from the lived-for-three-months-in-a-paper-bag-in-a-septic-tank dept.
Over at ScienceMag they have a wonderfully dismissive story on the worth (or lack thereof) of personal networking in the scientific community.
An interesting read, upon which I can not much improve, so give it a read.
Here’s how a lot of people believe networking works:
John gives Jane his business card. Jane returns to her life of privilege, a position at a big fancy science company where everyone loves their work and enjoys a fabulous quality of life. (So, Scandinavia.) One day, Jane’s boss reveals that a vacancy has been created in the field of fancy science and an advertisement will be published. “Wait!” cries Jane. “Do not appeal to the masses! For we will receive CVs from violent offenders, grammatically incapable undergraduates, and possibly literal baboons!” Who, oh who, can spare the company from such a fate? Jane withdraws John’s business card from the platinum case in the center of her desk, where she’d kept it safe for just such a moment. John is contacted and offered the job on the spot—a job he turns down, because John handed out 250 business cards, so John has 249 other offers.
That’s the networking fantasy. In reality, at least in my experience, networking works like this:
John gives Jane his business card.
That’s it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by umafuckitt on Sunday October 26 2014, @01:23PM
I agree that "forced" networking, like giving people your card or attending some formal mixer event, are unlikely to ever lead to anything. However, having a network of close contacts who you know well in your field is hugely advantageous. The only way to get this is to truly make friends with people. I've recently changed jobs and this is precisely how I got my new job: by being friends with someone who was hiring. The position was never advertised and I'd never have found it any other way.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday October 26 2014, @02:05PM
Let me guarantee you one thing: Any field you need nepotism to get into is a field you need nepotism to survive in let alone succeed.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday October 27 2014, @02:32PM
Knowing somebody is not the same as nepotism.
Nepotism is favoritism granted in politics or business to relatives. The term originated with the assignment of nephews to cardinal positions by Catholic popes and bishops.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @02:07PM
This. Networking has nothing to do with business cards or mixers. Networking is meeting someone at a conference, having lunch with them by accident, sending e-mails back and forth later because you're both working on the same problem from different angles, having lunch again to celebrate arriving at your respective solutions, each with the other's help. Networking is being introduced to X by Y, who is a longstanding friend of X and respected in the field. Networking is when you build and take advantage of relationships, and relationships aren't made out of two or three inches of cardstock.
Business cards are what you drop into the fishbowl at your local Chotchkie's.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @03:18PM
Networking works exactly like this.
I have that 'stack o cards'. But it is only so I can remember who are the decent ones I worked with. "Oh did you hear company XZY shutdown?" "OOOH he there was one really good dude who worked there here is his card lets see if he is willing to join us". "what about these other 10?" "They were salesmen who didnt know what they were doing" "Oh ok I will contact him".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday October 26 2014, @03:50PM
The organizational goal of the hiring process is to get the best person possible for the position at the cost that you were planning on spending on it. If you are limiting your talent search to people who are buddies with people in your organization, chances are you are excluding the vast majority of potential hires from consideration, which means you are necessarily excluding thousands of people who might well be better or cheaper than somebody who's a buddy of somebody. And what's worse, with a complete stranger it's easy to say "No, you don't have the job" if their resume or interview sucks, or "Sorry, you aren't working out here, and today is your last day of work" if you hire them and decide it was a mistake. Now try saying the same thing to the best friend of somebody with power in the organization.
The effect of companies hiring somebody's buddy rather than hiring based on qualifications leads to at least some completely lousy employees who you can't fire because of nepotism. This reduces the competence of the organization as a whole. This is, in the long run, really really bad for the organization. And if you have one of these kinds of jobs, you now know that your job depends on remaining close friends with the person who got you the job, which means you can't walk away from your friend even if they do something to hurt you.
This is one of the many subsets of what is sometimes called a "dual relationship", that is a situation in which you have 2 different kinds of relationships with the same person. The problem is that any kind of difficulty in either relationship leads to divided loyalties and all sorts of drama.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by m2o2r2g2 on Sunday October 26 2014, @11:04PM
I disagree.
The point of hiring is to find someone who will be SUITABLE for the role (will perform the duties adequately, will get along with the team, company culture, etc). If you get any more it is a bonus.
Some would argue that hiring people who far exceed the job is a negative, as they will eventually either need to be compensated for their talent (ie paying above their role, or promoted) or they will leave for better roles. So it is not in your best long term interest (unless you expect large company growth with lots of room for promotions/raises).
