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thefz

> it's very common for office life and social life to be highly intertwined

Until there's a conflict of interest between the two zones or between two colleagues and it all goes to shit.

Trust me, keep work and friends separated.

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> Trust me, keep work and friends separated.

That's what you do by changing jobs. When you move on to the next company, those guys you met on the job become just "out of work friends".

Most people with > 3 jobs worth of experience will tell you that coworker-friends rarely transition to non-work friends after leaving said company. You will become too busy with making new coworker-friends at the new company, combined with non-work family/friend commitments filling the rest of your time.

One person with over 25 years in IT will tell you not to generalize. We're all different. I keep in touch with people i worked with 25 years ago, even across different countries and continents. I am a contractor so I change jobs roughly every year. I still go out with friends i met at work, and i have brought many of them into projects i started at other companies. I also have been hired by people i worked with previously. People are precious. The fact that you work with them 8 hours/day doesn't make them less so. I won't talk about the difficult ones, there's always that category too

I know everyone has their own experiences, but I've just never experienced this. Makes me wonder what "friends" one is keeping as company.

I know, and I try and socialise with people who know, that work is just work, and its not worth sacrificing personal/social life just to simp for a boss.

I've met my best friends at work. I've moved across the world to another country with former colleagues. Created extremely deep connections with colleagues who've lead me to much personal growth.

I find this depends highly on where one lives. If you work somewhere where a significant chunk of the workforce are local either by growing up there or graduated there then this separation comes naturally since people have established social circles outside of work. It's different where the majority of the company's employees had to relocate to work there, people will be more open to making friendships at work and this will be a good thing. In the end it will be down to good leadership to manage the conflict of interests and they will arise anyway. I've seen this happen where due to the lack of friendships inside and outside of work some employees can be targeted and corrupted by vendors who take advantage of a person's social needs.

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