Patience for after-hours work socializing is wearing thin

Not so much the boss, but I like my coworkers and enjoy an occasional night out with them. This might shock HN but not everyone despises their job and not everyone hates the people they work with.

Company occasionally runs an optional dinner/entertainment night with food and drinks paid for. And I'm happy to participate.

theonething• 3 years ago

This might shock HN but not everyone despises their job and not everyone hates the people they work with.

Who is saying that? I don't despise my job or coworkers, but I'd rather spend time with my family after work. I don't really have that much free time so I prioritize.

Arcanum-XIII• 3 years ago

I like my colleagues. I’m having fun with them all day long. After hour I take care of my children if I have them, go to my sport activity, see friends, meet new people, get lucky, like to spend time alone to do stuff like read, draw, sculpt. So no I don’t hate my job. But I already give it a lot of my time, and I don’t define myself by it. Doesn’t mean I don’t make friends at works.

And… if they truly want to see me ? Select a work day, do it during the work day. Current job host a seminar during the work hour, with a one night out on a hostel on Thursday. Not a week end.

lettergram2• 3 years ago

Wouldn’t that be the very reason you’d want to schmooze?

harry8• 3 years ago

Flipping anti-employee fantasy that people get to leave on time and just work their hours. Never, ever seen it.

shawnc• 3 years ago

There's SO MUCH MORE TO DO at home or with close friends, coupled with everything else already said in the other comments, that it just doesn't meet the threshold of enjoyment or need it once felt like it did.

listenallyall• 3 years ago

Yes, SO MUCH NETFLIX to watch. I'd write a longer comment but the next episode is already starting.

zingababba• 3 years ago

manager detected

runako2• 3 years ago

What does "after work" mean when you are expected to respond to email & Slack/Teams after you leave the office?

The tradeoff to being always available to work is there's no "after work" time anymore; jobs have already claimed all the waking hours.

sneak2• 3 years ago

If you're not being paid an hourly rate x24 each day to be on call, turn off notifications for these apps when you aren't working.

It's a matter of setting boundaries. If you do work whilst not getting paid, the beneficiary is not going to correct your error. The only way you get them to pay for 24 hour availability is by not working 24 hours each day for free.

runako2• 3 years ago

Unlike the after-work schmoozing in the OP article, this will get you fired. Your employer will just claim this is an expectation of the job.

happytoexplain2• 3 years ago

I absolutely want to schmooze after work. With my family and friends.

superqd• 3 years ago

This x 1000

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Some of those friends you may even happen to work with

jayd164• 3 years ago

Only fair way to do this is just start during the last hour of the work day. You're not asking for donated time but people will probably stay a bit later if they're enjoying themselves. If they're not what's the point, anyway.

But there's so much negativity in these comments. Does everyone here despise casual time with their coworkers or what?

xboxnolifes• 3 years ago

Does everyone here despise casual time with their coworkers or what?

Despise? No. But, the decision isn't spend time with coworkers or don't spend time with coworkers. It's spend time with coworkers, or spend time with family/friends. I pick the second option. I'm already spending 40 hours a week with my co-workers. Let me spend the few remaining non-busy, non-tired hours I have with my friends.

But, what do I know. I never go out of my way to spend time with people I don't have a shared interest with anyway. So maybe I'm an exception.

lettergram2• 3 years ago

I’m a huge family guy, I too am confused by these comments.

1. After work activities are voluntary 99% of the time (even “required events” I’ve personally skipped many times)

2. I prioritize my family over everything (leaving jobs over work-life balance), but that doesn’t mean having time out of work with co-workers is necessarily bad

3. I tend to value my coworkers as friends and have even invited some to weddings, etc. I don’t think it’s all that odd to have fun outside of work

All that being said, I also hate cutting into family time. But not everyone has a family or solid friend group, so activities through work are probably a good thing

givemeethekeys• 3 years ago

But not everyone has a family or solid friend group

And they never will, if they stick around at work after work.

PakG12• 3 years ago

I think this perspective is easier when one is single, certainly not married, and CERTAINLY without kids. Before I was married, I'd be annoyed if married friends weren't as free-spirited as I was in terms of hanging out late. Even if we all had full-time jobs, come on, what makes you so busy, let's do stuff!

