156 4 Ways Almost Any Developer Can Build Their Professional Network

It is said that it is more a matter of who you know rather than what you know. How do I increase my network of who I know? How do I successfully build my set of connections? These are the questions we will answer in today's episode of Dev Questions.

Website: https://www.DevForge.com/ 
Ask Your Question: https://suggestions.iamtimcorey.com/
Sign Up to Get More Great Developer Content in Your Inbox: https://signup.iamtimcorey.com/

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey. Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology. If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered. Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

It's not what you know, it's who you know. You've probably heard that. And the question that we are going to tackle this week is around that. And that's how do I build a network of connections? How do I figure out a way to connect with people so that it is who I know and I know some people that can help me out? That's the question we're going to tackle in this week's episode of DevQuestions. How do you build that network of connections? Now, if you have a question you'd like to see answered, go to suggestions.iamtimcorey.com and ask it there or upvote when it's already there, and hopefully you'll see your question answered on a future episode of DevQuesti. So is it fair, first of all, that it's not what you know, it's who you know? Well, probably not fair necessarily, but at the same time, it's the reality of life. And here's why it's not just this insider system. If I'm looking to hire someone, well, if I already know someone who can do the job, it's a shortcut. I already know what they can do. I already know that they're available. It's really easy to say, hey, can you just do this job for me? Without having to go to searching through thousands of resumes and filtering things down and all the rest, it's easier just to say, hey, you know what, can you do the job? Or when I am looking through hundreds or thousands of resumes, and that really is what it comes down to, is if you're hiring for a developer job, you might look through a thousand resumes or more. If you're looking through that many resumes, being able to stand out in some way is huge. And so if I look through and say, oh, I know that person and I know what the work they do, that right there elevates them a little bit above a person who I don't know. So, yes, knowing people is important. But I do want to say off the very beginning, you don't have to know someone to get a job. You can absolutely get a job without knowing someone. It may be a little more difficult, it may not be quite so simple, but you definitely can. But I think it's really important to build a network of people that you can help and that can help you. And this is where a guiding principle before you get started in this, a guiding principle I want you to follow is that I want you to give before you take, give more than you take, and be genuine. If you follow those three steps, it will really help you build a network of people that can help you when you need help. So let's talk about how do you build this network. And I will tell you, a lot of developers, not all developers, but a lot of developers, struggle with being more introverted. You know, the idea that you don't really want to interact with people, you don't want to be extroverted and go meet people and speak in front of groups and you know, do all those things that feel a little uncomfortable. And I get that. In fact, in some ways, I'm a pretty big introvert. But you can do things that will still allow you to build those relationships without having to be quite so extroverted as you might think. Everybody, or practically everybody, can do one of these things I'm talking about. Okay? So at least one of these things. So there are ways for you to build connections with other people. Let's talk about the number, the different things that you can do. And these are just a few of them. But number one, volunteer at a local meetup. This is huge. Just go volunteer. You don't have to speak. You don't have to be up front. You don't have to be the person that everybody looks at and you know stares at the whole audience of people that are looking back at you, and you're like, oh my goodness, I can't speak in front of people. I get that. If you can't do that or you're not comfortable yet doing that, and I would encourage you to get there, but no problem, set up the chairs, clean up the trash, come early, leave late, help the organizer out. I tell you what, the person that does that is a big deal. The person that just says, hey, you know what? I can help you set up. Hey, I can show up early, unlock the place, get things set up, I can stay late and clean up the pizza boxes and make sure things are reset back up for the organization that we borrowed this space from. That's a big deal. You may say, well, how is that building relationships? I can tell you that the leader of the meetup remembers you, knows you, and is thankful for you. That will build a connection. So just showing up and helping out, even just grunt work is huge. And yes, find a local meetup if at all possible. If you can't find a local meetup, find an online meetup. There are multiple out there. Find somewhere to meet with other developers and just build relationships. Again, show up early, leave late, just ask people questions, talk to people, start to build small relationships where you just start talking about what you do in your day job or you know what you're working on or what project you're working on. That can be huge and just starting to build that network of people that you know. Number two, contribute to open source. Now, you may already say, Tim, I'm not yet a good enough developer to do that. You definitely are. So let's talk about ways that you can contribute to open source. The most obvious is fix some code. So there's usually an issue list, and in that issue list, there's even issues that sometimes are marked as beginner-friendly issues. Issues that, hey, maybe you've never contributed to open source before and you're trying to figure out how do I do this? What's the pattern? How do I go about this? Well, you can go through and fix one of those easy ones. But maybe you're not there yet. Maybe you're not ready to fix code. Well, can you update or improve the