Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

> I lost many friends.

They weren't ever your friends. People at work rarely transcend beyond co-workers and into actual friendship. If all you do together is work and around-work activities, they probably aren't your friends. You're effectively people locked in a cage together that happen to get along.

If you get together on days you don't work together then they might actually be your friend. If they've met your non-work friends they might be your friend. If they attend your birthday party where they don't work with 95% of people there they might be your friend.

If you don't invite them to those things you don't actually consider them a friend. If you hold any power over someone (e.g. CTO-employee relationships) and they do this stuff they still might not be your friend. But if they don't do any of this stuff they definitely, 100% are not your friend.

Also, one of the best ways to fuck up a friendship is to hire them. You need to be sure you can properly separate business and friendship if you ever do this.

I was shocked at the beginning of the lockdown in Silicon Valley how many colleagues immediately went to a dark place because they had virtually no support structure, social interaction, or even sense of identity outside of their in-person workplace associations. Granted, a lot of in-person socialization out of the office is also off-the-table, but that's not the problem I heard from people.

It's not healthy to live your entire life so embedded within a corporation.

It's understandable.

Look at pre 2012 SV. All the ping-pong tables, all the beanbag chairs, the free beer, the free laundry, the sleep-pods, the cafeterias, etc. 'Cynical' people thought that these accruements were meant to keep you there and working all the time. People got rid of their apartments, set up Winnebagos in the parking lot. Intents do matter, but still, if you were that kind of person, the one that thought Google was just college 2.0, well, yeah, quarantime is not going to be good to you.

This pandemic is resetting a lot of things. Expectations of intimacy are another thing on the list.

What happened in 2012/13 that ended this?

It's a complex issue and if you ask 10 people, you'll get 23 answers.

One of my answers: the greater geopolitical community woke up to the power of Web 2.0 with Tahrir Square and the questions that social media technology poses to us all. Largely, Tahrir Square was the high water mark of Silicon Valley and the old promises of free information exchange and the hippie ethos that spawned it all. The reaction by the geopolitical leaders was swift afterwards.

Again, super complex topic, I cannot stress this enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_revolution_of_2011

This is the first I've heard of this. Got any articles about this or want to give a longer explanation?

> People got rid of their apartments, set up Winnebagos in the parking lot.

Thats... a lot more about rent prices than people wanting to be at work all the time.

It was also just one guy, I think.

When I visited the Google office in Mountain View, I noticed the streets around it were packed with parked RVs. Do those RVs belong to homeless employees?

no. homeless people

I live alone and ended up going to live with my parents during this whole thing, since I can do my entire job remotely. It's largest amount of contiguous time I've spent with them in about a decade.

I feel that Americans tend to use the term "friend" a lot more casually than, say, the Japanese. In Japan, your boss is never your friend. Neither is your teachers, colleagues, parents or siblings. A "friend" in Japan is somewhat closer to a soulmate, and not surprisingly we don't have many (for some people, not at all).

What happens when your best friend starts working at the same place or even becomes your boss?

Then you're still friends. Depending on your performance and how both of you treat each other, that friendship may become affected but as long as you still treat each other as friends and hang out, that friendship will continue.

Of course, that was just my anecdotal experience.

If the Japanese word you are thinking about translates better to soulmate than to friend, then why not just assume it means soulmate instead of friend.

Surely Japanese people have relationships that fall between soulmate and coworker/acquaintance.

I often say that I think the greatest stroke of genius that Facebook had was calling it 'Friending' and 'Unfriending' instead of 'Add to your contacts' and 'Remove from your contacts'.

Which word are you referring to? I have limited knowledge of Japanese, but I’m fluent in Chinese so I’m curious if a similar word or usage exists.

It's very common for the founders and early employees to be friends prior to the startup. He may have very well lost friends. He didn't elaborate, so we really don't know.

The part about friends elaborated on all the interested and talented people he met, so I’m assuming they were new acquaintances.

For me the simplest barometer is, if I'm gone tomorrow, how long they will remember me/talk about me. For people at work, I think it'll probably be an hour or so or maybe a day if I'm lucky (+ when they notice old commits). Helps keep the perspective clear.

One of the best pieces of advice is to completely separate and isolate your work life from your social life. Build a wall around both and don't mix them, learned the lesson the hard way after a decade in the industry

It keeps your work life clean of any distractions and forces you to build and maintain a social network that isn't tied to your work. Also cuts out a lot of emotions from decision making.

Go to work, get your work done, and leave.

The last sentence is probably the best advise and i would extend it to any kind of social relationship. If you wish to keep your marriage/relationship/friendship/etc. intact, do not mess it with business.

I think tons of people fall into this trap in and outside tech, but just luckily never need to face the fact that they have no friends 10 years into their career.

Exactly, if you aren't willingly hanging out with each other outside of work, you aren't friends, you're just friendly.

This, 1000x times. At least someone understands what it means to be a friend.

It's daunting to hear so many people throw this term around casually.

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