After I got married, I understood what everyone was too nice to tell me. Hey, you're cool and fine, but... no, thanks. After my daughter was born? I'm spending all my time with her, except for the times my wife is happy that I go play basketball or tennis so that I don't fall unhealthily out of shape. It is crazy how quickly my switch flipped after marriage, and then flipped even more extreme after having a kid.

jayd164• 3 years ago

Well, again, I'm suggesting using work hours not extra hours. People seem against the idea entirely.

stephen_g• 3 years ago

The OP's solution seems to solve this problem though - if it's the last hour of 'work time' then people can stay for at least that hour and then if they have to leave at the normal time, they can.

If the socialisation time is always outside work hours, then yeah, people with young kids will basically never come.

itiro2• 3 years ago

Only fair way to do this is just start during the last hour of the work day.

Why is that the only way?

Does everyone here despise casual time with their coworkers or what?

What’s with the trend to hypernormalize human agency and preferences?

Why are alternative approaches to life forbidden? There seems to be a religious like statefulness in people where we see a typical human and assume “they must be like me, and they’re being negative if that’s not true.”

jayd164• 3 years ago

Why is that the only way?

Well, you don't want to ask people to donate time. You don't want to disrupt work too much either and it shouldn't be mandated. A loud mixer mid day for people who really can't spare the time can be distracting.

frandroid• 3 years ago

“The flake-out rate is so much higher at events now,” says Gretchen Goldman, a research director in Takoma Park, Md.
This summer Goldman sent an invite to 100 colleagues for casual after-work drinks at some picnic tables just outside the office as a goodbye party. She was taking a new job with the federal government. Fewer than 10 showed up.

Maybe don't have an event where people have to BYOB at work?? If I'm doing a going away thing I'm going to a pub.

yieldcrv2• 3 years ago

Here in LA - below the Valley - a lot of people are dry or drastically cutting down their alcohol intake. Not a selling point.

appplication• 3 years ago

Why is that? I’ve personally been drinking a lot less, but that’s because I absolutely hate hangovers and it just doesn’t feel worth it to me. I do enjoy a nice drink, I just never find it worth it anymore. It’s interesting to me that it would be happening more broadly.

rhplus• 3 years ago

Assuming most of these people were going to be driving home office in evening traffic, perhaps many realized that a couple of drinks weren’t worth risking a fender-bender with bonus DUI for.

fallingknife• 3 years ago

100 people? I can't think of even 10 at any previous job who I knew well enough to want to have drinks with on my last day. That's probably the main issue here.

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

Nobody wants to hang out with sycophants. They are sad to watch.

You are replaceable at work, but not replaceable at home.

winrid• 3 years ago

This. The game just continues after 5 if leadership is at the "party".

armchairhacker• 3 years ago

Maybe this borders the site guidelines, but I wish people would post less of these ragebait articles.

Yeah we get it. People like to treat work as "work", and not deal with overwork, socialization, RTO, micro-managing, etc.

gjvc• 3 years ago

Yeah we get it. People like to treat work as "work", and not deal with overwork, socialization, RTO, micro-managing, etc.

you're not speaking for those people who need reminding about it, depending on their circumstances.

There is no "we" when making a single post.

happytoexplain2• 3 years ago

"We", in the broad sense, demonstrably do not get it. "We" need to be reminded, continuously, because our system, while good at a lot of things, creates a continuous force that pushes the vast majority of individuals toward misery. It never stops doing this, and the pushback must be constant.

jmspring• 3 years ago

I've said this before...YC hosts "you want to work at a startup" day. In the past there have been multiple startups that claim "we are a family", "we work hard and play hard" but then handwave ... the only one that was honest at one of the years I attended, was Justin of justin.tv.

Work is a job. If you want to make it a social life, go for it. But let it be your decision.

I've had work situations in the past where many of us were friends and still in contact years later. But, don't let it become your life.

zen_1• 3 years ago

If it's truly like that, you're usually not recruiting at job fairs but through friends and friends of friends.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

I for one have had an incredibly great time that I've greatly enjoyed getting to hang out & socialize with all kinds of coworkers. I'm so glad I've gotten to connect with these people, in a less pressured way that the actual work environment seems unable to replicate. I've learned so much about people's lives, and learned so much background, and shared so many interesting stories.

