Networking Is Overrated for Most People
The way most professionals do it produces collectors of connections, not great careers. Do less of it, and do better work that travels.
Guest post!
A few years ago, an early-career friend showed me his LinkedIn at a bar. He’d just crossed five thousand connections. He was visibly proud. He’d been working on it for two years - daily outreach, weekly events, the careful curation of his “network.” He asked me what I thought.
I thought it was sad. I didn’t say so. I asked him a different question instead: In the last twelve months, how many of those five thousand connections actually helped you do anything?
He thought about it. He counted on his fingers. The answer was four. Maybe six if he was generous.
This essay is about that gap. Networking is one of the most over-prescribed activities in modern professional life, especially among MBA students and early-career professionals. The genre of advice that says “your network is your net worth,” that elevates conferences and coffee chats and LinkedIn cold messages into the central activity of a career - that genre is mostly wrong. Not because relationships don’t matter (they matter enormously) but because the way most people network produces connections, not relationships, and connections are not what compound.
I’m aware this is the most contrarian piece I’ve written here. Read it carefully. The argument is more nuanced than “don’t network.” It’s that most of what gets called networking is wasted effort, and reallocating that effort to better work would produce better careers for the people doing it.
What overrated networking actually looks like
Let me be specific about the activities I’m criticizing, so this doesn’t get heard as a blanket attack on relationships.
Conferences and industry events as a networking strategy. The professional class spends an enormous amount of time and money attending events whose primary stated purpose is networking. The actual yield, for most attendees, is two or three business cards that turn into nothing. The signal you absorb at conferences — what’s hot, who’s hiring, what frameworks are circulating — has mostly already reached the internet. The “in the room” advantage that conferences used to confer in 1995 has been largely arbitraged away.
LinkedIn at scale. The strategy of sending hundreds of cold connect requests, commenting on senior people’s posts to get visibility, sharing curated content to build personal brand. This produces a “network” that looks impressive on the platform and generates almost no actual career outcomes. The conversion rate from “person you’ve never met but connected with on LinkedIn” to “person who would do something meaningful for you” is something like 2-3%, and that 2-3% is mostly the people you didn’t strictly need LinkedIn for.
The 30-minute coffee chat circuit. The MBA student practice of asking everyone they can find for a 30-minute call to “learn about your career.” Some of these are valuable. Most of them are extractive on both sides — the asker gets generic advice, the asked person gets twenty minutes of ego-validation followed by an awkward goodbye. The ratio of these chats to actual career outcomes is somewhere between 50:1 and 200:1, depending on the chatter’s specificity.
The “advisor” or “mentor” portfolio. The collection of senior names that some young professionals accumulate to put on slides or talk about. In most cases, these aren’t real advisor relationships — they’re 2-4 conversations a year with someone who is too senior to actively engage, but too polite to decline. The relationship looks impressive when described. It rarely produces anything when needed.
Attending the events of every adjacent industry to broaden your network. The strategy of going to startup events as a banker, banking events as a consultant, etc. The breadth feels productive. The depth, in any of those rooms, is too shallow to produce real ties.
What actually compounds
To be fair to the activity, real networks matter enormously. The most senior people I know all have one. But the form of the network that matters is different from what most networking activity produces.
One deep network of 20-50 people, built through real work, sustained for a decade. This is the network that compounds. These are the people you’ve actually shipped projects with, gone through hard situations with, hired or been hired by, debated decisions with. They know your work in detail, not your LinkedIn summary. They will take your call at 11pm. You will take theirs.
The path to this network is almost the opposite of what conventional networking advice prescribes. You don’t build it by going to events. You build it by doing serious work alongside people you respect, then maintaining the relationships over years. The math is different — instead of 5,000 connections at one degree of depth, it’s 50 connections at fifty degrees of depth. The total relational mass is the same; the career utility is roughly 100x.
Visibility for serious work, not visibility for self-promotion. The networking activity that does compound, in 2026, is making your actual work visible. Writing about what you know in public. Speaking at events not to network but to share something specific. Being the recognized voice on a narrow topic. The output of this is paradoxical — you do the work, you don’t network, and people come to you. The selection effect is strong because people seeking you out have already self-qualified as relevant.
This is the form of “network-building” I endorse, even though it doesn’t look like networking. It’s just doing serious work in public.
Being useful before being needed. The single most reliable way to build a real network is to help people without expecting anything in return, repeatedly, over years. Not transactional helpfulness (”I’ll do this favor so you owe me one”) — actual usefulness, with no scoreboard. The people who do this consistently end up with networks that are inexplicable to outside observers, because the network was built through hundreds of small, ungrudging acts that nobody saw.
