In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.
Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with. That was sarcasm. One of the reasons I didn’t take a remote job last year was the lack of deep social connections I’ve experienced in other remote work.
I’ve observed that the best work is often done by small teams with deep social connections. Think the original Mac team in 1983 or id software in the early 90s. I want to like and even love some of the people I work with, even if the time is short and I’m fired. Because life is short and even a couple years with someone I connected with is valuable when it’s 8 hours a day for 1/40 of my life.
Every job I've been at I've formed close friends. My closest friends include people from every job and I don't think it's a coincidence. These friendships are just as real (and I'd argue stronger) than your "real" friends.
Maybe the problem is with you and you are just somebody people don't like? Or you think you shouldn't be making friends at work which is kind of sad.
Should you create life-long bonds with people because of accidents of geography, or because you have chosen to spend your working life doing the same thing? Even the incidental friendships you make at the water cooler with people who just happen to be working in the same company are as valid as the ones you make when you're walking your dog.
Despite this, the weekends are always busy with friends from outside of work. I find it builds a strong community.
For my part, I work for a Silicon Valley company and therefore do have some close friends at my job, I get the best of both worlds.
Over my career I've both worked with people that I've voluntarily kept in touch with after our time together ended (we even occasionally float the idea of jumping ship and going into business together) and people that drove me up the wall who I couldn't wait to get out of my life (as people, not even necessarily that they were unproductive employees, although some of them were). If I could just have less of those forced interactions due to physical proximity, then I'd have more social energy to spend on people I actually want to spend it on.
Actual friendships aren’t monetarily driven.
Some of the people I've worked with on it, I've made friends with—ranging from "friendly working relationship" to "would totally hang out with IRL if that were an option."
I'm also a member of a small online community that's about the same age, that includes a bunch of people who have never met physically, and probably never will, but who are very close friends, help each other through some pretty rough times, and are generally very supportive of each other.
"Remote" doesn't have to mean "never interact outside of pure work". You can 100% make friends remotely. Granted, it's not exactly the same type of social interaction as hanging out with someone in a physical space, but it's certainly social interaction—and for many people (me included), it's often better, because it doesn't have the same kinds of demands and pressures as physical interaction. As an introvert, it's much less draining for me to interact virtually.
If that's not true of you—if you're both someone who craves genuine physical interaction, and someone for whom the workplace is the primary place you want to get that—no one (or, well, nearly no one) is saying you shouldn't have access to that. We're just saying your experience is not universal, and we want to make sure there are a healthy variety of options for people with different needs and desires.
I would. No sarcasm. With the caveat that I don't have to spend 9 hours a day with them, as I'm not forced into an office space with them.
I've also found that working at companies which push for closer employee social bonds with countless office activities, quarterly teambuilding events, parties, etc. actually diminished my QoL. I realized that what I actually want are deep connections with people I like, not someone someone else hired to work on the same project. All those (imo, meaningless) socializing activities cut into my free time I could have been spending with friends and family. Working remotely also frees up time I would be wasting on commutes.
That sounds like having a life. I guess the alternative is to isolate yourself to a point where you don't have any personal relationships. No hard choices then.
- I know that everyone doesn't suck to work with
- I know who to ask for specific institutional knowledge, or to get something done through unofficial channels
- I know who is more or less competent in specific domains
- I know what kind of work people do and do not enjoy
You mean work relationships?
I have relationships outside work. Though, I'm fully remote and also have work relationships.
I also see “acquaintances” keeping in touch with ex-colleagues on some social media sites, so I know Im not an exception.
I appreciate “most” isnt all, but your comment is very different to my decade of experience. Work is a great place to form friendships.
I may be biased due to getting older and having a family, so I'd expect to hang out after work less anyway, but I observe that generally amongst younger colleagues too.
At my third job between 2008-2012, I keep in touch with one guy that followed me across two more jobs until 2015. We try to meet along with one of my coworkers from my third job at least once per quarter.
I also met my second and current wife at my third job. But I can’t honestly say whether I would have tried dating her if I hadn’t known that the company we worked at was about to go under anyway.
I had a Slack group where I kept in touch with 5 of my coworkers from my 5th job between 2014-2016. But that died off.
When I go back to my home state, I am going to try to connect with my former CTO and a couple of other people from my 7th job (2018-2020). My former CTO reaches out to me every now and then and we talk. I owe him, he gave me a chance to lead their “cloud native initiatives” and hired me even though I had never opened the AWS console at the time. But he thought “I had some good ideas” even though he knew I had just watched a video and went through a certification training.
