[D895n9o33436N42]

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

Eh, there’s enough anecdata to swing this in either direction.

I have not grown up in the US, so I’ve truly started my social network from scratch when I began my professional career almost two decades ago. The people I’ve become friendly at work make poor friends.

Perhaps my definition of “friend” is different than yours, but I expect to have a trust based relationship with a friend. If I’m having trouble at home or trouble with money, I expect my friend to hear me out, offer a shoulder and maybe give me some advice.

I wouldn’t tell such things to anyone I’m “friendly” with at work. Don’t get me wrong: I like these people, but would I want another team’s manager to know that I’m deeply in debt or fighting bitterly with my spouse? I’d think not. This is America: land of dog eat dog. People will use such information against me without hesitation. Corporate politics are real here.

Remember: when a “friendship” begins in a context of making money, it’s most likely no friendship at all. Surely there’s the opportunity for an occasional exception to slip past this rule, but don’t you go around thinking that it happens as a base case.

Lastly, work isn’t the only place where adults interact. I’ve met lots of people through my kid. School and sports teams and other places where my child is involved: there are human adults there too. Those other parents are better than colleagues in many ways. For one thing, you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.

And what happened to meetups? Yes, the pandemic has put a damper on those, but they’ll be back eventually.

Edit: PS: Had I not been working remotely, I’d never have found the time to show up to my kid’s sports practice or school committee meetings. Commute and office shenanigans always eat up that time. That’s just life. One door closes and another opens.

[bengale]

This is my experience too, I have a single long term friend that started as a colleague, but the rest have drifted into acquaintances after leaving companies. I liked the majority of them, and we socialised outside of work but when that main anchor of seeing each other during the week was removed the friendships faded too.

I suppose it is a problem to form proper relationships with people outside of work if you're not left with any time outside of work though, so for some people being sociable in the office is a good way to mask that work life balance issue in the short term.

It could also just be an age thing, when I was younger I would have probably preferred to be in the office, but now I want to be with my family as much as I can be and removing things like the commute makes a huge difference in available time.

[jefurii]

> you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.

Coworking spaces offer this plus - depending on the space - potential friendships with people in your field. I was at a space for awhile and there was a great group of fellow software people who all sat together.

[rutthenut]

>> I wouldn’t tell such things to anyone I’m “friendly” with at work. Don’t get me wrong: I like these people, but would I want another team’s manager to know that I’m deeply in debt or fighting bitterly with my spouse? I’d think not. This is America: land of dog eat dog. People will use such information against me without hesitation. Corporate politics are real here. >> That's a shame - you should be able to get some closer friends from a work environment and not have to consider or contend with this. Definitely a difference between 'colleagues' and 'friends'. It still makes sense to keep most private things at a private level. Being cautious always applies, with some work environments, far more caution clearly is needed

[zhdc1]

It's not the social isolation as much as it is being disconnected from your work environment. There's a very real benefit (that varies a lot on individual circumstances) to being close to the flagpole.

This discussion reminds me of Richard Hamming's anecdote about open and closed doors: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html.

[D895n9o33436N42]

What happens when everyone’s work environment is the same across a given company? Doesn’t this level the playing field? Evergreen communication seems to specifically serve the goal of reducing or even eliminating the need to be “close to the flagpole”, as you called it.

[zhdc1]

There were a lot of companies that were remote work first before COVID. The issue is that this is only possible for companies in certain fields (tech being one of them) that have the right tools and management structures in place, and where explicit knowledge is more important than tacit knowledge.

I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication (the closest I could find was a consulting-ish company online), but I'm sure that small companies in a larger number of fields could, theoretically, go remote work first.

[pX3q54Q55945w7E]

> I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication

I saw the words "evergreen communication" in a job posting this week, and they stuck with me. I've no idea if this is a common expression, but it seems to make sense to me. My interpretation of it is: words said during an in-person conversation tend to fade away into participants' imperfect memories as soon as they're said. Words that make up written communication (Slack, wiki, ...) tend to stick around, thus allowing others to who weren't directly around for the conversation to benefit from the knowledge later on.

"Asynchronous communication" likely refers to the same thing.