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I experienced all of these to a much better degree during college. Are you sure you don't just want to live in a city that provides plenty of shared spaces? Rel

I experienced all of these to a much better degree during college. Are you sure you don't just want to live in a city that provides plenty of shared spaces? Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise.

thatguy0900 5y ago
Especially looking for dates in the workplace as a selling point.
awsthro00945 5y ago
> Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise. Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun? If you scoff at people who want to make their workplaces more welcoming and happier, no shit the workplace is going to turn into anti-social, work-only hellholes that nobody wants to go back to. This attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a root of the problem.
- stemlord 5y ago
  But part of the value of WFH is the ability to lower work-time to something even less than one third. I've always found it extremely difficult to foster worthwhile relationships and have truly fulfilling fun in a corporate PC environment anyway.
  - rytcio 5y ago
    Well, that's the other side of it. If a company is paying you for 40hrs a week, they want to make sure they're getting their moneys worth. Of course you can argue about how employees, despite being "in the office" are only productive for 2 or maybe 3 hours of their 8 hour shifts. But that's now how management sees it. Having a person visibly in a chair makes management feel like they are getting their money's worth. I also don't get how people expect to get paid a full living salary for working less.
    - Matticus_Rex 5y ago
      Ultimately, at the market level pay rates are tied to productive value. We have a theoretical assumption of 40h/week, but almost everyone understands that it's fictional (and more people are learning that). Most people who are going home and getting the same work done in 2-3 hours aren't working less -- they're working more efficiently, or doing fewer other things (e.g. chatting at the water cooler). For many types of thought work, 3-4 hours is pushing it anyway; the default assumption of 8 hours doesn't make sense with the heterogeneity of what different types of work actually entail.
  - weakfish 5y ago
    PC environment?
- barbazoo 5y ago
  > Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. I surely hope this is rare. Even a 40h work week is less than a quarter of work per week and that doesn't account for holidays, vacation etc.
  - triceratops 5y ago
    Not if you take out 56h/week for sleeping.
    - lowercased 5y ago
      and commute. even a 'quick' commute (and attendant 'getting started for the day') is going to put you closer to 50h/week. Then another... ~50h/week for sleeping, as you say. The 'commute to an office' is closer to a 1/3rd of you week, and ~1/2 of your waking life for many folks.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Why? Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. The reason that there's such a disconnect between 20-somethings and everyone else on this issue is because everyone else has been through it already. Sure, there's a possibility that you will remain friends with people at your former place of work after you leave. There's also a VERY strong possibility that the people who are at that workplace are socializing with the people AT that workplace. The longer you stay away, the more people you DON'T know, and the less you fit into their social crowd.
  - awsthro00945 5y ago
    >Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. And how is this an argument for not also getting those things through work? I have many hobbies outside work. I live in a great place where I am able to spend my free time meeting people and doing things outside work. I still want those things from my workplace, too.
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      Because you have a limited amount of time to invest in certain things in life, and it's better to invest that time independently of your work environment. Not saying that you can't ever have it, just that some day will be your last day at wherever you are, and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.
      - awsthro00945 5y ago
        The fact that I have a limited amount of time to invest in things is exactly why those things are necessary to have at the workplace. I like having fun, and I like making friends. Being limited on time, I want to maximize the percentage of time in my life that I spend having fun and I want to maximize the amount of opportunity I get to make friends. It's great that I have personal free time where I can do that, but why would I not also want 8 more hours per day at work where I can also have fun and make friends? It would be silly not to, that almost doubles the amount of opportunity I have to have fun/make friends! >and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job. See my other comment in this thread. I haven't found this to be the case. Sure, not every relationship follows you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgo the opportunity to cultivate relationships that will follow me to my next job, or even for the rest of my life.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Because you might get fired or laid off or burnt out and leave and only then discover that you have invested too much of yourself into this faceless entity that does not care a whit about you. This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. So we fail to impart the lessons and each generation is forced to relearn them on their own. It can be maddening to know something is correct but unable to convince someone who must experience it themselves in order to see. But it's just life and humanity, it just works that way.
  - awsthro00945 5y ago
    >This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. Speak for yourself. I am very experienced. I have worked at many companies, some of which I left abruptly, and others where my close friends were fired/laid off. But guess what? None of that matters. Just because a friendship starts at a workplace doesn't mean it ends when the employment ends. Some of my best, life-long friends are people I met at work. My current SO, who I will marry, is someone I met at at a past employer. My wedding party is going to be half-filled with people who I met at work, even though I no longer work with them. I currently mentor (and am mentored by) people from past jobs, one of which was actually fired. This is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that I see in these conversations. People begrudgingly make nice with people at work, and restrict those relationships to only happen at work... and then are surprised when those relationships end when employment ends. If you only interact with your "friends" at your employer, then no shit those interactions will stop when your employment ends. But they don't have to, and for many people, they don't. It's not any different than any other part of life. I'm no longer in college, but I'm still close friends with people I met in college, and I don't regret at all the fun activities I did during college. I no longer go to my old gym (I switched to a new gym), but I still keep in touch with someone I met at the old gym and I still benefit from the exercises I did there. I no longer live in my old apartment, but I still keep in touch with my friend who lived across the hall from me. Why should my workplace be any different?
