| I have hired nearly all of my best friends (and even my girlfriend), and a large part of me regrets it; and yes: for the very reasons you describe (personal, not business). I have had to fire friends, and I have had to negotiate with them. I actually have managed to keep these people as close friends, but it got really tough going at times. :( The thing that got really really hard for me, though, is that I no longer really just have "friends" in the sense of "someone you can tell your problems to". Here is an example: let's say work sucks, or things are going badly in some negotiation, or maybe you literally jut hate your job that day and feel like going off on a massive "I wish I could just quit all of this" rant. It no longer works to do this with your friends: they now have both emotional and economic incentives to argue with you, become frustrated at your opinions, or, even worse, themselves feel bad about their own lives. In the other direction, I often feel the need to avoid hanging out with some of the people I most cherish in my life, as I know if I do they will ask after the status of something I should have done, or start asking me questions about something they should do. The result is that I'm, in a way, not even allowed to have work/life separation anymore: whereas I'm totally fine with the idea "this is just dinner, can we not talk about work?", it is nearly impossible to get everyone else to abide. I therefore have actually been quite happy as some of my friends have gotten larger jobs elsewhere (I really was mostly doing extreme part-time hiring as contractors) as I now can interact with them "normally". (Now, that all said, I also feel I have seen this "work better" in a previous company I was a part of, but I can't help but wonder if it was because I was the employee as opposed to the employer.) (I don't really hear my friends complaining about this interaction, for example; that said, maybe they just wouldn't tell me, due to this very same underlying bug.) |