It is a bad thing, for the reason you just eluded to. Your work goes away for any reason, and so does your social life. This is why many of my friends haven't made any real friends since highschool

What the OP has alluded to was that sometimes you just like the people you work with, and if you are in a situation with long hours and hard work, for some people it's more efficient to endure that in person and not in isolation, and it's not always a BS manager thing. Whether you choose for some reason to cling to those people, or fully realize that this is a team that gets together to get shit done, not a family, is a completely separate issue.

I don't think it was only this, but I agree this can be much better than in isolation. You just don't want your work and your work-social life to encompass all of your time. It's just not that important no matter how much your Saas is going to change the world.

I mean, nothing is stopping you from making friends outside of work too though. It’s just another avenue for socializing. WFH though means that socializing is likely completely off the table. Fine if you’re not into it - sucks a lot if you are. I really miss lunches with my coworkers. It was almost always the highlight of my day - if I didn’t do anything else after work.

Often times the feeling of pseudo-social life and working too much are some of the things stopping you from doing this. Then maybe a pandemic happens and you realize that all those people were doing the exact same thing, and there's no neutral substance to your friendship. For this reason, I always recommend meeting the friends of people at work. They're relatively neutral, and you only rely on your work connections as a jumping off point.

WFH means you can do other shit more easily because you have more time available to go to the gym, cafe, walking around, party etc..

Not to say that friends made at work cannot be friends, but all it takes is a trivial severance of that to reveal how close that connection was.

> For this reason, I always recommend meeting the friends of people at work. They're relatively neutral, and you only rely on your work connections as a jumping off point.

That's an interesting approach - how do you even do that though?

Honestly - WFH isn't much more time liberating for myself. Any amount of commute time I had (which was never very much - always under 20min each way, closer to 10min) was taken over by extra work demands or blurring separation of lines. On top of that - there's no happy hours, fun lunches, or what not now because WFH.

And I agree - but I guess what I'm saying is... You don't need lasting friendships for socializing to be enjoyable. Situational socializing can still be fun and it doesn't have to be this thing where you are going to have these people be your best man at your wedding.

> Situational socializing can still be fun and it doesn't have to be this thing where you are going to have these people be your best man at your wedding.

Absolutely agree. This is why I mean more specifically that this shouldn't be relied upon entirely. If you stop being in the office, and your social life goes away, then maybe too much is coming from your work social life, whereas my opinion is just that it should be an augment. You may not need your casual work buddies to come to your wedding, but you probably want someone to come to your wedding, and it probably needs to come from somewhere else.

It's just a common thing I've heard—from particularly 9 to 5, somewhat more socially anxious people—that they have no idea how to make friends now that they realize their work friends don't necessarily want to go have a picnic. Work tends to usurp their personal lives in this sense, though I don't necessarily mean it to be so dramatic.

> That's an interesting approach - how do you even do that though?

It takes time and breadth. It's probably a better idea in general to just meet people through other means, but the big thing is simply forming enough of a connection with a small subset of your colleagues that they'd invite you to a party or something, then you might get to meet some other people, of which a small subset of those will vibe well enough with you.

It's just like meeting the friends of your current friends in that if they move away, you have redundancy. You wouldn't want 10/11 of your social group dependent on that one person you met them through, but that one person might give you exposure to the other 10. Ideally you get to a point with the other 10 where you'd invite them regardless of your first friend's availability.

Well, now I manage to have lunch with my wife every day. I prefer that.

> Your work goes away for any reason, and so does your social life.

Sure, as can be true after leaving school or moving away from family. Reason enough to always foster the skill of both making and keeping friends.

Totally agreed. If your only friends are highschool buddies, then you'll likely never leave your hometown.

I'm still regularly meeting up with a group of ex-colleagues from a company I left 5 years ago

It can happen. Certainly if you did quite a lot of other things outside of work. It's just not necessarily a safe BET imo. If you live right next to them, or you became drinking buddies that talk about thingds other than the current project you're both working on, you stand a higher chance. If the only thing tying you together is your company though, it's going to be pretty vulnerable.

alluded*

> it's very common for office life and social life to be highly intertwined

Until there's a conflict of interest between the two zones or between two colleagues and it all goes to shit.

Trust me, keep work and friends separated.

> Trust me, keep work and friends separated.

That's what you do by changing jobs. When you move on to the next company, those guys you met on the job become just "out of work friends".

Most people with > 3 jobs worth of experience will tell you that coworker-friends rarely transition to non-work friends after leaving said company. You will become too busy with making new coworker-friends at the new company, combined with non-work family/friend commitments filling the rest of your time.

One person with over 25 years in IT will tell you not to generalize. We're all different. I keep in touch with people i worked with 25 years ago, even across different countries and continents. I am a contractor so I change jobs roughly every year. I still go out with friends i met at work, and i have brought many of them into projects i started at other companies. I also have been hired by people i worked with previously. People are precious. The fact that you work with them 8 hours/day doesn't make them less so. I won't talk about the difficult ones, there's always that category too

I know everyone has their own experiences, but I've just never experienced this. Makes me wonder what "friends" one is keeping as company.

I know, and I try and socialise with people who know, that work is just work, and its not worth sacrificing personal/social life just to simp for a boss.

I've met my best friends at work. I've moved across the world to another country with former colleagues. Created extremely deep connections with colleagues who've lead me to much personal growth.

I find this depends highly on where one lives. If you work somewhere where a significant chunk of the workforce are local either by growing up there or graduated there then this separation comes naturally since people have established social circles outside of work. It's different where the majority of the company's employees had to relocate to work there, people will be more open to making friendships at work and this will be a good thing. In the end it will be down to good leadership to manage the conflict of interests and they will arise anyway. I've seen this happen where due to the lack of friendships inside and outside of work some employees can be targeted and corrupted by vendors who take advantage of a person's social needs.

I'd prefer to have more choice about who / where / when I get to socialise. E.g. with remote work I can save time on commute and use it to visit a tech event, or a coworking space; I'd still meet similar people there, while having more freedom.

> I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing per se. The problem is that it seems in some places there's no alternative

It's not a bad thing imho.

I joined a banking grad scheme many years ago in my first role out of uni. Have about 10 friends from there now 20 or so years on that I am in regular contact with.

I have moved to several different jobs since and pick up maybe one friend along the way but nothing as close as from our first job. Obviously age / place in life at the time was a big factor.

>This may just be my experience as a young person in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, but it's very common for office life and social life to be highly intertwined.

Damn, I've seen some random ass video on yt called "normal day of Googler" or something like that and it shocked me hard that "normal day" meant hanging out with coworkers

Don't get me wrong, it's not like we don't do it "here" - like going to pub or something, but it's definitely not normal day.

Yea, I think both kinds of work, on-site with high social interaction and at-home with focus on individual work, have their raison d'etre.

It's not an either-or. Both modes of working will exist in the future.