If you call it 'networking' it sounds bad.

If you call it 'getting out there and speaking to people, listening to what their problems, hopes, opinions are, and sharing the same yourself and making a connection to see if you can mutually help each other' then it suddenly sounds like a better thing, doesn't it?

Networking isn't talking to people about important things. It's talking to people with the specific goal of moving your career forward. That's what makes chronic networkers insufferable, and those people give networking a bad rap.

I network all the damn time. I talk to people. I get lunch with new people who I don't know (there's a standing invite in my HN profile for a reason). I don't have some Specific Goal of Moving My Career Forward. I like people, I like meeting people, I like learning about them, and in the future maybe I'll do them a solid or they'll do me one.

It pays off, though. And it's fun.

But I have never started a conversation (at least, not with somebody I didn't already know well, like my boss) with the Specific Goal of Moving My Career Forward.

If that's what you think networking is, you're missing out.

Small note on that one: you probably want to include an e-mail in your about field.

I have and don't receive much spam.

No? Good to know. I'll do that. Thanks.

No, that is what makes bad networkers insufferable.

Really, when you network the goal should be to share and absorb information about who is doing and interested in what. Some time, which may be anywhere from milliseconds to decades, you might remember somebody who is going to benefit from that connection (could be you, could be somebody else, could be the person you talked with) and so you suggests the parties meet.

The people you complain about, and I agree with you 100%, are those who are focused on a particular goal, in the short term.

Human connections are like any other investment, if you try to get results this quarter, you will ruin everything. If you can wait ten years, you can get the world...

Networking is about give and take, providing value and making connections.

I don't want to reply to every single reply here, so I'll clarify here.

I'm not trying to say networking is cold and calculating, or it's bad or whatever. There are 2 points I'm trying to make:

1. Networking isn't inherently about important things, and talking about important things isn't necessarily networking. "What kind of embedded database do you use for that?" can be a great networking question, and maybe it's interesting and relevant to your job, but it isn't necessarily the most important thing to you. Asking "what happens when we die" is generally not a good networking question. I just don't think defining networking as "talking about important things" is correct.

2. People who try very hard at networking to get themselves ahead, with no concern for others, are annoying. Maybe "chronic networkers" is the wrong way to put this, and I don't have a good way to describe it. But sometimes people give off a vibe that they just want to leech off of other people and learn their names so they can ask for a favor later. I'm complaining about the phonies who talk like manipulative car salesmen, not the amicable people who want to meet at coffee shops to chat and talk shop.

> Networking isn't talking to people about important things. It's talking to people with the specific goal of moving your career forward.

If that's what you think networking is, I can't imagine that you're getting great results. Are you?

For about a year, I smoked cigarettes. Taking a smoke break with your boss, and their boss, is one way to be noticed, stick out from the pack, and advance your career. Other methods are healthier.

I wonder if anyone would notice if you 'smoked' an inert substance in a vape pen?

At my former job, you could always tell who'd get the promotions by who smoked with who. It sucked, as a non-smoker, but I eventually fell into the habit of going out with them while they smoked and just talking.

Healthier example: I met my boss doing group trail runs.

The way you move your career forward is by talking to people about important things and providing some kind of value to the people you are talking to -- if networking with you does not benefit other people, they won't do it!

The motivation may be self-serving, but the outcome is that you help others while you help yourself.

Is it though?

If you look at a less "localized" instance: Donald Trump arguably won the election because he was actually more in tune with the dissatisfaction of a significant portion of America than pretty much all other political candidates.

Sure, this might not be for the benefit of America in the long run, but the idea that unimportant things made a man president of the United States is ridiculous.

The key points he built his campaign on are obviously very important to many people, and a political campaign is just networking at scale (like any other advertisement).

Hmm, not really.

Everyone should just work in isolation right? Nobody needs any help or to share any ideas or problems?

This isn't about working, it's about getting together in cliques to decide who should be offered the best positions, based on mostly irrelevant personality factors.

It isn’t. Someone I know (who hired me at one of my jobs) is an expert with people. He’s had many Successful exits and somehow always has a team that loves to work for him that’s great at their job. Knowing him has led to me discovering way more teams I could work with.

It’s great and very helpful to people like me - who are less effective at building that network of people. I think it’s great these people exist. They’ve been a multiplier on what I can do.

So the degree of success of your career may be entirely due to your luck in meeting a person like that. It doesn't seem very efficient, from the point of view of getting the right people into the right positions.

>It doesn't seem very efficient

It actually isn't. Which is exactly the reason networking is emphasized so much. You generally have to meet many people, with virtually no way to reliably prescreen them to get any benefit out of it. If it were a lot more efficient, it would be a lot easier and there wouldn't be a need to heavily emphasize it.

There’s no way around it without an oracle ranking us all at our suitability for a job, unfortunately, and I would question the ability of such a thing to exist, never mind the ethics.

Something has to connect people with various skills and I trust people to do this better than anything to be honest. I would imagine that it would be a false efficiency for something else to happen. The number of charlatans in the world is too high and without human filtering I would never participate.

You have really misunderstood society.

Nobody is "given" these opportunities by some Opportunity Santa. Those who go out and search for opportunities find, create and take them.

It's not a misunderstanding, I'm asking if that's the best way to achieve optimal results. How many social problems are caused by people not being offered opportunities for spurious reasons?

It works both ways. Society would be better off if some of the people who have no interest in networking accepted it as a necessary evil and learned how to do it.

That's silly. Skill acquisition is important for everyone.

You know how in Pokemon they keep on teaching you "don't tackle your problems alone, learn to depend on your friends?" That's what networking is.

That approach requires learning to make friends in the first place. I don't naturally tend to talk to people in that mode. I find most "social" spaces disorienting and exhausting to be in for more than a few minutes; when I do convince myself to go to a party or other social gathering, I tend to get conversation-starters along the lines of "are you okay?". The very few actual friends I've had in my life have mostly been others who are socially awkward, and none of those relationships are still active because either my family moved or theirs did.

That is to say: I think there's a lot more variation in this space than most people are prepared to acknowledge.

So true. Seems like this situation has haunted humanity for thousands of years.

>Think of how much society is set back because people who have no interest or ability with "networking" aren't given the opportunities that they should have had.

Your frustration is likely borne out of the assumption that people deserve all those opportunities.