[kevingadd]

I think networking is pretty important. Almost everything I have today I owe to connections I established with other people, either accidentally (over IRC, forums, etc) or intentionally, at a conference or local event. In a few specific cases, I established these connections by emailing someone to offer to buy them coffee after we had only corresponded via twitter or email.

The author calling these interactions meaningless rings hollow to me, though I can imagine how in his position, perhaps all his interactions with strangers are meaningless because they only want money.

I will agree with the premise that 'networking events' seem to be a waste of time, though. While you can have some interesting conversations at them, I can't think of a single lasting relationship I've forged with a peer at a networking-focused event, despite a lot of effort spent attempting to 'convert' the interaction into an ongoing conversation, so to speak. I still think trade conventions and parties and events like SuperHappyDevHouse can be incredibly valuable if you approach them in the right mindset, though.

To give a concrete example, I specialize in game development. Recently I was coworking with a client and we were trying to come up with possible solutions to a tough problem. We were stumped, so we pulled up footage of similar titles on youtube to try and understand how they had solved the problem. At some point during this process, it occurred to us: Why not just ask one of the people who wrote one of the games that tackled the same problems? So, a few minutes later we had looked up the credits from a game that came out back in 1992, and contacted the programmers on facebook. A half an hour later, one of them responded. An hour later we were talking with him on Skype and he answered our questions in 5 minutes - telling us exactly how to solve our problem!