10 ms·

For me too many companies use the "family" aspect of things too much. No, we're not a family. My family would let me sleep on their couch if I got fired or lost

• tibiahurried 6y ago
  You nailed it! I never bought the "family" argument. Fully agree with you. Work is work. We are not family. I don't get it when I see people let go, writing extensive blog posts on how awesome the company "family" was yada yada. They let people go .. it means that they are only "family" for as long as it is beneficial for them. Real families don't work that way. So for younger folks out there. Don't drink the cool-aid and don't buy into all these family/social bs. Always think about your interests first. And be ready to move on when your work is no longer beneficial for you.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • kevmo314 6y ago
    > Real families don't work that way. I dunno, mine certainly does. My family extends only to where they're no longer toxic in my life. When they intrude and become a negative influence, I cut them out. My gripe with the antagonistic "work is not your family" approach is it sends the signal that the people I meet at work will never be my family. That kind of sucks. Sure, corporations cutting people out aren't very familial, but there are other humans at the core and some of those coworkers do care if I get fired or am having personal issues. Unilaterally casting them out as a machine to further my personal interests is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
    • mulmen 6y ago
      > My gripe with the antagonistic "work is not your family" approach is it sends the signal that the people I meet at work will never be my family. This seems like a safe assumption? I guess you can marry a couple coworkers in the course of a career but how else are they going to become family? I don't see that as antagonistic. Work isn't your family. The purpose and circumstances are entirely different. It doesn't mean throw all your coworkers under a bus but the relationship is fundamentally different.
      • kevmo314 6y ago
        Ok I didn't mean literal family. I also think most people who write blog posts talking about family mean "our team is like family"? I have many people who are like family that I have worked with in the past.
        • mulmen 6y ago
          Ok, from context it sounded like literal family so I was confused. Still, I don’t think “work is not your family” is antagonistic and I don’t think it implies you can’t form meaningful relationships with your coworkers. I interpret it from the other direction more like “don’t expect your coworkers to be your family”.
      • ghettoimp 6y ago
        This is probably just a matter of how one defines "family". On one level there's my "real", immediate family (my spouse, my children). On another level there's my "real" extended family (parents, other blood relatives). On yet another level there's my "adopted" family (close friends, their children, etc.) It's pretty easy to see certain coworkers moving into the adopted family category.
        • deleted 6y ago
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        • tibiahurried 6y ago
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• _bxg1 6y ago
  There is also a difference between a company/management and your peers. There's no such thing as a corporate entity being your friend. Having a boss as your friend... maybe isn't impossible, but is definitely complicated. But it's entirely possible to develop real friendships with peers, even as a group. The differentiator is whether that narrative is pushed from above, or whether it's something that naturally develops from the ground up.
  • mulmen 6y ago
    I can count on one hand the number of actual friendships I formed with coworkers. I mean relationships that continue past the time where we literally shared an office. Most of the people I work with are highly ambitious and globally mobile. Our average tenure is something like a year. People who have been at the company for two years are veterans. Forming friendships in that situation is difficult because at this point many of those people have moved away for greener pastures. Most of my friends are people I met trough my extracurricular social circles. Personally I like that almost all of my friends have different jobs in different fields. There's never work talk in social settings and I get a more diverse perspective on the world.
    • brundolf 6y ago
      > Most of the people I work with are highly ambitious and globally mobile. Our average tenure is something like a year. People who have been at the company for two years are veterans. That sounds like a highly irregular company. My last company, which wasn't very big (<100), had half a dozen people who had been there 15+ years. The majority had been there 3+. A bunch of us would go out for a group lunch nearly every Friday (not organized by management). We'd do group Halloween costumes and wear them to the office. People would have game nights at their houses and invite people over. I realize that my anecdote is probably also outside of the norm, but I just wanted to illustrate how wide the range is.
      • mulmen 6y ago
        It is a highly irregular company. But based on my experience there I formed friendships outside my work circles and that turns out to be a great thing. I used to work at a <100 person company and most of those people had been there for years and a decade was common. I had a few friends there but those relationships stagnated immediately after I left. I've worked at a lot of companies over the years and there are two people I consider friends today that I met at work. Everyone else I consider a friend is a person I met through social circles.
• werber 6y ago
  I do not trust people when they use culture as a selling point. I made the mistake once, and did meet some great people, but I don't see a single one of them regularly. We ended up having a temporary job and basically just shared mutual trauma. I tried to stay up with the escapee Slack channel, but, it feels more like a support group for people who fled the same cult. With that being said, I've made some of my best friends in boring coding jobs that only promised me money in exchange for work. It's funny now that people I'm friends from other jobs have met and mixed, that I don't even remember who I worked with where or what the hell we even did.
  • runarberg 6y ago
    I can testify—from non-tech job at the service industry—that great work culture and fun colleagues can be a dangerous venue to be exploded by your bosses. I was working with awesome people and had tons of fun as a particular tourist resort exploded in popularity (and revenue) while us workers only saw union minimum wage increases along a massive work stress with the increased work. We all justified still working there because we had fun with our work buddies, which was promptly exploited by upper management that had us work more for less money. The moral of this story is: Don’t get blinded by good work culture. We still have our rights and demands as workers.
• papito 6y ago
  "We are a family" is bullshit. You need to be a pretty egregious repeat offender to be ostracized from a real family. A company can fire you on a whim, simply because someone with a business degree sorted a spreadsheet with salaries in descending order, and you were in the top 20. The more correct analogy is a sports team. Everyone works well together to win the medal, but it's much more pragmatic in that sense. Perhaps back in the age of B&W TV, when people could spend their entire life with a company, it was sort of more true. You had that one job, you had your pension. It was really like a second family, an getting let go was like death. I am beginning to see that nowadays, even full time jobs are becoming essentially contract gigs with better benefits. You should treat it as such anyway. Be professional, be good at what you do, but also be detached and non-emotional about it. It can end at any second. What you take from a job is not that you were "like a family". What you take from it is the experience, what you have learned from your own mistakes, and most importantly - friendships. The rest is ephemeral like a docker container. Be ready for it to go POOF.
