There is also a difference between a company/management and your peers. There's no such thing as a corporate entity being your friend. Having a boss as your friend... maybe isn't impossible, but is definitely complicated. But it's entirely possible to develop real friendships with peers, even as a group. The differentiator is whether that narrative is pushed from above, or whether it's something that naturally develops from the ground up.
I can count on one hand the number of actual friendships I formed with coworkers. I mean relationships that continue past the time where we literally shared an office.
Most of the people I work with are highly ambitious and globally mobile. Our average tenure is something like a year. People who have been at the company for two years are veterans. Forming friendships in that situation is difficult because at this point many of those people have moved away for greener pastures.
Most of my friends are people I met trough my extracurricular social circles. Personally I like that almost all of my friends have different jobs in different fields. There's never work talk in social settings and I get a more diverse perspective on the world.
> Most of the people I work with are highly ambitious and globally mobile. Our average tenure is something like a year. People who have been at the company for two years are veterans.
That sounds like a highly irregular company. My last company, which wasn't very big (<100), had half a dozen people who had been there 15+ years. The majority had been there 3+. A bunch of us would go out for a group lunch nearly every Friday (not organized by management). We'd do group Halloween costumes and wear them to the office. People would have game nights at their houses and invite people over.
I realize that my anecdote is probably also outside of the norm, but I just wanted to illustrate how wide the range is.
It is a highly irregular company. But based on my experience there I formed friendships outside my work circles and that turns out to be a great thing.
I used to work at a <100 person company and most of those people had been there for years and a decade was common. I had a few friends there but those relationships stagnated immediately after I left.
I've worked at a lot of companies over the years and there are two people I consider friends today that I met at work. Everyone else I consider a friend is a person I met through social circles.
