I don’t have any connections | Hacker News Reader

I don’t have any connections

ninjasandrobots.com

117 pointsawwstn39 comments

Heh. A rant, if I may:

I lived in a small town in northern Canada until I was 17. I had had an interest in programming since I was 11, but the job most relevant to "computers" you could get up there was repairing them at BestBuy. My parents weren't particularly rich, and didn't encourage me to strive for high academics or anything of the sort; in fact, the only thing they really wanted me to do was to get a driver's license, so I could have a fallback job as a truck driver. I hadn't a single role-model for the "white-collar dream" I found myself pulled into from playing with Linux and reading Slashdot. I just knew I couldn't manage it living where I did.

At 17, I finished high-school and, with virtually no separation, moved to a more reasonably-large city (Vancouver) and began taking courses at a community college. I believed, at the time, that taking my first two years at a "cheaper" school would be good for my future student-loan-debt load, and optimized for this instead of, say, networking opportunities. The community college was full of unmotivated students just trying to squeak by, teachers who knew less about CS than I had learned from the Internet, and in the end, I didn't feel motivated enough† to make the grades to manage a transfer into the CS program of the "state" university (UBC.) My student loans cut off, and I dropped out.

I started attempting to do software-dev contracting. (It's very hard to get full-time employment as a developer without a Bachelor's, whether or not you're an autodidact with 8+ years' experience in some technologies.) I moved from one gig to another, never really finding that fabled "word of mouth" that would let me lever one contracting job into another. I always worked alone, and remotely; I was never hired onto a team. I looked on eLance a lot.

I still haven't made, in all this time (I'm 23 now), a single "programmer friend" who would qualify as a connection, nor met a programmer in person from whom I've learned a single fact, rule, or concept I wasn't already familiar with, or been introduced to any neat new technology. This isn't bragging about my talents--rather, just painting a picture of the bottom-of-the-barrel places I've been hanging out. I'm sure I would feel out-of-my-depth (in the best way) sitting in any arbitrary coffee shop in Silicon Valley‡, or in any even-somewhat-modern startup here or elsewhere.

If you want to talk about lacking connections, first imagine the closest thing to a "programmer" in your Facebook friends list being your friend from high-school who does accounting at an oil-and-gas firm. Imagine everyone in your family saying that the one time you got paid $50k was "a fluke and won't happen again; you should just work at a gas station like your mom and your aunt do" (leaving alone the fact that you don't have enough customer-service experience to be considered for that job in a competitive market.) Imagine having no major portfolio pieces you can show off, despite years of coding, because you've alternated between struggling to survive on a total dry-up of income with no savings (no time for side-projects), and doing programming jobs for capricious clients who take your backend system and give up on the idea before hiring a front-end guy, relegating your efforts to only be examinable through API calls and doodles of wireframes. (And while you're at it, imagine having a few friends in the US, who have perfectly good job opportunities available for you with their companies, but who can't help you out until you go back and finish school--which you can't, at least yet, afford to do.)

But there is that app I made two years ago that I still have in closed beta, the browser-based-collaboration-environment one with an active community even when I don't check in on it for weeks at a time. No time to remodel it into something good enough to launch to the public... but it lets me call myself a startup founder nevertheless. I'm just in stealth-mode, that's it. Heh.

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† Having undiagnosed ADHD may have had something to do with that as well. I imagine, having detected and compensated for that flaw, I would be quite better at slogging through that remedial-feeling workload if I had to do the same now.

‡ I'd love to move there, actually... if I had American citizenship. Or an undergraduate degree to legally qualify me for an H1B or TN work visa. Blocked on all fronts, there.

Have you considered meetup? There are many tech-oriented meetups near Vancouver: http://www.meetup.com/PolyglotVancouver/ http://www.meetup.com/Vancouver-social-media-nonprofits-soci... http://www.meetup.com/HackerNestVAN/

Being in that position is not unusual at the young age of 23. I'd suggest looking for a full-time position first, getting some experience under your belt, then trying the contracting thing.

If you are set up to take an occasional trip south, Vancouver is not far from Seattle or Bellingham, both of which have active developer communities. (I live in Bellingham).

Vancouver has quite a few talented engineers but the teams can be a bit insular. The meetups are good and you should definitely go to either the Ruby on Rails one, or Node Brigade. CascadiaJS is happening soon too.

If you want to get some introductions I'd be happy to grab a coffee.

Connections don't have to be people you meet & interact with physically. Many of the people I work with I've either never met, or only meet every couple of years on an international flight to the other side of the world.