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  We've learned in this pandemic that for knowledge work the workplace is no longer a requirement for productivity. Work should be what you spend one third of your time doing, but it should not be where. During college I did my homework in the computer labs where other students were doing their work and we chatted and built a rapport despite working on different tasks. I look forward to working out of the office and out of my home and building relationships with people that are not contractually obligated to be with me. I expect to treat my co-workers with respect, but that is no different than what Open Source projects have done for decades.
- nklop 5y ago
  Friends are friends and workmates are workmates. A lot of people confuse these groups and think they are somehow the same. Workmates might become friends but more likely they are work colleagues that vanish after a contract ends, especially if they didn't mesh with your network. In my circles we as a group often get work at a company. At least do referrals etc. We also leave together to find new opportunities when the place goes feral. This is partly why we think office work is less than good a lot of times. I'd argue most offices devolve into hellholes as management forget about people and treat them as things.
- drclau 5y ago
  Let me be the devil's (to be read corporate) advocate for a moment here. You say: > Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun? I say: aren't you supposed to, you know, work while you are at work? The office is not a social club! Jokes aside, I always wondered how much time people actually do proper, productive work while in office, in software engineering. My view is rather restricted to my own experience (personal + people around me). I'm asking because if it's, say, 4h a day, I'd rather just spend 4h a day in office, and spend the other 4h however I choose to (alone, with family, or with colleagues, friends etc.), instead of watching YouTube or listen to conversations I don't want to (thanks open plan office!), or whatever people do when they are not productive. Maybe one day we'll collectively figure out the right amount of time we are actually productive, and get back the rest of the time.
- pawelduda 5y ago
  The root of the problem you descibe are incentives for why workplaces exist. They exist so employees can go there and work. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's an explicit contract between employer and employees that both sides agree on. Some employers will be very happy with blurring work/personal life boundaries: employees make friends (but the real quality of friendships will only surface after you've changed jobs, unless you plan to stick to a single job forever), eat great food (because maybe it's cheaper than simply paying the employees more) and have fun (enough to make impression of a laid-back place but not too much, because it would hurt company's performance). It's because all these 'perks' are built on completely different goal. I used to think they're mandatory for me to feel satisfied with the job - looking back they now seem artificial. That's why I personally love WFH - it let's me focus on the essence of working which to me is providing value for my client. For everything else, there's time outside of job.
- spfzero 5y ago
  Your employer is not really motivated to provide those things for you. They have a different motivation, which is to get you to work productively on a job they think needs doing. They may provide some of those either explicitly as an incentive, or as a side-effect of putting a bunch of people in close proximity, and that's great. But when profits are looking iffy, I don't think you can rely on it. It makes more sense to be less dependent on your job, which might go away, and to build those social experiences outside of work so you still have them to fall back on if you change jobs.
- ducharmdev 5y ago
  Totally agree - often it seems people take a transactional approach to work as a way to insulate themselves from social or economic harm, but then proceed to complain about the transactional nature of work that they assist in perpetuating. But there's plenty of room to be critical of companies without sacrificing the positive things you've listed above.
padobson 5y ago
Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise. This is a brilliant sentiment and can be tide to multitudes of other items. The more that can be voluntarily decoupled from the employer-employee relationship, the more should be.
- aaron-santos 5y ago
  > Making friends with employees This is a lesson I learned in the last year. Even though I've made real friends with colleagues and I wouldn't change that, I would still advise caution. It can be tempting to make friends at work because spontaneous regular encounters and shared experiences are the natural basis for cultivating friendship. However, making friends at work has hidden hazards. Most (but not all) colleagues are like fair-weather friends. It is easy to confuse someone being friendly with someone being a friend. If you couldn't imagine spending time with this person outside of work, they are probably friendly but not your friend. If it would be weird for them to call you outside of work to ask how you're doing, they are probably friendly but not your friend. Why wouldn't you want to cultivate true friendship in the workplace? Don't expect workmates to continue to be friendly when you switch workplaces. If you're not engaging with them outside of the workplace, their friendliness will simply fizzle out. Secondly, confusing friendliness for friendship makes it easier to be exploited. I've stayed at a dysfunctional workplace far too long because I liked my "friends" there. However, when I finally did switch and these "friendships" fizzled out, it became much more clear that these were simply friendly people. This doesn't make them bad people, it's just a social lesson I learned. Finally, the last hazard of workplace friendships has to do with the insulating effect of selection bias. Especially in the tech sector, workplace friends will tend to be a much smaller slice of class, race, and gender and it's easy to have a narrow worldview as a result. Maybe the importance of that differs from person to person, but it makes it easier to wake up one day and realize, "Huh, I have only middle class white guy friends. What's up with that?"