Recruiting through personal connections gives information about how they will fit personality wise etc etc that can never be found out via interview. So rather than pick those that exceed the role on paper and may or may not be a fit for the company (interview), why not trust the staff and get someone who you know more about (in theory a more certain fit for performing the job adequately).
(Score: 1) by lizardloop on Monday October 27 2014, @12:34PM
As some one who occasionally does hiring for my own small business I will generally always hire a "friend of a friend" recommendation rather than hiring from an advert. Primarily because it serves as a filter on personality. If they are a friend and someone is willing to put them forward then most likely they are a decent human being. That is 90% of the job requirement filled. The other 10% can usually be learned in a few weeks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Sunday October 26 2014, @06:52PM
I disagree entirely.
Instead, my contention is that it entirely depends on the field you're in. If you're in a tech field, working for companies of any size, then networking is basically a waste of time. The requirements for various jobs are much too specialized, and larger companies don't give a shit about who some peon knows personally. They post their jobs on Dice.com, or if they're really huge, they have their own internal recruiting website where candidates can submit their resumes and apply for open positions. It's completely impersonal.
Other industries are different. In the aviation industry, for instance, from what I've seen, most jobs are indeed filled through personal contacts. But we're talking about companies with only a handful of people working at them, not some 80,000-employee behemoth like Intel. Small companies do not work like large companies. For these companies, when they want to hire a new pilot, they call around to their buddies and ask them if they know any pilots who'd be interested. They only resort to one of the job boards (and these are entirely industry-specific) when that search fails and it looks like they'll need to bring someone in from out of the area.
I think it's safe to assume that most people reading SoylentNews are in the tech industry, especially programming. For this industry, from everything I've seen, networking is very unlikely to help you with a job search. But other industries (esp. ones which are small, like aviation) aren't like this.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday October 26 2014, @08:42PM
Pretty much the same hiring pattern for me. The last time I got a job where I didn't know someone onsite was probably in '95?
A lot of the negative comments assume you live in Manhattan or SV with 50K competitors for the job and its a software dev company trying to hire software devs. Most of the world doesn't operate under those conditions of course.
In my experience HR vetting is so utterly awful at tech positions that anyone worth hiring will never make it thru HR and anyone who makes it thru HR is almost certainly not worth hiring. HR provides a big stack of guys who are experts at optimization of resumes, experts at playing HR games, experts at phone interviews, experts at lying to people. That's what happens when a position gets 100 resumes, lets optimistically say only 50% are manipulators are 50% are real, the manipulators are always going to do better with HR because what does a 22 year old girl really know about being manipulated by technology guys (sometimes the politically incorrect truth hurts) so your top 3 or whatever candidates will all be highly questionable. This is before the "cheap candidate" factor comes into play. If HR is evaluated on a metric of finding the cheapest employees for the position, you're going to end up with relatively unqualified applicants even if the greater overall market is pretty decent. So HR ends up providing a list of experts at the process of being the best cheapest liars. Thats actually not so bad of a fit for sales or customer service or even management. Unfortunately if you're a telecom company with some software engineering needs, that's not going to work so well.
Life at a coastal company that focuses solely on software dev might be a totally different experience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @03:52AM
Life at a coastal company that focuses solely on software dev might be a totally different experience.
No, I think you 100% nailed it. Your description of the HR filtering process and the poor resulting output is exactly what I have experienced in several coastal (west) software companies. The only way to hire quality people is to use your networks, or get really, really lucky.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Monday October 27 2014, @04:22AM
Right on the spot. One time, some years ago, a guy asked me for an interview directly. I told my secretary (yes, I had one. It tells how many years ago that was!) to send him to HR, because company policy dictated that candidates should be vetted first by HR.
The guy insisted, saying that he had already talked to HR. I was curious, so I let him in. He was precisely the kind of person I was looking for and hired him on the spot. Only to have to fight HR because they had already dismissed him, because he wasn't appropriately dressed! He had a t-shirt and jeans and HR wanted people to show up for interviews "well-dressed."
Technical knowledge? References? No, sir, he wasn't wearing a tie!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @01:40PM
"SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 5 submissions in the queue."
Otherwise, it will be more BS posts like this "story".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Sunday October 26 2014, @02:10PM
On April 18th 1930 the BBC decided there was no news worth reporting, so didn't.
If there's no worthy submissions, don't post anything. Simples.