documentation? Maybe it's as simple as just fixing the spelling and grammar of some of the documentation. Maybe it's reading through a documentation and saying, hey, this section is not really clear here. Figure out what it should mean and then improving the clarity of that section. Maybe it's adding a new section or a new example that better clarifies how to use this tool. Here's one that anyone can do. Tell the person thank you. You'd be surprised how many people will post issues and say, this is a problem. They'll complain, they'll say you should fix this faster, this is not being done fast enough. There's a lot of negativity around being an owner of open source. So when a person comes along and says, hey, thank you for that, and maybe specifically, thank you for this feature, I use this here. That makes you stand out. Now, will you build an instant connection with a person who owns the repository? No, you won't. But over time, as you do more in that repository, where you say, hey, you know, these are the things that I really liked out of that last update. You know, valuable feedback. These are the things that, you know, here's what I found didn't work quite right, or I didn't understand quite right. And so you start to give good feedback, not just complaints, not complaints, but instead saying, hey, here's how it could be better. Here's this is this is working great, but now this over here, maybe this could work and offer a suggestion. Giving valuable feedback, but being very, very thankful for what they do will definitely make you stand out in a positive way. Now, number three, create content for the community consistently. And yes, it's all C's, I didn't mean it to, but create content consistently for the community. And this is what I do. So it could be blogging, it could be YouTube, it can be TikTok, it could be podcasts. I've chosen YouTube primarily, but I also do a little bit of blogging, and I, of course, have this podcast. So creating content consistently for the community is giving back to the community in general. You'd be surprised how many people will read your blog. And maybe it's only a few people at first, but there'll be people that say, this helped me. And it does not have to be wait until I'm an expert and then do something. You can do it right away. If you're just learning, one of the best series I saw on a blog was by a person who was, they were just learning C sharp. And so they create a little blog post every day with this is what I learned today. This is what I learned today. And you can follow along and follow in their footsteps to see how, you know, maybe you say, I didn't know that. Or, yep, I knew that. Um, or hey, I need to practice that. Well, that was helpful to a lot of people. So being consistently help, consistently helping people will be huge for putting you out there in the community and building a resource or a number of people as connections to help you eventually. Another part of this is interact with the audience. And you'll probably notice this is what I do quite a bit. Now, I don't have time. I used to respond to every single comment on every single video. Forever. So I had videos that were three years old that I was still commenting on. I don't have quite that much time anymore. And so, especially if a comment comes along that has an in-depth question that can't give a ready answer to or can't point them to a video, I might not answer it right away, or maybe even at all. But for the most part, I try to interact with as much of the audience as possible. And that's not just because I want to say, hey, how are you doing? I want to help move my audience forward. And people realize that people understand that. And you know what? That has built a lot of connections for me because people say, Oh, that helped me with this. I know who you are. You helped me. And again, you want to make sure that you're helping others first. Okay. Give before you take, give more than you take, and be genuine. Doing those things while you're consistently giving content will be really helpful to a broad number of people. Okay, so that's the third possible way to build your connection community. Number four is build something of value and give it away. And this is open source, okay? So if you create something in the open source, if you give something away, you'll be surprised at how fast your audience will grow of people who you've helped. And you know what? With all of these things, the point is to help people. Again, being genuine. But at some point, you're gonna need help yourself. Again, the idea is that it's not what you know, it's who you know. And so when those tough times come, when you get laid off at work, when you are strolling at your job and you need to find a new one, if you can say, hey, you know what? I'm looking for work, or I'm looking for a side gig, or I'm I'm looking to do some consulting work, and you reach out to the network of people that you have helped, they'll be much happier and much more willing to say, hey, you know what? I know of something and reach out and help you. And again, that's not the point of building connections. The point of building connections is to be a part of and interact with the greater community. But that is a huge benefit of doing so. So now here's some hard truth. Okay, some people just take. And those people wear others out. So I see this a lot as a content creator where people come to me and the very first interaction we have will be: can you get me a job? Can you employ me? Can you fix this thing for me? Can you, can you, can you? And they're basically just wanting to take. Now, I totally get it. There are times when you're just stuck and you need help, and maybe you haven't built a community of connections that can help you. And sometimes you just reach out and say, hey, I'm desperate. Can you help out? But there is a pattern for some people where even if you help them, the next thing that happens is it's just trained them to come back to you for more. And so they'll ask for the next thing and the next thing. And those people, quite frankly, are wearing because it's just a one-way relationship, right? Where it's just me giving and them taking. Well, over time, people have learned to filter in order to better help those who genuinely need it. For instance, my audience is literally hundreds of thousands of people. I cannot help everybody. I'm sorry, not individually. I