GavinMcG 5y ago
It's unwise to rely exclusively on anything, but if I'm going to devote half my waking hours to something, I'd better be able to rely on it to provide more than just money to spend on the other half.
topkai22 5y ago
Work, like college, provides directed activity and identity to bond over. Just having shared space isn't the same. Finding/developing institutions that provide that and aren't work is difficult and will take time
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I'm more-or-less the person described in the GP, and I live in Manhattan. Being in a city doesn't mean crap if I spend the day sitting alone in my tiny studio apartment. 40 hours a week is a huge chunk of my life. I don't want to just be a robot during that time, I want to be part of a community of some sort. (Even as I do try to maintain connections outside of work too!)
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  Now that others are not working in the office, I hope that communities realize that we are drastically under-creating shared spaces and push for significantly more of them. As these offices are sitting empty and are no longer required, instead of letting them sit empty, let them be free to all. Community involvement is the only way to get this done.
  - test_epsilon 5y ago
    > Now that others are not working in the office, I hope that communities realize that we are drastically under-creating shared spaces and push for significantly more of them. The lack of of "community" is not due to lack of concrete boxes, in my opinion. How busy is your local library? From the odd occasion I've been, mine is not very. And seemed to be almost entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet and were pretty solidly absorbed in facebook / paying bills / online shopping / whatever. I don't think people like to invest a lot in public shared spaces because antisocial behavior from a few can easily ruin it and is difficult to police without being extremely restrictive. Private clubs, groups, organizations are much more successful, and those are everywhere and (in my small experience) have good community spirit. You just don't necessarily see them easily because you can't necessarily walk in the door and start doing what you want.
    - rytor718 5y ago
      Or it could be people dont prefer to socialize at libraries (I have always been taught its a quiet place, personally)? I agree with the person you respond to: we kinda haven't figured out the social spaces thing, nor had to figure it out, for a very, very long time. All of our current shared social spaces are conventions from a time past that we continue because they're still relevant (bars/pubs, clubs, private clubs, restaurants, etc). Not complaining about any of these -- they're fantastic. Just noting the absence of modern social spaces. Its the reason I really love Summer where I live. Always a festival or event to go got and get lost in a crowd, meet new people and celebrate whatever's on display that day. Aside from those, there's very little of what I'd call modern "social spaces" around me. Seems like a void needs to be filled there in the community.
taylodl 5y ago
This. So much this. Young professionals need to learn the difference between friends and colleagues. When working from home it's hard to blur that line. As far as chatter goes, nobody wants that. It's distracting to those around you. When we were at the office we were chatting over IM to cut down on the noise. Guess what? We're still chatting over IM while WFH. Besides, many companies are adopting a hybrid plan anyway. My team, which includes many young professionals, wants to go to the office once per month. Make good use of that time to build your network.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  > As far as chatter goes, nobody wants that. I interpreted "social chatter and engagement" not necessarily to mean people are yapping at their desk, but that people say hi in the break room, have lunch together, etc. > Young professionals need to learn the difference between friends and colleagues. I hear that a lot on HN, and I'm sorry if I have to roll my eyes a little. TONS of humanity make friends at the place where they spend nearly half their waking hours, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's fine that not everyone does, but this "rule" people like to spout about "your co-workers are not your friends" - well, maybe your coworkers are not your friends, but I've made plenty of deep, lasting friendships through work.
- forz877 5y ago
  Not everyone you meet at work needs to be your "Best friend forever and always." I just like talking to people. I like being able to go down the hall and solving a problem in 5 minutes that would take 3 days and 3 meetings WFH. I am "friendly" with many people in the office. I socialize with them. They aren't dear dear friends but they are acquaintances that have helped me out of tight spots and I helped them. I can't tell you how many times I've been helped through these sort of relationships. If you're introverted just say it. There's nothing wrong with it. But there's nothing wrong with socializing either.
  - taylodl 5y ago
    I'm extroverted, actually. We have several slack channels for each of the departments and hierarchies of our org. People say good morning. You can "go down the hall" and ask a question. We still do pair programming. In short, not much has changed from when we were in the office. Once allowed we'll be going out to lunch again. I always made it a point to go out to lunch with people - people I work with now, people I've worked with in the past, and people I've met through meetups. I like going out at a minimum every other week and prefer once a week. Maybe it's company culture? We're in multiple states and have multiple locations within the same state - and I need to work with people from all these different locations and so we've solved this "working together remotely" problems ages ago. It's an important part of our corporate culture. WFH just solved the problem of working in a big, noisy area.
tgragnato 5y ago
Dating at work is especially a bad idea. Things could be perfect, but (with high probability) a relationship will abruptly end and managing every social aspect can be difficult.
- nafix 5y ago
  Maybe for you it is. I know tons of people who do this with 0 issue at multiple places I've worked.
- Matticus_Rex 5y ago
  Dating at work can be a bad idea. But also, a very large proportion of the married people I know met their spouses at work.
- astrange 5y ago
  Most people don't care about their jobs more than they do about their relationships.
gowld 5y ago
Sounds great, but there's nothing like college and work for bringing people together all day. Without the structure, most people won't come together.

