Joel Spolsky: Lunch (opens in new tab)

I have always hated this and probably always will. I have rarely eaten lunch with my work mates. Just a few reasons why:

1. I don't want to talk about work at lunch.

2. I want to get out of the office and get some fresh air.

3. I often want to get away from the very people that Joel suggests spending time with on my break.

4. I'm a "food outlier". I hate pizza, deli, and fast food. I won't eat it away from work. Why should I eat it there?

5. Sometimes I want a beer with my lunch.

6. Sometimes I just want to close my eyes for 5 minutes.

7. If my work mates are talking about something other than work, I'm probably not interested. I'd rather chew razor blades than talk about traffic, weather, casino gambling, baseball, real estate taxes, gun control, politics, or Dancing with the Stars. I'd rather shoot myself than hear anything about their children.

8. If I am going to talk about work, I will want to bitch about the boss. Tough to do if he/she is there.

9. If I am going to talk about work, I want everyone else to talk freely and openly. This never happens. They will bitch about anyone else if they're not there, but when we're all together, they act like everything is just peachy. Phoneys.

10. "Enforced association" is phoney. I'd rather just make my own friends at work or out of work. So what if it appears to be a clique? All that means is that we are humans acting naturally.

To those who thought that team lunch is "mandatory," you misread the article. It's not mandatory. You can go out instead. You can go to the gym instead. You can hide in your office and "free your mind" instead. You can bring your friends or family to our lunch. You can go out instead. You can take a picnic. You can come in after lunch and work late instead of working early.

I don't even think there's social pressure to go to lunch. People do because they enjoy it. Sorry if this wasn't clear from the article. It's not a weird cult where I'm forcing introverts into cult-like hanging out with people that they hate or already spend too much time with. That would be inconsistent with our goal of making a humane, friendly, and fun workplace, which was the point of the article.

We very rarely talk about work at lunch. I've never met anyone who visited us for lunch and thought that it was weird. I have met some pretty anti-social people in my time and some of them work for us and somehow they don't seem to mind sitting at the table during lunch and listening to everyone else enjoying the conversations.

Joel is obviously not aware of the differences between introverts and extroverts, which seems weird for someone who works in a field with a lot of introverts.

I'm not down on his idea of eating lunch together - it's probably fun and productive. But if someone spots me eating lunch by myself while reading (a book, a magazine, on my phone, on my computer), it's not because I "don't like people," or, sadder, that I pretend not to like people because I've been rejected socially. It's because I find dealing with people all day somewhat wearying and I enjoy having time to myself doing things that I like, such as catching up on reading I can't do during work hours.

Interesting that there is so much anti-company lunch sentiment on HN. At Justin.tv we serve lunch (and dinner!) every week day. Originally, when we were much smaller, it started as a time saving measure (it was a lot quicker to get back to work than if everyone went out). Now, I see it as much more about giving everyone a chance to hang out and eat, and as a cost benefit to employees. If you don't want to eat at the big lunch tables, you don't have to. If you want to go somewhere else, you're welcome to. People do meet friends for lunch elsewhere, or bring them to the office for lunch.

At lunch, people rarely seem to talk about work (or at least, in a specific "x,y,z tasks need to be done" kind of way), and generally talk more about topics I can only really describe as technology and liberal arts. We don't really talk sports or reality tv, as pretty much no one in the office watches.

After lunch usually a few people play Street Fighter 4 for 20-30 minutes or so in our common area which adjoins the lunch room.

This is something that varies depending on scale.

I work for Google in one of the larger offices (New York). Here we have several cafeterias. You go at anytime (in the meal times), take what you want, eat it there or eat it at your desk.

You can eat with team mates, by yourself, with friends from other teams, with random strangers or whatever.

I love this for several reasons:

1. There is obviously the cost aspect (not having to pay for lunch) but for me this is probably the least important part;

2. It saves so much time. Other places I've worked, going out to lunch means 30-60 minutes for a lunch break. Here you can eat and be back at your desk, if you want to, within a few minutes. Waiting for elevators, waiting in line, etc are all such incredible time wasters;

3. When choosing where to go and what to get for lunch, you're basically asking me to make decisions I don't care about. This I hate. Here I simply choose what cafeteria to go (typically the closest one) and take from the selection. I don't have to decide about where to go, what to get. I simply taken what's (generously) offered.

(3) for me is probably the most important. This one applies to software and hardware too and is (IMHO) one of the key reasons for Apple's success: Apple is unafraid and unapologetic about making most decisions for you. These decisions are right for most people most of the time.

