| Episodes | 29 |
| Mentions | 40 |
| Cited here | 16 |
| First — last | #9 — #700 |
| Top guests | Dave Young, Dave Vandenbout, Piotr Esden-Tempski |
| Related | consulting · hackerspace |
Professional networking is the practice of forming and maintaining relationships with other people in one’s field as a working technical capability, and in engineering it is treated as a prerequisite for solving problems rather than merely a means of career advancement.[77] The ability to telephone someone and describe a problem is itself a technical skill; engineers who try to derive everything from books alone, and who lack the habit of making and keeping a large number of acquaintances, are handicapped in solving problems, not just in advancing.[77] Relationships convert into work through a concrete mechanism: when someone asks who does a particular kind of work, the names that come up first are the people the recommender actually cares about, and that ordering is formed in person, over dinner or a handshake, rather than through online interaction.[193]
Networking as a technical practice
The advice to “network” is regarded as useless when stated baldly, because it names an outcome rather than an action.[288] The version that transfers is narrower: talk technical. Engineers who cannot make small talk can usually discuss a circuit indefinitely, and that conversation produces the same relationships that conventional networking is supposed to produce.[288]
A specific procedure follows from this. The way to approach a design engineer is not to ask about design engineering in the abstract; it is to take one of their products apart, bring the schematic with something circled, and ask why they did it that way rather than another. Engineers will talk for hours about their own decisions, and the relationship forms out of the technical conversation.[288] Buying people lunch is a concrete and unusually effective variant: an hour of someone’s time in exchange for a meal, spent asking about their work, is a low-cost way to learn what a role actually involves and to be remembered by the person doing it.[288]
Talking to someone who holds the job one wants is worthwhile even when that job will never open. What is taken away is the skill set to develop and the shape the work actually has, which then gives a personal project something specific to aim at.[288]
Introversion and visibility
Benefiting from professional relationships does not require becoming an extrovert. Being outward for a day or two and then retreating to recover is a workable pattern, and it produces the same in-person connections that carry more weight than remote ones.[193] Standing out positively is worth deliberate effort, because being one more indistinguishable person in a crowd of several hundred means not being remembered when a hiring decision is made months later; the specific means matters less than being distinguishable at all.[35]
The stronger position is framed as the inverse of the usual advice: rather than knowing people, be known. Someone with a public reputation announces availability and is approached, instead of approaching others — a slower thing to build and a far more durable one.[262] Publishing work substitutes for sociability: a repository, a blog, or documented projects make an engineer findable without requiring conversations, which matters because a substantial fraction of good engineers will not do the conversations.[262] Publishing is the beginning rather than the end; maintaining the relationships that follow pays off in ways that are hard to predict, because the contact who has no job to offer still hears about jobs, and that indirect route is how most opportunities travel.[27]
Career entry and job hunting
Connections matter most exactly where a candidate has least to show: the first couple of positions are the hardest to obtain and the ones where knowing someone changes the outcome most.[305] Successive jobs commonly come through people already known — a former colleague from an internship, a field applications engineer who mentions an opening — and the mechanism is unglamorous and specific: the occasional catch-up message and the offer of a coffee keep those channels open.[262]
The most effective route into a company is somebody technical on the inside who will smooth the way, and the modern precondition for having such a person is being visible online, so that they have something to point at when they vouch for a candidate.[232] Moving from one kind of engineering to another needs demonstrable work: committing to a substantial project, budgeting real money and months for it, and finishing it even if the result is pointless in itself. Nobody moves from test into design on an assertion of interest.[288]
Nontraditional careers in electronics share a pattern rather than a credential: networking into jobs, finding mentors, and eventually working independently. Where a conventional route is closed, making the job is the remaining option, and it is a well-trodden one.[146]
Cold approaches
A cold approach works when it is honest about itself: say how the contact was found, be specific about what is interesting in their work, and make the interest genuine rather than flattering. Interest in the person is what gets the message read, which is the hardest part.[306] Leading with what one can offer is preferred, even if it is only an outside technical perspective on what the recipient is building; there may be nothing to give someone further along, in which case their own curiosity is the offer — but the real offer should be checked for first.[306] Anyone with a public profile receives more mail than they can answer, so brevity is essential, and a very prominent person is the wrong first target: approaching people two steps ahead rather than twenty is more effective.[306]
Events and institutions
Conference attendance is considered worth paying for personally and taking leave for, on the understanding that the value is meeting people rather than the talks; walking the floor and talking to people is the activity, and the programme is the excuse.[141] Small recurring domain-specific gatherings — an annual dinner for a particular speciality — put an attendee in front of people who have been in that field for decades, which no general industry event and no online forum reproduces.[236]
Professional bodies are useful to independents in an unglamorous way: finding an accountant or the other auxiliary services a consultancy needs, from other members who have already solved the same problem.[301]
Tools and their limits
The professional social network functions more as a directory than as a place relationships form. It is useful for being findable and for confirming who someone is; the searches run against it by recruiters are frequently so crude that the contact they generate is noise.[9]
A shared workspace is valuable precisely when one has no network and is trying to enter a field. Once an engineer has industry contacts of their own it adds little, and the people around them are likely to be in trades with no bearing on theirs.[624]
Remote study at a fraction of the cost gives up the in-person contact, the incidental relationships and the exposure to research method that constitute much of what a graduate degree is actually worth — which may still be the right trade for someone already inclined to work alone.[146]
Industry structure and independent practice
Electronics is a small industry and people circulate through it repeatedly — working alongside the same colleagues at three different companies over a career is unremarkable. That recurrence is what makes a reputation, good or bad, follow someone.[289]
A consulting practice is generally built on the network that preceded it — the earlier colleagues who passed on opportunities and tip-offs — which means the groundwork has to be laid years before there is any intention of going independent. At Xentronics, Scott Williams attributes the existence of his consulting practice directly to the network and colleagues he had worked with beforehand.[624] Dave Young’s route to consulting clients began with attending entrepreneurship meetups in a new city and listening to what people were trying to build, looking for something worth helping with; framing it as meeting people in a new place rather than as selling is what made it sustainable to keep doing.[305]
References
| Episode | Title | Date |
|---|---|---|
| 9 | From Boston In Boxers? | |
| 27 | 555 Contest, Computer Museum, Octopart - The Green Pen Hornswoggle | |
| 35 | An Interview with Jeri Ellsworth - The Ternary Tussle | |
| 77 | An Interview with Dr. Howard Johnson - Winsome Waveform Wizardry | January 9, 2012 |
| 141 | FPGAs, Robots & Thermocouples - Wampum's Wavering Worth | April 15, 2013 |
| 146 | Hamvention, Arduino and Intel - Burdensome Background Battology | May 21, 2013 |
| 193 | We're Sorry! But Apple Ain't! - Remorseless RAM Racketeering | April 7, 2014 |
| 232 | Impedance Matching" with Davidson and Vandenbout - Presbytes Pushing Portfolios | |
| 236 | Questioning Everyday Prototyping - Verrucose Vehicle Vitilitigation | February 10, 2015 |
| 262 | Jobs For Weirdos | August 12, 2015 |
| 288 | Call In Show #3 | February 24, 2016 |
| 289 | Documentation Is A Waste Of Time | March 2, 2016 |
| 301 | The Nerd Calendar | June 1, 2016 |
| 305 | An Interview With Dave Young | June 29, 2016 |
| 306 | Catalyzing Change Agents | July 6, 2016 |
| 624 | Design & Manufacturing Consulting with Scott Williams from Xentronics |