a thread on networking, because it's come up several times in my feed this morning and because it's something that totally baffled me when i started my career.

if you're unsure about the point of networking, this might interest you. 1/19

never, during my college or work experience, was "networking" ever explained to me. i'd never even heard the word until i graduated - though to be fair the fact that i worked construction in HS and college probably didn't help. 2/19

my first job out of college was at a systems integration shop. once a month, we'd have a more or less mandatory "networking" cocktail hour at a hotel that was not super convenient to get to. 3/19

at this happy hour, the room would be packed with well over a hundred people drinking substandard cocktails for an hour. most consultants there had no real relationships outside of their immediate team. 4/19

for introverts this environment was difficult to navigate, and even for extroverts, trying to find people that were interesting or doing interesting work could be a challenge given the packed room and limited timeframe. 5/19

i went each time and did what was (implicitly) asked of me, but even after investing a fair amount of effort events like this seemed pretty unlikely to have any real return for me. 6/19

once, my immediate boss got me face time with the head of our local branch, which was considered something of a coup.

we had a nice conversation, parted on good terms, promised to follow up and nothing whatsoever came of that. 7/19

all of which led me to believe that networking was, with rare exceptions, going to be a complete waste of my time.

fast forward five or six years, and i've just moved to denver. 8/19

then, like now, i was working for redmonk which meant that i didn't have a local office to connect to people with.

my best friend and some other folks i knew lived there, so my social life was good, but professionally i was more or less on my own. 9/19

so i started looking around for other people in denver and in tech, and unsurprisingly found them. i then invited all of these people out to lunch. 10/19

some of these lunches were perfectly pleasant but professional dead ends. other lunches turned into interesting professional relationships. a subset of all of those turned into good friends i remain close to to this day
(who may in fact be reading this right now). 11/19

once i had connected with a few of these people, i started the denver tech meetup essentially to introduce these people i had met to each other, to build connections between people from different sectors. 12/19

it was always casual, purposefully unambitious and never more than maybe two dozen people, but it brought folks together who might not have otherwise had the opportunity to meet each other. 13/19

i followed much this same pattern - with a lot of assistance from other like-minded folks (shout out to the portland computers anonymous chapter) - here in maine when i came back.

at @redmonk we have done something similar with the @redmonk beers we run at events. 14/19

it didn't occur to me until a couple of years into the denver tech meetup that what i was doing was, technically, even literally, networking.

it was just networking in a format that was going to be much more useful, productive and enjoyable for me. 15/19

so as i tell folks just graduating from college or early in their careers, if you don't like networking, it's likely that you just haven't found the right networking format for *you*.

keep trying. 16/19

if you enjoy and are proficient at working a packed room of consultants in suits, more power to you.

but if that's not your thing, that's ok. remember that those types of events are not the only way to network. networking can be as simple as grabbing a coffee one on one. 17/19

the most important lesson i've learned, however, and that i try and pass along, is that networking is really just meeting people, whatever form that takes, and that meeting people is very emphatically not a waste of your time. 18/19

all of which hopefully explains how i became maybe the most unlikely defender of networking ever or at a minimum helps explain the format for @redmonk beers.

and lastly, for all of you folks new to your career that are confused by stuff like this, DMs are open, always. 19/19