Are you friends with your co-workers?
4I have a smallish group of friends from the office. We go out drinking after work, we play in a kickball league (non-company), or go shooting or something on the weekends. A lot of the people I know outside of work say they would never be friends with their co-workers for various reasons. I've even been told that its a bad idea (outside of the expected hating their co-workers or the "my co-workers are dumb-asses" reasons). I don't get it. I guess maybe it's because I'm not in a job where we need to step on each other to do well in our careers. Most of us are in different technical fields anyway. Are you friends with anyone you work with?
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I've only worked for 1 company where I actually made friends that carried over to "real life." Otherwise I have "work friends" who I'm friendly with at the office, but we don't spend any time together after work hours.
I am now. It's better this way.
I'm married to mine.
Nope; albeit, I have only worked here since February. Also, most of my coworkers are twice my age so I doubt they are looking to become friends.
Oh man, they're the worst
DELETE DELETE, HOW DO I DELETE THIS
@matthew I don't like you either, butthead.
@matthew Damn man, I didn't realize that my Mad Ape Den karaoke pushed you to this kind of generalization regarding your co-workers. It was that agonizing (for you, but fun for me) 4 minutes we spent together, right? If not, I'd just state that you have no enemies here... as far as I know, as of this minute.
When I was in the Air Force in the '70s I made friends who are still good friends today.
I became a civilian in 1997 and since then know many people from work, none of whom I would consider a friend. Acquaintance, yes; friend, no.
I consider myself lucky that I have made several close friends over the last decade. But none of them from work.
Counter-example: Two years ago my wife and I started our own consulting firm. We work together every day, and I wouldn't change anything. She is still my very best friend.
It's like any random group. There are a couple who are friends -- we hang out outside the office -- a bunch who are perfectly nice acquaintances, and a couple of toads.
College job, yes. Current job, no. When I started this job, all my co-workers were middle-aged women and I was a young stud fresh out of college. Probably why I got the job... I had visible abs back then! Popular with the middle aged ladies and their daughters too. Now, I'm too old to hang out with new hires and too young to be friends with the people who have been here awhile. I've got a kid now and I'm overweight... Maybe I'm just bad at making friends. :(
@medz this tale, I know it well. I need Irk's guaranteed weight loss challenge.
my company recently invested in a game room, so I have a bunch of work buds that I beat the shit out of in smash bros after work almost daily.
there are a few I'll hang out with outside of the office with too. this is a good thing as a developer because 1) teams and 2) managers and admins are shit, so you can get solid job advice from other people in your situation.
I think it depends on the company and the people, mostly. In a competitive culture, I would avoid close friendships with coworkers and keep it like a friendly acquaintance. Somewhere that didn't have that backbiting culture, new friends are great!
I've been at my job for 17 years. Before marriage and before other coworkers started having kids we would all go out pretty regularly. Now it's only occasionally, but I definitely consider most of them friends, we pretty much all grew up together.
My only job is keeping house and raising kids, so my answer is no. An emphatic "no".
I kid, I kid.
@PurplePawprints This is the only workplace where you can love and hate (especially when they are neglecting their chores) your coworkers at the same time ;)
Gallop, yes the opinion pollster company, has a question on their employee satisfaction survey that asks "Do you have a best friend at work." Pisses my employer royally that a lot of us refuse to use Gallop's definition of 'best friend'. because by definition there is only 1 best
Farcebook has done more to destroy the concept of friendship than Satan could ever do (if I believed in him.)
@Cerridwyn As a manager, that question is the bane of my existence every year. WTH Gallup?
i telework and none of the folks i work with live nearby so it isn't really feasible for me to socialize outside of work. i miss the days of working in an actual office type setting.
One of my best friends is my boss. When I first started working for my company, I worked in the T24 department. We worked weird shifts, weekends and long hours, plus I had just moved to the area, so I mostly made friends at work. I've since moved to a different department, and work at home but my closest friends still work for the company. Hopefully that's not sad..lol...at least I have friends!