just can't. And I do feel bad about that sometimes because I genuinely want to help people succeed. This is why I do what I do. I create content so I can help as many people as possible. But when a person comes to me and says, hey, I need help, if I help that person, this is an opportunity cost thing. If I help that person, I'm not helping somebody else. Or I'm not creating content to help lots of people. So I have to make a choice. And the choice is who do I help? Now, for me, as much as possible, I try and help a large group of people versus a small group of people or a one person. But the other thing to evaluate is who do I want to help? Who do I think I hate to use this word, but deserves the help. There are people, like I said, who just take. Well, if if I feel like that this person is just taking, this is a one-way relationship, maybe they've never talked before, and the first thing you say is, give me something. You know what? That puts you in a category of people that are really taking away from people who genuinely need help or who maybe deserve it more because they've helped others out. And that's where the evaluation comes in, where a person like me or people, anybody really, they say, hey, I can only help so many people. So who do I choose? Well, we choose the people who best help out others. That's the way I do it. So for instance, and I'm not going to name names here, but you may figure out who these people are. Um, there is one person, it's actually a few people, but there's one person in particular who, when they watch my YouTube videos, they will take notes and mark down timestamps. And they say, oh, that's a new chapter and mark it on timestamp. And when they're done, and then we have to go back a couple times to do it, but when they're done, they will post those in the comments and say, hey, here's the timestamps for this video. I will take that and put it in the description so that everyone can have chapters in the video. I don't have time to create the chapters for my videos. It's again, who do I help? Do I put chapters in these videos or do I create more videos? And so I've leaned towards create more videos. But this person has come along and said, hey, I can help everybody by just marking down timestamps. Well, I'll tell you what, they have done that consistently. And you can tell when they are, when they are working, when they're busy, when they're because they're not doing as many. And that's fine. But they have consistently helped the community. If that person came to me and says, Tim, I need some help, I am much more likely to help that person. I'm much more likely to spend some time to give that person my attention, give that person some time I could give somewhere else, because they have helped my audience out. They have built that connection, even though we've never talked in person, because they have spent some time to help out the people who are important to me, my audience. So there are people like that. There are people in my forums. So if you buy a course from me, you get access to the forum for that particular course. There are people who have purchased a lot of courses from me, but then they go into those forums and help out newer developers. They're the ones that are commenting on new developers and helping urge them along and doing things that I can't because I don't have time to be in the forums responding to people all the time. In fact, I rarely go to the forums. That's for the more experienced developers to help the newer developers. But I see who those are. And you know what? If that person reached out to me and said, Hey, can I have a few minutes? I need help with this. Absolutely. I was recently at the Microsoft MVP conference, and it's just for MVPs. And while I was there, I met with one person that said, Hey, I am a leader of a user group. I would love to have you come speak. My answer, absolutely. Just let you know. Because I know they're helping the community. And so I am thrilled to be able to help them help the community. Because that's the connection that they have built. They have said, hey, I'm going to help this community. Would you help me? Absolutely. Because that's how you build connections. That's how you build community is by helping each other out. But if you're just there to take, if you're just there to consume and take and ask for more, more, more, I just don't have time because I have to choose and prioritize. So that's how you build connections as a developer. It's not always easy. It's not always comfortable. It's not always easy to walk into a new user group and just say, hey, I'm new. Or it's not, it's definitely not easy the first time you walk up on stage, uh, or let's be honest, in front, just in front of a bunch of people, it's not easy because you're like, I'm not sure what they're thinking. And they are there for you. They're there, they want you to succeed. But it's not easy to do that the first time, to step in front of people and say, hey, I want to share what I learned. But taking those steps, moving in towards building connections and meeting people and building a network of people that you know is really important as a developer. Because then when you need help, you're not just taking. You are saying, hey, I need help, but I've already invested in this community, and people are much more willing to genuinely want to help you. That's not to say that you won't get help if you need help right away. But this is the way to be a giver and not just a taker. Okay? So that's how you build community and connection in the development world, even if you're an introvert. Now, if you're an extrovert, that's awesome. Because you know what? It's a whole lot easier for you. Just go meet people, go talk to people, be genuine, learn about them. And if you do so, you will build a much quicker community than some of us introverts do. But this is the way that even introverts can build in the community and become known to others as being helpful. All right. Thanks for listening. As always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions. Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer. If you would like to help make more content like this possible, please like, subscribe, rate, and share Dev Questions. You can also send your questions to questions at IamTimcorey.com. Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to imtimcore.com and enroll in a course.