6 ms·

I have changed my opinion on professional warmth. In demanding industries, people spend 2/3rds of their waking hours around their coworkers. That's practically

by screye 1y ago

I have changed my opinion on professional warmth. In demanding industries, people spend 2/3rds of their waking hours around their coworkers. That's practically their whole life. It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment. You aren't family. But, you can be comrades. Your friendships can be forged through shared struggles, shared spaces and convenience. It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers. Other industries have layoffs, politics and capitalistic competition. That doesn't stop coworkers from becoming friends. The new generation is more isolated than ever before. The workplace is one of the few remaining mandatory social spaces. We should encourage the organic warmth that builds up between coworkers. It's cliche. But we're social animals.

AlexandrB 1y ago
There's a difference between professional warmth and "we're a family". The latter usually comes top-down, from management and is fundamentally disingenuous. It's often a self-serving way of trying to get you to treat the company as your family, while company leadership still won't hesitate to lay you off in a mass zoom meeting. It's fine to be friends with co-workers or managers, but don't let companies obscure the fundamental nature of the relationship.
jazzyjackson 1y ago
> It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers. I don't know how you can assert this, among any other "stuck in a cubicle" office environment. Opportunities to be social are brief anyway. I'm on the side of 'give people time off enough to develop relationships outside of work'. 4 day work weeks would go a long way to helping people get the socializing we need.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  The problem is the lack of "everyday" socializing, and commute is the cause of that. In ye olde heavy industry days, workers lived relatively near to their workplace, and often gathered for a beer after work - just visit any of the old heavy industry towns here in the Ruhrpott, there's so damn many pubs situated closely to the mines, pits and smelters. That also was the prerequisite for why and how unions got popular - the employer could ban unions from entering the workplace itself, but they could not restrict political activity on third party places such as beer halls. Today, all of that is gone. Average commute times tend to be measured in hours, so with regular "overtime" you're looking at 12 hours of being away from home for work purposes - eight hours of working , two hours of commute, one hour of lunch break, one hour of overtime. And on top of that, work is condensed ever more by everything being tracked, can't even take a piss any more as a call center worker before the supervisor gets a notification that you haven't picked up a call in 60 seconds.
  - nxor 1y ago
    Here in the US, urban sprawl is still the norm, and attempts to criticize it seem to be outweighed by "but more houses -> more money" :(
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - gadflyinyoureye 1y ago
      Let's be a bit gracious. A big issue is how much value is destroyed forcing people who don't necessarily want to live in a big city to live in a big city. Take Dallas. If you condense it into a 10 mile super city, you lose the sprawl. You gain a short commute, maybe? But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good? No more sprawl, sure. But good?
      - dangus 1y ago
        Not everyone wants to be required to purchase and operate a 5-figure transportation device where you must be abled to operate it, it depreciates to dust and might kill you in a crash, etc. Why is that the standard of “freedom” but “living on top of each other” is a bad thing? Comfortable suburbs do not have to be wasteful of land, purposefully difficult to walk around, and built so that you must own a car to get around. You can live in a single family home without consuming an excessive amount of land. There are many examples of single family homes suburbs and neighborhoods within city limits where land isn’t wasted like crazy and residents are confined to living life in their vehicles. Americans literally spend thousands of dollars on vacations to the great cities of the world (and Disney World) where people gladly “live on top of each other” in order to enjoy the benefits of walkable urban fabric. I will also point out that sprawl is horrendous for the natural environment. Dense cities are better for the planet and our long-term survival. Replacing fertile farmland and natural habitats with development has negative consequences. Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
        xp84 1y ago
- nxor 1y ago
  I agree with the first sentence, but not the rest: even 4 days of work and 3 days of weekend means I am still around work friends more than I am around outside-of-work friends. I'm also wondering if a 4 day work week would only then make it easier to work two jobs, since there will be people who don't want to be 'idle' for three days, and others who will not use that time to be more social.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
Agreed wholeheartedly. I'm not certain it's the company encouraging it, though. IMHO it's far more the economic realities we find ourselves in, where holding onto the same job for an extended period of time is basically, according to all casual career advice, fucking yourself over in terms of compensation. My generation has been encouraged by this reality since we entered the workforce to change jobs every few years, because companies are so stingy with raises. If you're planning to do that, you naturally keep distance with your coworkers; they're probably leaving before you are, and even if not, you are planning to. Companies see no value in their existing workforce and it's honestly quite self-defeating and stupid. "Losing" any worker be it to their choice, or layoffs, or whatever it might be is a genuine LOSS to your team. It's however many months or years of experience not just with code, but with your code-base, your business, and your products going out the door. The fact that so many companies lose so many good people because they simply refuse to let an employee have a bit more money is honestly mind-bending; and once they're gone, they'll happily list their job online, often with a salary range even higher than the employee they just fired wanted. Absolute corporate idiocy.
azemetre 1y ago
Have you heard of the idea workplace democracy [1], and would this be something you'd start advocating for? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
cperciva 1y ago
In demanding industries, people spend 2/3rds of their waking hours around their coworkers. If you sleep 8 hours/night, this means you're spending 75 hours/week with your co-workers. That seems... a bit excessive?
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  That doesn't seem all that unusual for the Silicon Valley darlings. The days of FAANG employees playing table-tennis all day and heading home at 4:30 ended a while ago
- screye 1y ago
  Should've clarified. I meant for the 5 working days. 10/16 hours.
gspencley 1y ago
> It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment. You're straw-manning. The person you're replying to never once mentioned being cold, let alone encouraged it. They simply expressed a preference for companies that don't try to pretend that their mission and purpose is something other than what it is. I've worked in tech exclusively my entire 25+ year career. And I've worked for way more companies that try to put on a front of "we're a family" than the opposite. As someone who has worked as an employee and owned businesses (often simultaneously), I'm on board with the parent. I don't want coldness in the workplace. But I also don't want employees or co-workers who don't respect that we're here to build something that we're offering for sale on the marketplace either, least of all in a highly competitive landscape where we're under constant threat of going out of business if we don't get productivity and efficiency right. I want my businesses to be enjoyable places to work. But at the end of the day, if I'm paying money for someone who isn't pulling their weight then I am extremely resentful of anyone who tries to get in the way of me correcting the fact that they are effectively ripping me off and, by doing so, hurting every single one of their co-workers by hurting their employer. Succeeding in business is hard. And while there are a lot of shady businesses out there, and a lot of big corps do things we take issue with, 99.9% of businesses are making the world a better place for you to live by producing everything from the concrete that paves your sidewalks, to the shippers that get food from farm to your table. The anti-business, anti-capitalism attitudes that are so prevalent in the west are truly disturbing. By all means be pro-worker. But there really ought not be a conflict between business and employee since, at the end of the day, it is a mutually beneficial relationship. Business can't succeed without its employees, employees don't earn a cent if the business doesn't earn a profit. And lets not forget that what a business can afford is irrelevant. The business doesn't exist to employee people. It exists to produce the goods or services that it set out to in order to turn a profit. And there is nothing wrong with that. An employee that hates the profit motive is one I don't want working for me. You're hopefully profiting by being employed. Otherwise I don't know what you're doing with your life. So stop the hypocrisy and double standards. We're not a family, and we don't need to be cold to each other, but we're in this shit show together so let's act like reasonable, rational actors and do our fucking jobs so we can all take home money and feed our families and savings.
theragra 1y ago
I agree, but my mind only changed when I got to the company with good working conditions. Until you have no decent work life balance, benefits and compensation, speaking of friendship and family looks like an sarcastic insult. But to be true, most of my current friends are through work. Some are from hobbies or university, but nobody is from school.
array_key_first 1y ago
The solution IMO is to reprioritize work. The 40 hours work week is obsolete. It is time for it to die. We just don't need it.