The hard part of this is patience. The yield doesn’t show up for years. Most people stop being useful when the immediate return doesn’t appear. The ones who keep being useful end up, ten years later, with the most powerful networks of anyone in their cohort. This isn’t strategy; it’s character. But the career outcome of this character is real.
The actual math
Here’s the part most networking advocates don’t engage with. The empirical contribution of “network” to career outcomes, controlled for skill and luck, is more modest than the discourse suggests.
The biggest factors in career outcomes, in roughly descending order: skill (the ability to do the work itself), luck (the right opportunity at the right time), reputation (what people who don’t know you say when they hear your name), domain expertise (the depth in a specific area), and finally, network. Network shows up. It’s a real variable. It’s just the fifth variable, and treating it as the first produces overinvestment relative to what compounds.
The careers I’ve watched succeed disproportionately have done so because the protagonists were unusually skilled at their work, were in the right place at the right time, and built narrow but deep relationships through that work. The networking-as-primary careers — the people who specialized in being well-connected — mostly haven’t aged well. Their visibility plateaued in their thirties because their actual work didn’t compound, and by their forties they were running out of room for the network alone to carry them.
This is the brutal version of the argument. Most people who think of themselves as great networkers are just people who don’t have enough else going on to fill their calendars with substantive work. They’ve defaulted to networking because the alternative — sitting alone and getting genuinely good at something — is harder.
When networking actually matters
To be fair to the case for networking, there are real situations where it earns its keep:
Industry-switching. Moving from one sector to a completely different one, especially mid-career, is the situation where networking is genuinely necessary. You need warm introductions, you need translation of your prior work into the new sector’s language, and you need the credibility transfer that only a respected insider can give you. If you’re contemplating this, invest in the new sector’s network deliberately.
Geography moves. Discussed in the international-role piece on this Substack. When you arrive in a new city, the first 30-50 relationships you build are disproportionately important, because they shape the second wave of relationships and the structure of your reputation in the new market. Networking matters here, but in a focused, deliberate way, not at scale.
Fundraising. If you’re a founder raising capital, your network is genuinely your asset. But this is so specific that the general “build a broad network” advice is still wrong; what you need is depth with the 50-100 specific investors who could write you a check.
Sales-driven roles. If your job is to sell, your network is part of your work. But that’s not “networking” in the sense the genre uses the word — it’s relationship-building inside the work itself, which is different.
These exceptions are real, and they explain why networking advice has the reputation it has - the advice was generated by people in roles where networking is genuinely the work, then over-generalized to roles where it isn’t. For most knowledge-work careers in their first decade, the exceptions don’t apply, and the optimal allocation is closer to “do excellent work, build narrow deep relationships organically, and skip most events.”
What I’d actually advise the reader
Three frames, in descending order of importance:
Spend 90% of the time you’d spend networking on getting better at your actual work. The compounding from genuine skill in your craft is, for most knowledge-work careers, a higher-yield use of the same hours. The exception is roles where networking is the work — sales, deal-making, fundraising — and even there, the work matters more than the events.
Build relationships through work, not at the side of work. The 20-50 deep relationships that will matter in your career are the ones you’ll build by working with people, not by meeting them. Optimize your work choices partly for who you’ll work with — pick teams with strong people, take projects that put you alongside people you respect, prioritize companies whose alumni networks you’d be glad to be part of. The relationships that emerge from these choices are the ones that compound. The events you skip won’t matter.
When in doubt, default to making your work visible rather than yourself visible. If you have time to spend on what feels like networking, spend it on writing, speaking about your work, building a public footprint of substantive output. The yield is non-linear and slow at first. But what you get from it is qualitatively different from what you get from networking — you get a reputation tied to specific work, which is durable, rather than a reputation tied to social presence, which depreciates.
A final note
I am, of course, aware that I have a Substack and write publicly. That sounds like networking. By the framework above, it isn’t, exactly — the goal isn’t to meet people. The goal is to develop and share thinking that people who care about the same questions will find useful. The relationships that emerge from that — and they do emerge, at a rate that surprises me — emerge because of the work, not because I went looking for them.
That’s the version of “networking” the genre should have endorsed. Do excellent work in public, sustain narrow deep relationships through real collaboration, and let the rest take care of itself. Almost everything else that gets called networking is performative, and recognizing it as such is one of the more freeing realizations a young professional can have.
Stop going to so many events. Stop scaling your LinkedIn. Stop the 30-minute coffee chats unless you have a specific question that someone specific can answer. Take the time you’d spend on these and use it to get better at your actual work. In ten years, you’ll have a vastly stronger career than the peer who networked, and a meaningfully stronger network too — because the people worth knowing tend to seek out the people doing serious work, not the people who optimized for being visible.
Less networking, better work. That’s the trade.
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Hit a chord with this piece!