thatguy0900 5y ago

Especially looking for dates in the workplace as a selling point.

awsthro00945 5y ago

> Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise. Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun? If you scoff at people who want to make their workplaces more welcoming and happier, no shit the workplace is going to turn into anti-social, work-only hellholes that nobody wants to go back to. This attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a root of the problem.

stemlord 5y ago
But part of the value of WFH is the ability to lower work-time to something even less than one third. I've always found it extremely difficult to foster worthwhile relationships and have truly fulfilling fun in a corporate PC environment anyway.
- rytcio 5y ago
  Well, that's the other side of it. If a company is paying you for 40hrs a week, they want to make sure they're getting their moneys worth. Of course you can argue about how employees, despite being "in the office" are only productive for 2 or maybe 3 hours of their 8 hour shifts. But that's now how management sees it. Having a person visibly in a chair makes management feel like they are getting their money's worth. I also don't get how people expect to get paid a full living salary for working less.
  - Matticus_Rex 5y ago
    Ultimately, at the market level pay rates are tied to productive value. We have a theoretical assumption of 40h/week, but almost everyone understands that it's fictional (and more people are learning that). Most people who are going home and getting the same work done in 2-3 hours aren't working less -- they're working more efficiently, or doing fewer other things (e.g. chatting at the water cooler). For many types of thought work, 3-4 hours is pushing it anyway; the default assumption of 8 hours doesn't make sense with the heterogeneity of what different types of work actually entail.
- weakfish 5y ago
  PC environment?
barbazoo 5y ago
> Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. I surely hope this is rare. Even a 40h work week is less than a quarter of work per week and that doesn't account for holidays, vacation etc.
- triceratops 5y ago
  Not if you take out 56h/week for sleeping.
  - lowercased 5y ago
    and commute. even a 'quick' commute (and attendant 'getting started for the day') is going to put you closer to 50h/week. Then another... ~50h/week for sleeping, as you say. The 'commute to an office' is closer to a 1/3rd of you week, and ~1/2 of your waking life for many folks.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Why? Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. The reason that there's such a disconnect between 20-somethings and everyone else on this issue is because everyone else has been through it already. Sure, there's a possibility that you will remain friends with people at your former place of work after you leave. There's also a VERY strong possibility that the people who are at that workplace are socializing with the people AT that workplace. The longer you stay away, the more people you DON'T know, and the less you fit into their social crowd.
- awsthro00945 5y ago
  >Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. And how is this an argument for not also getting those things through work? I have many hobbies outside work. I live in a great place where I am able to spend my free time meeting people and doing things outside work. I still want those things from my workplace, too.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Because you have a limited amount of time to invest in certain things in life, and it's better to invest that time independently of your work environment. Not saying that you can't ever have it, just that some day will be your last day at wherever you are, and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.
    - awsthro00945 5y ago
      The fact that I have a limited amount of time to invest in things is exactly why those things are necessary to have at the workplace. I like having fun, and I like making friends. Being limited on time, I want to maximize the percentage of time in my life that I spend having fun and I want to maximize the amount of opportunity I get to make friends. It's great that I have personal free time where I can do that, but why would I not also want 8 more hours per day at work where I can also have fun and make friends? It would be silly not to, that almost doubles the amount of opportunity I have to have fun/make friends! >and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job. See my other comment in this thread. I haven't found this to be the case. Sure, not every relationship follows you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgo the opportunity to cultivate relationships that will follow me to my next job, or even for the rest of my life.
sanderjd 5y ago
Because you might get fired or laid off or burnt out and leave and only then discover that you have invested too much of yourself into this faceless entity that does not care a whit about you. This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. So we fail to impart the lessons and each generation is forced to relearn them on their own. It can be maddening to know something is correct but unable to convince someone who must experience it themselves in order to see. But it's just life and humanity, it just works that way.
- awsthro00945 5y ago
