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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

1. Strawman. I never said that socializing was unimportant. But socializing is not the only way to actually collaborate. You don’t have to be best buddies with your collegues to work with them. “Having lunch together” does not imply being friends with people, but it could certainly imply having a set time to talk more informally about more general problems without a set “owner”.

2. I was at Debconf for two weeks. I hardly consider that to be “precious little time”.

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But you emphatically said that you do not go to conferences to socialise. That's the most important part of a conference. I daresay, it's really the ultimate goal. Otherwise, we could just all post screencasts online instead of having a conference. That would be a lot cheaper.

Emphatically not wanting to socialise sounds exactly like you think socialising is not important. A less emphatic "no" might still make it sound like you think it has some importance.

And two weeks a year is precious little time, if you compare it with having lunch with your coworkers every day.

You, (like many people, including the organizers of many conferences) keep conflating socializing with collaboration. I tried to make the difference clear in my original comment, and it was also the point of the linked article. Being friends with someone isn’t the only way to collaborate with them. It is simply a way to do it, and if you want to collaborate that way, then socializing is certainly important to keep that friendship alive. But if I want to collaborate as a professional colleague instead of as a friend, then no, I don’t think I should be expected to socialize with great masses of people in order to simply collaborate with some of them.

Neither of jordigh's comments said anything about socializing being the same as collaboration; in fact, the first claimed that socialization improves collaboration, implying that the two are completely different things. You're being preemptively and repetitively belligerent here.

I hate the conference socializing, too.

Having lunch with your coworkers gives you 250 chances per year to have an important work-related conversation. A conference offers precious little time, so it is important to be efficient in getting people together who have things to say to each other.

Funny, where I'm working you'll get nasty looks when "talking shop" at lunch.

Important work conversations happen at work. Not on the break.

In that case, why spend your break with your work colleagues?

You may not believe it, but people can actually talk about other things than work. We all have private lives.

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