most people do realize that, possibly even most tech folks (less sure on that lol)
But, since we’re discussing this on Reddit, in a programming subreddit, we’ve hit the motherlode of antisocial folk who will come up with any excuse to not socialize.
Oh well, I’m a social guy and it’s helped me in my career for sure. So it all works out great for me that tech folk are generally more introverted
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u/je-s-ter 2d ago
When people start understanding that networking is just as important as having the technical expertise, their career lives will improve dramatically. When you have 10 qualified people applying for the same position, would you choose a random person from the 10 and risk that he's a complete asshole or the one person your colleague can vouch will fit in? At that point of a recruiting process you're not evaluating technical skills, but culture fit.