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Comment by laurels-marts | Hacker News Reader

>Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships

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.

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idk I religiously firewall my work and personal life but still feel a lot of "personal work employment inertia":

    - 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

etc. It's actually the main reason I haven't done the whole salary optimization by job hopping thing, well that and the effort of hyping myself up into extroverted self-pimp mode

This type of knowledge is far more valuable than many people realize. When you see people who get things done, get more raises, or seem to do great work without working so hard... then they know things about how to operate in the organization.

> you don't have any personal relationships.

You mean work relationships?

I have relationships outside work. Though, I'm fully remote and also have work relationships.

The average tenure at most tech companies are around 3 years. I assure you that most of your “friends” at work won’t keep in touch with you three years after you leave.

Complete opposite experience for me. Worked for a startup a couple of years as a young dev, made some amazing friends including my wife. 12 years later we're all quite a bit older and still meet up every couple of months (and now our kids are best friends).

I’ve been working for 25 years across 8 companies. Only two of them has anyone heard of. One was a fortune 10 company at the time (ruined by the decisions of Jack Welch) and one is currently a fortune 10 company. I keep in touch in real life with three people. One person followed me between three companies between 2008-2015 and I married the other.

Well the average person only has a few close friends. It sounds like you made at least one (your wife) at work, so having a work place where deep social connections are possible was very valuable to you.

Perhaps the UK is different (Im making assumptions obvs) but I’ve kept in touch with quite a few from each job I’ve worked in - potentially 50% of my friends are people Ive worked with.

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 do think there's a big cultural difference. I've worked over a decade each in the UK, Australia, and now the US. In the UK and Australia, it was very common to hang out with colleagues socially, but I see it rarely in the US. Maybe it has to do with the "pub culture" in the UK and Aus, and a few beers after work being common, which it doesn't seem to be in the US (at least where I've lived - places with a 'bar scene' like New York may be quite different).

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.

When I was younger at my second job between 25-34, we all had more money than sense (not anywhere near what we can make today) and it was a combination of men and women. We were all single, hung out at each others house, went to strip clubs together (yes the women too) went on overnight trips at cabins together. But as we got older, and settle down, we became more of “coworkers”. I keep in touch with a couple of them once or twice a year.

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.

Going to brothels with coworkers at the end of the day was a common thing regardless of marital status back in the day here (before my time).

Not sure what happened

That's fine, then I'll have friends in one place for three years, and then I'll have friends in another place for three years. I don't see the problem here.

The problem where you end up not making any friends and you're all alone now because your Meetup groups are bust.

A 2080 worker who works 35 years will spend over 8 entire years of their life at their job.

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.

Or, just do some socializing outside of work.

People keep saying that.

Humans don't work like that. Almost all meaningful relations are based on prolonged proximity.

You must hang out with some poor quality humans.

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 like (and appear to be liked by) many people where our politics are quite different, including my spouse. I value “how interesting are you to interact with?” far more than “how perfect a mirror are you?”

> Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view

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.

>Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly

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.

even if that were the case, the only place you're getting prolonged proximity to a (relatively) fixed group of people is your workplace? that sounds super not good.

I would argue that proximity matters, but there are many different ways of slicing proximity.

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.

Very few (but not zero!) of my meaningful relations have been through work.

This is so sad to hear and it's insane how many people on HN are against the idea of forming friendships at work.

Ya'll really are socially inept.

Nobody is against it. People are just reflecting their lived experience.

What’s sad and socially inept is that you’re demonstrating no ability to empathise with that.

I think you misunderstand. It's the opposite; it's that our non-work relationships are more meaningful, not that we are unable to form friendships at work.

Way too many people (mostly when young) fall into this trap of making their work their life. Don't be one of those people!

meanwhile all my post college relations have been through work and I've struggled to try and make friends outside of work. Unironic advice seems to be to make friends with co-workers. And meetups, which I have yet to form a signifigant bond at (when most people flake after 1-2 sessions and sessions are monthly, I can't blame them).

I am not sure why you would say that. I mean it is true, but I am not sure how it is relevant here. If one avenue is not there, ones that crave it badly enough will venture forth. If I don't go to work and WANT to engage with others so badly, I will. And besides, meaningful relations is a meaningless term.

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 your health limits your active hours to barely more than you can work, you won’t. In that case, you get very lonely, from my experience.

You have a point and I actually understand that rationale. I have no real argument against it beyond general question of whether individual loneliness should be solved with my forced presence.

The big problem these days is age. My neighhbors seem fine but are in different stages in life. I more or less inherited this house but it's a house built for families to be raised. So all my neighbors are 40's+ taking care of at best very young teenage kids, and I'm a 20's tech dude. Not much clicks.

>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.

This is what I have seen so far. The younger cousins in my extended family consciously opted to live in Chicago-Chicago specifically due to night life. I will admit that I never understood it ( and I moved to suburbs as soon as it became an option for me ). Naturally, all anecdotal, but I doubt people changed that much over 20 or so years.

My dad retired from his factory job last year. Outside of company Xmas events, he met his colleagues exactly 0 times in a social context while he worked there.

Yes, and the point is that if you or your coworker is laid off or take a new job, that proximity is immediately nullified and the relationship typically withers and dies.

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.

>so that relationships of your choosing can be formed

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.

that's why I show up to my olympic weightlifting club, and music shows, and acroyoga jams regularly.

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.

>But if seeing them in the office was my only social life I'd die.

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.

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