A thread on the Rands Slack recently caught my eye. It was top of mind, given that I had just started a new role, and because it had been concerning me throughout my career.
Why do our friends at work disappear when we leave? Why do we effectively often cease to exist when we walk out of those doors?
I went out for a few drinks with old teammates recently and very much got the impression that one is there purely as a face to pour one’s agonies onto. Nothing more. It’s always taken sustained effort with a few ex or current colleagues to actually make them friends, something that lasts beyond the job. As a young engineer, I went out of my way to do so because I genuinely liked and admired my co-workers.
That was certainly the exception, though, not the rule. For the most part, my jobs only ended up me accumulating more and more forgettable bosses along with a line of faceless memories, or memoryless faces, that I would never see again.
The Turnstile
As someone who has worked in a lot of places, so many that it’s getting to the point that I have to actively reduce the number on my CV, I know what it means to leave a job and to start a job. I know how people behave when they meet you and are not impressed, when they meet you and there is a genuine connection.
The way I see it, in life, you have to take the rough with the smooth. Some people are never going to be your friends at work, and if you tend to default to being a people pleaser at least to begin with, when you start somewhere new it’s sometimes hard to know where to draw the line between being genuine and being professional. How much do I share? How much do I want to know?
So it turns out that work is typically just work. We might like to think of ourselves as the life and soul of the party, but we’re just work people. People at work, doing a job of work. Just because we’re IT people, software people, we’re not that special or different after all. In fact, perhaps it’s the very creative spirit of many engineers that makes us such poor mixers. We are inherently selfish, as creators.
Because creation and creativity are core to the job that we perform. We must think on our feet, bringing our experience, our technical and people skills to bear to make things happen. Like a hundred conductors overseeing an orchestra of millions of moving parts. We occasionally take control, causing everyone to look our way before another takes over. We vie, we compete with one another.
People are just People
When I was young, I had a desire and drive to learn new languages, new design patterns and new technologies. Everything was new and exciting, and this collective learning and exploration was a key part of the ongoing bonding process.
But not all engineers are created equal. What turns one on to a way of working is anathema to another. So age isn’t the only caveat here. Enthusiasm, approach, energy – all of these things cause differences in the way we engage with a job.
Inevitably, office politics will also start to play its part. The boss will have their favourites. Lines are drawn.
A Job of Work
Many people who’ve worked in this industry for a long time have very few genuine contacts left. As one person in the Rands thread put it bluntly: fifteen years in, two people they’d call friends. Another: a handful of ex-colleagues, still in touch. I’m the same; while I tried very hard when I was younger, I now have only a few I could genuinely call friends.
The good news is you can take the pressure off. Work is work. The rare friendships that last beyond it are worth more precisely because of that. You’ll know them when you find them. And as I’ve found out, the ones that you pursue will be the ones that last for life.