by screye 1y ago

AlexandrB 1y ago

There's a difference between professional warmth and "we're a family". The latter usually comes top-down, from management and is fundamentally disingenuous. It's often a self-serving way of trying to get you to treat the company as your family, while company leadership still won't hesitate to lay you off in a mass zoom meeting. It's fine to be friends with co-workers or managers, but don't let companies obscure the fundamental nature of the relationship.

jazzyjackson 1y ago

> It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers. I don't know how you can assert this, among any other "stuck in a cubicle" office environment. Opportunities to be social are brief anyway. I'm on the side of 'give people time off enough to develop relationships outside of work'. 4 day work weeks would go a long way to helping people get the socializing we need.

mschuster91 1y ago
The problem is the lack of "everyday" socializing, and commute is the cause of that. In ye olde heavy industry days, workers lived relatively near to their workplace, and often gathered for a beer after work - just visit any of the old heavy industry towns here in the Ruhrpott, there's so damn many pubs situated closely to the mines, pits and smelters. That also was the prerequisite for why and how unions got popular - the employer could ban unions from entering the workplace itself, but they could not restrict political activity on third party places such as beer halls. Today, all of that is gone. Average commute times tend to be measured in hours, so with regular "overtime" you're looking at 12 hours of being away from home for work purposes - eight hours of working , two hours of commute, one hour of lunch break, one hour of overtime. And on top of that, work is condensed ever more by everything being tracked, can't even take a piss any more as a call center worker before the supervisor gets a notification that you haven't picked up a call in 60 seconds.
- nxor 1y ago
  Here in the US, urban sprawl is still the norm, and attempts to criticize it seem to be outweighed by "but more houses -> more money" :(
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - gadflyinyoureye 1y ago
    Let's be a bit gracious. A big issue is how much value is destroyed forcing people who don't necessarily want to live in a big city to live in a big city. Take Dallas. If you condense it into a 10 mile super city, you lose the sprawl. You gain a short commute, maybe? But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good? No more sprawl, sure. But good?
    - dangus 1y ago
      Not everyone wants to be required to purchase and operate a 5-figure transportation device where you must be abled to operate it, it depreciates to dust and might kill you in a crash, etc. Why is that the standard of “freedom” but “living on top of each other” is a bad thing? Comfortable suburbs do not have to be wasteful of land, purposefully difficult to walk around, and built so that you must own a car to get around. You can live in a single family home without consuming an excessive amount of land. There are many examples of single family homes suburbs and neighborhoods within city limits where land isn’t wasted like crazy and residents are confined to living life in their vehicles. Americans literally spend thousands of dollars on vacations to the great cities of the world (and Disney World) where people gladly “live on top of each other” in order to enjoy the benefits of walkable urban fabric. I will also point out that sprawl is horrendous for the natural environment. Dense cities are better for the planet and our long-term survival. Replacing fertile farmland and natural habitats with development has negative consequences. Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
      - xp84 1y ago
nxor 1y ago
I agree with the first sentence, but not the rest: even 4 days of work and 3 days of weekend means I am still around work friends more than I am around outside-of-work friends. I'm also wondering if a 4 day work week would only then make it easier to work two jobs, since there will be people who don't want to be 'idle' for three days, and others who will not use that time to be more social.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

