The question is just what it sounds like. Are there persons in your workplace you consider genuine friends, in the sense that you choose to socialize with them outside of work and believe you would continue to do so if you no longer had a job in common with them?
Poll in a moment. Public results because I feel like it.
Currently in private practise but am in contact with people from the last job, dinner next week.
But you could argue networking is part of the job, so one might argue its not entirely friendship based - Im pretty sure it is, but there is a secondary benefit.
Otara
I once become somewhat friends with someone at work, and then much better friends when I left that particular job, but for the most part, I like to keep those worlds separate.
I married someone from work.
Yes, among peers BUT it didn’t really develop until severe budget cuts put us all into survival mode last year.
Also, my two genuine friends from work are no longer really at work with me: one was laid off and now works in a different state, one was transferred to a different branch.
I normally actively strive to avoid making genuine friends at work.
Several real friends from previous jobs. I can think of one work acquaintance that might survive to be a real friend if/when one of us leaves the current job.
What others have said. Many of my geniune friendships developed after one of us left our jobs and there was no more possible work conflicts.
That being said, I can think of 2 jobs where I was friends with someone while at work - but I tend to keep my personal life pretty private. I’m a very different person outside of work, and as a manager I often have to be a bit more reserved.
Teachers, IME, almost always pull their friends from work. They are the only people that share your weird schedule, and most of us are pretty obsessive about our jobs. Also, parents/students are great gossip targets, so it gives us a lot to talk about. It also helps that our jobs are rarely interdependent, so there aren’t any weird issues there.
All but two of the friends I’ve made in the last ten years have been teachers I work with, and of the other two, one is a parent of a student and the other taught with my husband.
Otara, I’m not talking about people you network with as a part of your job. I’m talking about people who share the same employer as you, whom you socialize with in ways unrelated to your job and whom you’d keep in contact with if you or they left the field.
One of my bosses is a good friend. We became friends as peers, but he’s been in middle management for at least three years now, and I was one of very few people from work he invited to his wedding about eighteen months ago.
Our friendship was probably one of the factors in me actually getting my current position as one of his direct subordinates.
I picked you left out. I have one friend at my work. We were friends before I started working there.
In that case, one of the first three options should’ve worked for you. That said, I gather that you mean that you would not have become friends with your colleague had you only met him or her after starting at this job. Is that so?
I know that.
I dont know how to untangle those two links entirely though. I would say the primary link is friendship but there are networking advantages as well.
Otara
We don’t have a very tiered corporate structure, so I only voted peers.
Yes - and especially within the little 7-person team I’m in, there is a great deal of cameraderie, shared interest, banter, common humour, in-jokes and memes - all of which I consider hallmarks of genuine friendship - especially as it’s hard to say which of them pre-existed the relationship, and which developed within it. There’s also a healthy helping of the sharing and caring stuff, and outside-work contact, especially Facebook (which counts, as far as I’m concerned)
I am currently working on it, and we’ve done a few things together, but while I’ve expressed interest in further activity, I’m getting a meh vibe from him. <shrug>
The friendships and camaraderie are the only reasons that I hate leaving my current job. Crappy hours and low pay, but I have 2 genuine friends there- one colleague and the manager - and genuinely warm acquaintances with the other manager and the other four front desk people. Over the past 2.5 years, we’ve supported one another through births, deaths, illnesses, financial troubles, and other traumas. We’ve celebrated holidays and birthdays and kids’ milestones. We’ve shared recipes and hand-me-downs and secrets. It’s like family, and I’m sad to leave them.
Yes, I have friends among my peers, people I invite to dinner, play poker with, etc. These days, I work from home (for the same company, though) and none of my direct co-workers are within a reasonable drive, so they are more former than current peers.
Heck, just today I had lunch with a former peer. We both still work for the same company, but we have both taken new roles since we met in the course of our work.
Yup.
I never made any friends when I was working as an adjunct in Chicago (I rarely ever encountered the other teachers) but here, as an ESL teacher, it’s very easy to make friends with your colleagues. And because most of the teachers come to Korea without knowing anyone in the first place, people bond pretty quickly (strangers together in a strange land and all that). Lots of drama also follows, inevitably.
When I worked, the people in my office were a very close, tightly knit group not unlike a family. We went out to lunch and office parties together, went out for drinks after work every Friday, shared our triumphs and woes. But I can’t say we were after-work friends, though once in a great while someone would have an open house at Christmas. The younger people, mostly women, would bond together in little cliques according to coolness, exactly like middle school, and I made a couple of drinking buddies where we went out to clubs together to scope out guys, you know, but other than being escorts and bodyguards for each other, there was no other socializing. After I left the company to have my baby, they came over exactly once, though they were happy to see me when I was downtown every few years. That’s OK, people have their own lives. The drinking buddies had gotten married and I never heard from them again. Bitches all friendly when they needed a ride, you know?
How about “I used to”? Back when I started my first career job, I made friends with about a dozen people at work. We did a lot of socializing and my kids were friends with their kids.
Twenty years later, we’ve all moved apart, the kids have all graduated high school and we don’t see each other any more.
But we were really a close bunch for several years.