No one said your co-workers must or should be your only social connections. Simply that it helps if they are A social connection.

You're still going to deal with your co-workers eight hours a day. Dealing with people who think of you as a friend is a lot easier than with people who don't.

I want to deal with my co-workers as professionals, definitely not as friends. They are not my friends, I’m paid to work with them. Companies are more productive when you remove social drama, not less.

There's always social drama because humans are social creatures and not machines. Hiding your head in the sand doesn't make it go away but merely means you're at it's whims with no influence on it. The difference is that if you're viewed as a friend other people first give you the benefit of the doubt since they assume you had good intentions. If you're not they don't and then things can escalate very quickly and not in your favor.

It sounds like you’ve worked under terrible management if you’re having these problems. On a properly run team people don’t squabble and politic. It is possible to work in a healthy manner, remote or otherwise. The drama you avoid when remote stems from not being forced to co-locate with individuals for a large swath of your waking hours. That is a breeding ground for unhealthy behavior.

I have yet to see a non-tiny company that doesn't have political squabbles cross-team and especially cross-department. It's the nature of many groups competing for finite resources and diverging goals. I have however seen many engineers be utterly obvious to the politics going on and getting burned by it in the end.

The politics are greatly reduced when everyone is remote. No “in group” lunches or beers after work…

There are entire categories of drama that wfh eliminates.

Basecamp was a fully remote company that got enough drama to cause almost half the employees to leave within a single month. Remote doesn't prevent in-groups but rather it allows them to grow in really odd ways without anyone noticing until it's too late to stop cleanly.

It doesn't eliminate them, it just hides them from you.

No it eliminates them. In office drinking, office romances, listening to petty personal problems… all completely vaporized in wfh.

You're just not on those Zoom calls. Presumably the office romances/drinking sessions are gone, but politics continues unabated.

Perhaps this is fine for you, but I want to point out to others that just because you don't see this happening anymore, doesn't mean that it has actually stopped happening.

> Presumably the office romances/drinking sessions are gone

That’s a huge win and those aren’t the only detriments eliminated when you don’t force grown adults into a high school like environment.

For you. For the happy marriages that didn't happen, probably not.

I suggest that lots of this WFH/WFO stuff is super personal, and what benefits one may disadvantage another, so it'll be interesting to see how all of this pans out over the next few years.

This is utopia. Human beings are competitive and social, and to achieve your goals you need more than professionals sometimes- you need friends.

It’s unprofessional to suggest that you can only be productive if you are surrounded with friends. I will happily produce with a team made up of people I would never socialize with. It happens all the time as none of my real friends even know how to code. Not once has this impacted my performance.

friendship /= drama

Please never hire at a company near me, thank you

I wouldn’t hire you based on your comments in this thread alone.

Firstly, the context of what I wrote was building trust and team cohesion within the organization. I don't think having or not having friends and family is relevant to that.

Secondly, we spend a lot of our finite lives working, do you want that part of your life to be cold and robotic? Wouldn't life be richer with a wide range of human relationships?

WFH fosters far more trust than “I must see my underlings churning away to be comfortable”, which is currently the driving force for those trying to return to the previous norm.

Every contractor will tell you that you can be far more productive than normal employees because you don’t get quagmired in silly social drama. Look at open source software, it is absolutely possible to create great software without even knowing the other team members. This whole concept that reproducing high school in a professional setting adds to productivity is entirely unfounded.