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Comment by gh1 | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to ask an open ended question : how important do you think it is to be well-connected? I am sure if someone spent a lot of time going to plenty of networking events and put serious effort into talking with people, then they could grow their network pretty fast. But every minute spent in networking is a minute not spent in doing something else. So how do you set your priorities?

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It really depends on what you want to accomplish, if you're an engineer, love your job and would be happy doing it for the next 4 years, there's probably not too much to gain. If you're an investor, your network is everything.

Yes, agreed. But I guess an engineer would want to make career progress too, right? Isn't it smart to be networked to ensure that you are at the forefront of opportunity?

As an aside, I was in the academia previously and it seems that networking is highly correlated with success there.

This struck a nerve in me.

What I found to be true over 15 years of a programmer carreer is that you can grow in your current job, but not by much. There exists some kind of psychological barrier for the people above you and they find all sorts of ways to put you down. Maybe it's just the money; who wants to spend more without knowing beforehand if they'll get more value?

So I'd say for a tech worker networking becomes extremely important if they are looking to move to a next step in their carreer, be it in terms of responsibility, money, new sub-area of work, or a mix of all.

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