Best way to network

Career Advice
1

Hello, everyone! My name is Nathan, and I’ve been coding for about 8 years as a hobby. I’m entirely self taught, or at least in a non formal education setting. I’m hoping to turn it into a career change.

I only know 2 people in software development. Both just personally.

What do you do to build your network and meet people in the industry? (I’m in Central PA, btw).

Thank You!

2

Hello Nathan

Create a LinkedIn profile as part of your networking efforts.

Join LI-groups you are interested in and reply to posts in your feed. Once you get comfortable with the website, you can start posting yourself. Both will give you exposure and help you grow your network.

Also

  • Block and report people connecting to you just to sell their garbage (annoying and against TOS)
  • Get familiar with scams like shady job offers
  • LinkedIn won’t stop pesking you with buying Premium, don’t feel pressured by them

You can look me up and connect anytime.

Best regards

3

Note - just making friends on LinkedIn will not do a ton to give you a productive network. Really, effective networking comes from keeping in contact with people you work with.

1 Like
4

In person meetups are the best in my opinion. Any kind of conference or hackathon or meetup groups. And it you’re socially awkward, what makes these kinds of meetups are good because you already have common ground. You can just ask anyone “what are you working on these days?”

You may need to travel a little too. The bigger cities have more of that kind of thing going on.

5

Go to general networking events in your area even if not developer focused. People you meet may introducte you to others inside tech and you might get some basic work .e.g WordPress sites. Market it as its cheaper that you do than them hiring someone else. I did this trick when I started 2015 and managed to get 6 projects done in year, gave me a great starting point of experience.

Its all business tricks / understanding customer needs.

Hope this helps.

6

Finding groups that you share common interests is one way that worked for me, niche groups i.e niche discord channels, X communities, Reddit communities or even niche programming language communities, Open source contirbution comm… then engage in the topics of interest vigorously. See, no one wantts to netwok where they not seeing value, the best networking occurs when you’re getting stuff done in the right environment. Forget about LinkedIn.

7

Showcase some of the projects you have worked on. This will attract some new connections.