(Score: 1) by tadas on Sunday October 26 2014, @03:06PM
On April 18th 1930 the BBC decided there was no news worth reporting, so didn't.
If there's no worthy submissions, don't post anything. Simples.
I wish I had mod points -- this would get +1 Insightful in a flash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @06:14PM
Who decides what is and what isn't "newsworthy"?
There was a great submission here recently about a bug involving Debian's wine package.
A bunch of rather dumb, short-sighted people bitched about it not being "newsworthy".
Yet it's the most newsworthy article I've seen here in days!
Those idiots think, "It's only about a minor bug!", but they're too fucking stupid to realize that the actual news is that the Debian project is destroying itself.
Debian is important. It's damn important. It's perhaps the most important project within the Linux community after the Linux kernel itself. It's a more important project than the GNU project is, without a doubt.
Everything affecting the Debian project, from systemd to the talk of a fork to a serious and unjustifiable wine bug, are all very newsworthy and should definitely appear as a story here.
If you're too mentally challenged to see or understand how something is newsworthy, then that's a problem with you, and just you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @07:19PM
LOL! "Great Submission" != your submission
At least half the posts in that story are yours bitching about how a minor program in a TESTING release had a typo in their startup script, and this is the end of the fucking world for you. AND, you won't shut up about it outside of that story.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday October 27 2014, @01:42PM
I read the article and it's the kind of article I want to read. It goes against the usual things we're told about networking, explains why, and does a damn fine job of it. The only thing it is missing is what I need to know: how do I go about getting a job? And that answer is what I was hoping to find here at Soylent News. (Found one by Magic Oddball [soylentnews.org].) There seem to be a lot of comments about "BS posts" that I don't find so BS. Not every story is my cup of tea and not every story is perfect for Soylent News, but I find this one and many others very insightful, useful, and thought provoking.
(Score: 4, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday October 26 2014, @01:52PM
An interesting read
Upon which I can not much improve
So give it a read.
It's supposed to be 5-7-5 syllables. And rhyming "read" with "read"? Just lazy.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Funny) by hemocyanin on Sunday October 26 2014, @02:50PM
Haikus don't need to rhyme. Limericks do though.
There once was networker from Boise
Who handed his cards out like crazy
And then in a fuss
Cause nobody called
He stuck his dick in a mouse
or something like that.
I hand out my card
Creamy eighty weight cardstock
Yet never a call
(Score: 3, Funny) by cafebabe on Sunday October 26 2014, @09:31PM
There once was a networker on Craigslist
Who wondered if employers were ageist.
After bumping her resume
Closer to this century
She received a lewd offer from a fetishist.
1702845791×2
(Score: 1) by Darren on Sunday October 26 2014, @02:05PM
In order to combat this I ended up spending a lot of time creating a website that features what I could do. I tried to make business cards and hand them out but like the story submission said it didn't do anything. I tried social networking sites but I'm too busy and not very interested in chatting. I noticed that most other developers were creating landing pages that are very very generic in terms of content.
I went out of my way to make a very rich complicated site with a ton of examples not of completed sites but of points of interest that might be included in a site. Things like the back end content, games, content management etc. I also on the business end tried to be very very clear and create a walk through explaining what I do, how I do it, and what are the costs without lots of graphics and I wrote it myself to keep it plain.
The problem is that we are all used to listing our abilities rather than demonstrating them which has led to people listing abilities they do not have granting them an edge in an honor system competition of resumes. I'm the only one using my approach but it works great, employers are always impressed when they see what can be done and it opens up their imagination for projects.
Web Designer - darrencaldwellwebdesign.ca
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @03:07PM
FYI, your site looks OK in Chrome (though I question overlapping translucent text boxes) -- but it is seriously borked in Safari 5.1.10. The hover menu when you go over a word on the left column superimposes itself on that word rather than appears to the right, and if it longer than the word's box, the menu is hidden by the gray box for the word below it, and the content boxes that show up on the right aren't boxes at all but basically just centered text, sometimes top justified and sometimes center justified.
(Score: 1) by Darren on Sunday October 26 2014, @04:01PM
Yeah I know, safari actually doesn't seem to really be interested in development of their browser. They dropped the ball on 3d rendering as well. There really isn't much I can do about that except try to reduce my site for one browser at the expense of others. I already compromised my 3d model demonstration (truthfully if your using mozilla etc I could have put in a wicked fong shader) but safari and IE couldn't handle it and nothing would show for those two.
