Networking for Mid & Senior Devs

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>> Jerome Hardaway: So that Mid & Seniors. Now, this is where you fit in, right? It's different, what I see, the number one problem, especially as you get higher in your career, you stop communicating and networking less because you get complacent. In the military, we have a term, complacency kills.

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It kills in real life and in military terms, kills careers, right? You're sitting, you're being complacent with your career, and then you get laid off and you're like, holy crap, what am I supposed to do? Because you have not been out there drilling the skills that pay the bills.

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You haven't been making new connections. You haven't been making internal connections. You come in, you do your eight hours, you learn just-in-time skills for whatever project you're building, and you go home, you plot in front of the TV, you do nothing. So when it comes out, it hurts you, right?

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First thing you should do, whether you're looking for a job now or you're not looking for a job, is you should start looking and leveraging your existing connections. To this day, once a week, I talk to at least two different people that I haven't talked to within a year.

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I make it my point to go through my LinkedIn on Sunday and reach out on Monday to two people I have not spoken to in at least a year. I've been doing that for five years now. You can do that. That's a very small ask for yourself to keep your network fresh.

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Go talk to somebody, send a LinkedIn message for someone you haven't spoken to at least a year, that's professional. And just say, hey, I was thinking about you. I wanted to catch up sometime and see what you're working on and share war stories. It's very easy, very small ask.

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When you're talking, you're keeping your network fresh, right? That's the first step that you need to be doing. Reach out to the programmers, UX designers, the talent that you already know, right? And when I ask, hey, what are you doing for work? How it is at your place?

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My place, I'm getting kinda shaky, I might be on looking for something new. Hey, yo, man, we got these new roles. You get your resume and everything going. I can refer you. Snap, now I have a referral that I wasn't even looking for cuz I just talked to my network, right?

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I just talked to people I already knew. You can transition to that product-based networking format. For me, it builds a format of a way of trust, right? I like products-focused feedback loop as my networking because it doesn't feel as intrusive and just sliding into DMs and asking people for their time just because, right?

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I think that's helped me. I have a product. I wanna improve it. Can I ask for your feedback for it? Thank you for your feedback. I'm gonna take that feedback and iterate on it. Now that I have that feedback, and I'm gonna iterate on it, I'm gonna talk to you again.

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Next thing you know, three, four, or five conversations on the end. We're talking about, can we get on a call sometime? Now we get on the call. Hey, I'd love to buy you coffee around on this call so we can go dive deeper. I'm networking with this person, especially we're over Zoom.

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I've sent the Starbucks gift card or a DoorDash card. They have DoorDash Starbucks to their house cuz Starbucks is on DoorDash, or I think you'll have Carboru coffee down here. Caribou. Caribou, yeah, something like that. You all can DoorDash that, Uber Eats it, their coffee of choice. We go from there, now we're on the Zoom, we're talking, I'm showing them projects, showing them code-based stuff that I can do.

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And they're like, okay, now I'm building that rapport, I'm building that network, I'm pouring into it. But you have to realize, the best time to start that is yesterday, the second best time is today. Networking is not a short-person game, and I think that's one of the things why people are so bad at it right now.

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They want that instant feedback loop. They don't understand that it takes years to get to the point where you get a network of substance, right, you get a network of influence. When we think of influence now, we think of followers and likes, and then we convert those followers and likes into marketing.

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That's not what influence is. Influence is, hey, I can call this person. This person can help me get my foot in the door into this role while everybody else is hurting, right? There's a group that I talk to. And one of the things that those people have, they have that influence and networks that they talk about, is the survivor's guilt that they're having in the community.

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Because they know intrinsically, regardless of what happen, they're gonna be kinda okay cuz they know that their network is secure. They know that they have options. And so whenever they feel bad for the people that don't. And they're like, what do I tell the people that don't wanna do these things that I've done, or how do I help them, right?

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I mean, that's one of the things that we're always talking about. How do I help people who might not want to do this type of work? And the only thing we can do is by showcasing the lack of stress that it comes to. Yes, it sounds a lot like work.

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I'm gonna spend Sunday looking through my LinkedIn like a weirdo to email two people that I haven't spoken to in a year. You don't know what opportunities those people are giving or what conversations you're missing, or, heaven forbid, if those people are still around. You might have actually liked those people and you don't even know if they're still around anymore.

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So you need to go to your network, talk to people. With Mid & Senior, your first step, emphasizing the people that you already know, right? Start rebuilding those relationships, your rapport. Focus on your established skill set, right? There are people who you know think and feel like you're pretty good at your job, right?

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Start with that, all right? Start with those people, and then move forward from there, right? You wanna make it expansive, but you want your end marketing and sales, they call it your core 100. You want your core 100, the people that are gonna support you no matter what you do, and you wanna build in your network, your core 100, right?

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That is your primary focus when networking. You're gonna have 5,000, 6,000 people, but what you really need is a core 100 in your network that are gonna help your career no matter what.