Now that I work remotely at AWS in the consulting department, there isn’t anyone I consider a “friend”, but one person who I worked with from the time they were an intern when I was their mentor.
The “team” I work with changes dynamically based on the project.
Not sure what happened
I have plenty of friends in real life and plenty of things to do, but I do value, at least somewhat a good work environment considering how much of my life I'm going to spend in it.
Humans don't work like that. Almost all meaningful relations are based on prolonged proximity.
Ya'll really are socially inept.
What’s sad and socially inept is that you’re demonstrating no ability to empathise with that.
Way too many people (mostly when young) fall into this trap of making their work their life. Don't be one of those people!
Example. My parent has neighbors. They have lived closely to one another. So closely and long, in fact, they had to sue to resolve some outstanding issues. In other words, neither prolonged proximity or meaningful relationship is a useful metric. I will trade those for a new neighbor every year.
Humans work like they always worked. Their predilections move them. If those are not satisfied, they are channeled.
>If one avenue is not there, ones that crave it badly enough will venture forth
I guess all my 20's demograpic in town don't crave socialiation. Or I guess literally all of them are in bars. Not my scene.
My meaningful relationships are based on how much I like the people.
Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly.
Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view, not whether we worked on unrelated things in the same neck of the woods.
I've been in the work world for almost 40 years now and I have just one friend I met at work. Most of my friends are people I met through purest chance who happen to have similar world-views.
I’m a pretty social person, and have great relationships both at work and outside of work: this list you’ve provided made me recoil in disagreement. The first two items are aesthetics and politics!? Even philosophy and world view I cannot strongly agree with.
Not saying that this isn’t true for you, and that’s genuinely fine. But I wouldn’t agree that you can generalize your preferences in relationships to others if the quoted sentence is genuinely true.
Mutual respect, friendliness, interest, shared experiences come to mind for me, though I admittedly typed that up in a few seconds without thinking very much about it.
I'm not goint to like nor even remember every neightbor, but it gives me OPPORTUNITY. You need some luck to make friends post college, and luck is simply opportunity + preoaration.
Especially post COVID, opportunities are sparse. All I want is a chance. If we don't click, cool. The kind of people that I probably click with aren't going to random meetups I guess.
Certainly moving away from friends so that I no longer can interact with them routinely would affect the relationship.
But you can also view proximity as how often people show up in your routine. There are many people I knew and had solid friendships with just because we put in the effort to call or message in the evenings a few times a week.
Spend less time socializing at work, and more time creating that prolonged proximity outside of work, so that relationships of your choosing can be formed that are less subject to the whims of your bosses and the economy.
and then you realize no one wants to choose you back and maybe your niche geeky tech company is the best place to find fellow introverts.
I do like my co-workers. A lot. But if seeing them in the office was my only social life I'd die. I can't speak for everyone, but personally the time/effort invested into forming meaningful relations by regularly showing up to places where I can engage with others who have similar interests (oly lifting, music, acroyoga) has probably been the best thing I've done for myself.
And being able to work remotely greatly facilitates that.
great. Now imagine if you didn't have that nor any clubs where you felt welcome. That's the situation for many people who do make friends at work.
I'm currently reading Marx Das Kapital and it's amazing how all the narratives are more or less exactly the same. The worker is lazy, society will collapse if every moment of time is not taken from the socialised labour etc.
This never seems to end.
yea and I already feel those effects. had an office for one month and then they closed it in order to transfer elsewhere. Was already configured to WFH so no issue transitioning. Meanwhile I haven't seen a human face in 2 weeks and haven't interacted with someone my age in 3 months. I guess that is great for true hermits, but I liked SOME interaction.
This also seems to have an indirect impact on my career aspects. Some of the best parts of office was the growth as you worked directly with experts in your domain and seeing how they tick and hearing their war stories. You can hear all that passively in a cafeteria as you're on break. That goes away and I now interact with maybe 5-6 people max per week, and I wonder if I am even growing anymore.
Oh well at least the pay is good.
People switch jobs frequently is the norm anyway.
Factor in that with the boomers retiring, the workforce is much smaller, especially among those with more experience. Unemployment is expected to stay low for some time (in the US at least), which means workers have more power. This is especially true for work that requires more experience or education. Those roles will be harder to fill overall, and the expected outputs are higher.
As a person working in a fully remote, global company... and as a hiring manager, I can attest to the challenges in hiring and maintaining a remote workforce. Hiring is tough, but keeping employees is also tough... because it is so easy to leave in a time of low unemployment.