7 ms·

I miss the office for.. - Social chatter. - Making friends with old employees who I didn't know, and connecting with new employees. - Work Life separation (b

• skapadia 5y ago
  Exactly.
• jerry1979 5y ago
  Have you considered joining the rotary club or similar?
  • 35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
    I'd agree – there are real advantages in maintaining a friends group outside of work: you spend far less time griping about your day to day, and the connections you make are far more stable. Get a beer once a month with coworkers, sure, but relying on work to be a primary social outlet always seems risky.
    • mirker 5y ago
      Yep, it’s more meaningful for someone to go out of their way to meet up with you (when there’s only friendship to gain). Also prevents mixing personal life with work.
      • RSHEPP 5y ago
        My first job out of school, moved to a new city. For three year my only friends were coworkers. We socialized (drank) couple times a week and almost every damn conversation was work related, mostly complaining. I left that place because I "hated" it so much. I wonder how much those conversations contributed to it.
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  A lot of us don't miss any of that. I can do all that on my own time and have been for several years now. I'm not going back in until I've exhausted every possibility.
  • dimitrios1 5y ago
    Just bear in mind when you say "a lot of us", it's a small minority of the general workforce. For the majority of the workforce, working from home is a.) not even an option, b.) torn 50/50, with your sales and client success type folk, typically customer facing and person interacting jobs overwhelmingly favoring a return to the office, and us mangly, dirty coding bots overwhelmingly favoring continuing to WFH. I am squarely in the WFH is great if it's possible camp, but perspective is necessary here. Pushing / demanding that the entire work arrangement norms for the majority of the workforce change for a vocal minority is exactly what gives people with cushy desk jobs their (deserved in this case) bad names.
    • zeroonetwothree 5y ago
      My employer gave everyone the option to continue wfh or return (no effect on compensation). Only 20% of the “mangy dirty coding bots” opted for wfh.
      • EliRivers 5y ago
        That is astounding. When asked to decide, my place went 100% software engineers committing to WFH, and well over two-thirds of every other group as well. Team admin is tag-teaming a physical presence at the office, the big boss likes to come in, there's one person in sales who likes to come in, and the guy who assembles the hardware has to come in on a number of days. I think that's about it. Almost the entire company chose to go remote, and we're never going back. The big boss indicated towards the end of last year that we're giving up the lease on one of the two office spaces. At least one person has already moved hundreds of miles to Yorkshire where he's simply having a better life. That's what it is. It's the opportunity for a better life, just waiting to be grasped. I do have sympathy for people who have discovered that their social well-being depended on physical interaction with people in the office; I would hazard that the solution to that is not to go back to the office. There are better ways to get that. There is a better life to be had.
• kilroy123 5y ago
  I agree with you and that's why I'll join a co-working space when I feel I'm missing these things. (I've worked remotely before the pandemic) You can get the same thing from a lot of co-working spaces. I still prefer working form home, because I can pack my bag and go back home anytime I want. Soon, I'll likely go back to a co-working space because right now, I miss those things as well.
  • mdorazio 5y ago
    I had the same thought as you re: co-working spaces, but I am frequently on audio and video calls throughout the day and need an office. Co-working space dedicated offices are expensive as hell if your employer isn't paying for them. I haven't really seen a reduction in prices due to the pandemic, either. Has anyone found a good solution?
• jessedhillon 5y ago
  I find myself feeling vaguely offended by this response. These are needs that all previous generations fulfilled through their community, or by meeting strangers. But I have the feeling that (some subset of) current generations find that proposition unacceptably risky. And I guess the offense comes from the idea that we should all be inconvenienced for their sake, and also from how the idea "I can only make friends in a safe space" is presented here and just expected to be believed.
  • woofcat 5y ago
    I mean we're in the middle of a pandemic right now, but with my WFH life currently I leave my house once a week to pick up groceries. (Where I pop the trunk and they put them in) I feel like it's really easy for people to not get out of a comfort zone and meet people just /randomly/ on the road or at the Grocery store. Especially to the point of being friends. Sadly our community has died, church attendance is massively down in most of the world. Which killed that social circle, clubs seem to not really exist anymore. Basically we're down to meetup.com, work, and bars.
    • alexgmcm 5y ago
      Meetup.com are clubs though? It seems at least there you find people with shared interests rather than the random sample at work or church. I met my friends through language classes and meetups as I emigrated.
  • jayd16 5y ago
    Why are you appealing to the past when the fully remote but post industrial 9-5 day schedules is the new thing? My parents and grandparents have either work friends or old college friends.
• Taylor_OD 5y ago
  Wow. You get a lot more out of the office than I do. I hate small talk and at work it feels like a distraction. I am friendly with coworkers but I'm not actually friends with many/any. I have tried to decouple my sense of belonging from work as much as possible since that is very unhealthy because its not a situation I control (if I get laid off is my belonging gone?) Company sports are great but those can be replaced by sports with friends. Dating at work is... Well I'll leave that alone. And food I cook is better than any office food I've ever had. That being said I havnt worked in a FANG office that has a chef.
• dagmx 5y ago
  It's interesting that you mention work life balance, when the majority of your points are really in the "life" section.
