If you are going out binge drinking with your co-workers, you're doing it wrong because it blurries the lines between professional and personal life in my humble opinion.
Very few deep friendships develop at work, at best they will be acquaintances you see once in a while.
So by all means, be nice and cooperative but keep your distance.
But what you're saying is legitimate, and it bothers me the amount of people acting like it doesn't matter. American society already isolates people. Work is a big (maybe the biggest) avenue to develop friendships as an adult, just like school is when you're a kid. Not everybody gets married and then their life becomes about their 2 kids and any social interaction outside of that is incidental.
Maybe in USA, but my experience in multiple (>5) workspaces in Poland as 28 years old spftware engineer, is that people over 40 are maybe 5% of devs/tech leads.
Maybe I'm being naïve, but I don't see how "toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics" would result from these casual friendships. If anything, I'm more likely to hold myself accountable to my team members when I know them better personally.
You're going to spend nearly 1/3 of your waking hours with these people. You don't need to be best friends forever, but working somewhere that you don't at least have some friendly interaction and culture sounds utterly miserable.
> Socialising at work is when you develop unconscious and conscious biases and it is a breeding ground for a toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics.
There is more to life than team dynamics. Metrics won't keep you warm at night. Perhaps I'm forgetting the HN demographic...
Why are you assuming remote == unfriendly? That's silly.
What people are pushing back against isn't being friendly or developing a good working relationship with your peers. People are pushing back against "Not mandatory but you will be judged for not attending" after work happy hours, or extra-curricular work events where you are expected to attend during your free time. Things that seek to place your coworkers as your friends, and take away from time you could spend with your family and outside-of-work friends.
This parasitic work culture seeks to make the workplace replace your family and friends and it's all centered around the office.
> There is more to life than team dynamics.
There is more to life than work, period.
What about them? I assume they will be welcome to go back to the office one the whole pandemic thing becomes less of an issue.
I'm morbidly fascinated by the polarisation that drives some online conversations. Admittedly I have probably fuelled some of that with my question, I'll try to do better in future. However, it was intended to point out that there are shades of grey here (as evident in the comments) while the post I replied to seemed very black-and-white to me.
I wonder if a better question might be something like: what does a healthy, productive future of work look like now that covid has demonstrated that some people will very much want to continue working entirely remote, while some people very much do not?
For what it's worth, I completely agree and sympathise with all the issues people raise here. None of remote, in-office, or hybrid are perfect. They all have problems.
It seems that covid has given us the opportunity to at least try to improve things, even though clearly the answers are difficult to find.
Slight tangent: I was saddened to read recently that Basecap has permanently closed their Chicago HQ [0]. I've held up this place as a model for how I'd want to build an office space should my unicorn/cash-cow finally hatch. No, it's not perfect, but I loved the fact they explicitly tried, and they explicitly recognised it might be seen by some as a waste of company funds, particularly when they also did things like deliver fruit & veg to employee's homes rather than workplace as an incentive to go home rather than stay late in that expensive office space [1].
I think there are major underlying structural issues that discourage companies from solving issues relating to worker happiness. Extortionate rent and service charges have produced homogenous high-streets, and they're homogenising the business districts too. The labels over the door of each building might be different, but the attitude inside is the same. Worker happiness is grist to the mill, productivity and the bottom line reign. I think we could do better.