Try reaching out to people on HN, email them with a specific question about how they achieved something that you're interested in & that they've done. I've been trying some of that recently and had a ridiculously high response rate (100% so far.) It might not turn into a "connection", but you'll probably learn something in the meantime. Expect that maybe only 1 out of 100 people you contact will actually turn into a "connection".

The connection I needed to found my software company (not a big company, but it's provided for me (and now my family) for 14 years) came from e-mailing with the author of a hybrid math / programming book about bugs in his published code.

And in the last five years I started working on the Perl 6 project in my spare time. I've made at least a dozen connections in the Perl community that way, and getting started with it didn't involve anything more than getting on the IRC channel and participating. That also found me a group of peers who have a lot to teach me about programming. Not to mention I get the chance to discuss language design and implementation issues with Larry Wall on a regular basis.

What I'm trying to say is the Internet and open source software make it easier to make connections with people doing interesting work than it has ever been in the history of mankind. If you're just looking to make connections in the physical area around where you live, you're really missing out.

I waffled on whether or not to reply here, due to the personal nature of some of what I have to say, but here it is.

First; quit making excuses and having regrets. Either get off your ass and make it happen or be satisfied with not doing so. This is the only life you are going to get. It is short, and people in far worse situations have gotten further because they aren't afraid to try.

I grew up in total poverty, surrounded by poor uneducated friends and family, mostly who had defeatist attitudes that nothing better was possible for them. We were a family of poor white trash the whole time I was growing up. Everyone at school looked down on me and mine. Some of my immediate family, friends, cousins I grew up with are now addicts, thieves, pushers. Some of them are in rehab, some of them are dead; one in a shoot out with the cops. Most of the rest are working dead end jobs and drinking their way to early graves.

During my junior year in high school, my friend Mike looked at me and asked, "What are you going to do after high school?" I told him I was going to go to college, get a good job; and eventually maybe start my own business. Mike said, "That's a nice dream, but you're just going to end up hanging around here getting high and drinking yourself to death like the rest of us, because that's who we are. We're losers."

As a child I was beaten, stabbed, ate food out of dumpsters. On top of all of this I have terrible ongoing chronic medical illnesses and have had since I was a very small child. I can say, emphatically, my situation was worse than yours.

Now I have been writing software for 15 years, and I am not the best, but I'm damn good at what I do. I make enough money; I live a good life. I have connections. None of this was given to me. I worked and sweated, I gave, and I took back. And when everyone said, "You can't."; I said, "I will."

Cold emailing / cold calling definitely works. But it's a Good Idea to do your homework first. Here's a little tip I learned some time ago, and have been working on implementing lately:

Say you want to sell something to Foobar, Incorporated. But you have no warm contacts there. OK, you can go to Hoovers.com, or use LinkedIn, Jigsaw, etc. and get names, contact info, etc. BUT... and here's the "tip" part... on LinkedIn you can also find people who used to work for Foobar, Inc. and contact them first. Why? Because there is a good chance they'll offer to talk to you (people like to be helpful and it makes them feel important) and they have little to lose (they don't work there anymore), but yet they can still give you TONS of valuable inside information (depending on how long they've been gone) to help you establish credibility when you do call.

Example: The info on LinkedIn, Hoovers, etc. can be outdated. So let's say you have a list of 15 names of people at Foobar, Inc. Some of those people probably aren't there anymore, or have changed titles, etc. When you talk to an ex employee, you can run through the list with them and find out what's going on.

You also get a chance to ask things like:

"Who is the real power broker over there?"

"Are there any big landmines I should know to avoid walking into"?

"What are the main strategic issues management is grappling with there"?

etc.

Of course, not all ex employees will want to talk to you, but for any reasonably sized company, you should be able to find a few. And, you do have to be aware that they, in turn, have their biases and misconceptions, etc., and so you can't take everything they say as Gospel truth. But go through the exercise with a couple of people and you should be able to get pretty clear picture.

Now when you call somebody at Foobar, you can start off sounding very credible:

"I know companies like yours often deal with issue X, and may have tried solutions like Z that didn't work... I'd like to talk to you about another way of solving that problem..."

Where you learned about "X" and "Z" from those "ex employee talks".

I'm not sure if I'm alone here but I just lack social skills. It's like everyone but me has this secret book of how to interact with people. I'm not autistic or anything but I had little social life when growing up. I was actually rather popular at the Internet but that didn't translate well to real life. I'm now trying to catch up in my early twenties. I meet interesting people every day but connecting with them non-superficially is the hardest part. I am too shy to talk about anything and I have low self-esteem. I literally start to mumble when telling a story if I don't know the person well. So far rationalizing about it hasn't helped.

