Guest Post: Networking for programmers with very little free time

The following guest post is by Moshe Zadka, explaining the importance of networking and how you can do it with minimal time outside work.

A good professional network is a long-term asset. When you’re looking for a new job you can talk to people you know, ask them if their company is hiring, and then have them submit your resume directly to the hiring manager. This will allow you to skip the “resume filter”, and often get you past the phone screen as well.

But even if a professional network is useful, how do you find the time to build it? You probably don’t want to have to get out every evening to a social gathering, and spend hours talking, just to plan for a hypothetical future job.

One way to start building your professional network with little time spent is by focusing on your current job. Over time your colleagues will leave for other jobs, and every former colleague is a potential referral to another company. So you should always make sure you have non-work contact details for your colleagues.

Unfortunately, you can only expand your network so much from attrition at work: if you want a larger network, you will have to do some work. But by making judicious use of your time, and going to the right venues, you can grow and maintain a good professional network while still only spending one or two evenings a month at events.

How networking helped me

In one of the San Francisco Python meetups, I met someone working at PayPal– a company I had no interest working for. However, we kept in touch. At some point, he moved to a start-up. At another point, I found myself looking for a job, after a company shutdown. Because I had kept in touch with him, it was easy to reach out.

Even though I was on a tight timeline for getting another job, he made sure I was fast-tracked through the process – a pro-forma resume review, and skipping the phone screen. I still had to go through a half-day’s worth of interview panel, but removing the simple filters from my path probably saved a week or more worth of being unemployed, and also let me put pressure on other prospective employers to fast-track me.

Business cards

Business cards sound like an antiquated thing, something you might see on “Mad Men”. However, even with modern smartphones, there is no faster way to share your contact details with someone you’ve just met. For that, a business card’s most important part is your e-mail address.

In all of the opportunities below, give people a business card when the conversation is done. Making your own cards is free to cheap nowadays, no need to wait for your job to print you one. In any case, you want to make sure you have your personal e-mail on the card, not your work e-mail.

Conferences

If you are already employed, ask your job to send you to relevant conferences. Some places have a budget for “professional development”, others have funds specifically marked “conferences” – or maybe it’s under the recruiting budget. Choose a relevant conference, and remind your manager that sending you to the conference is a form of training: a great investment in employees.

Some companies will only fund your trip if you speak at a conference. Most conferences understand that some people will only come if they speak, and structure their timeline accordingly: you’ll know whether your talk is accepted far enough in advance to get your manager to sign off on sending you. An efficient way to send talk proposals is to recycle – if a talk is declined from one conference, it is fine to send it to another closely related one, although sometimes it will have to be tweaked slightly. If the audiences are sufficiently distinct you can even reuse a talk you’ve already given.

Once you are at a conference, attend birds of feather sessions, and try to sit with new people for conference meals, if those are served. This is a great way to meet more people at the conference. Giving a talk is also a great way to meet more people: you can often meet other speakers, and many people in the audience will want to talk to you afterwards.

Meetups

Many places have tech meetups in the evening. You can probably find time to go to a meetup once a month. If you do go, make sure to make the most of your time – mingle, talk and hand out your business card.

Avoid going to the same meetup month after month – while it is comfortable, it tends to be the same people: your goal should be to expand your network. So once you stop meeting new people, switch to a new meetup.

As with conferences, giving a talk at a meetup is great way to meet new people. You might even be able to work on your talk at work, if you can pitch it as a recruiting event to your manager.

Engineering blog

If your company has an engineering blog, participate. Find something you have done recently which was interesting or surprising, and write about that experience.

If your company does not have an engineering blog, see if you can make one happen. It helps with recruiting, and helps people develop in their career.

Keeping in touch

Keep in touch with your network. If you come across an article relevant to someone, send it to them with a note “thought it might be interesting”. Often they will already have read it, but will be interested in sharing their thoughts.

Summary

Developing and maintaining a professional network does not need a huge time investment – a little bit goes a long way, if properly allocated. And when the day comes that you need a new job, that small investment will pay off. While you usually can’t just get a job just by knowing someone, a network will help skip past companies “resume filters”, and you can have a more streamlined interview process if you have a friend on the inside.

Moshe is a core developer on the Twisted project, and has been using Python for 20 years. He’s just published a book, “from python import better”.