I feel like picking jobs off of a desire to live a social life and feel like part of a community is extremely normal and valid. Remote work is essentially accepting that the primary way you'll engage with your colleagues and labor is through a screen, and that is an uncomfortable feeling (to some people at least)
My coworkers are my colleagues. I don’t mind sharing a beer with them once in a while, but apart from “work” we have different interests, values, and experiences. That doesn’t lead to community, it leads to having acquaintances. And if you doubt that, ask yourself how many of your “work friends” from a job you’ve had more than a year ago do you still interact with?
The pandemic has been a joy for me because it’s let me separate my parasocial interactions from my true friends.
I still interact a lot with people I was on a team with >1 yr ago – the ones I met before we went remote. Can't say the same about the ones I was never in the office with, even though they seem like equally good people.
> but apart from “work” we have different interests, values, and experiences. That doesn’t lead to community, it leads to having acquaintances.
It has not been my experience that "community" arises particularly from this kind of homogeneity.
I'm also kind of curious what you mean by "parasocial" outside of the context of media.
I actually went back and forth on using it - even considering a hedge with a "quasi-" prefix. But it felt apt: plenty of my past "work friends" exist as little beyond a persona that I interact with via LinkedIn. I give a thumbs-up for their job change, we exchange polite offers to get a coffee that we both know neither will accept, and we go on.
I would say that the majority of my friends and close Social Circle are people who I met and worked with an office at one point. Sure it started with cooler chat and beers after work, but it evolve to going to weddings, backpacking trips, and our partners becoming close with friendships of their own.
I do like workplace community, even if I'm only close with a subset of my colleagues. I find it vastly more fulfilling to work with friends that I enjoy. I don't like turning off my personality and become a faceless COG working with other cogs for 8 hours a day and find it depressing
Been on my own and remote since 2000. I am remote with my clients save for occasional face to face meeting when possible and I am remote with my subcontractors. It feels "extremely normal" to me and the last thing I've ever want is my friends and people I hang out with being supplied by my workplace. Does not mean that I've never made friends when I did "normal work" long time ago but it was just extra.
I do think that this discussion is often people who disagree not bothering to disagree, which probably explains why I read your comment wrong.
It makes sense—wherever you spend the most time around others is where you’re most likely to make friends and feel a sense of belonging.
Remote work upends that. It’s great if you already have an established social circle, but bad for people who want to develop one.
There’s no reason why work has to be the main thing that satisfies these needs, but it’s fulfilled that role for so long that it has sucked up most of the oxygen from alternatives.
I hope that as remote work continues to take off, we’ll see a new wave of third places that can take over this function. There’s a huge opportunity here for anyone who can help socially struggling remote workers feel more connected.
The argument would be a lot stronger if most office work wasn't perpetually online to begin with.
2. Sign-up to a local coworking space in Central London and make a habit to go there every day. Try to make friends with people there and go out with them every now and then. Many coworking spaces even try to facilitate community building by organising events, etc.
3. Profit.
Socializing doesn't need to happen at work.
Also, keep in mind not all coworkings are made equal. It might take trying a few before you find one that suits you well.
In my experience small, local coworkings are best for building relationships. Big, chain coworkings like WeWork are the worst. Everyone just minds their own business there.
I prefer this to spending £40 for the train to then drink £8 pints in overfilled London pubs while standing outside and shouting over each other. I actually don't want to spend more time with my colleagues after spending all day with them, I prefer to have a second friend circle which is more diverse than <group of people who happen to work in the same company as me>.
Also, note that neither of these activities involve colleagues, who I'd usually only socialise with post-work once a week (typically Fridays).
My friends don't share my work context, nor do I want to have them hear about it endlessly. Getting a drink with friendly coworkers is a good way to have a conversation with that shared context.
This works great for you but for many it doesn't. Both are valid perspectives.
For every bold company that leans into remote, the majority rest check the public temperature and do what seems in line pending open revolt form their employees or competitors offering remote.
So much of the public temperature around remote work is oriented around heavy support from public figures for return to office. By some employees supporting it as well, everyone risks getting swept back into office whether they like it or not and don’t have a job with enough power (like a talented dev) to go against the grain and protest.
If you’re not in those jobs with leverage and at a company considering RTO or not, Employees supporting remote work are espousing very safe career views, and the employees who disagree risk going against the grain with mgmt who want the office back so stay silent.
So this is what I mean by OP’s opinions mean everyone else gets swept in it as well.
The Mayor of NYC and state governor are directly petitioning companies to “fill our downtown!” For Pete’s sake.
So, with that in mind, I’m advocating for employees who want to go back to consider how their vocal opinions affect other employees who don’t want it, which based on the ghost-town hybrid office attempts and midtown NYC being at like 40% capacity are a critical mass of workers, to understand how their vocal-ness gets co-opted by entities that care a lot less about that worker’s having a friend group and more about commercial real estate, getting commuters back and generally abstract “well this is how it’s always done” logic, and to understand that they as employees add the final piece to making RTO happen in a way that harms all employees who aren’t in nimble jobs like SWE but should still be able to see their families grow up even if they don’t know how to code.
