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Tech Companies Need to End the ‘Friendship Tax’
When did common interests with coworkers become a prerequisite for doing my job?
When I started my first full-time job in tech, I was clear with myself: I was not going to have friends at work.
“I’ll be friendly, of course,” I told my confused friends, “I want to get to know my co-workers, and if we end up hanging out outside of work, cool. But I don’t want to be friends with them.”
I had just graduated from a historically women’s college with a degree in computer science. I already knew that my personal interests — creative writing, queerness, my own brand of quiet activism — did not align with those of many of my fellow comp sci majors. I spent a lot of time teaching my peers how to engage productively and respectfully with me when we had no shared interests. I figured that, going into a workforce overwhelmingly dominated by white men, there would be even less overlap.
So I made up my mind: no work friends. I did not want to continue the emotional labor of teaching people how to engage with me when we didn’t share personal interests and they weren’t genuinely interested in me as a person. If the friendship happened naturally, excellent. If not, I would be no worse off for it.