ToucanLoucan 1y ago

Agreed wholeheartedly. I'm not certain it's the company encouraging it, though. IMHO it's far more the economic realities we find ourselves in, where holding onto the same job for an extended period of time is basically, according to all casual career advice, fucking yourself over in terms of compensation. My generation has been encouraged by this reality since we entered the workforce to change jobs every few years, because companies are so stingy with raises. If you're planning to do that, you naturally keep distance with your coworkers; they're probably leaving before you are, and even if not, you are planning to. Companies see no value in their existing workforce and it's honestly quite self-defeating and stupid. "Losing" any worker be it to their choice, or layoffs, or whatever it might be is a genuine LOSS to your team. It's however many months or years of experience not just with code, but with your code-base, your business, and your products going out the door. The fact that so many companies lose so many good people because they simply refuse to let an employee have a bit more money is honestly mind-bending; and once they're gone, they'll happily list their job online, often with a salary range even higher than the employee they just fired wanted. Absolute corporate idiocy.

azemetre 1y ago

Have you heard of the idea workplace democracy [1], and would this be something you'd start advocating for? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy

cperciva 1y ago

In demanding industries, people spend 2/3rds of their waking hours around their coworkers. If you sleep 8 hours/night, this means you're spending 75 hours/week with your co-workers. That seems... a bit excessive?

swiftcoder 1y ago
That doesn't seem all that unusual for the Silicon Valley darlings. The days of FAANG employees playing table-tennis all day and heading home at 4:30 ended a while ago
screye 1y ago
Should've clarified. I meant for the 5 working days. 10/16 hours.

gspencley 1y ago

> It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment. You're straw-manning. The person you're replying to never once mentioned being cold, let alone encouraged it. They simply expressed a preference for companies that don't try to pretend that their mission and purpose is something other than what it is. I've worked in tech exclusively my entire 25+ year career. And I've worked for way more companies that try to put on a front of "we're a family" than the opposite. As someone who has worked as an employee and owned businesses (often simultaneously), I'm on board with the parent. I don't want coldness in the workplace. But I also don't want employees or co-workers who don't respect that we're here to build something that we're offering for sale on the marketplace either, least of all in a highly competitive landscape where we're under constant threat of going out of business if we don't get productivity and efficiency right. I want my businesses to be enjoyable places to work. But at the end of the day, if I'm paying money for someone who isn't pulling their weight then I am extremely resentful of anyone who tries to get in the way of me correcting the fact that they are effectively ripping me off and, by doing so, hurting every single one of their co-workers by hurting their employer. Succeeding in business is hard. And while there are a lot of shady businesses out there, and a lot of big corps do things we take issue with, 99.9% of businesses are making the world a better place for you to live by producing everything from the concrete that paves your sidewalks, to the shippers that get food from farm to your table. The anti-business, anti-capitalism attitudes that are so prevalent in the west are truly disturbing. By all means be pro-worker. But there really ought not be a conflict between business and employee since, at the end of the day, it is a mutually beneficial relationship. Business can't succeed without its employees, employees don't earn a cent if the business doesn't earn a profit. And lets not forget that what a business can afford is irrelevant. The business doesn't exist to employee people. It exists to produce the goods or services that it set out to in order to turn a profit. And there is nothing wrong with that. An employee that hates the profit motive is one I don't want working for me. You're hopefully profiting by being employed. Otherwise I don't know what you're doing with your life. So stop the hypocrisy and double standards. We're not a family, and we don't need to be cold to each other, but we're in this shit show together so let's act like reasonable, rational actors and do our fucking jobs so we can all take home money and feed our families and savings.

theragra 1y ago

I agree, but my mind only changed when I got to the company with good working conditions. Until you have no decent work life balance, benefits and compensation, speaking of friendship and family looks like an sarcastic insult. But to be true, most of my current friends are through work. Some are from hobbies or university, but nobody is from school.

array_key_first 1y ago

The solution IMO is to reprioritize work. The 40 hours work week is obsolete. It is time for it to die. We just don't need it.