It's a wonder I managed to get a few friends.

If somebody said to me what you just posted, I would want to talk to them. I feel the same way. It's often jokingly pointed out that two introverts will never engage each other. I think that in addition to being funny, it's also true.

This is something I see pretty often. I'm a business co-founder, so this stuff is pretty much my bread and butter.

An idea I've been kicking around is some kind of "Social Skills Primer" type product, probably done by video for ease of explanation and to capture/explain nuance.

I haven't fully decided on doing this yet, but would that be interesting to you, do you think?

As a side note, I would highly recommend reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.

I'm still a bit wary of this kind of advice, because it's mostly pushing against the technological meritocracy. The loudest in the room gets the light, the most outspoken is raised as an example. All this effort is still not spent building the right product. I live in France, where the tradition is that money, marketing and sales people run the company. The only successful startups here now are selling advertisement, optimizing advertisement (or whatever retargeting is), dealing personal data and other user-bothering technology. Nobody is optimizing mousetraps or producing media content anymore. But hey, they worked their connections while you where making smoke in the lab.

And knowing people or coming from money is the technological meritocracy?

No, "technological meritocracy" is just bait for geeks to work long hours on low money and stock options.

What this article proposes is to counter connections and money with being the loudest - realistic, yes, but depressing.

Creating a startup isn't primarily technical. It's about business stuff - marketing, hiring, customer support, all sorts of soft skill things. All the clever code in the world won't make a startup succeed without the other stuff.

So really, "technical meritocracy" isn't what makes for successful startups. I think the concentration of technical founders in these parts gives us an unbalanced view.

You forgot another company runner in France, and a very important one: the procurement people.

These guys make it incredibly difficult to build new businesses. In their mind contracting a company with less than a hundred people is heresy.

Not heresy; it's risky. If you do it and stuff goes wrong, your boss will ask you wtf you hired this puny company and not a large one. No matter the reputation of the large one (bad or good) or the reputation of the small one (bad or good).

I know connections between people can be quite awesome and important. It is even more awesome if they can discuss about something important and give their opinion and listen to your opinion without starting a fight. When there is a problem it is good to have someone to ask help from.

I maybe have one true friend and we mutually keep our friendship active. Then there are those who may drink coffee or have a beer with me now and then, but we never really talk about anything important. Then there are those so called social media friends who really do not care what you do. Then there are these few people who use my kindness quite often for help as they have found I will most likely help them anyway I can.

Seriously I have tried to keep in contact with people who may some day become great people. The problem I have is that I lose motivation to stay in one way contact when the other does not seem to care a shit how my days go even though I try all kinds of things to get them active even though I am not in need of any kind of help at the moment, but in future I might be.

It's not like I want to be liked, but maybe a call to a bar and have fun once would be nice. Why it always has to be me who initiates almost every damn discussion or happening where I could take part in this tiny circle of my so called friends. These days I don't even care to try and just let them be and answer them if they have a problem.

When talking about these connections with famous people you could take advantage of I often do not even press the send button because I've realized my own stupidity after explaining my problem in the email. I'm not looking for help. I'm just stating that lonely people can solve problems and have fun too, though if someone would see me having fun alone they probably would say I'm going nuts.

Good Friday from Finland.

So, how was your day?

Thanks for asking. It was fine after driving few girls from bar to their homes and getting back home to sleep until 10 am and then I went and did chemistry exam at university. After that I played little GTA 5 and then I went and took ~10 kilometer bike ride in this cold Finnish autumn. While on the bike ride I took a break at a student restaurant in the town and drank few coffee cups alone. Once I got back home from the bike ride I have just been lazing off and been thinking what to do the whole next week as autumn holidays from university started today.

So how was your day?

That's just human nature. People don't care how you're doing unless it benefits them now, or possibly in the future. I just learn not to rely on human interaction for my life satisfaction.

Yeah there is so much entertainment around these days that we really do not need friends anymore to just hang around and waste time.

Making contact with people isn't the hard part, I don't think. Motivating them to help you is the hard part.

Thanks a ton for the comment on this and reading the article!

But see, I don't think motivating someone to help you is really that hard. As I mentioned in there, there are so many places where there's oodles of people who'd love to help. Want to ask Alexis Ohanian something? Pay attention to when he hosts another AMA on Reddit. Or use Clarity or Public Beta. Or really just email them. I answer a ton of questions I get over email.