Joel had an old blog post on this (probably the famous "Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy" one that everyone should read) that said something like this: every option you give someone forces them to make a decision. I would go on to add that every decision has a cognitive cost, which simply annoys the decider if they're deciding on something they don't really care about.

Now, on a smaller scale I can see work lunches being a problem. If you need to be there at a set time, have limited opportunity for mingling or your team is so small that if you don't want to get stuck with someone (eg you don't like them or you simply don't want to talk about work).

So I see edw519's point. On a sufficiently large scale however, provided meals are fantastic.

Cause/effect.

I'm sure anyone who has ever worked in a team where things weren't going so well has tried the whole "let's go to lunch together!" thing but it's never a solution.

Good teams tend to eat lunch together = true. Good teams are good because they eat lunch together = false.

A good team evolves from a consistent and careful approach to hiring and organisation and when a manager groups people together based on common principals, approaches and motivating factors. Or they form themselves when people who realise they see eye to eye decide to team up and build stuff.

If people who don't agree on the basics or just plain don't get along get together and try to be productive, there will always be that loss of focus and resentment when compromises have to made. Getting together for one hour a day to make small talk doesn't change that.

From "You and Your Research" by Dick Hamming:

Now Alan Chynoweth mentioned that I used to eat at the physics table. I had been eating with the mathematicians and I found out that I already knew a fair amount of mathematics; in fact, I wasn't learning much. The physics table was, as he said, an exciting place, but I think he exaggerated on how much I contributed. It was very interesting to listen to Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, J. B. Johnson, Ken McKay and other people, and I was learning a lot. But unfortunately a Nobel Prize came, and a promotion came, and what was left was the dregs. Nobody wanted what was left. Well, there was no use eating with them!

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.

In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, "Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven't changed my research," he says, "but I think it was well worthwhile." And I said, "Thank you Dave," and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, "What are the important problems in my field?"

One of the first things I noticed when I started working at Fog Creek is that most everyone in the office is always working and it stays pretty quiet. We rarely have meetings and individuals are able to remain focused on getting things done.

The office is generally quiet except for lunch. Lunch gets pretty loud when Fog Creek and Stack Exchange gather around two long tables to eat great food. Sometimes we talk about work, but most of the time it's off-topic. Occasionally people eat at their desks, but most of the time everyone is together for lunch.

The people I work with are incredible and I'm excited to join them for lunch every single day. Perhaps I get an extra boost at lunchtime because I'm an extrovert, but I think even the introverts enjoy this time together with great people.

I see a lot of comments here about how awful it is that introverts are forced to sit with others at lunch. I suppose that's possible, but I don't get the slightest impression from anyone that they'd rather be eating alone. Since most developers are shielded from distractions most of the day and are heads-down in code, lunch allows them to connect socially with other people at the company.

Maybe you'd have to experience lunch with great coworkers day-in and day-out to understand Joel's perspective. I couldn't agree more with what he wrote.

At my last job, I ate my lunch 2-3 hours earlier than everyone else, thanks to dietary issues and the fact that I started work 3 hours earlier than they did. That meant I always ate alone.

But everyone else tended to bunch together. (The boss actually vetoed that, requiring that at least 1 person remain in the tech room. (Which was me, obviously.) After the team grew, it became '3' for the requirement.) They would all have lunch together, going somewhere they decided on, or playing pool upstairs in the breakroom.

It was obviously something that was strengthening them as a team, and despite my anti-social tendencies, I really wanted to join them.

I don't doubt for a minute that Joel is on the money with this issue.

I remember my first day working at IKEA as a summer job. I was young, I didn't know anyone, I didn't know the culture. So I got my lunch, found an empty spot to sit, and was about to sit down. But I didn't sit down properly before someone came over from a busy table, asking me if I wanted to join them.

From then on I realized that the culture was that everybody always eats together there. That way I got to know loads of people, many of whom I otherwise never would've talked to because they'd work in an entirely different department. This is just 1 example of the awesome culture at IKEA.

At my last job, I had a really fantastic lunch group -- intelligent, inquisitive, and always wanting to talk shop. It was fantastic, I feel that I learned and grew more as part of the lunch group than with respect to a lot of other things I did at work.

At my current job, I'm sad, because generally I don't have anyone to do that with, as most people are only interested in empty socializing.

Frankly I'm so uninterested in my current job, I'd rather eat while working and go home that much earlier. Which is sad, but there you have it.

Lunch is also a really important part of my job. I run the IT department for a fairly small company (~200 employees).

Going to lunch with people affords me the opportunity to hear them complain about their job. Sometimes, although they might not realize, their complaints are things that I can fix for them. They're my best source of ideas for projects.

