[tavʁaj] Ganbold

Waste time at work, near as I can tell. Never made any difference at all for me, networking IRL always delivered better results. Finally deleted mine last year after literally not logging in for like 5 years.

Platforms like LinkedIn don't replace networking IRL but can be useful/expected as a sort of record of your networking.

Honestly, physically getting to the space where other people are is important, but it's the LAST step. You want to work on yourself - social skills, dress, and confidence - to the point where you are consistently more impressive than the average person they meet.

Then once you have this down, you leverage this by hitting a lot of events. If you hit events before you have this, you can get a lot of cards, but no one really remembers you so it's a dubious use of time/money.

yeah, that's the thing. i don't know where the events are. i can generally make connections when there are events, but a decent growth rate doesn't mean much when it's on top of a very small network.

IT world there are a ton of local user/dev/whatever groups, usually at least one in a major-ish city, but I've got no idea about other industries. It's possible you may have to travel on your own dime to a regional or national industry seminar/convention if they're less common.

Primarily it serves as a long form, living resume--with the ability to have recommendations from actual people built in, as well as letting me search for recruiters from specific teams and orgs to cold open to when job hunting.

ah, thanks. how important are the recommendations from actual people?

Probably the least relevant part of the above. It's more useful (when job hunting) to use it as a way to annoy the shit out of recruiters then they can see your background.