There are a couple reasons though sometimes I don't reply to an email "looking for help":

1. The email is thousands of words long. I don't have time to read that. Very few people do. Keep these intros and notes and questions to 5 sentences or 500 characters, or try your hardest to get close.

2. Ask something. I get too many emails looking for help, but when you read the email, there's isn't actually a question inside. What do you need help with? Be specific. "Feedback" is way too open. You want Feedback on design, or features or marketing or what? It's best to focus me on something so I can save time figuring out how I can actually help you.

And if you really want to use some extra encouragement to get people to help you, flattery gets you everywhere. Mention what you've been reading of theirs. Quote their stuff on Twitter.

Yep. People generally want to help, but they're also mindful of their bandwidth (especially the successful, busy people who can offer the best help).

So ask for help, but don't waste their time.

Totally in agreement. I've emailed business owners relevant questions to projects I'm working on and 8 times out of 10 they reply back. I keep it short, to the point, and thank them up front for their time.

Also, I see too many people that say something like, "No one wants to help me." Everyone WANTS help; to get help you need to give some. Start networking like crazy, find out what someone else needs and provide that. It takes time and dedication, but you will be reciprocated.

And one of the reasons is the idea that you don't pay back, you pay forward. Everyone got help at some some point, and many are aware of this idea.

I've got a couple of quite well-known and very busy people (whom I didn't previously know) to help me, simply by asking. The article is a great reminder to do it more often.

Also, "help" doesn't have to be a one-way street. Maybe the person you want to meet is coming to your town and needs a ride from the airport.

I totally agree. After years being a lurker online I've decided to change my outlook to be able to get like minded people's ideas and opinions. I totally understand how it is. It's always easier to be alone then to get to know people as you have to make an effort to make first contact.

I'm pretty sure that for many people even such cold email can be intimidating. On rational level they know it's the necessary thing to do, but the fear of rejection drags them toward "I'm not ready yet. I'll mail them a week later when I build/write/learn more".

I hear you. And you are definitely right. It can be intimidating. Those cold calls, I still can't get the nerves out when I've done those. But emails, you don't actually have to feel any rejection :)

I have never gotten someone to reply negatively to an email I've sent them. The worst ever, and it's rare, is someone simply saying "Thanks, but no." Of course there's lots of ignores. But even ignores, I've followed up on and gotten replies like "Thank you so much for reminding me about this! I meant to reply but got busy when I received your note."

For self-founded entrepreneur procrastination is the worst enemy.

Read Improv Wisdom. Take an improv class. Practice makes perfect.

I agree, or you lose hope in the process. You're not going to get a reply the first time or even the 100th time, but if you believe that it works and keep modifying your approach in the email, it can work. I've tried sending cold emails and I got a reply after the 12th time. I try to tailor the email to each person. It's more time consuming and I can't send them as often as I want, but I find this more effective.

Some of my best personal & business relationships started with a cold email and a random coffee meeting.

One thing I'll probably cover in the future is one of the things that have made these cold emails and random meetings successful is simply being clear about what I want.

I've made the mistake many times of simply saying "I'd love to chat for 15 minutes". Even "I'd love to get your feedback" isn't enough usually.

Specific questions like "I'd love to hear how you'd design this" or "What would you do next here to get more traffic" or "Would you try this with a collaborator and see if it makes your life easier" generates better hits and more useful conversations.

I think a lot of the problem when it comes to making new connections is unwarranted shyness. If you know the other party is open to new messages/meeting requests from strangers (which they sometimes are!), it becomes less intimidating to reach out. Online dating sites like OkCupid have dealt with this problem really well by creating a community of people open to receiving messages of a particular kind from strangers. It's totally appropriate to ask a stranger out on OkCupid. It isn't so appropriate on Facebook.

I'd really appreciate people checking out my first web application, called Treatings (treatings.co). It's a community of professionals open to meeting strangers over coffee to discuss their work. No one is guaranteeing meetings with anyone, but everyone is open to meeting requests and the possibility of being treated to coffee/a drink by a stranger interested in their background.

treatings.co/activity

We recently secured a small investment from an angel investor without prior connections. Having graduated from an Ivy League 12 years ago, I realized that more than school affiliation, it was our team, product, vision, and perseverance that made a difference. I used to regret not networking more in school, but quickly realized that in the startup world, you have to be a problem solver. No time for regrets or to crib about the present. Thanks for this article. I'm going to distribute this to my team.

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