HN takes it a bit too far, but there is some wisdom in maintaining a boundary between work and personal stuff. like suppose you are struggling to recover from alcoholism. you might want to confide in your close friends. you might not want to share this with friends from work. you almost certainly should not share this with your boss, even if you consider them a friend.

I treat work friends as a sort of "probationary friend". I'm happy to meet up and do stuff outside of work, but I'm a bit more guarded than I would be with someone I don't work with. I might hesitate to introduce them to some of my more "out there" friends (for whatever reason I seem to attract a lot of very weird people). once we no longer work together, they can just be a normal friend.

>like suppose you are struggling to recover from alcoholism. you might want to confide in your close friends. you might not want to share this with friends from work. you almost certainly should not share this with your boss, even if you consider them a friend.

I would absolutely share this with my "work friends" and even my current boss. When one of my previous bosses shared with me that he was having trouble at home with his spouse, it wasn't like he suddenly became a bad boss. If anything, it helped our work because it gave me the opportunity to be more understanding when he seemed more worn out or needed to leave early for the day to go spend time with his family. If he had told me he was struggling with drinking, then I would know that maybe we should go play sports rather than to our weekly happy hour. We build each other up, both inside and outside of work, because that's what friends do, and it has the nice side effect of making our professional careers better, too.

Perhaps I just have had a lucky stream of working on unicorn teams, but I would hate to work at a company where I couldn't share details of my life with the people that I spend 40-60+ hours a week with. Obviously every workplace and relationship is unique and you aren't going to share everything with everybody (I'd share the above details with my current boss but by no means with all of my bosses), but I don't understand this attitude that you shouldn't share anything with anyone that happens to have a common employer.

To me, work is just another facet of our relationship alongside the many other facets, no different than if we had met through volunteering or went to the same gym. I don't share everything with every coworker, just like I don't share everything with every other person that visits my gym. But I also don't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they are my coworker, just like I wouldn't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they also use the same weight set that I do.

I'm not saying you shouldn't share anything with anyone, but there are some things where the upside of sharing isn't worth the potential downside. when dealing with someone who is responsible for evaluating your job performance, it's unwise to volunteer reasons for them to doubt that. it's hard to judge productivity, especially for engineers. if you go through a rough patch but say nothing, people might never notice that you were less productive for a month or two. if you tell your boss you're having an issue with alcohol/drugs, they might perceive a drop in productivity that didn't even exist! unless your issue is so severe that it can't possibly escape notice, and/or you have a good plan to fix it very soon, there's just no reason to share this kind of stuff.

also, I would say work is quite a bit different than a gym. it's a lot easier to find a new gym than a new job, and it's much less disruptive to your life if you have to do so.

> when dealing with someone who is responsible for evaluating your job performance, it's unwise to volunteer reasons for them to doubt that. it's hard to judge productivity, especially for engineers. if you go through a rough patch but say nothing, people might never notice that you were less productive for a month or two. if you tell your boss you're having an issue with alcohol/drugs, they might perceive a drop in productivity that didn't even exist!

My boss and I have a good enough relationship at work where I'm 1000% confident this wouldn't happen, and if said boss did "perceive" some kind of drop in productivity, their response would be to help me with that rather than turn it into a negative. Indeed, during COVID when I expressed to my boss that I was having a tough time, his immediate response was to ask how he could help and to offer me a couple days off to recharge.

And the reason we have that relationship is specifically because we treat each other as friends that also happen to have a working relationship, rather than letting the work relationship dominate all else.

Not everyone will have that kind of relationship with their boss, but I believe it is something everyone should aspire to rather than immediately rejecting it as even a possibility.

there is always the exception to the rule and i'm glad that your workplace is an environment you can share stuff like that. however, for most of us, we would get fired or condemned if we spoke freely like that.

I think it's like anywhere else, with some people you're just going to click and be friends, whether you met at work or at a house party

Some people will dislike you; most people will be neutral. But it's all wetware and basically instant

It makes me even sadder when people's social circles and even their entire social network align strictly with work.

I've met plenty of good friends at work, but I'm very happy my social network includes mostly people doing different things with their life. It means there is much more breadth of perspective, and you realize very easily that work isn't everything.

It sounds like you also might not have had much experience in the current "everyone is friends!" startup office culture. There's a pretty strong pressure to socialize all of the time, during lunch and after hours, with everyone. The people get laid off and they are erased from that social circle, typically people won't even communicate with them anymore. It's repulsive.

I think all of what you are describing is a symptom of letting the "co-worker" facet of a relationship dominate all other facets. In other comments I've been using the term "work friends", but I use that term loosely because the reality is that they are first and foremost "friends", it just so happens that our friendship was first kindled through work.

For me, being co-workers is just one small facet of our friendship. We do talk about work sometimes, just like sometimes we talk about sports teams we have in common or other hobbies. But we don't only talk about work. I don't feel that my perspective is limited at all because my co-workers have introduced me to their spouses, who might be in totally different industries, or to new hobbies such as surfing or soccer, or brought me along on trips to new places or encouraged me to volunteer. All of these things have expanded my perspective greatly, and if you trace them back far enough, all of them are originating from my co-workers.

In your startup example, I have been on teams where this culture was the case, and certainly with some people I have completely lost touch after they/I left the team. But for others, even though we worked together work was not the dominating reason that we were friends. When I left the team we lost that one facet of our relationship, but our friendship still survives because we have many other facets that facilitate it.

So I think the problem isn't when someone's social circle aligns strictly with work. I think that's fine. I think the problem you are describing is when it turns into a "work-dominant social circle" rather than "a social circle that just happens to have the same employer in common".

Furthermore, I think the "anti work friend" attitude is counterproductive to this. People are saying "don't spend your time building friendships with co-workers because if you leave work you will lose your friend". But if you carry this attitude and don't build a friendship that is strong outside of work, then of course your perspective is going to be limited to work, and of course you will lose your friendship with that person once your work ends. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

I think it's important to make the distinction that while you can be friends with your colleagues it's very important to also have friends outside of work. Having friends from work is great, but if you only have friends from work then you have nothing outside of work which isn't healthy (for example, if things start going poorly at work then it can feel like you are trapped).

I disagree. At any of my previous jobs when work started going poorly, my friendships were, if anything, a boon to me because I had a support system that immediately understood my work situation and challenges. They were immediately in a position to help because of their close proximity both to me and the challenges at work I was facing. After leaving one job, the relationships with my "work friends" were invaluable to me in helping me find another job since they were in the same field and had connections I could leverage.

Outside of work, my "work friends" and I go out to eat, go play sports together, hang out at each other's houses, etc. We talk about work sometimes because it's obviously a common interest, but our friendship doesn't revolve around it, and if someone severs their relationship with the employer that we have in common, it does not mean our friendship also severs.

I would look at this from a different angle. Work friends have extreme pressure to be around you. They get paid to be around and collaborate with you. You can't easily determine the extent of a relationship standing on its own merit if someone is literally being paid to collaborate with you. With that said some of my best friends came from former jobs as well, but if we're talking about emotionally vulnerable people they especially need relationships outside of work. Imagine all of your relationships being tied to work and inevitably you get fired (as most people will experience in their life). That would be devastating without support outside of work. What if it turns out your friendships only lasted because of the financial incentives to be around each other and common in-office conversations?

tl;dr; relationships outside of work are important and that's not sad to me because it doesn't prevent anyone from also having friends inside of work.

This is a very underrated comment