i recently lost my job and it's horrible being in the 'unemployed' class -- you're made to feel worthless, you have to take advice from people, perfectly well meaning of course, that are basically encouragement on digging your own grave - i love being in the position where i have to do some fake elizabethian courting ritual where i have to pretend i'm super excited to do whatever tf they do, oh and i'm the best man for the job! -- when you've just sent in 200 applications and gotten nothing back, when you've just been let go for dubious bullshit reasons, you're supposed to act like you're ready for a challenge!
important video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkYHNO2vNG4
so much this!
I used to recoil at the thought of "networking" for similar reasons as OOP. I'd rather make smalltalk at a conference for exactly as long as it takesb to find someone to go ditch the entire thing with. I don't wanna talk shop for the sake of talking shop or "networking", I wanna go for a beer and talk about fully automated luxury gay space communism ๐
However, now that I'm professionally doing something that I'm interested in, things have changed a bit. I actually enjoy the challenges at my job and actively seek out people that (hopefully) know more about the pitfalls than me. I want to learn from other people! Hopefully I can pay it forward sometime.
But now, all of a sudden, I'm networking. I know what Rebekah does over at Engineering and I know what Claude is trying to accomplish over at $competitor. They in turn know what's in my roadmap and where I might need support. They also know how I work.
And now, every now and then I get a LinkedIn message alerting me to a professional learning opportunity or a job opportunity. Likewise, I keep Rebecah and Claude in the loop about things that might be interesting to them.