"GUH! I keep asking $so_and_so for new $office_supply, but I guess we're out of it, WTF!?"

Hmm...maybe we need an inventory tracking system for the office supplies?

"$so_and_so is gone today, and she is the only one with the $excel_spreadsheet on her computer. It sucks because I can't get ahold of her and I need $excel_spreadsheet!"

Well how can we solve this? Why aren't they using the file server for this stuff?

And so on.

It seems there's an obvious middle ground which doesn't seem to have been mentioned by Joel or anyone else.

Being compelled to have lunch with colleagues every day sucks. Sometimes you are feeling cranky, want some fresh air, need to run errands, or have a hot date.

Not having the opportunity to lunch with colleagues also sucks. It provides a great opportunity for employees to get to know each other, make friends, and informally discuss company business.

Seems the onus is on the company to make lunch pleasant, and perhaps to steer newcomers into the middle of the crowd. After that, create the kind of environment where no one feels compelled to do anything, but employees want to eat with each other at least a lot of the time.

What a crock of shit.

This strikes me way too much of the, "I see people doing something I don't do, so there must be something wrong with them." mentality.

I like leaving the office. Go outside for a good long, quiet walk along the creek to think about non-work stuff. Or going home and enjoying some left overs.

When I come back to the office, I'm fully refreshed and ready to jump right back into things.

I hate it when people assume that everyone else thinks the same way they do.

Just because you get lonely eating alone doesn't mean everybody does.

"Being in any clique, even if it’s just the nerds, is vastly preferable than eating alone."

This is just bullshit. I don't want to be part of a clique. Or a group. Or anything of the sort. My lunch time is a time to get AWAY from people and recharge. Take that away from me and I get stressed out and my productivity suffers massively.

"For loners and geeks, finding people to eat with in the cafeteria at school can be a huge source of stress."

For a lot of us, feeling pressured into "socializing" because some bigwig decided that it's good for us is a huge source of stress. Just leave us be! Please! It's my time, so let me do my thing. Alone.

I need a break at lunchtime. For me that means sitting quietly, spending some time away from the effort of conversation, catching up on reading or taking the opportunity to think about ideas that have been on the back burner.

There goes my career at Fog Creek!

I'd rather not be compelled to eat with co-workers at lunch. Lunch should be a time to do whatever you want. For things like meeting people/friends outside of work, having some quiet time to read a book, or going to the gym.

Some days I don't even feel like eating at lunch, and prefer to have a late lunch in the afternoon.

And why the compulsion to sit with people that I already interact with the entire day? Nothing wrong with being social with your co-workers, but it ought to be natural. This isn't kindergarten.

While there are some positives, to enforce this seems quite inhumane.

People often need a bit of space in order to work together better.

Also, in a group > 2 there's huge potential for conversational drift. So, if two people want to talk about a certain topic, it becomes too easy to derail.

Embrace the quiet.

At my first real programming job we (developers) went out to lunch together every day. We went out to restaurants, not fast food. Lunch often took 1.5 hours and sometimes 2 hours. Our boss came with us. We were a small company, so there were only four of five of us, usually.

Sometimes we talked about work, and sometimes not. When we did, we often discussed higher level stuff rather than quotidian matters. We had our boss there, so anything we decided at lunch was ready to go ahead with.

Back at the office we almost never had to have meetings, because we didn't need them. This alone is pure gold.

Outside of work some of us were actively friends, and others not. But this really didn't change lunch. Nobody was forced to go to lunch, and there was no unwritten rule that non-lunchers were outsiders. It's that lunch was pleasurable, relaxing, with good food, and we naturally talked about what we had in common.

Since that time it's never quite reached that level, but I've come close occasionally. If you've never experienced it I imagine that it might be hard to grasp how nice it can be.

I think some of what I've said above is inline with what Joel is talking about, but it's a slightly different take. Make of it what you will.

It seems Joel finds it difficult to believe that people can eat alone without being lonely. I am an introvert that is rejuvenated by spending time alone. I like eating lunch by myself. It helps clear my mind.

The idea that new starters are "not allowed to sit by themselves in a corner" is draconian, and in my case, it would prove counterproductive. It would make me feel like I was back in school, being told where to sit by my teacher. This is not the mindset you want to instil in your employees.

I think the best approach is to provide a working environment where people have the opportunity to gather together. Those that want to socialize can do so, and those that prefer periods of solitude aren't made to feel guilty for spending time alone.

I think Joel's article glosses over a point that most of the con arguments here don't notice: in order for this to work, you have to set up a group of coworkers who mesh spectacularly well.

