Relationships are like a garden, they require continual, repeated effort to maintain.
It doesn’t need to be an onerous amount of effort, but reaching out to people to shoot the shit once even a year is often enough to maintain the relationship for professional networks at least.
In software we have an unfortunate amount of people who don’t value social connections at all so we end up with a large tranche of people who can’t get past the “but why would I talk to them without a specific reason?” argument and then lament why all of their relationships end up transactional, or even better lament why no one will help them specifically because all their relationships are transactional and they aren’t offering anything of value
It doesn’t need to be an onerous amount of effort, but reaching out to people to shoot the shit once even a year is often enough to maintain the relationship for professional networks at least.
In software we have an unfortunate amount of people who don’t value social connections at all so we end up with a large tranche of people who can’t get past the “but why would I talk to them without a specific reason?” argument and then lament why all of their relationships end up transactional, or even better lament why no one will help them specifically because all their relationships are transactional and they aren’t offering anything of value