This feels like the end ya'll; another scary nail being driven in. I'm in a top 10 city in the US. At least half the establishments used to be open till midnight every night, and now the city is going to sleep at 10:00. The meetup scene has collapsed; the industry has literally no social functions left for people who do want to opt in to hanging out & shooting the shit & swapping tales. The city center is dead as shit; no chance to swap stories & mingle there. My work division used to do trivia and board games and happy hours and all sorts of other things, but we've lost headcount and lost critical mass & lost the social drivers; now it's so hard to get people to do stuff. Tonight was a pretty nice all company happy hour and almost no one from my division was interested. It was a great night.

I've been at places where a lot of people had to really plan & make sure it was ok for them to do social activities; home or other commitments kept them busy. But every place I've been, folks have been eager to hang out, even if just for a bit. Sometimes there've been slowdowns but the resistance now feels new & difficult, unprecedented to me. I know I'm over-projecting my current experience, but I can totally see & immediately grasp where we are a as a crisis point, where common bonds & worthy good cameraderie - not corporate run, top down edict, but genuine bottom up socialization - happens. I don't know what the world looks like if we lose these cohesion points, if we stop having exchanges.

There's a lot of good reasons for negativity & skepticism. There were real costs. But fundamentally I think that view is twisted, that it is wretched & sad to not acknowledge & embrace the opportunity & to recognize the upside. The world has, in my view, become far more quiet & isolated, & not all workplaces are great, but I hope many people have had good workplaces & good colleagues & can recognize some merit to having better than formal at-will as-necessary purely-industrial relationships. I don't want work me to just be a robot.

anon291• 3 years ago

I mean the insane reaction to COVID (to lock down all cities for years) and send workers home is going to have major effects on down towns. Unfortunately my fellow urban dwellers supported these policies despite the fact they were going to hit cities hardest.

In my opinion it wasn't worth it, but this seems like a minority opinion . It's so important for innovation and career growth to have these opportunities.

Kadin• 3 years ago

I get that the WSJ needs to run these sort of pieces every so often to sell papers, but "No One Wants [Whatever]" think-pieces should be treated the same way as the overly-speculative question headlines that led to "Betteridge's Law" in the early 2000s.

Office culture, like the rest of culture, is cyclical. People are reactive, and tend to move in herds. Given an intense external stimulus like the pandemic, we should expect to see waves of behaviors propagating out through time for at least the next few years.

During the pandemic, nobody was in the office, so right after the pandemic, there was a boom in office socialization (in some quarters). Now, apparently according to WSJ, the pendulum is swinging back. This isn't indicative of very much, except that there was a big shock to the office-work social system and it's still not stabilized.

In particular, it's not especially suggestive of what the steady state will be, once these perturbations diminish.

I think we probably have several more back-and-forth cycles around everyone-works-from-home! vs. 40-hours-in-office-or-bust!, before the market works out what the relative value is (to the employer and the employee) of having people in the office and paying for a physical office for them, vs. the flexibility of working from home and of having a potentially international hiring pool. There are benefits and hazards for both parties in either arrangement.

My personal feeling, just based on how the job market has tended to stratify in the past, is that we'll see multiple approaches within each industry/sector, based on how fundamentally creative the work is.

The organizations in a particular sector who are really pushing the boundaries of that industry, who are actually advancing the state of the art, will likely be in-office cultures, because nobody has yet found a substitute for in-person communication particularly as it applies to creative problem solving. But those will represent a small tip of the workplace iceberg, sitting atop (and demanding higher rates than) a larger volume of companies whose work simply isn't that fundamentally creative or challenging, and have to compensate by offering flexible / WFH arrangements, and actively court the employees who are more interested in work-life balance than in working in their industry's version of the Manhattan Project.

qp11• 3 years ago

Corporate wonderland is an such an abnormal environment. How it all hasn't collapsed is a mystery.

Its structure is hierarchical, but the world has become a hyperconnected network. Underlings might have much more interesting networks than their bosses. In theory this should be putting lot pressure on what "orders" can flow top down. Its like pushing circus animals, trained to perform ever diverging niche tricks the whole day, into a common space and hoping connection happens. Its not going to happen. The circus is an abnormal space for connection.

Gud• 3 years ago

In most parts of the world, it's still very much hierarchical. And in the other parts of the world, it's just less visible.

SanderNL• 3 years ago

I get it though, a bit of mingling is good for morale and most people are pretty nice.

