My experience in the military supports this argument. I have a few life long friends through this experience. Some of which I disliked initially.
Although, I do agree with the spirit of GP 's argument. You don't have to be in the office to be social and you get so much of your time back it's hard to justify the time cost if the value proposition is small talk.
People who define themselves through their work are depressing and need to wake up.
The old future is cancelled. Good. It was a bad future.
Not all cultures are like this. I had a German coworker who would always complain about how much time we spend socializing at work (while socializing with us).
He would tell us, "In Germany, we come to work, we put our heads down for seven hours and work, then we all go out and spend two hours drinking beer together before we go home to our families".
Definitely not the case here in Berlin. All of my jobs here had plenty of post-work socialising, some even obligatory.
During work itself, people also tend to spend a lot of time in "kitchen area" or browsing Facebook, chatting on WhatsApp etc.
The "put our heads down for hours" thing is not something I have ever observed.
Maybe the culture has shifted since then.
British work culture: spend 7 hours at work socializing, 2 hours at the pub after
French work culture: spend 2 hours at work socializing
Japanese work culture: spend 12 hours at work with your head down not working, then 5 hours at the pub
>> we all go out and spend two hours drinking beer together before we go home to our families
and
> in comparison, american work culture feels extremely centered around social interactions
I mean, when I worked at eBay in San Francisco, going around to bars after work -- more than once a week -- was the expected way to socialize with your coworkers. I didn't participate, but that meant I didn't connect to the rest of the team. I didn't find the idea that people in Germany do the same thing to be much of a stretch.
There's practical reasons for that. Socialization centered at school transitions easily to socialization centered at work. Also, probably for the worse, many people have few connections to communities independent of work/school. Creating those connections can be difficult, and many of the modern solutions to this problem are aren't very good (e.g. various relationship-shopping apps like "online dating").
If you were a doctor, you would still know your community fairly well; whether they be a farmer or another blue collar worker. As we've replaced the prominence of community based institutions such as churches with elite institutions (primarily colleges and workplaces), we've isolated lots of people who aren't able to participate in these communities (due to many inequalities). Obviously these previous community institutions had major flaws (racism/sexism), but they still provided a shared experience that makes a diverse and broad social group easier.
I've probably been brainwashed by "popular culture" and the "corporate narrative" that they prob wanna push on us. I'm in my early 30s and my hobby is to build things, I've always loved that, now mostly software, but also hardware electronics etc. My biggest dream is to have something like General Magic or early Apple or some other startup building something crazy with a small group of people that are brilliant and driven.
Again this is probably just because I've been brainwashed, but I really don't see that scenario playing out over a Zoom call for instance: a brainstorming session on a whiteboard where everyone is excited and trying to solve a huge challenge together, building on each others ideas etc; It's right now just not how our zoom calls usually plays out.
I'm all for anyone being able to work remotely, and picking talents from wherever they might be, but I just don't hope this is 100% of what the future will look like.
WFH will strip 'friendship creation factor' from work. Definitely not to zero, but it will in effect reduce fun from work because 'working with friends' will be less often (unless you start work with people you're already friend).
The issue is not that you can't or won't develop work-friends on a distributed team, its that those work-friends have difficulty translating to "not work friends" because they may be in a different state/country than you and can't come over for a pizza and beer afterwards.
IMHO, the difference between a "work friend" and a "friendly relationship with a colleague" is "do you frequently disengage from work to socialize together." For instance: taking breaks together to chit-chat. I can't see how someone you're in "repeated regular meetings" with could quality as a work friend, unless those meetings are not work related.
I chit-chat with colleagues too, but they're not work-friends because it's usually in the context of doing work (e.g. a few minutes of friendly small talk before we get down to business).
A work-friend is someone you go hang out with just to hang out or talk with just to talk. The main difference with a friend-friend is that doesn't happen outside of the workplace or work events.
Case in point, I'm an introvert in every way: hate going to loud places like bars to socialize, prefer chatting with small number of friends in a quiet setting, prefer staying home reading , think Americans' obsession with sports is insane (not that I don't like sports. I myself was reasonably athletic and was in school's track and field team for years), can't understand why students in school were so obsessed with being popular... You get the idea. Yet I'm still more productive in office, still prefer 1-on-1s in person, and still miss the days when I worked with my co-workers on a whiteboard.
Without choice, people can grow on each other. With friends, we move on if it becomes difficult. With coworkers we have an opportunity for personal growth. In a way, coworkers are more like family than friends.
I read this as an opportunity to act like someone you're not, aka, conformity. With friends, I can be myself, and surround myself with people I actually like, vs trying to convince myself to like people that I'm around.
There's a very strong correlation between how much we like someone and how similar they are to us. We like people with shared values and hobbies and opinions on important topics. Our friend group has a tendency towards homogeneity unless we actively try to avoid it.
If we assume that diversity of thought is a good thing, being forced into situations where you can't choose the people who will surround you (school, college, workplace) is probably a good thing. Seeing things from the perspective of folks different from us is the personal growth GP was talking about.
This is probably the crux of making someone likeable or not.
> If we assume that diversity of thought is a good thing
I don't really care what other people think.
> Seeing things from the perspective of folks different from us is the personal growth GP was talking about.
When did everyone start earning these self-help merit badges for themselves?
