The earbuds in are a suggestion you're not interested in conversation. Many people also are not interested in random conversation... ever. As much as I'm happy to meet people in social environments, I don't want anyone to randomly start talking to me on a street. And I'm not even "young people" anymore.

Your IT graduate made their own choices - maybe they wanted to do their job and go home rather than discuss with world-class people. Or maybe they had problems with concentration or noise.

Some people are introverts, or have busy life you're not a part of and never see, or just have different priorities. It's ok.

I understand that you don't want to talk to random people on the street, but I disagree strongly with "just doing your job" mentality. If you have any sort of creative output job where you work within a team (engineering, academia, some artistic endeavors), things are different.

Companies often pay for their employees to attend professional and technical development workshops or go to conferences, because part of your job is to improve your skills. Casual water cooler talks do the same thing; they improve your skills, and help initiate creative ideas that ultimately help build better things.

In my own PhD, I saw supervisors demand their students attend department get together, bar hangouts at conferences, and even casually talk to other people in the dept. If I was a manager of creative types, I would absolutely rate someone who didn't "waste their time" at work lower, because if your job description is to create, you need to do reasonable things to improve your creative skills and outputs.

As with all things, there's a time, place, and situation where it can be more suitable or less suitable.

Several of my employers issue staff with noise cancelling headphones on day one on the job. The employee is supposed to make the suitable judgement call on when they're suitable (needing a few hours of uninterrupted concentration) and when they're not.

The alternative is giving people offices so they can actually isolate, or understanding that people who operate on 'maker time' will not be productive with regular interruptions.

I think we are in complete agreement. Creative employees must have the right to direct their own work day (especially their uninterrupted deep work hours), and the responsibility that they fulfill all their formal and informal job requirements. One aspect of the latter is casually exchanging ideas with coworkers they don't usually work with.

People don't always have to be improving themselves at work. At a certain level of skill (say average), just doing your job is enough. Now sure, if you want to get ahead at work, then it's a good idea to go the extra mile, but not everyone cares about that or needs to care about that. They have other aspects of their life that they want to focus on at the expense of their work life.

> except he couldn't hear them.

AirPods Pro are often used as hearing aids in “transparency” mode. Do not make the (lazy) assumption that someone wearing them cannot hear every word you say.

Furthermore, I think if I had to listen to self-proclaimed “world-class” engineers all day, I’d wear earphones too. And not on “transparency” mode.

Maybe the dude have enough social contact as is, so he does nor have to rely on watercooler chat. Work is not the only place to be with people. Since people change jobs fairly often, it is less of place to form long term community.

I mean this 100% seriously: when you have community outside of work you spend less time chatting at work.

Short answer: they don't. Most recorded metrics around young relationships are dropping like a stone.