this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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when that site first got going, back in my 20s, it had the most aggressive recruitment strategy. it was walled off from non users and prompted new users to add all their contacts as a way to automatically connect them with each other "professionally". it would then spam email addresses not associated with a user account asking "Do you know [Name of Person]?", prompting/pressuring you to make an account and do the same to all your contacts.
just wave after wave of emails until I created some spam block rule for the entire site out of frustration.
it took seems like a decade for the network effect to really seize people, when some old fart would ask me why I wasn't on linked in. "Never saw the need" I'd say, "I'm trying to be on less social media sites, not more" maybe if they seemed like they'd understand.
I resolved in those first days I would never join such an aggressive site that flooded the shit out of my inbox "on behalf" of unsuspecting users. I didn't want to be part of the problem.
seeing what it has become as it's user ballooned into "Facebook for sociopaths" has been as disgusting as it is unsurprising.
I've changed jobs 4 times from age 30 to mid 40s and never used it. barring some true curveball between now and my last days, I expect I will be able to have cultivated an entire complex, professional career involving various credentials, professional associations, formal education/training, and technical skills networks without ever having a linkedin account.
and it feels fucking fantastic. fuck that scumsite.
As someone who struggles on the actually getting the credentials and professional connections/associations thing, can you give me advice on getting started?
this is probably context specific to the discipline, but higher education is a gateway to the professional sphere... no matter how many Mike Rowe's, Joe Rogans, or other Dennis Prager puppets / think tanks insist otherwise. it always will be, because formal training and civil service are welded together. the capitalists want to keep it subservient to their interests, and they've had a lot of success with that over the last 50 years, but they can't completely kill it and that makes it a contested space.
I used to totally buy into the anti-intellectual arguments and the decrying of higher education as a corrupted, ossified institution: because it is. nevertheless, the social capital of higher education is second only to inheritance. I dropped out at 20 and wrote it all off until I was 29 and found work I was actually interested in. of course, this work was not the sort that had any pathway for workers to become enterprise owners without a family cash injection of millions. so after beating myself up for some time, I went back to school and treated it like a full time job. I lived in a shit hole, took out max loans, and went after scholarships whenever I could. had no shame about crashing student events for free food. worked every summer, and had a few side hustles during the year... but school and professional networking always came first.
not just credential seeking by doing what it took to get the paper, but trying to absolutely crush expectations. doing the optional reading, joining organizations, taking obscure electives, making interdisciplinary connections on projects, taking the harder classes, attending meetings, starting organizations, going to conferences.
all that shit introduced me to a lot of people, and being introduced in the context of someone who isn't there to just chill and then go work for family set me apart.
of course, absolutely none of this would have been possible if I had never found the thing I was passionate about. the topic that blurred the lines of personal and professional, because I was excited to talk about everything (problems, issues, successes, history, new developments) associated with it.
higher education being the gateway means that having that official affiliation with an institution opens the doors to all sorts of optional further training, professional associations, and informal networks. it's a never ending process of meeting people, going to lectures, and going to meetings. and yeah, most of them are "whatever" and meetings are draining/time sucks... so what kind of masochistic pervert seeks out optional ones to attend?
meetings are where people are, figuring out shared values, talking about common interests, exchanging resources, and setting group priorities. learning to recognize all those soft skills, like creating space for quiet people to talk, facilitating a planning session, etc.
ultimately, networking is about joining groups. you don't have to love it. I'm introverted as shit and mostly work on my own or occasionally in small teams. that's what I prefer, but I go to the damn meetings, pulling myself to them when I must, because like 5-10% of the time something absolutely critical is shared that makes all the other times worth it.
so in summary, find the thing you want to do until you can't and then go to where the people are that can't shut up about it.
Yeah, I've managed to rack up the credentials, I'm just terrible at professional networking and feel overwhelmed by the number of professional networks/optional training things. The post-covid remote work move has definitely not helped my introversion, either. I'll have to start forcing myself to get out more.
yeah, the remote thing feels like a double edged sword sometimes. some groups make really good use of it so groups that are dispersed widely can meet routinely and share digital resources much easier, but I have totally become dumber at in-person shit unless the organizer do a good job with ice breaking activities up front... which I hate participating in, but holy shit are they necessary lol.
as for winnowing down or strategically figuring out which associations, and aside from the theoretical promise of their missions, sometimes I try to get the scoop from members in other organizations, like people I vibe with if there's a casual in-person thing. "what's the deal with [x]?"
it can be gossipy and like third hand bullshit, but occasionally helpful for informal context.
I guess, in the larger picture, I always try to be an easy resource for people with questions by not bullshitting them when I don't know, qualifying my opinions, and not gatekeeping whatever I do know.
like I almost always have 5-15 minutes to answer a question or give a walkthrough to someone, and it they want something more indepth, I offer up an hour or so of my free time. most people are really appreciative, and in the remote era, most people have the tools (software+skills) to do a remote chat
its a cool way to get to know others in / around the profession and create some kind of context for me reaching out if I am looking for something.
Yeah, I work on a college campus so I feel like those connections should be feasible, but I have a hard time keeping things going - I can get coffee and chat but then don't know what to do next, or I ended up running afoul of my boss by trying to up skill with a side project and that ended up being a whole big thing.
There's a group that meets around climate change but, while it is nice to have a place to gather and talk, it seems like conversation mostly sticks to what's going on in the lab because it seems like folks are worried right now that they might not even be able to keep doing the research. I keep an eye out for ways to volunteer that are relevant to my expertise but haven't really been able to make anything click.
being on a campus can be helpful at least, assuming it's the sort of place that can host an occasional conference.
climate change oriented groups can vary widely, as it is such a big/multi disciplinary issue and there are so many different actions or directions a group could take.
what might help is looking up schedules in those conference hosting spaces to find those events bringing in people from the national stage to present on their research, if the research was something at least tangentially related to my own. there was usually support for being a member of the broader campus community and attending lectures even though I wasn't registered. couldn't crash the free food easily, but as far as sitting in on panels and lectures like they were excited that I was curious lol.
it definitely helped to have a checked out boss that all I had to say was that I was attending a conference on campus and it would cost zero dollars.
anyway, they could be exhausting to attend, but I would meet people from all over the continent with similar interests coming up through similar institutions and we could talk about our experiences in the discipline and/or adjacent career paths, like for fed/state/local government agencies, private non profits, community action or "industry".
talking to lots of early career academics is kinda how I learned about those other alternatives, because invariably people burn out at the academy and go do something else with their fancy paper. agencies can do a real shit job of recruiting and most have onerous application processes. private non profits can be crazy opaque, especially smaller ones.
national and regional conferences tend to be the only times all these different sectors collide, so they can be illuminating in finding out what else is out there, professionally, and what they want.
its also one of those "weak ties" things, where sometimes you only see or communicate with some of these people once a year or so. like just enough to stay on the radar or reach out with a question/update. having lots of those weak connections is major. I mean, basically, it's the selling point of any social network platform: they offer to facilitate those weak ties for you all in once place with the same communication system in exchange for your personal information and the right to steer your attention.
but, we all have email and I've found that people tend to appreciate when I take the time to connect with them once every year or so with a personal/professional update and inquiry.
this feels rambly, so I'm gonna cut it off here. hope it helps?