Everyone knows that networking is the best way to get a job. Not everyone is prepared to attend “networking events”, hand out business cards to people they meet, or spend all their time maintaining professional relationships. If you are one of these people, I have good news. You can still benefit from networking to find jobs and other opportunities. Merely by being non-hostile, open to the possibility of networking, you can benefit from the networks of people you already know, your friends and coworkers.

The reason is simple: networkers need you. People in the world who network, who spend lots of time maintaining relationships, are participating in a gift economy. They trade favors, introductions, contacts, and other information. Most networkers are looking for win-win situations, connections they can make which benefit both parties. When they get you a job, they are also helping someone fill a position.

These networkers need raw material, which comes from people like you who are not otherwise plugged into the network. By being open to networking, you let them help you. Here are three simple principles to be open to networking:

• Be open. When you meet someone socially, and they are interested in you, tell them about yourself. If you are looking for a new job, or new opportunities, or about to finish a program at school, or an expert in some part of your field, feel free to volunteer that fact. This isn’t begging, it is giving people the opportunity to help you out.
• Be specific. The more specific you are when telling people about your interests, the easier it is for them to help. No one wants to flood their network with a request for “a job”, but if you are “an experienced robotics engineer looking for a clean tech startup,” that message is valuable and easy to route to the right place.
• Be appreciative. People who network do it because they like helping people. But do not immediately respond with a gift or other token. Networking is long term game, and there will likely be opportunities to reciprocate in the future. Or you can pay it forward, by doing your own part to help others in a similar way.

Networking doesn’t have to mean pushy conversations with strangers. By maintaining your existing social relationships, and being open, specific, and appreciative, you can let other people do the networking for you. Good luck.

In these markets, the price buyers are willing to pay is defined by average quality of good. Buyers lack information, so can only assume they are going to get a product of average value. Unfortunately, this lower price drives the best products out of the market, because sellers (who know they have the best goods) won’t accept that price. When the best goods are removed from the market, the average quality drops, the price drops, and the next best goods are removed from the market. The conclusion is that in these markets quality falls until it matches the amount of information that buyers have.

Bruce applies this principle of economics to explain why there are so many bad security products. But others in the blogosphere have picked it up as a way to describe other parts of software. I first saw it at David Anderson’s blog, where he talks about the lack of information when hiring software engineers. The most stark application to the job market comes in a Reddit comment through:

I just realized that it applies to the IT job market. Here the seller (the applicant) has all the info about himself, while the employer knows nothing. So what happens is that companies expect the average, and pay accordingly. That’s why people who are smarter than average shouldn’t go on job interviews, because they’ll likely to get below what they are worth.

In the IT market it also helps to explain the pervasive use of certifications. Even if they don’t indicate that a candidate is good, they do cut out the bottom of the distribution of candidates (the truly terrible sysadmins). Since top people will have already taken themselves out of the market for these jobs, it’s ok to alienate them. Removing the bottom people pulls up the average, so prices (salaries) presumably rise.

As much as I like thinking about the talent market, my favorite application of this meme is Reg Braithwaite’s The Not So Big Software Design where he applies it to tract housing (a pet issue of mine) and by metaphor to custom software development. The customers for both new houses and custom software are definitely ignorant, and they tend to buy based on what we in the software industry call buzzwords. For new home buyers, these are things like granite countertops, en-suite master bathrooms, the number of bedrooms, etc. Builders optimize for these easy-to-observe items, at the expense of things that can be critical to livability or maintainability of homes.

It’s a good discussion of the realities of custom software. The metaphor does tragically fall down though. At least buyers of used cars and tract housing can resell them to the next ignorant buyer. Companies are generally stuck with their custom software.