Don't make Tech your entire personality

Tanay Dwivedi traces a narrowing effect in developers who spend the workday immersed in tech and then socialize mainly at tech meetups and hackathons: communication with unfamiliar audiences stops getting practiced, and the unfamiliarity compounds over time. His fix is building an offline life with no connection to tech, treating those interactions as ends in themselves rather than networking exercises.

Fichamento

#

• A mentally demanding, screen-based workday leaves little bandwidth to socialize afterward, so people default to the circle that already understands their work and vocabulary.
• The result is a cycle: less practice talking to unfamiliar people makes those conversations feel harder each time, which reduces the practice further.
• The counter to that cycle is offline hobbies with no connection to tech: a painting workshop, a photography club, a book club.
• Toastmasters and similar clubs require active participation, not just listening, in front of people from different ages and professions.
• Reconnecting with old friends, or meeting online-community friends in person, counts the same way. A meetup he describes with friends from an ADHD community carried no career or productivity talk at all, and he names that absence as the value of it.
• Good networking includes curiosity as much as self-presentation: asking about a topic you know nothing about, instead of performing expertise.
• Turning curiosity into another productivity project defeats the point. Hyperfixating on a topic for hours, or doomscrolling news, doesn’t count as broadening one’s view of the world.

Connects with Give-First Mentality Over Transactional Networking and Four Groups Every Network Needs, both on what makes networking work once you’re in the room.