OTOH it's also possible to have conversations of a whole other nature online. The pace is different, and the urgency is different. You can have hours long discussions about interesting stuff with someone you've never even met. For instance I talk to a professor in my field about stuff, and it's not that easy to find someone to just do that. Similarly I've had a lot of slow but insightful conversations with teammates about various technical issues, or personal issues.

"Maybe others feel differently." Come on. How can anyone who grew up during or after the BBS era could have this attitude? You can obviously have deep online interactions with people. We've been doing it for decades. You have to be open to it. It is a different type of interaction.

edited to add: People have also fallen in love online for decades. I know several people who met their spouses online.

What evidence would convince you that you don't need to discuss Johnny Carson's monologue at the watercoolor to interact with colleagues in a meaningful way?

> I know several people who met their spouses online.

Sure. But I'll bet you that sooner or later they've moved their relation from mostly online to mostly offline.

The myth sounds mostly based on all the other issues the office brings with it. In a vacuum, would people communicate more in face given they had enough similarities, the work at hand would greatly benefit from it and there were no negatives? Well, I think so.

But that's not what reality is. Many people work in a lousy, suboptimal open office. They don't get to handpick their teammates. They might have to spend a lot of time commuting at times not matching their natural rhythm, which inadvertently has an effect on their mood.

And that's really all there is to it. If there's truth to how many people just "glue code together" in their developer jobs, then the immediate follow-up is "do you really need to discuss that much to glue code together, when requirements are already far out of your reach?" For many, the work literally becomes a case of "the more you bother me, the less work I'll get done", which coupled with the above and pressure to perform, is a recipe for disaster.

Given something closer to the ideal with more collaborative requirements, then yes, in-office would be better no doubt. With the caveat of the disadvantages one would still have.

Not all of us seem to connect with colleagues on a personal level, and prefer to instead optimize for what’s necessary to get our work done. These are not friends; they are workers who share a common compensation provider.

When the going gets tough, these people are very hard to work with. The lack of connection means it will be hard to understand each other when a solution must be worked out collaboratively. And the lack of a prior emotional connection between two people will make it very easy to escalate from "I disagree with your point" to "you're dumb and an asshole".

Maybe some jobs don't require that, but as a software engineer I've needed to tread those interpersonal waters a lot. Discussions about interfaces, pushing back on requirements, picking up neat tricks, offering tough estimates, it's all much easier if there's already some report there.

...

So is being so extremely judgmental without even considering things from GP's perspective.

They are trying to keep things in harmony while focusing on output. It might not leave the work environment socially positive, but they aren't actively trying to make the place worse socially, either. That doesn't sound a bad deal considering some of us are very selective with relationships and frankly, selecting companies for colleagues would be a ridiculously long and potentially fruitless endeavor. Meanwhile, what you do get is someone who is a large net positive on other fronts.

I assume a lot of HN participants only get social interaction at work, or their colleagues are their only or primary friends, which leads to the idea “if you don’t have friendships with these people, you’re a bad worker.”

One can deliver quality work cordially, but at a distance socially, in my experience.

personally I find 1x1s over Zoom extremely fatiguing. No app will ever help with that, ever. I'd even take an in-person 1x1 in a drab conference room over Zoom.

It's way less fatiguing for me since I switch off my cam or at least the display of my own video image. You should give it a try. :)

Yeah, but then you're talking to an emotionless box in a Zoom window, which is even worse.

but then you lose out on a massive amount of information sharing that you'd normally get via body language

On the other side of that: I am forced to go to work so that I don’t die basically. I don’t use it as a social occasion and in general all of the tedious people who either can’t make friends or have an enjoyable life on their own time, get in the way.

Workplaces that try to use Work and Pay as a reason to have a social outing aren’t workplaces. I’ll fake it to be paid but if remote means it goes away… that is a very very good thing.