But.. if socializing is important why not do it during office hours?

xyzzy123• 3 years ago

I think the part that's not talked about is how much more risky it feels in 2023 to drink with co-workers than it did 10 or 20 years ago. Am I just getting old?

Drinking culture has largely changed for the better and I think workplaces are safer than they used to be. But I also think you'd have to be an idiot (or risk-blind) to get loose at company events like a lot of people used to do.

whynotkeithberg• 3 years ago

It's not more risky for decent people. Just the people who can't stop being perverts & sexually harassing people while drunk actually get held accountable rather than it being swept under the rug. For those of us who don't participate in such behavior nothing has changed or become any more risky.

People getting loose at parties used to mean harassment and it was deemed ok because "men are being men" but it was never ok. Just treat people as they deserve whether you're drinking or not and there's no issue to be had.

DangitBobby• 3 years ago

Okay, you could jump straight to sexual harassment. But lots of people do dumb shit that has nothing to do with sex while they are drunk. "Letting loose" means lowering your inhibitions which makes you more likely to do something regrettable. And I don't want to hear anything about "decent people" unless you're the 1 human on this planet that's never done or said anything they regret.

justinjlynn• 3 years ago

If people phrased it as what it was "doing psychoactive drugs with co-workers/competitors in a non-work setting" ... the activity would seem as dangerous as it always was. It's just that now people, rightfully, have higher expectations of each other's behaviour because work forces otherwise incompatible people together due to economic pressures and those relationships must remain collegial. Those pressures have always been there, but as time has gone on - and especially since the 1970s with the rise telecommunications and database technologies - that social pressure has only increased due to the growth of more tightly knit but wider scoped social networks (among essentially all employers in a field, esp.). This has grown to global social networks and databases essentially creating a permanent reputation in all aspects of life. Job mobility has likewise decreased. Given that psychoactive drugs alter a persons mind and cause a person to do things they most likely would never do when they were sober, and esp. at work - the changing culture seems a natural outcome of all of those pressures as a rational way to decrease the risk of disaster.

jonathankoren• 3 years ago

People that “got loose” at company events never learned to drink socially, and instead binged. These people are always a problem, regardless of where.

The vast majority of the people at a drink up could handle it, but occasionally there would be the one troublemaker (and it was always the same person, although not always everytime) that simply couldn’t read the room, or couldn’t control themselves.

At official or unofficial drink ups, I’ve seen:

Someone have to have their keys taken away.

Someone have their keys taken away, and then bite — literally, angrily bite — the coworker that took them before running off into the night.

The worst event, I didn’t see happen, but saw the aftermath of. Someone got in a car (hopefully theirs), and proceed to jump the curb of the traffic circle in the office park and ram — and destroy — a nondescript abstract sculpture that was owned by whoever owned the office park.

I believe the last person was fired. Hopefully, that person got help, because that could not have been the first time for a trick like that.

Interestingly enough, all these events happened at the same employer. And yet, I still think fondly of those drink ups (though, not those instances).

jayd164• 3 years ago

You could always just not drink.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

Agreed.

We live in a surveillance culture today. And those photos and videos will haunt you wherever and whenever you are in the future.

fliglr• 3 years ago

I feel like people drink with coworkers if they want to accidentally cheat on their partner. Either way I only drink before work

jmauritz• 3 years ago

I've been on ... 4-5 "after works" (as we call it here), since the pandemic. But even then we usually get going around 16.00 and the night is over before 20.00.

But if the company is planning something after work hours? I consider that to be a "team-building" activity, a part of my 8 hour work day.

mytailorisrich• 3 years ago

Many places I worked at did that over lunch.

It does not take any extra time and people end up get a longer lunch than usual.

000ooo000• 3 years ago

Interestingly no distinction made in this article between socialising with coworkers because you want to, and Mandatory Cuddles, i.e. some unlikable dickbag organises a mandatory social team outing outside of 9-5. The moment it becomes an obligation, you've lost me. You already get 50% of my daily waking hours, and once a commute and chores are factored in, my daily leisure hours are even fewer. You want some of those too? Get lost.

thefz• 3 years ago

It takes one special kind of emotionally disconnected sociopath to put people in a "social" event and expect them to be like a family. Why they don't kiss?

Past boss was like that, big parties and then stabbing you in the back. "but we are a team, right? we drink together". Nah.

Patience for after-hours work socializing is wearing thin

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