The personal growth comes from accepting somebody else the way he is.
Friends on the other hand, also choose. So if I want to spend time with them I have to conform to joined values. It's a non-issue most of the times because friends are chosen among people with similar values. Still, when it comes to conformity, it's the friendship that depends on it.
I am not saying I hate social interaction. If I had to chose between being locked in my basement and not seeing anyone and going to the office, I would chose the office. However, if the choice is between more time and freedom outside of work vs more in office interactions, then I chose the former.
Again though, if you are the type of person that highly values that in-office camaraderie, you are free to join a coworking space and get that. You can still commute and ask your deskmate how your day went.
Im not like that though - I like to wake up early, get my work done, and spend my afternoons rock climbing with a different group of people who are my close friends. The value I get out of this is way higher than building (often) superficial relationships with my coworkers.
Thats the nice thing about working remotley - you can pick what you do with your time. Forcing everyone to indulge in office socialization just because some people enjoy it is a disservice to those who don't.
My family likes to joke that they can tell who my former coworkers are or online friends because they call me jedberg instead of Jeremy.
My ability to feign interest in your baby pictures does not in any way indicate my ability to deliver a sprint task.
Different projects and organizations vary, but I've been on teams where a "brillant" but anti-social person left (or was ejected) and seen overall throughput for the team shoot up. And I've seen people brand new to coding (and without much skill in it) still deliver value rapidly because they are relentless communicators. I've stopped valuing the former and started valuing the later.
This assumes that work expectations won’t expand to fill the space. I’ve kept pretty strict 9am to 6pm work from home with a 1 hour offline break to eat and clean and I still find the expectations creeping in, especially since some coworkers have migrated to other time zones to be with family.
Overall, given the history of labor in the US, I am sceptical that we will see an opening up of free time because of this shift.
Having said that, I'm not one of those folks, and I actually agree with your points and I am 100% for remote. I am at a remote role right now and could not be happier.
First, that's a nice way to respect your coworkers that they are a random set of people who work with you because of their Leetcode skills.
Having work relationships is much more than get a PR reviewed, or asking for feedback on documents. Working together, involves interactions that humanizes your fellow co-workers. Since, I've worked with people before, now that we have to remote collaborate I understand the social cues, people can come stand-offish or rude, in remote meetings, because video and voice calls can rarely bring out emotions.
We went from cracking a jokes at the beginning of a meeting and chit-chat while walking to meeting and walking back from meeting rooms to more formal remote meetings, since people are concerned that they won't be interpreted correctly over a call (the fear is rightly so given video calls are inherently bad at this)
There's no reason to detest your colleagues, they're people with priorities and one of them is work. There's going to be weeks where you'll be spending way longer than 8 hrs a day together and nights where you will need to call them in the because of an ongoing issue in production. To dehumanize these relationships would be a great loss.
If you want to build long lasting friendships, you can definitely do that at work. I know people who have made friends on same and different teams, through work related happy hours and hangout casually now (meeting people outside your team is severely crippled with the current remote work culture), heck people get married to people they meet at work.
Rather than feeling like statues that live in an office and turn to stone at 5PM, only to reawaken the next morning, my colleagues actually feel more like human beings in this config.
How often will differ from employee to employee obviously.
My hope is that once this settle down companies that are able to have employees work from home without a negative impact to performance allow them to do so freely.
In practice we might just end up working longer hours.
Of course you could tell them to STFU (perhaps in a more professional vernacular) but that can be difficult to do if you're not an assertive or confident person.
That most corporations fail at it doesn't mean it's not the ideal
Async audio/video tools like Yac, Loom; those are the next wave.
VR will follow after that.
Even the fact that business relationships are fairly shallow - all the more reason for the businesses themselves to encourage them.
[I think it's from From Better off Ted]
> If you could eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily
This is it. Without self-driving cars this is the most important present you can give to a worker. What would you pay for an additional hour a day?
For many of us, a workplace is a very small piece of our consciousness, and thus, the amount of shared interest with colleagues is bleak.
But I'd like to mention that it seems like a few people are forgetting about how they met their friends in the first place -- for a vast majority of us, the answer is school, something we sort of had no choice over and were sort of forced into. I participate in quite a few forums and sub-Reddits, but how many of them turn into actual real connections beyond the digital ones is slim.
Secondly, in response to those that want to only choose who they want to hang out with -- the flip-side of that is group-think and echo-chamber-ism by not subjecting oneself to orthogonal perspectives...
Lastly, as people in technology, we have choices about where to work -- find a place that works on something that you like with people that you like. I have a hard time empathizing with those that say, "we don't have a choice". Yes, getting a job, as a dev can be a grind, but imagine being a musician or an artist or an architect. Honestly, people in tech have it best -- in all other fields you're absolutely stuck and we're here bitching about WFH policies...
I think people get stuck in the mental construct of "office = socializing" therefore "no office = antisocial". But thats not the case. If you could eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily on small talk and office distractions, as well as the 1 hour daily on commuting, that leaves you two extra hours a day of your life to focus on whatever you chose.
You can join a club, pick a new hobby, learn a new language, volunteer or even start a revolution. Be as social or not social as you want, but the beauty of it is that thats time you have complete freedom over. I choose that over contrived interactions with a random set of people who happened to do enough Leetcode problems to get in the same room as you.