By 28 I was balding enough that I just went with it and shaved the rest clean off. Been ten years now and I haven't looked back. Since then, I've only ever rec

By 28 I was balding enough that I just went with it and shaved the rest clean off. Been ten years now and I haven't looked back. Since then, I've only ever received compliments and the occasional friendly question about what motivated the shave. Highly recommended if you think you can pull off the look. For networking (and general interesting fun) meetup.com is my favorite thing ever. People go to businessy/techy meetups for the express purpose of meeting interesting people. Many of them end up literally standing around waiting for someone to walk up and say Hi. My go-to greeting is "Who are you and what do you do?" It's blunt. But, it gives people permission to just go ahead and introduce themselves to me without the silly social dance around finding an appropriate opening. We're all here to meet. Meet me dammit! If you do this enough, you'll have awkward moments and you'll meet a few jerks, but mainly you'll get to practice meeting interesting people in a fairly safe way. If you screw up, you'll likely never see that person again. If you are awesome, you still probably will never see that person again, but you just might actually make a long term contact.