  >This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. Speak for yourself. I am very experienced. I have worked at many companies, some of which I left abruptly, and others where my close friends were fired/laid off. But guess what? None of that matters. Just because a friendship starts at a workplace doesn't mean it ends when the employment ends. Some of my best, life-long friends are people I met at work. My current SO, who I will marry, is someone I met at at a past employer. My wedding party is going to be half-filled with people who I met at work, even though I no longer work with them. I currently mentor (and am mentored by) people from past jobs, one of which was actually fired. This is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that I see in these conversations. People begrudgingly make nice with people at work, and restrict those relationships to only happen at work... and then are surprised when those relationships end when employment ends. If you only interact with your "friends" at your employer, then no shit those interactions will stop when your employment ends. But they don't have to, and for many people, they don't. It's not any different than any other part of life. I'm no longer in college, but I'm still close friends with people I met in college, and I don't regret at all the fun activities I did during college. I no longer go to my old gym (I switched to a new gym), but I still keep in touch with someone I met at the old gym and I still benefit from the exercises I did there. I no longer live in my old apartment, but I still keep in touch with my friend who lived across the hall from me. Why should my workplace be any different?
ItsMonkk 5y ago
We've learned in this pandemic that for knowledge work the workplace is no longer a requirement for productivity. Work should be what you spend one third of your time doing, but it should not be where. During college I did my homework in the computer labs where other students were doing their work and we chatted and built a rapport despite working on different tasks. I look forward to working out of the office and out of my home and building relationships with people that are not contractually obligated to be with me. I expect to treat my co-workers with respect, but that is no different than what Open Source projects have done for decades.
nklop 5y ago
Friends are friends and workmates are workmates. A lot of people confuse these groups and think they are somehow the same. Workmates might become friends but more likely they are work colleagues that vanish after a contract ends, especially if they didn't mesh with your network. In my circles we as a group often get work at a company. At least do referrals etc. We also leave together to find new opportunities when the place goes feral. This is partly why we think office work is less than good a lot of times. I'd argue most offices devolve into hellholes as management forget about people and treat them as things.
drclau 5y ago
Let me be the devil's (to be read corporate) advocate for a moment here. You say: > Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun? I say: aren't you supposed to, you know, work while you are at work? The office is not a social club! Jokes aside, I always wondered how much time people actually do proper, productive work while in office, in software engineering. My view is rather restricted to my own experience (personal + people around me). I'm asking because if it's, say, 4h a day, I'd rather just spend 4h a day in office, and spend the other 4h however I choose to (alone, with family, or with colleagues, friends etc.), instead of watching YouTube or listen to conversations I don't want to (thanks open plan office!), or whatever people do when they are not productive. Maybe one day we'll collectively figure out the right amount of time we are actually productive, and get back the rest of the time.
pawelduda 5y ago
The root of the problem you descibe are incentives for why workplaces exist. They exist so employees can go there and work. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's an explicit contract between employer and employees that both sides agree on. Some employers will be very happy with blurring work/personal life boundaries: employees make friends (but the real quality of friendships will only surface after you've changed jobs, unless you plan to stick to a single job forever), eat great food (because maybe it's cheaper than simply paying the employees more) and have fun (enough to make impression of a laid-back place but not too much, because it would hurt company's performance). It's because all these 'perks' are built on completely different goal. I used to think they're mandatory for me to feel satisfied with the job - looking back they now seem artificial. That's why I personally love WFH - it let's me focus on the essence of working which to me is providing value for my client. For everything else, there's time outside of job.
spfzero 5y ago
Your employer is not really motivated to provide those things for you. They have a different motivation, which is to get you to work productively on a job they think needs doing. They may provide some of those either explicitly as an incentive, or as a side-effect of putting a bunch of people in close proximity, and that's great. But when profits are looking iffy, I don't think you can rely on it. It makes more sense to be less dependent on your job, which might go away, and to build those social experiences outside of work so you still have them to fall back on if you change jobs.
ducharmdev 5y ago
Totally agree - often it seems people take a transactional approach to work as a way to insulate themselves from social or economic harm, but then proceed to complain about the transactional nature of work that they assist in perpetuating. But there's plenty of room to be critical of companies without sacrificing the positive things you've listed above.