  • kevmo314 6y ago
    I like the sports team analogy. The biggest gripe I have with some people is the "you are not my friend and will never be my friend" attitude because they have a strict work/life separation. It would be nice if more people instead thought of work like a sports team where the working together aspect could disappear overnight, but we're still friends.
    • und3rth3iP 6y ago
      I've worked with one of these people. Never attended a single off-site work event, even when it took place during work hours. And then he was shocked when he went for a promotion and it didn't happen. It was a topic of discussion among the management team and a big con on his pro/con list. Since it was a small company (25 people), it was decidedly weird he refused to take part in culture. That said, culture shouldn't be forced. I think employees should be given multiple ways to participate to find a way that is most comfortable to them.
      • 6y ago
• slimskim 6y ago
  I think just as there are good salespeople and bad salespeople, we've got to do our part as job seekers to sniff the bad ones out. Some of those folks, rare albeit, genuinely mean to help. For me, a focus on company culture is super important but that comes with understanding that it's a business. And sometimes there will be tough business decisions that need to be made. I'd much rather work for a company who at least tries to foster good culture rather than one that completely ignores it.
• growlist 6y ago
  We had something like this at work recently - a meeting in which all the benefits we enjoy were reiterated to us as if they were industry leading; not a single one of them in reality being significantly different to comparable roles elsewhere. So we have an app that can get me a free coffee once a month, wow awesome, I'll start planning that early retirement now with all the money I'm going to save shall I...
• netcan 6y ago
  >"For me too many companies use the "family" aspect of things too much." I'm not sure if I'm in total agreement or in total opposition. Family is an analogy... At the scale of many of our workplaces "tribe" might be more fitting. I'm also note convinced people quite believe it... It's more that they're learning the language of their new social structure, whether that's "team," or "family" or whatnot. In any case, it's suspicious that we're using analogies here at all. Workplaces, usually a company, are the main social institutions of our society. Only the family rivals it. Why do we need analogies to describe workplace the relationship? I agree that it's not a family. What is it though? A purely transactional definition doesn't work in this context. Your workplace is not your bank. You don't have to be emotionally vested in your bank. You can't avoid being emotionally vested in your workplace in a psychologically sound way. So... going to the OP's point somewhat... Something is very broken, socially, in the thing we call companies. It's often unpleasant and for many people this lockdown is a reprieve. I think work from home, as a norm, is a move towards a more transactional relationship with work. This may be better than whatever sucks about your workplace, but it's also got problems. We spend so much of our lives working. A minimalist relationship may not be enough.
  • mxcrossb 6y ago
    I enjoyed the Office UK version, where Tim kind of muses on this pint at the end. Offices are a unique social structure, where we spend a huge amount of time interacting with others that we never choose to be with. It seems to me there is definitely some overall benefit there, and I would hesitate to say it can be replaced by spending more times on one’s hobbies.
    • netcan 6y ago
      It is pondersome. I think I disagree though. I don't think it's replaceable, unless we're replacing work. With remote work we'll be replacing office culture with online office culture, not hobbies. I suspect they'll inherit some of the problems. Where we spend huge amounts of time interacting with others that we never choose is what most of our major social structures are. Family, tribe, village, parish. Work happens to be our most important social structure besides family. It the one that grants you your privileges and titles, so to speak. You can't just replace it with a hobby. Hobby's take much less of your time and have much lower stakes. To be more engaged with what's going in a minor part of your life than a major one.... it's not healthy, IMO. I'm not crying over office culture getting lost. We can't get rid of it, that's the problem.
• dcolkitt 6y ago
  > No, we're not a family. My family would let me sleep on their couch if I got fired or lost my home. Research in industrial psychology consistently demonstrates that managers are extremely hesitant to fire workers, particularly when the human welfare costs are high.[1] They'll consistently keep workers employed well past the point where it's economically justified. So, I'd say for most people co-workers are not "family". But it's certainly a closer human social bond than an arms length economic transaction in most circumstances. [1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/06/firing_aversion_2.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/06/firing_aversion_2.h...
  • opportune 6y ago
    There are second order effects to firing people. Even if I'm doing a great job and enjoying my work, I'm going to get stressed out if I see 10% of my coworkers get fired every performance review cycle. Sure it would be nice if people who don't carry their weight were replaced but in any profession where productivity is non-objective, that's scary.
• commandlinefan 6y ago
  > My family would let me sleep on their couch I can tell off-color jokes around my real family. I censor the ever-loving hell out of myself when I'm with my "work" family. I talk about work, and nothing else.
• 5cott0 6y ago
  If a company tells you "we're a family" that means they are going to damage you psychologically.
  • walshemj 6y ago
    Is any one else thinking of the Phillip Larkin poem here
    • hootguy 6y ago
      Reference, please?
      • walshemj 6y ago
        Might be a more U&K thing https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66966-they-fuck-you-up-your-mum-and-dad-they-may https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66966-they-fuck-you-up-your...
        • 5cott0 6y ago
          that's the good stuff
• ct520 6y ago
  I agree. I come to make money and build cool shit. Company provides money in trade of work. That’s it. Nothing more is owed or should feel obligated by saying that family shit. (Rewarding coworking relationships is a cool plus I’ll take though )
• chasd00 6y ago
  my response to the "we're family!" pitch is quoting Goodfellas, "f*ck you pay me".