I’m a developer and I hate “networking”. Here’s why.
Tine Thygesen, a previous colleague from 23, declares provocatively that developers hate networking for the wrong reasons:
The reason developers, and many non-business people, hate networking because the terms is largely misunderstand and misused! … The reason [is] they think they have to entertain hot shots they have nothing in common with with witty oneliner or deep business insights.
Tine is absolutely right. As a breed, we don’t really like chatting for the sake of chatting. (And we absolutely don’t have neither wittiness nor insight when let out of the cave. By then the uncaffeinated climate has shocked our systems enough to keep us quiet in the corner.)
To the developer mind, networking changes any focus from short-term action to the long-term talking. Networking challenges us to talk our way into key relationships - rather than to act, build, do. And above all, any good developer will prefer to do.
Tine’s call for a different way to talk about networking is spot on, but she is aiming her arguments in the wrong direction. It’s a mistake to try to teach developers the value of community and of relationships though. Ask any developer how he or she learned to code, and I guarantee you that the answer is through tutorials and questions on blogs and forums. And by reading open source software.
The interesting bit is that the social web (take Twitter as an example) is teaching The Network People to network the same way that developers have been doing for ages: By showing yourself to knowledgeable and interesting within an accessible and flat structure. It’s modern networking through content and personality, rather than through access, status and position.
Twitter creates informal bonds and provides ample room to listen in to a conversations form the side-lines. And then to contribute. It starts off with an open invitation and slowly encourages people to get involved. This is very similar to how geeks have been setting up well-functioning open source and crowd-sourcing projects through the ages.
I think we are teaching the bizzies to network, not the other way around.