padobson 5y ago

Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise. This is a brilliant sentiment and can be tide to multitudes of other items. The more that can be voluntarily decoupled from the employer-employee relationship, the more should be.

aaron-santos 5y ago
> Making friends with employees This is a lesson I learned in the last year. Even though I've made real friends with colleagues and I wouldn't change that, I would still advise caution. It can be tempting to make friends at work because spontaneous regular encounters and shared experiences are the natural basis for cultivating friendship. However, making friends at work has hidden hazards. Most (but not all) colleagues are like fair-weather friends. It is easy to confuse someone being friendly with someone being a friend. If you couldn't imagine spending time with this person outside of work, they are probably friendly but not your friend. If it would be weird for them to call you outside of work to ask how you're doing, they are probably friendly but not your friend. Why wouldn't you want to cultivate true friendship in the workplace? Don't expect workmates to continue to be friendly when you switch workplaces. If you're not engaging with them outside of the workplace, their friendliness will simply fizzle out. Secondly, confusing friendliness for friendship makes it easier to be exploited. I've stayed at a dysfunctional workplace far too long because I liked my "friends" there. However, when I finally did switch and these "friendships" fizzled out, it became much more clear that these were simply friendly people. This doesn't make them bad people, it's just a social lesson I learned. Finally, the last hazard of workplace friendships has to do with the insulating effect of selection bias. Especially in the tech sector, workplace friends will tend to be a much smaller slice of class, race, and gender and it's easy to have a narrow worldview as a result. Maybe the importance of that differs from person to person, but it makes it easier to wake up one day and realize, "Huh, I have only middle class white guy friends. What's up with that?"

GavinMcG 5y ago

It's unwise to rely exclusively on anything, but if I'm going to devote half my waking hours to something, I'd better be able to rely on it to provide more than just money to spend on the other half.

topkai22 5y ago

Work, like college, provides directed activity and identity to bond over. Just having shared space isn't the same. Finding/developing institutions that provide that and aren't work is difficult and will take time

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

I'm more-or-less the person described in the GP, and I live in Manhattan. Being in a city doesn't mean crap if I spend the day sitting alone in my tiny studio apartment. 40 hours a week is a huge chunk of my life. I don't want to just be a robot during that time, I want to be part of a community of some sort. (Even as I do try to maintain connections outside of work too!)