I've worked at the same place for 10+ years now, and I am good friends with many co-workers and that makes me happy. We do the normal junk, happy hours, random holidays together, hiking, paintball, whatever.
I've even managed some of them at work, though I probably wouldn't do that again if I could help it. Nothing bad happened, it was just awkward.
I have always been in some type of management position, and while I am friendly at work in some ways, I still have a job to do. I have hired and fired good friends and learned to leave life outside the door of work. I have friends that I worked with at one point, but only became good friends after one of us left the company we worked for.
I've always had fantastic friendships with coworkers. But I've also mostly worked for Christian ministries/nonprofit organizations for the last decade. So we were pretty much there because we cared about the same things.
Now I'm a stay-at-home-sick-person and don't really have local friends (with the few exceptions being my husband's coworkers).
We are a very tight knit group of assholes - you either fit in around here, or you don't . . . those that do stay tend to never leave, and we take care of each other like we are family - BECAUSE WE ARE. We sometimes know more about each other's families and what's going on with someone else than we do that which may be happening in our own - everyone here are great friends. I'd take a bullet for any of them, which I recently kind of did, at great expense to my own health - but he would have done it for me if the shoe were on the other foot, and everyone knows it. We pretty much do everything together - work and play - to the point that spouses occasionally become jealous.
We've become very adept in the hiring process to weed out anyone that might not mesh well and fit in, but admittedly, our firm isn't for everyone. We work LONG crazy hours and play hard - and sometimes we work for weeks at a time non-stop (very literally), and then pull back to one or two days a week between projects . . . It is a crazy ride. And a lot of our work is away from home (some of it out of country) - so we rely on each other and our connections to get us through when we can't be near our own families for weeks at a time. If you do join us and decide to leave, we'll bend over backwards to get you placed somewhere you'll be happier. And we'll still treat you professionally, with respect, and probably continue to send you work - after all, we hired you because you were the best we could find for the job needing to be done.
@Pavlov I think this is why I am such close friends with my co-workers; we really are a crazy family with a lot of shared history at the company. Sadly, this is also why I don't really want to stay at my company anymore. As we've grown over the years (inevitable), we couldn't always hire people who fit in the right way. After a while, the noobs just push out the old guard, and I guess its the way it goes.
@Pavlov Your company sounds amazing. What kind of work do you all do? My husband will get his 20-year retirement in a little over two years and will need to find something new to do.
@Pavlov This sounds a lot like the environment I work in. We work our asses off to get the job done right- usually in miserable conditions, there are times when we might not see anyone besides each other for days at a time, and we literally have to trust each other with our lives. But when you've got the right chemistry, you know how to enjoy it and it can actually be pretty great.
@Pavlov Did you use to work with those of us former woot staffers? Sounds somewhat similar to that environment, until we learned from the new mothership in 2010-2012 how to "manage out" everyone (me included) that made it all happen and that actually gave a shit about not only our customers and community members, but all of our stake-holders. That group also included our co-workers, our vendors, and even all those truckers that spent the night in our parking lot waiting to drop off their load so more of those hard-working truckers could swing by later in the day to pick up all the loads of crap we had to ship out every day. Man... what a great ride that was, and what an even greater ride it is again. Rest assured, you, our customer stake-holder, that the rest of us other stake-holders appreciate you.
@PurplePawprints @Jdub - I am co-founder of a media production studio / house - wide range of clients. Equity (rev-share) partnerships for documentary and direct to consumer work. Lately, a lot of contract work (VFX) for feature film. Personally, right now I'm sitting in a damn rehab hospital, itching like hell to get back to work.
I've been at my PRN job in various capacities for 16 years now and consider most of our regular crew to be my family. I'm also starting a new business with my boss from my last temp job and have become friends with him in the process. So I guess I'm doing pretty well work-friend-wise