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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting cultural problem. Whether it changes more with time or from country to country is not clear to me and would be interesting to do research around.

For example, I grew up in the USSR and I saw how my parents' colleagues were practically all very close friends. Both my parents worked in academia. Someone's birthday was usually a big noisy gathering of the whole department of the research institute where they worked, plus some more friends from previous organizations and of course some classmates. Yes, at times it was that insane!

Looking back now I realize what has been lost. Why though - I have no idea.

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As sibling comments are pointing out - the jobs are not for life anymore (and the tenure is getting shorter).

But there are 3 other aspects, specific to your location/economic system, which do not apply (and mostly never applied) in the US/West:

- people did not move around the country for jobs like they do in the US

- salaries in Eastern Europe/USSR were public and the same for the same position/responsibility.

- bosses' salaries were perhaps 30% higher (certainly not 300+% higher, so everyone was in the same socio-economic class, facilitating camaraderie

Very true. So basically things that are good for the economy - labour mobility, flexibility in salaries, etc - are not good for friendship building. It's either or.

Anecdotally my mom who worked in a soviet hospital still keeps in touch with her coworkers - multiple decades after emigrating. Meanwhile I (usually) stop making an effort to keep in touch the second someone leaves the company.

I think there's two parts to this - the Russian attitude of maintaining a few, deep close friends and everyone by and large staying in the same city their entire lives.

I don't think it's specifically Russian (as I am not Russian, for example) but rather it was a Soviet thing. Your sibling comment explains it pretty well.

It's the purposeful destruction of job security which is used as a threat to make employees work harder. Why make friends with your co-workers if you or them could be fired at any point when the shareholders decide to "cut the fat" for higher profits?

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm

>The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.1 years in January 2020

It's difficult to make friends in this environment and this is a relatively recent change: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1984/10/art2full.pdf

It's even shorter in the software industry. I think it was 2-2.5 years or close. Ordinary engineers switch jobs often as the only way to bump up their salaries.

Cell phones and social media. To learn about people you just look it up. You don't interact with them anymore. You text or snoop. It sucks but not like the past was all that better either.

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