ItsMonkk 5y ago
Now that others are not working in the office, I hope that communities realize that we are drastically under-creating shared spaces and push for significantly more of them. As these offices are sitting empty and are no longer required, instead of letting them sit empty, let them be free to all. Community involvement is the only way to get this done.
- test_epsilon 5y ago
  > Now that others are not working in the office, I hope that communities realize that we are drastically under-creating shared spaces and push for significantly more of them. The lack of of "community" is not due to lack of concrete boxes, in my opinion. How busy is your local library? From the odd occasion I've been, mine is not very. And seemed to be almost entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet and were pretty solidly absorbed in facebook / paying bills / online shopping / whatever. I don't think people like to invest a lot in public shared spaces because antisocial behavior from a few can easily ruin it and is difficult to police without being extremely restrictive. Private clubs, groups, organizations are much more successful, and those are everywhere and (in my small experience) have good community spirit. You just don't necessarily see them easily because you can't necessarily walk in the door and start doing what you want.
  - rytor718 5y ago
    Or it could be people dont prefer to socialize at libraries (I have always been taught its a quiet place, personally)? I agree with the person you respond to: we kinda haven't figured out the social spaces thing, nor had to figure it out, for a very, very long time. All of our current shared social spaces are conventions from a time past that we continue because they're still relevant (bars/pubs, clubs, private clubs, restaurants, etc). Not complaining about any of these -- they're fantastic. Just noting the absence of modern social spaces. Its the reason I really love Summer where I live. Always a festival or event to go got and get lost in a crowd, meet new people and celebrate whatever's on display that day. Aside from those, there's very little of what I'd call modern "social spaces" around me. Seems like a void needs to be filled there in the community.

taylodl 5y ago

This. So much this. Young professionals need to learn the difference between friends and colleagues. When working from home it's hard to blur that line. As far as chatter goes, nobody wants that. It's distracting to those around you. When we were at the office we were chatting over IM to cut down on the noise. Guess what? We're still chatting over IM while WFH. Besides, many companies are adopting a hybrid plan anyway. My team, which includes many young professionals, wants to go to the office once per month. Make good use of that time to build your network.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> As far as chatter goes, nobody wants that. I interpreted "social chatter and engagement" not necessarily to mean people are yapping at their desk, but that people say hi in the break room, have lunch together, etc. > Young professionals need to learn the difference between friends and colleagues. I hear that a lot on HN, and I'm sorry if I have to roll my eyes a little. TONS of humanity make friends at the place where they spend nearly half their waking hours, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's fine that not everyone does, but this "rule" people like to spout about "your co-workers are not your friends" - well, maybe your coworkers are not your friends, but I've made plenty of deep, lasting friendships through work.
forz877 5y ago
Not everyone you meet at work needs to be your "Best friend forever and always." I just like talking to people. I like being able to go down the hall and solving a problem in 5 minutes that would take 3 days and 3 meetings WFH. I am "friendly" with many people in the office. I socialize with them. They aren't dear dear friends but they are acquaintances that have helped me out of tight spots and I helped them. I can't tell you how many times I've been helped through these sort of relationships. If you're introverted just say it. There's nothing wrong with it. But there's nothing wrong with socializing either.
- taylodl 5y ago
  I'm extroverted, actually. We have several slack channels for each of the departments and hierarchies of our org. People say good morning. You can "go down the hall" and ask a question. We still do pair programming. In short, not much has changed from when we were in the office. Once allowed we'll be going out to lunch again. I always made it a point to go out to lunch with people - people I work with now, people I've worked with in the past, and people I've met through meetups. I like going out at a minimum every other week and prefer once a week. Maybe it's company culture? We're in multiple states and have multiple locations within the same state - and I need to work with people from all these different locations and so we've solved this "working together remotely" problems ages ago. It's an important part of our corporate culture. WFH just solved the problem of working in a big, noisy area.

tgragnato 5y ago

Dating at work is especially a bad idea. Things could be perfect, but (with high probability) a relationship will abruptly end and managing every social aspect can be difficult.

nafix 5y ago
Maybe for you it is. I know tons of people who do this with 0 issue at multiple places I've worked.
Matticus_Rex 5y ago
Dating at work can be a bad idea. But also, a very large proportion of the married people I know met their spouses at work.
astrange 5y ago
Most people don't care about their jobs more than they do about their relationships.

gowld 5y ago

Sounds great, but there's nothing like college and work for bringing people together all day. Without the structure, most people won't come together.