My only suggestion would be to use a higher quality browser than safari, it's basically similar to IE in that there is no passion for development and standard adherence. I don't know why that is but I think it has something to do with it being built into the operating system at sales time rather than selected from the wild after comparison shopping which would entice competitive development.
Web Designer - darrencaldwellwebdesign.ca
(Score: 1) by Darren on Sunday October 26 2014, @04:06PM
I'm not a browser fanboy, but I do notice that any browser you pick up off the net be it opera mozilla etc etc they really try to bring their game up and render things correctly it's a goal and a passion of theirs. The best ones experiment and add in their own tags in hopes of this expanding the web and giving us new tools. With the bundled browers historically throw shit at a wall and see what sticks and then ship that out.
Web Designer - darrencaldwellwebdesign.ca
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Sunday October 26 2014, @05:49PM
Yeah I know, safari actually doesn't seem to really be interested in development of their browser. ... There really isn't much I can do about that except try to reduce my site for one browser at the expense of others.
Wow. I'm amazed that anyone calling themselves a "Web Designer," would still say this out loud.
Surely we've reached the point where it's not that hard to create web sites that work with all of the major (and not so major) browsers?
Back in the day, when I was actually doing lots of web site stuff, I tested everything with the current and recent versions of IE, Firefox, Safari, and even Opera, and if something was seriously wrong I sweated it until it was fixed.
Or, as often, dropped some fancy ass feature that didn't really add much to the overall usability.
A "Professional" finds solutions, not excuses.
(Score: 1) by GeminiDomino on Sunday October 26 2014, @11:18PM
In the general case you might have a point.
In the case of Safari, though... not really. Back when Chrome was still using Webkit, you could use that as a reasonably-close approximation, but with Chrome having moved to Blink and Safari-for-anything-not-Apple abandoned, it's too much of a PITA to deal with for anything that's not some sort of retail site.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 1) by Darren on Sunday October 26 2014, @11:47PM
Nope we still haven't. A lot of the CSS tags like user select etc still have -moz- or -o- or -webkit- tags at the start to work with those particular browsers. This extends into the javascript which won't always run the same, as well as how each interprets some standard CSS tags. Also more advanced elements like the canvas tag can be affected.
Web Designer - darrencaldwellwebdesign.ca
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday October 29 2014, @12:08PM
I'm astounded that after 20 years, "professionals" are unable to do the following:-
Seriously, this has been fairly straightforward since Mosiac1.1 and even if you don't have merchant payment facilities, a good shopping basket has a "print 'n' post" facility which allows payment by check. Despite this, people continuously find new and interesting ways to screw this process [jwz.org] and then wonder why the industry looks amateur.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday October 26 2014, @08:54PM
people listing abilities they do not have
I have no idea who invented the fizzbuzz test for programmers, but however unknown he is, at least his test is famous.
You, or someone, should invent the "fizzbuzz for web designers" where you ... well, its your specialty so I donno. Something short, simple enough to do fast, not so complicated as to be impossible to explain or evaluate...
Fizzbuzz is that programming task basically, do you know how to run a loop or equivalent, know modular arithmetic or equivalent, know how to print stuff, know some basic logical operations, thats about it.
If you want to show off or maybe piss people off you can implement fizzbuzz in weird ways, which is fun. Gimmie a recursive fizzbuzz. OK now go all "sieve of eratosthenes" on it and calculate it in an array (which is a funny way to avoid modular math. OK now play games like output in roman numerals simply because you can. The craziest way I ever saw it done was something like Erlang where you spawn off 1000 threads and each thread decides if it should live (print) or die (not) and then had some ugly hack to make the output appear in order. Or you can go all "Enterprise Java" and turn it into as many pages as possible, which turns out to be very complicated once you get over 50 or so pages of code (a general outline is you implement set theory and binary arithmetic as an emulation layer sorts). Oh and extra props for providing the answer in 6502 assembly along with an absolute minimal homemade 6502 emulator just for the project.
(Score: 1) by Darren on Sunday October 26 2014, @11:43PM
I think the fizzbuzz is in a way self evident with web developers. You have your own web server and develop or you run around all day with a resume in your hand looking for someone to let you develop on their mighty morphin corporate web server.
Those who can do etc etc.
