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Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I would prefer a more professional work environment, even if it's less funny.

Unfortunately, the problem with "professional" relationships is that they're not very good at fulfilling the social needs of humans. It's practical to keep things professional in order to avoid drama, but when you work all day and work is the main place you get to interact with other people, it can get a bit depressing. And this is partially the reason why things like "company culture" and "culture-fit" come about, but obviously it's a hard and tricky problem to solve.

Yes. I don't really fit in at places where I don't have some kind of personal relationship with my co-workers. We don't stand in front of the whole office and make fun of each other, but when we're at lunch or in private we do play a little. Expecting people to robotically conform to an idealized notion of "professionalism" creates sterile workplaces. You spend enough time with someone and you will eventually become friends with them, co-worker or not.

Then again, workplace is not meant to fulfill your social needs as a human. People who are fun to socialize with and people who are pleasant to work with are very different people. One can be fun and pleasant friend while not so reliable college.

Professionalism is what allows you to work together despite being very different people with different interests and personalities.

Fun workplaces tend to discriminate against those who are different on personal level regardless of their actual skills and contributions.

> workplace is not meant to fulfill your social needs as a human

It's not, but when it takes up the majority of your waking life at ~60-80hrs/wk, it's not an unreasonable expectation, especially for the mental well-being of the workers. And so long as the trend continues towards longer work hours, there really doesn't seem to be much of a humane way to deal with that added stress otherwise, despite all the obvious drawbacks you mentioned.

The ideal of course, would be to shorten the workday. Unfortunately, inertia seems to be working very much against that possible solution.

If it takes 60-80hrs/wk, then you need a better workplace regardless of nature of communication. Unless you plan to live like monk (meaning no family no friends out of work) - beware tho, monks have pretty much guaranteed membership for life you do not.

Yes, my observation is the same - the people who spend 60-80hrs at work do take all their socialization into workplace. Meaning they waste time of people who want to work at work and then go home - either because of kids or because of aging relative or because of anything else including hobbies.

The above is one more reason to avoid fun cultural workplaces. They tend to want all of you, not just your work.

I wonder why this was downvoted. I have the same preference.

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