Researchers actually have a name for this feeling. When networking feels purely transactional, people start to feel like they're treating others as means to an end — a form of moral impurity that's uncomfortable enough that a lot of technically talented professionals just quietly stop doing it, even when they know their career depends on it.
The reaction to all this has been a counter-argument that's gotten pretty popular over the last decade or so: forget the wide net. Go deeper, not wider. Focus on building a smaller number of genuine connections. Bring value to people before you ask for anything. Be a person in the network, not just a name on a list. For most technical folks, this approach makes immediate sense — it maps onto how they already think about their work. You're a contributor. Contributing is your default. Don't keep score, bring generosity, and the relationships will follow.
I think this is good advice. And I also think it's incomplete on its own.
Sociologist Mark Granovetter studied where professional opportunities actually come from, in a paper that's become one of the most cited works in social science. His finding was almost counterintuitive: most people find new opportunities through weak ties — casual acquaintances, people they don't talk to regularly — rather than through their close connections. The reason is structural. Your close network mostly knows what you already know. Your weak ties connect you to different circles, different information, different doors. Ronald Burt, building on that work, found that the people who bridge different communities see opportunities first, because they have access to information that doesn't circulate inside any single group.
The practical translation is uncomfortable for a lot of people: if everyone in your network works in the same building, the same company, or the same corner of your field, you're not getting new information. You're getting confirmation. Deep relationships inside a small world are valuable — and fragile.
So why don't most technical professionals build a wider network even when they understand this? Two reasons, and they tend to reinforce each other. The first is that gravitating toward similar people is natural — researchers call it homophily, and it's not laziness or snobbery, it's just how networks form by default because similar people feel safer. More predictable. Less threatening. The second is that meeting new people with an agenda feels manipulative, and most technical folks only push themselves to do it when the stakes are already high — which makes the agenda problem worse at exactly the moment you need it to be better.
The fix isn't pushing through the discomfort by reminding yourself that networking matters. Your brain doesn't really distinguish between social risk and actual danger, which is why the stakes always feel higher than they are. What actually changes things is changing the goal.
Stop thinking about casting a wide net as collecting contacts. Start thinking of it as exploration.
One of the participants in a networking workshop I ran put it better than I could have. She said she was finding that transactional networking felt too surface-level — that it didn't actually let people get to know each other well enough to be memorable. Her takeaway was that she wanted to understand people at a deeper level. When you're genuinely curious about someone, it doesn't feel like networking. It feels like a conversation.
That reframe matters because it changes what success looks like. You're not trying to close a deal or secure a referral. You're trying to find out if there's something interesting here. For curious people — which most of you are, or you wouldn't be in the work you're in — that's a much more comfortable frame. And there's a second shift worth making alongside it: when you reach out to someone new, you're not just showing up to extract value. Your experience, your perspective, your network are useful to other people too. You're not imposing on someone by showing up curious and genuine. You're offering them a chance at the same thing you're looking for.
When you meet enough people from that place, some of those conversations develop into something more. They stick because there's something real there — mutual interest, complementary skills, shared values. Those are the ones worth deepening. Over time, you end up with something that looks like the depth-first model, but built on a much wider foundation.
That's not a compromise between the two approaches. That's what the research actually describes as the most effective network structure: broad enough to discover opportunities, deep enough to act on them.
Networking will probably always sit a little outside your comfort zone, and I'm not promising otherwise. But curiosity is already in your toolkit — it's what got you into technical work in the first place. You just have to point it at people, not only at problems. And if you shift how you measure success away from "did I make a connection" and toward "did I have a genuine conversation," the whole thing gets a lot less heavy.
Enough genuine conversations, and the connections take care of themselves.