Become Well Connected
Relationships matter - networking well can accelerate your career or business.
Welcome to Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.
This week we have:
Tip of the week: Become a Well Connected Software Developer to Advance Your Career
Book of the week: Thinking in Bets
Finds of the week: How Emotions Affect Perceived Productivity, Moneyball for Software Teams, Guide to a great process for hiring engineers
Tip of The Week: Become a Well Connected Software Developer to Advance Your Career
In 1996 Chris Fralic was selling software for Oracle. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next, but had a curiosity about venture capital. Through a connection he got introduced to a famous venture capitalist who introduced him to the industry. But that’s not what’s interesting to us.
Today he’s a successful VC himself and ascribes his success to the relationships he’s built deliberately over the years. It’s a common story - relationships matter - because it’s true; but Fralic is considered to be world-class super-connector, taking relationship building to the next level.
Let’s dig into how he does it.
He has one core networking belief - the best way to be highly influential is to be human to everyone you meet. And seven rules for making great connections to accelerate your career or business:
Convey genuine appreciation - actively project warmth and energy. People like you when they feel liked by you.
Listen with intent - demonstrate you’ve heard what they’ve said and encourage them to keep talking.
Use humility markers - admitting you can be wrong and like all humans are fallible helps make you relatable.
Offer unvarnished honesty - You can stand out by being as honest as you can, just root your honest in what will benefit the other person.
Brainstorm with people - maybe you can’t directly help them, but you might be able to provide value by brainstorming it with them.
End every meeting or conversation with the feeling and optimism that you’d like to start the next conversation between you with.
Don’t fake it until you make it - if you want to connect with someone don’t fake knowing them. You need to know why you care about them you need to be able to articulate it succinctly.
He also offers some do’s and don’ts:
✅ Do: keep a list of dream contacts, then you’re ready if you find a route to connecting.
✅ Do: make it easy for the other person to say yes or no without creating an imposition. Ask for the minimum you need.
✅ Do follow up and follow through.
✅ Do: systemise keeping in touch.
✅ Do: recon, come to meetings prepared having done your research.
✅ Do: learn to be indifferent to rejection, better to get a quick no and learn from it.
❌ Don’t: ambush people.
❌ Don’t: reach out only when you need something.
❌ Don’t lose track of your response rate - if it’s 100% you’re not pushing far enough.
Remember:
Give before thinking about what you get. Always offer something of value before expecting or asking for something in return. The key to this is not focusing on reciprocity.
Want to Level Up Your Coding Skills?
I believe the best way to do this is to build real-world applications. For that reason I write a weekly newsletter sharing Coding Challenges.
The coding challenges are all designed to walk you through the process of creating an application and to be less than 8 hours work.
Each challenge has you focus on building real-world software rather than toy applications or algorithms and data structures.
You can tackle the challenges in the programming language of your choice. You can even tackle them in several different languages if you prefer.
You can see the challenges and subscribe on the Coding Challenges SubStack.
Alternately I’m launching a live cohort based course: Coding Challenges Live: Redis Edition.
Book of The Week: Thinking in Bets
The best decisions aren’t guaranteed to work out. Sometimes seemingly bad decisions can sometimes turn out to be the right ones.
So when things go wrong, who do we blame and why? And what about when things go right? In Thinking In Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts Annie Duke explains why our focus on outcomes leads to irrational thinking and us confusing luck with skill.
Some of the key learnings to take away from this book are:
We have a tendency to confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. some bad decisions lead to good outcomes and vice versa. The reality is decisions are rarely 100% right or wrong. We would do better to make decision based on probably outcomes that a right or wrong outcome.
If we want to make good decisions based on facts, we have to work around our hardwired tendency to believe what we hear. Unfortunately our beliefs are easily formed and hard to change. Duke suggests we can address that by asking ourselves if we’d bet on our beliefs. Most of us wouldn’t without trying to properly validate them.
We can learn a lot from our mistakes, but we need to be careful to differentiate between those where our decision affected the outcome and those where it didn’t. That’s hard.
Intellectual and ideological diversity in a group naturally produces high-quality thinking - so we can improve our decision making by being part of a group.
To make better decisions, we need to spend some time in the future. We can do this by imaging as we make a decision, how we’ll feel about it in ten minutes, ten months and ten years.
Ultimately, whether or not there’s money involved, bets make us take a harder look at how much certainty there is in the things we believe. They force us to consider alternatives and stay open to changing our minds. So when it’s time to make decision, accept that things are always somewhat uncertain and make the best bet you can.
It's awesome you read Thinking In Bets! I've been looking forward to reading it as well. Great to have some of your key takeaways before diving in