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Comment by dorkwood | Hacker News Reader

I use to think of networking as “going to events and handing out my business card”, which I could never quite bring myself to do. I figured I just wasn’t cut out for the whole networking thing.

What I ended up realising after looking back over my career was that I’ve been networking this whole time without even meaning to. By generally working hard and being friendly those who have come and gone over the years, I now have a pretty sizeable network of people who will vouch for me. If someone ever asks me for networking advice, it will be “find a job where other people are doing the same thing as you, and then become someone they enjoy working with”.

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The dark side of that is discrimination when "someone they enjoy working with" is based on more than a friendly attitude and hard work.

And I'm not just talking about the politically favored and protected groups. I'd say it applies even more so to groups that don't get that political support.

To be fair, everyone kind of already knew that "it's all about who you know", so to speak. So the fact that disenfranchised people tend to stay disenfranchised is not really news to most people who followed the inevitable implications of that adage.

Nobody really understands or digs into the implications. They simply assume that if they are successful it's because they are great people while others are not great or as smart or hard working and that's why they suck. It's very difficult for privilege to understand implicit privilege... or for those looking to fix the situation to not piss people off as it's seen with those that are already in the in-group as being unfair.

This has a name, btw:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

But a major part of networking is charisma. Or, as Andy Warhol said, "Without charisma, you're dead."

I think more accurately, it's based more on a friendly attitude than hard work.

I don't really agree. I won't vouch for an asshole, but I'd much rather vouch for someone who is reserved and hard-working than overtly friendly but lazy or incompetent. I don't know of anyone I trust that feels different on that (the topic has come up many times).

I think a lot of the debate here lies in the gap between "vouch for" and "recommend".

It's not just whether people would choose friendly incompetence over reserved hard work, but whether the reserved hard worker is going to be a name anyone mentions when it's time to find a candidate.

> The dark side of that is discrimination when "someone they enjoy working with" is based on more than a friendly attitude and hard work.

In my experience friendly or not, people tend to be quite honest when vouching or generally asked an opinion on someone.

Referring a bad candidate (or an incompetent one) will damage your reputation/credibility, and most people don't want that.

That's true, but it only solves one side of the problem, where unqualified people won't get hired by pure networking. If people only get hired by networking plus performance, it still means that capable people who are pushed out of effective networking (for any of a host of reasons) will lose opportunities. They might not get bad recommendations, they simply won't be on anyone's list to call.

Even worse, it's quite possible for discrimination to become a disincentive to recommending someone, just like incompetence would be. Someone who won't be well-received for personal reasons is effectively a "bad candidate" with the potential to damage the recommender's reputation. The result is that even a person who overcomes barriers to find network connections won't necessarily be able to draw on them effectively.

(A past-tense example to cut down on politics: a Liar's Poker trader wouldn't recommend a friend who couldn't sell, but they also wouldn't recommend a skilled trader who wasn't a friend. And if they had recommended a skilled friend who wasn't a white guy, they could have expected at least as negative a reaction as if they'd recommended a bad trader.)

Network with people that look like/conform to the majority power in your market. They have the same background as other people that are decision makers in that market.

Getting married to one country's politically struggling groups or disenfranchisement issues is playing a totally different game, and is a total waste of time for this game.

I do this in a lot of markets. Almost country by country when necessary. Work with someone that looks like money in that market. Go to the places they are. Don't masquerade your pride of being the front person of your company as 'progress' that society let you get that far just to inspire 4 year olds, unless that is honestly the game you are trying to play.

Although my own background and success would probably inspire people "that look like me", alongside the general distribution of wealth and status seekers

Sadly, this often takes money because powerful people tend to be in expensive areas.

An alternative is to find the lean rising power and make yourself valuable to them.

> Sadly, this often takes money because powerful people tend to be in expensive areas.

Then just be honest about your lack of chances and stop preaching that ill-positioned people have a chance at all. (Not literally 'you', just the industry and society)

There is an even distribution of entrepreneurship across all levels of society, the survivorship bias leans toward the already wealthy and well-connected because they get to retry. Other people have to earn their initial capital for 10+ years, try once, earn again for the next 10+ years and get caught up with supporting some other life changing situation.

