Networking Is Just “Making Friends” for People Who Hate Business

I hate the word networking.

Not because building relationships doesn't matter. It matters more than most people want to admit. I hate it because of what the word implies: that connecting with other humans is a process you optimize, a funnel you work, a game where the goal is to extract value from the right people before they figure out what you're doing.

Most networking advice makes it worse. Show up to events. Work the room. Follow up within 24 hours. Have your elevator pitch ready. It's a system designed for people who have already decided that other people are a means to an end, and it shows. Everyone in the room can feel it.

Here's what actually works, and what I've seen play out over a twenty-year career in tech: be someone people genuinely like being around. That's it. The opportunities follow from that, not from the strategy.

Why Tech Feels Different (But Isn't)

There's a story engineers tell themselves: that the work speaks for itself. Ship good code, solve hard problems, deliver results, and the career takes care of itself. I believed this for longer than I should have.

The work does matter. But it doesn't travel on its own. Someone has to know it exists. Someone has to think of you when a role opens up, when a project needs a lead, when a team is being built. That someone is almost never a stranger who read your resume. It's almost always a person who worked with you, learned from you, or just remembers that you were decent to be around.

The developers I've seen stall out mid-career are rarely the ones with skill gaps. They're the ones who treated relationships as optional. Who kept their heads down, delivered their work, and figured visibility would come naturally. It doesn't. Visibility is a byproduct of relationships, and relationships require some intentional investment, even if that investment looks nothing like traditional networking.

What Actually Builds Relationships

The bar is lower than most people think. You don't need to be charismatic. You don't need a large following or a polished personal brand. You need to be consistently helpful and easy to work with, and you need to maintain contact with people even when you don't need anything from them.

That last part is where most people fall down. They reach out when they're job hunting. They resurface when they need a reference. People notice. Not always consciously, but the pattern registers. Transactional relationships feel transactional because they are.

The alternative isn't complicated. Share something useful when you come across it. Congratulate someone on a promotion without asking for anything. Respond thoughtfully when someone asks for your opinion. Show up for people when the stakes are low and there's nothing in it for you. Over time, that builds something that no amount of conference badge scanning will ever produce: people who actually want to help you.

The developer you helped debug a nasty issue at 4pm on a Friday will remember you when their company opens a lead role. The junior engineer you took seriously when nobody else did might be a hiring manager in five years. This industry is smaller than it looks, and your reputation travels faster than your resume.

The Close

None of this requires you to become someone you're not. You don't have to go to events. You don't have to be on every platform. You don't have to manufacture enthusiasm for small talk with strangers over warm beer and bad appetizers.

You do have to show up consistently for the people already in your orbit. Your teammates. Your former colleagues. The people you learned from and the ones who learned from you. Invest in those relationships without keeping score, and the network you end up with won't feel like a network at all. It'll feel like a group of people who happen to be rooting for you.

That's the whole strategy. Be helpful. Be genuine. Stay in touch. Repeat for twenty years.

The opportunities tend to take care of themselves.

If the idea makes sense but the actual reaching out still feels awkward, The Anti-Networking Outreach Pack has outreach templates built for people who hate networking but still need to do it. No scripts, no tricks, just messages that sound like a human wrote them.