One impression I could imagine having after reading this post for the first time is something like: “eca would prefer fewer connections to people and doesn’t value that output of community building work” or even more scandalously, “eca thinks community builders are wasting their time”.
Community building is mission critical. It’s also complicated, and not something I expect to have good opinions about currently, overall, because of lack of context and careful thought, among other things.
I have personally found these types of introductions enormously valuable, especially in other phases of my career, and it would make me very sad if people turned them off!
Even if I didn’t find them personally valuable, I’d guess that they were still very valuable overall because I expect this to be person and context dependent, and I see others get value.
Even if more should be invested in work connections overall, its not clear that the folks sending me intros (THANK YOU!! PLEASE DON’T STOP!) should be the ones doing the collaboration themselves (“Have you worked with [Someone] on anything? Or do you know anyone who has?”). Gains from specialization could imply that the folks making intro connections should focus on that, and others should do more deliberate working on stuff.
Rather, my nebulous aim is some combo of A) sharing what my intuitions (narrowly trained) say the marginal effect of trading intros for work experience would be, for me, B) gesturing at an opportunity for even more value to be produced by community builders, if my experience generalizes and C) hoping selfishly that someone will help me understand whats going on here, so I quite complaining about it to my dinner companions before impulsively writing a forum post.
Not sure how much of this is in my head, but thats a thing.
One impression I could imagine having after reading this post for the first time is something like: “eca would prefer fewer connections to people and doesn’t value that output of community building work” or even more scandalously, “eca thinks community builders are wasting their time”.
I don’t believe that, and would have edited the draft to make that more clear if I had taken a different approach to writing it.
A quick amendment to that vibe.
Community building is mission critical. It’s also complicated, and not something I expect to have good opinions about currently, overall, because of lack of context and careful thought, among other things.
I have personally found these types of introductions enormously valuable, especially in other phases of my career, and it would make me very sad if people turned them off!
Even if I didn’t find them personally valuable, I’d guess that they were still very valuable overall because I expect this to be person and context dependent, and I see others get value.
Even if more should be invested in work connections overall, its not clear that the folks sending me intros (THANK YOU!! PLEASE DON’T STOP!) should be the ones doing the collaboration themselves (“Have you worked with [Someone] on anything? Or do you know anyone who has?”). Gains from specialization could imply that the folks making intro connections should focus on that, and others should do more deliberate working on stuff.
Rather, my nebulous aim is some combo of A) sharing what my intuitions (narrowly trained) say the marginal effect of trading intros for work experience would be, for me, B) gesturing at an opportunity for even more value to be produced by community builders, if my experience generalizes and C) hoping selfishly that someone will help me understand whats going on here, so I quite complaining about it to my dinner companions before impulsively writing a forum post.
Not sure how much of this is in my head, but thats a thing.