I find that certain types of jobs seem to encourage a more friendly envirnonment, and others do not.
When i worked at the radio station, a lot of the sales people tended to party together and become friends outside of work. As noted here, librarians also seem to have some good friendships from work.
Some places I’ve worked at were so numbers focused or competitive that friendships were somewhat viewed as anti-business.
No. The combination of shift work, changing schedules, who works OT and who doesn’t makes the lot of us friendly strangers at best. Also, breaking up the lunch hour into 1/2 lunch with mandatory rotating 15 min morning and afternoon breaks means having lunch together off prem is never an option.
I’m not so sure that this is unintentional. (We are just Meat, right?)
When I was younger, in my first real corporate job I was on a team with about 15 other twenty-somethings. We were almost all young, single, making decent money, so we became friends and often hung out together outside of work. Romances even formed (a few couples even eventually married). That was fun.
Eighteen years later I’m a mid-level manager and though I like most of my co-workers, both subordinates and superiors, I wouldn’t consider any of them real friends nor can I imaging seeing them outside work. I have my own life and family now outside the office, something I didn’t have at 25.
I’m very fortunate that I work in an office that is packed with people my age the entire engineering staff is under 30 and no one is from the area we work in. This basically has caused all of us to hang out and become friends. While there are some I like more then others, I’m dragging him to my bestfriends batchlor party in Germany in 3 weeks, for my birthday the entire staff, except for the one guy with kids, drove and hour to eat dinner with me and play bar golf.
It does make acting professional at work a little tougher because whoever didn’t make it out for the weekend debauchery wants to hear all of the gossip and stories from the weekend on monday and then there is planning the next weekend’s parties.
Not currently, but in the past.
I met my wife at work, and we actually became “work friends” before we started dating.
Also, two of my best guy friends were once workmates. We haven’t worked together in 26 and 22 years, respectively, but continue to see each other often. In fact, one of them was my Best Man and I was his.
But, I haven’t made any enduring work friendships since then. There are a couple guys that I’ll grab a beer with after work sometimes, but I’m quite certain that I’ll never see them again once we no longer work together… and I’m perfectly OK with that.
It’s a little awkward for me because most of my team mates are a good 10-15 years younger than I am and have been working together for 4-5 years. I have been on the team for about 10 months. Everyone else socializes outside of work quite a bit. They’re all very nice and funny, but kind of on a different wavelength than mine with respect to personal interests and family life. It doesn’t help that I have been on a no drinking, low-carb kick since February, so I don’t get invited to the informal lunches and post-work bar crawls anymore.
But I’m OK with this since we all work well together and I have plenty of non-work friends. I’m definitely not opposed to coworkers being friends, although I think my team goes to extremes with it sometimes. For example, they vacation together twice a year. I take vacations to get away from work and all it reminds me of. Eh, as long as they don’t ostracize me for not joining them, I really don’t mind.