I like the idea :D
Web Designer - darrencaldwellwebdesign.ca
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Monday October 27 2014, @09:28AM
I've added a FizzBuzz variant to a placement student questionnaire once, however one of the requirements I listed was that the code is readable. If someone is only going to be there for a short time, I'd want anyone to be able to read any code written once they leave...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @04:43PM
Of course my code is readable. I've checked the file attributes twice! ;-)
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Sunday October 26 2014, @06:11PM
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday October 26 2014, @09:06PM
John gives Jane his business card.
That’s it.
No thats not it, the business card printer makes money, the rented social venue makes money, the paid parking / transit provider makes money, the caterer makes money, the networking consultant makes money, the HR recruiters are on the clock making money. In fact pretty much everyone makes money, except the idiot handing out the cards. Like that old line about if you can't figure out who on the poker table is the sucker, that's because you're the sucker...
I have a nice stack of "personal" business cards with my personal contact info, private-ish contact info, GPG key fingerprint, stuff like that. They used to be useful before linkedin and facebook and all those other services. Remember when AOL instant messenger was cool, a long time ago? Well, those old business cards of mine now make nice bookmarks. I was thinking of ordering new cards, but I'd never use them.
Oddly enough despite being called "business" cards I mostly used them for non-business purposes. Like "hey mr roofer if you need to call me while you're doing work here's my card" or "here's my car keys I'd replace the thermostat myself, its pretty easy, but its only warming up to -3 degrees F today so good luck and here's my card let me know when its done" Both true stories BTW.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @09:42PM
Just yesterday I was cleaning out my house and I came across a Franklin Planner that was... many years old let's say, and not well used. Then I remembered I bought it at a Franklin Planner store that used to be in my town. Googled and found that they're still in business (along with their competitor Day Timer); apparently Wal-Mart still sells their stuff, and you can probably order it online direct.
I guess Apple pretty much put these people out of business, or on life support, with the iPhone/iPad combo, and the calendar apps developed by third party developers. Notebook planners - another casualty of the Internet/mobile computing era.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday October 27 2014, @07:57AM
You're off by a few years. :) The change began in the mid-late 1990s with the Palm PDAs, then gathered steam *really* quickly in the late 90s & early 00s as they gained color screens, the ability to make phone calls, full internet access via wifi, complex apps of all kinds, and so forth. The original iPhone was a continuation of that market — I'm not sure what differentiated it from the others at the time.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday October 27 2014, @08:34AM
I think that one of the big problems is that people aren't really taught how the hell to "network" -- I know that one of the reasons I opted to not go to grad school (which I originally had hoped to do) was the fact that getting into a 'good' campus would have required "networking" with my professors as an undergrad, and I had no idea how to even start.
A veteran game developer whose blog I follow made a series of "how-to" posts on the topic, since she started out not knowing how to network and wants to pass on what she slowly pieced together over the years. (Even though she uses her industry in examples, what she wrote seems like it would be applicable to other disciplines as well.) I'm not in a position to really try it, but I've seen the "howto" praised by others and what she says does make a lot of sense, so I figured I'd post it here in case it helps anyone:
Part 1 - network-building using social media [sherigranerray.com]
Part 2 - network-building using conferences & business cards [sherigranerray.com]
A quick (but detailed) resumé how-to [sherigranerray.com]
Part 3 - get your name out there: volunteer & make things [sherigranerray.com]
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday October 27 2014, @01:54PM
Thank you. There's a lot of good things to think about from what you linked to. I don't think I agree with it, but it had a lot of thought provoking things to say. If I had points, I'd mod you up.
With that said, I'm still sitting here scratching my head. Networking requires a tremendous amount of effort -- especially for an introvert such as myself. (Note: Introvert = energy recharge by being alone; extrovert = energy recharge from interacting with others; I am not shy.) I have been doing so much networking lately (looking for a job), I feel sick to my stomach every time I go out and do it or get on a computer and do it. I become physically ill over this. It also feels so artificial, just like what the original article stated. And once I have a job, I'm supposed to keep up networking too? It's like a second job!
I don't have kids, but I do have a wife. I also enjoy reading and writing -- two solitary activities. I go out with friends and family too. That doesn't leave a whole lot of time for networking. I have no idea how I'm supposed to put so much energy into something I absolutely hate doing. I need my solitary time and I need my friends and family.
I suppose my question is: how is an introvert suppose to excel in today's world?
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Thursday October 30 2014, @11:51AM
http://www.juliahobsbawm.com/ [juliahobsbawm.com] :
I found out about this because the latest issue (#1378) of UK magazine Private Eye picked her [twitter.com] as the target for one of their regular satirical pieces. She took it in good humour [twitter.com].