Please Network
Lots of people posting their LinkedIn accounts and enthusiastic replies saying they connected.
Cool, but if you aren't part of the excited "Connected!" party, don't fret too much.
I've spent years trying to network. Most men see me as nothing but a piece of ass.
I've read questions on that cesspit Metafilter that indicate other women have the same problem. She's spending time getting to know him, this is the most personally he's gotten to know a woman in ages, he knows she's trying to make a professional connection and wants to hit on her anyway.
I've talked about this before but I used to delete a lot of my posts so I don't know if it's still live somewhere:
Women -- me included -- expect to have PERSONAL relationships and spend more time on trying to "get to know" people as individuals and so forth. It's how we parse the world.
It also gets interpreted by other people as looking for romance or friendship, not "networking."
It's not just crazy talk. Knowing someone well helps you know what they are actually good at etc.
But I've never figured out the networking thing and I don't think it's "all my fault." I'm quite certain several married men knew damn well I was trying to network, found me attractive and wanted an excuse with plausible deniability to get to know me and decide if they could reasonably line up their next wife in case they ever got around to divorcing their current ball and chain.
Women are worse. They gush at me vacuously about my wonderful blog writing or whatever and it goes NOWHERE, not even to "Oh, I could potentially have an affair here but it's not helping my career, no."
Someone on HN once told me networking is about getting your WORK seen. Women tend to not do that.
I showed up at the house of a couple employing me very part-time for their community development nonprofit and the husband came in and asked if we had covered X yet. No, us two ninnies were talking about irrelevant shit like clothes and knitting.
I don't even knit. She was my boss. I let the conversation go where she took it.
I've personally given up on "networking." Everyone wants a PERSONAL relationship to me. Trying to network just opens the door to bullshit excuses to talk to me and waste my time while doing NOTHING for my career.
At my corporate job, I did establish trust with a high ranking VIP and he was willing to help me professionally. But I didn't stay long enough for that to pay off in a big way in part because a senior programmer in the department I wanted a job in asked me for a date, so I was clear my hopes of getting into IT were dead.
Pretty sure he checked to make sure asking me out wouldn't hurt HIS career. Zero thought given to what it did to mine.