On the remote work side, you have largely tech companies which are down for it no issue but aren’t most companies, and then you have employees who just want to see their families and soccer games and get to know their spouses before age 60.
This population gets ignored by the somewhat very powerful stakeholders for RTO by wrapping up the argument in abstract “national /personal meaning” arguments as if the office is the only way to get those, and then the addition is that the stay-at-home employees are pajama-wearing slackers who don’t understand this greater good.
But, as long as employees don’t budge by and large and hop companies for remote, this is in balance for both the employees that want to be remote and the ones that want an office.
But when employees who want to RTO and start advocating for it, it’s changed. They add the final piece for employers and stakeholders who ultimately just want commercial rent paid and downtown lunch traffic to say “see, employees want RTO too!” This is all over LinkedIn and op-eds consistently.
The sweeps start happening, and everyone comes in, all because Bob wanted easy access to after-work pub experiences. At the cost of other employees’ family lives and literal hours of their day on a commute.
I’m not advocating for censorship, I’m advocating for candor in evaluating what’s going on.
I will continue to argue against any government regulations forcing the issue one way or another. But if companies start demanding workers return and the pool of jobs available to you shrinks, that's not my problem.
To be clear, I oppose Mayor Adams's (and anyone else's) inept efforts to distort the labor market in favor of in-person working, even if it's towards something I personally prefer. Government should play no role in remote vs in-person.
The market might solve it via PwC tanking over 10 yrs due to talent, but in the meantime that’s 10 yrs of people who deserve to see their families more too and can’t.
You could argue they should just be good enough at their jobs and/or choose the right career as to get remote options. Fair enough and this is what I’ve done.
But the implied primitive that the market decides who gets more family time, especially when it’s almost as simple as internet at the office or internet at home, seems very socially wrong to me.
Candidly, I believe that employees who advocate for RTO are playing into the hands of stakeholders who don’t care much at all about those employees interests and reasons for going in, and by extension it damages fellow employees who want to stay remote.
The issue is, and by extension my primitives:
- remote employees can stay remote without damaging RTO employees’ social connections as there are a mountain or ways to get those social connections outside of easy-mode work.
- if RTO employees start going back, remote employees get damaged. There is the binary in office/not in office option. demonstrated outcomes are RTO pressure from some leads to RTO pressure for all.
- so, remote employees aren’t infringing on RTO, but RTO infringes on remote. There is more than enough evidence of this. One is allowing whoever to do whatever, the other is infringing on one population to support the social needs of another. That doesn’t seem right for Pete’s sake.
Ultimately, between a person’s ability to get easy access to a pub in light of the above, vs the resulting damage on employees who just want to work via the internet connection in their homes vs the one in the office and as a result see their kids grow up and get to know their spouses outside of pre-8am and post-7pm… that seems like a clear greater good to orient around and to be aware of one’s views’ impacts. It’s more than just pub nights involved.
No, I'm looking for companies that fit my preferences. Which is making my job search much harder, but I know what I need.
If your experiences are different, I'm sorry for that, the last thing I want portray remote as an invalid preference. But when the topic comes up, I'm not going to sit on mute if it feels like my preference isn't getting any airtime.
What I’m referring to is this. I’ve worked at a few places that maintain an in-person office option for employees like you to support hybrid offices. These offices are frequently libraries though. Nobody is there. So the following happens.
If it’s a disciplined, remote-first place, this is accepted and ok. The subset of companies that can support this is small IMO.
For most others, they look at the empty office, hear preferences like yours that want in-personal back via appeals for community, at the extensive and the loud culture of OpEds in the Wall Street Journal/NYT by Peggy Noonan or Malcolm Gladwell about how remote work is critical for national and personal meaning, and then the return to office discussions start b/c employees support it as do thought leaders, the media, and politicians, and the nearly-empty office is expensive.
To be sure, there might be work places that stay totally in-person and you’re free to work there.
But the other issue is a lot of people don’t want work friends as their friends. This is loose scientific evidence, but Office Space is a very popular movie in the US and the Office in UK/US for this reason, for example.
So calls for return to office means, imo, a lot of people who would also love to be remote but can’t bc they’re not software engineers or wherever get swept back in. So your personal needs harm that greater good as I see it.
I feel like people get this or not. The relationships at work are more for career advancement than friendship (or I’m a sociopath). This has been a thing forever, Office Space was a hit for a reason.
Good times.
The polarisation of this debate is quite weird to watch. I get why people who prefer remote feel they have to fight for it now that it has become a common thing, but it's weird to deny that other people might have other preferences and there is room for both.
During my somewhat passive job search, I've only been considering companies that have an office local to me (i.e. Central London). I've been working remotely since the start of the pandemic, and I simply don't like it. Sure, I don't miss having to commute or offices with bad noise pollution controls, but I miss everything else.
Most of all, I miss being in town at the end of the day and being able to pop to the pub with colleagues if one of us needs to vent, or go to a salsa party nearby. I basically don't go out anymore; yes, this is a me thing, but it's also always been a me thing. I've always found it easier to have a social life on weeknights rather than weekends because I struggle to overcome the inertia of being at home.
This preference means some very exciting companies are effectively off-limits to me, and that's hugely frustrating; but I also know what I need.