  • bart_spoon 5y ago
    I agree. It only improves work-life balance if you've made work and your life one and the same. For the rest of us, the "balance" tips heavily towards work and away from life when in-office is required.
• treespace88 5y ago
  That is totally cool with me. As long as I would be able to be fully remote in the same company. What I need for that is high quality audio and video for meetings. Do you think that is possible?
  • nhumrich 5y ago
    Can (s)he work in office and get all the perks, while you with remotely and receive none of those perks, at the same company? Sure. This "hybrid" model has been working for a lot of companies, small and large, pre-covid.
• bart_spoon 5y ago
  Sounds like the office has become a substitute for social interaction everywhere else in life. That may not be a bad thing for you, but it is a negative in the sense that it forces everyone to make it a part of their social lives. If you are looking for making new friends, a sense of belonging, sports and games, drinking buddies, meeting potential dates, and group lunches, you can in theory find outlets for all of those things outside of work. But everyone working in an office means that if you aren't interested in those things, (you already have friends, a family, hobby groups, etc), you are forced to spend time away from them to participate in the in-office culture. It seems extremely backwards to me. Its like if people who make church their social group, which is very common, required people who aren't interested in church to attend to enable their social lives. I don't know how or why a large number of us have made work a substitute for our social lives, but it has been a major problem for the rest of us who haven't.
  • wdhilliard 5y ago
    This feels like a heavy-handed response to me. Socializing in the office doesn't need to be a substitute, but can be one many missing pieces in a well-rounded social life. Many of the ways people found a social life outside of work are either still not available or not the same. I used to love working from the coffee shop down my block. There were often around 50 people working in there at any given time of day, but the chairs and tables are still stacked against the wall, and people come inside only to get their coffee and go back home. Even finding conversation in a crowded bar can seem more difficult as people are still keep physical distance from people they do not know.
    • Apocryphon 5y ago
      What about meeting people through volunteering or by even joining an open source project?
      • altpaddle 5y ago
        I guess it's just more efficient to try and make friends with people that you already have to hang out with 40 hours a week. People are lazy and making friends as an adult is difficult
• andrewzah 5y ago
  You can do all of those things outside of work. There are meetup groups, local sports leagues, etc. There is no reason it has to happen at the office. Also this is just my opinion, but I find it odd when people's social groups are... just people from their job. There is so much more to life than just people who work in the same company or industry as oneself.
• jayd16 5y ago
  I just miss being able to meet, pair, collaborate and mentor lag free with the full presence of in person communication. I find zoom really exhausting.
  • Ashanmaril 5y ago
    Yeah, all of that stuff is WAY worse over screensharing/calls. Being able to turn your head over to a coworker and say "hey take a look at this" and they take a few steps over to see your monitor is much less of a hassle than ringing their computer for a video call and screensharing which may be better or worse depending on either of your internet connections. Not to mention depending on your monitor sizes it might not even work properly. i.e. if you're using a larger monitor where everything is rendered smaller so more can fit on screen, it will probably be too small for them to see on their laptop. And in the case of ultrawide monitors, just give up the idea of screensharing on that entirely. At least if you use Teams where you can't share a portion of your screen. -- only the entire thing, or a single window which has problems of its own. Oh and Teams doesn't even let you draw on the other person's screen so they can't point to things! Alright this is turning into a Teams rant now.
• FredPret 5y ago
  I mean this in absolutely the nicest possible way. But all of the above can be solved by getting a social life outside the office
• dehrmann 5y ago
  > Meeting potential dates On place I worked with 100-120 people in the office saw 5 marriages. A big part of that was they employed a lot of single 20-somethings, but that's a lot of couples who met at work.
• duckfang 5y ago
  - Social chatter. I associate with my friends and a few groups I frequent. I've never felt the compunction to do this at work or with work people for the most part. - Making friends with old employees who I didn't know, and connecting with new employees. Too true; there is this. I've a small handful of people whom I met at work and would call friends. But I usually try to maintain work as work - having friends tied up at a workplace can make for some really bad times when you leave or something happens. I think it's like a work-conditional friend. - Work Life separation (balance). If you can master working on work stuff during the day, once you log out of $workchat and vpn, you're off. Set a schedule when you do everyday and work on being predictable. - Sense of belonging.. team outing, weekday after hours beer. To me, "hanging out with the team" is definitely work. It has to be work-appropriate talk, on and on. That's enforced team-building activities. My sense of belonging is the paycheck I receive. I will seek elsewhere, not tied down by a job, to get a sense of belonging. - Intra company sports and games, and then teaming up with office colleagues to play inter company tournaments. Again, for me, this seems to unhealthily attach a jobs' modus operandi to your own. In reality, unless you're the owner, you are as expendable as any other machine or cog. And I try not to intertwine work relationships with friends. Only rarely do those actually cross. - (Not me but others) Meeting potential dates Yipes. - Office facilities for breakfast, lunch. My counter is that I have health issues that restrict my diet. At home, I can control exactly what I eat. At work, is what is provided. Its usually good, but sometimes I don't have anything. I would much rather have control of what I eat, by being in my kitchen cooking with my own foodstuffs.