> Don't masquerade your pride of being the front person of your company as 'progress' that society let you get that far just to inspire 4 year olds, unless that is honestly the game you are trying to play.

What's the meaning of this? That a person should avoid unnecessary 'progress' PR?

Thats a feature not a bug. Networks are based on trust. You have a shared interest in making sure your recommendations work out and there is nothing more valuable than knowing who you recommend will work out.

Discrimination is based on a realistic assessment of trust?

In the proper context of course it is.

Why would I choose someone I don't know and who I don't know if I can trust when I know someone else who can do the same task, I trust them and are required.

We don't live in a fair society, and I think we all know that. I would not have experienced the same degree of success if I looked different or had an accent, even if the quality of my work was the same. There's nothing meaningful I can do with that information though.

Of course there is ... "I think we all know that" sits, who knows, in the unconscious. Regularly bringing it to the conscious mind, like in this thread perhaps, reminds us of the possibility of making different, better choices should we have that power now, or one day.

>"We don't live in a fair society"

I think it's more correct to say that "the state of nature is incredibly unfair, and our society does not perfectly mitigate this."

that's proper networking, but networking can also means oligarchy~ where you just get inside groups because people know you and you're just not bad enough to get the boot.

Even having a Github profile and some open source contributions is networking in my book.

Passive networking isn't very effective.

I disagree slightly. It's interesting the connections, google chats, calls, etc that have spawned from someone just seeing a random comment or commit I've done on Github. I'm definitely not a heavier contributor and have seen the effects. That may be more than your definition of passive though.

I wouldn't call contributions passive.

"Contributing" versus "having contributions", I suppose.

Lots of advice new-ish engineers implies that just having a Github profile with OSS work will improve prospects, when in reality most people I've seen admit that they don't even check Github profiles for applicants.

As far as the act of contributing turning into discussions, connections, and jobs, that's far more plausible. But I think it's a mistake to imply that merely having that work will provide visibility and opportunities. When people are getting offers passively on the strength of their past OSS work, they're more likely people who wrote popular libraries or led projects than just names on a contributor list.

> I use to think of networking as “going to events and handing out my business card”,

Even this works a bit too well, to be honest.

This is the most important point. Networks are created mostly, not only born into. Success recognizes skill, by developing a skill then ASKING to work for successful organizations(big and small) the network grows naturally.

Network above your pay-grade, these people are more interesting. Colleagues are useless.

I strongly disagree with your points. Building a trusted group of peers is the most valuable action you can take in establishing a network. I don't dispute the value of mentors and high-ranking friends, I know many people who can attribute a large part of their success to the right person in the right position.

However, a group of peers provides the following benefits:

* support and camaraderie, as you are likely facing the same challenges at the same times

* a more natural connection and more conducive environment for meeting and regularly interacting

* a rising tide that raises the whole group, as you help each other gain more success

Finally, I would say that your idea comes dangerously close to the idea of "kissing up and kicking down," which I personally find to be an unfortunate and disingenuous style of network management that discourages me from working with that person.

Did the people above my pay grade just magically get there? Are none of my colleagues ever going to advance in their careers? Why wouldn't I want to cast a wide net? Why wouldn't I be friendly and nice to my coworkers?

I've gotten jobs through former co-workers who have moved on to new companies. Some of my peers have been promoted into management and having a good relationship with them prior has given me a leg up. It's so incredibly easy to network with your colleagues. Just work hard and be a decent person and the network will create itself. Acting so dismissive of colleagues is short-sighted and silly.

That's called brown-nosing and it's not attractive.

If you could effectively network above your pay-grade, your pay-grade would be different. Then again, if you think colleagues are useless, that will likely not help anything -- does that mean if you were your own colleague, you would think you are useless?

Yes, I would and it would be true too.

Oh right, I forgot to mention I'm not a wage slave and not in a hurry to become one either.

I was talking about actual business opportunities. Good luck getting anywhere by being friendly to the, quick frankly, annoyingly arrogant sysadmin. Sure, some of them are nice - although most of them aren't because of the nature of the job, but that's not the point. We all are "nice" people, that does not pay the bills.

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