For something you're going to spend your life doing, it's a horrible prospect to not expect to make friends at work. As a child did you spend 12 years not making friends in school, since school is for learning and not socialization?
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It's important to be _friendly_ at work but there's no reason someone needs to make "friends".
I've made lifelong friends at work but it was in a setting where it was a small startup and the entire company literally fit in one room. It was almost impossible not to form relationships just because we spent so much time together.
Getting older, having a family, and working for big corp vesting RSUs? No, I'm not likely going to be making any friends at work.
My experience coming from remote working for several years was I made friends in my neighborhood through volunteering and local places/events rather than at the office. In a lot of ways it has worked out so much better that way.
Of course all that is on hold with lockdown now, which I think is giving people the impression that remote working means no friends.
As much as I've liked the company of coworkers and been friendly with them, I've never had a coworker friendship 'stick' after they or I leave for very long.
The longest was a guy I used to meet up with at dog parks so our dogs could play together, or meet for a pint sometimes, and even that is looking like it's probably not going to stick.
The longest lasting friendships for me have been friends with a shared hobby. Like I have a lot of friends that are really into board games. Except for the pandemic it's been real easy to maintain those friendships, just organize a game night.
The average Millenial worker will job hop every 1-3 years. While it’s good to be friendly with your colleagues, you also shouldn’t build friend networks that get broken and reformed with such regularity.
That might be true for high earning, in demand programmers, finance types, or doctors, but I doubt it’s true for others, especially outside of large cities.
People find a place to work and then stick with it, out of complacency or other properties. It’s why employers famously provide minimal raises, and you earn far more if you change employers.
Employers are betting people will rather accept lower pay in exchange for less volatility and perceived risk, and they are correct.
A good friend and current roommate of mine has spent his entire working life doing menial work. Kitchens and factories mostly. He changes jobs just as often as your average resume-driven-developer. Not for raises of course, those don't really exist in menial work, he just gets sick of one place's shit and moves on to a different place with a different set of bullshit to deal with, just for variety.
This makes no sense. Just because you switch jobs doesn't mean you can never talk to people at your old job never again.
Meeting your former colleagues is like the high-school reunion that happens once per decade. It is too rare, and it is obvious that most of the things that connected you in the past are not there anymore.
Again, this isn't some law of nature. I regularly connect with old colleagues, we all went our separate ways and a lot of our commonalities changed, yet somehow I can still talk to them, see what they're doing, etc.
Of course it doesn’t mean that you can’t talk to those people ever again, but unless if you put in a lot of ground work to create a common connection external to work, most of those friendships will evaporate the moment they lose the shared experience of working at the same place.
Millenial or not, those friend networks are still how you'll be able to find the better jobs when you're older.
I've gotten better jobs through networking and none of them were friends. People should recommend others who are good at their job, not friends.
It's important to be _friendly_ at work but that doesn't mean someone is your friend.
I've gotten several jobs through colleagues, none of which were based on having made an actual friendship in the sense that I hung out with any of these people in my free time. It was more like networking and was based on professional experience and capability.
Imagine you're on a spaceship, say the Nostromo from Alien. And your biggest skill is making others do your work. I'd say you'd be the first in line to be spaced.
That's precisely why you want to make friends at every shop, since you'll all be rotating jobs and running into the same people in future jobs, sometimes hiring them sometimes being hired by them.
I wonder if that is skewed my certain kinds of jobs (Ex: retail and software) where a skill is broadly transferable to many many other companies.
As a fairly specialized electrical engineer, I could still find employment at several other companies which do what I do, but I'm not itching to move (been at the same company for a decade). Is everyone on HN constantly shifting jobs?
I'm not sure it's just specialization. Outside of hands-on engineering, there are a lot of roles in product management, developer relations, marketing, finance, etc. that are pretty transferable between companies. There's just a lot of job hopping in SV--especially between often short-lived small companies--that you probably see less of elsewhere. Personally, aside from one company that went pop in the dot-com era--I've never been at a job less than about 10 years on the east coast.
For the Bay Area specifically:
1.) Small startups die often
2.) People vest their RSUs and realize their employer doesn't value them enough for a refresh so they take a giant pay cut hence start the job search
> For something you're going to spend your life doing, it's a horrible prospect to not expect to make friends at work.
Yeah well, as they say, life's a bitch and then you die. On the scale of things that are horrible prospects "not making friends at work" strikes me as something very privileged to be concerned about.
Jesus that's dark. Everybody needs community, there's nothing privileged about that. Through the ages we have bound ourselves to our profession and the people we work with and for in our community. Is that some far-fetched ideal to strive for?
And I'm not meaning some buddy-buddy friends, but at least making good acquaintances. You can't really go much farther than that unless you have developed a good personal rapport and share some set of similarities.
Some people have very low social needs, very little desire to socially interact and are very picky. In that regard, I agree with GP. Personally, work is work and I don't go there to small talk with every single person who is incredibly unlikely to mesh well with me. Worse is when they come out with the "but you can change" arguments, when I'm fairly satisfied with the few great friends I have outside work.
I too find the need to be friends with everyone quite privileged, and worse, trying to force one's world view onto others. Some people just don't have the luxury of surrounding themselves with people of a largely similar mindset they can bond to in a work environment. Friendship is not something I wish to lower my standards for. Maybe the definition of what constitutes a friend is just different, too. I have high standards for a friend. An acquaintance, not so much. You could be an acquaintance just by saying 'hi' every week.
> Everybody needs community, there's nothing privileged about that.
It is extremely privileged to expect your job to provide that. Most people do not have that many different jobs with different considerations to choose from, and when they do choose they do it based on more important and immediate needs like working conditions and compensation.
Is it so horrible? I have friends outside of work.
I get on with my coworkers, we talk about non-work things, we occasionally do (well, did) social activities in the evenings or weekends... but if someone leaves I fully expect to never see or talk to them again, and the thought doesn't pain me.
> it's a horrible prospect to not expect to make friends at work
But I already do have friends, and I see no reason to replace them with my current coworkers.
For me, a horrible prospect is that a corporation could hold my social network hostage, so that if they fire me, I not only lose my income, but also my support group, on the same day.
(I am not opposed in principle to finding a friend among my colleagues, if we happen to click on the personal level. But I am not going to force it; my standards are quite strict. It happened twice in my life, and we meet regularly despite no longer working together. They have been upgraded from the "colleague" level to the "friend" level.)
Yeah, it’s probably just me. I did not have friends at school. I really did just go there to learn things.
The way children socialize compared to adults is completely different. So you really can't make a valid comparison between school and work in terms of socialization.
> As a child did you spend 12 years not making friends in school,
Indeed
I never even had a single conversation in school
>since school is for learning and not socialization?
I did not even learn there anything. I learned basically everything at home from books.