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Comment by EDEdDNEdDYFaN | Hacker News Reader

Feel like part of the issue is everyone’s self imposed neurosis about not intruding on others. My wife insists on not ever asking to come over to someone’s house - she only wants to be explicitly invited. We invite people over to our place when we can but this leads to us basically never visiting any of our friends because they aren’t the planning type.

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I think it’s harsh to publicly describe your wife as neurotic for following basic etiquette

Ask vs Guess culture. Look it up, it explains a lot.

Coming from a very WASPy family, I am very much in the Guess culture -- for a long time I wouldn't dream of inviting myself over somewhere -- but I genuinely think taking some cues from Ask culture people makes a lot of things easier and more sociable.

I'm from the south (US Southeast) and I would never invite myself over, but I've been to hang outs at the vast majority of my friends' places. On this topic it's barely even guess culture here - more like assume! We're still a very sociable culture, we're just a somewhat high-context one. For example, we had a friend who never invited us over despite dozens of hangouts at our place and others. We always wondered why he didn't view us as real friends. It's an expectation for close friendships here, even if you've just got a studio or place you share with roommates. Just part of knowing each other.

That's not "basic etiquette".

I've had plenty of people throughout my life express wanting to come over to my place and hang. There's definitely a social grace of how you'd phrase it, but it's not like it's some alien concept.

Maybe that neurosis explains another phenomena I’ve noticed.

My household hosts a lot and we’ve come to expect a full on 50% flake rate, down to multiple instances of people getting to our street and deciding to stop at the restaurant at the end for food and go home instead of arriving.

It means if we invite less than 5 people there are occasions where literally no one shows up. It’s also difficult to plan for when the odds go in the other direction like one news year party where we invited 30 people, expected ~15 and had 29 show up.

> down to multiple instances of people getting to our street and deciding to stop at the restaurant at the end for food and go home instead of arriving.

That's insane. Who does that and how does it make you feel and have you told them?

First couple of times I was annoyed. At this point it’s become a common joke that X isn’t coming to the party until they walk through the door.

It’s a mix of people with social anxiety and people who have FOMO and agree to three different events on the same day.

The more polite ones in that second group have done things like shown up in tuxes for a casual party and dipped 10 minutes later for some other event.

No talking to the various people in this category has done anything so they just get treated as nice to haves of they show up and we wait 0 seconds for them for anything scheduled.

> That's insane.

You meet a lot of weird people in software

> You meet a lot of weird people in software

That's not a software-engineer attribute. I live in another major software hub on the east coast and people are not like this over here.

We're not prepared to say exactly why they are weird.

If I was going to be more verbose I’d say in the 10-15 years prior to AI there was such a demand for software engineers that people with poor social skills or with unique idiosyncrasies were tolerated so the odds of meeting odd people in software were higher than in the general public.

It may go further back than that but I don’t have experience before the 2010s

Yea, we see somewhere between 50-75% flake. You have to invite a LOT of people to end up with a few showing up. Without a way to post the Sankey diagram:

Out of 30 people invited to a typical house party, I'd say maybe 10 respond that they'll come. Out of those 10, 3-5 will actually come. Out of the 20 people that didn't reply, maybe 2-3 of those will show up unannounced. So you need to invite at about a 3:1 ratio.

You'll want to try and expand your circle of friends to include those that are the planning type and will bring variety to the location. Either that, or start changing the location.

If you don't, people will get bored and eventually the group will disband.

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