Fog Creek has pretty obviously done that; it's one of their top priorities. I've worked at companies where lunch is communal and companies where it isn't, and it seems to me that the difference has less to do with personality types and more to do with cohesion.

Put differently, the types of teams who want to eat lunch together are the types of teams you should want to be on. The company shouldn't need to enforce it; they should just help to facilitate it.

I don't mind lunching together with a bunch of people if there is no pressure to join in with the "conversation" or the "group activity" at the table.

Sometimes I want to read the Bible at lunch. I don't mind if we talk shop about which chapters we're reading, which Biblical story best fits our challenges at work, or maybe even discuss differing viewpoints from differing faiths, etc, but a lot of times reading the Bible requires some personal concentration and contemplation.

In that case, I wouldn't mind eating at a big table - just don't expect me to join in talking about the latest movies, or which MacBook Pro is better to buy, or which web server we should use.

For me, I can handle reading in solitude while also being in the middle of a group. If the group of coworkers can understand and accept that idea, then I'm all for eating together.

However, if my religion makes other people at the table uncomfortable, I'd rather sit and lunch on my own.

Joel's free to want to eat lunch however he wants, but who is he to decide that people who are happy to eat alone are "loners", "don't like people" or are pretending not to be sad?

I rarely get time to eat lunch. When I do, it's a precious 30 or 60 minutes of solace where I can actually get away from people and enjoy some time to myself.

Why on earth would I want to spend it jammed shoulder to shoulder with people chewing and talking about work?

I guess I'm just a lone wolf who likes to get things done during lunch.

Typically, I go for a walk and get some errands done. Or sit quietly and reflect. Or I'll go have lunch with non-work friends.

Occasionally I'll go out with work friends.

I think taking Joel's thoughts on lunch in isolation from his thoughts on workspace design is a mistake.

In my experience, when my workspace has been more quiet/isolated, I've enjoyed lunch as an opportunity to get to know colleagues, wrap my head around what's going on, and otherwise get my quota of human contact for the day.

On the other hand, in more "social" work environments, i.e. stereotypical startup open floor plan, lunch is a nice opportunity to escape, walk in the park, watch kids chasing pigeons, reset my brain, process the morning, and figure out the rest of the day.

As Joel is a huge advocate of private offices in the work environment, the social lunch is a natural compliment to that.

I'm glad I found you all, 'cause I so desperately wanted to comment on Joel's post, but his discussion group is closed.

I'm one of those people who eats lunch alone everyday, mostly just to take a break from work and catch up on my reading.

So the statement that bothered me the most was this one: "Maybe they’re reading a book or checking their email while they eat so they don’t look sad"

I don't understand why so many people think that reading a book is only something you do, when you don't have anything else better to do. I read 2-3 books a month and lunchtime is when I get a vast majority of my reading done. It annoys me to no end when people interrupt me because they think I’m “lonely”. No, I’m READING! If I was looking for conversation, the book would be closed and I would be looking around to make eye contact. What part of the whole nose-in-a-book-with-a-totally-engrossed-expression do you not understand?

Having said that, I do think Joel simply makes the office environment conducive to eating together. I just hope he doesn't look down on people who don't take advantage of it.

I'm definitely on board with this. My last job was pretty lonely until we all started eating together every day. Eventually our long table was taken away by HR and we had to find somewhere else to go. We all wanted to keep it though because it made work much better so we found a way to still eat lunch together.

Do any other introverts feel this arrangement would affect them negatively? Subjected to this setup, it's likely I'd perform worse.

I work with some loud opinionated people all day, and look forward to my quiet walk around a park each day. Often I'm walking on complicated problems, and the last thing I need is an hour of listening to pointless arguments about movies or whatever.

Eating lunch together (whether to talk technology or just to socialize) is huge for building a cohesive team that works together and talks outside of the lunch room. Especially if you don't work with each other directly on a day-to-day basis, it helps to reinforce that you all work together rather than on separate teams.

I prefer to grab a sandwich and go for a walk. This was especially true when I was contracting and based in interesting cities that were fun to explore.

For those that are against spending time eating lunch with your co-workers, the following Tina Fey quote comes to mind (paraphrased. not exact):

Never work with or hire someone who you wouldn't want to run into at 3am.

I like eating lunch with my coworkers some of the time. (Maybe once a week.) It's good team building.

However, I'm an introvert, and I pair program nearly every day. This tends to leave me wanting a nice break in the middle of the day where I can have some time alone. Also, my idea of a good/healthy lunch usually doesn't intersect with any sort of work-provided lunch, if such a thing is being provided.

The best place I ever worked at was small: ~7 people.

We ate together every day. Every day of the week, it was someone's duty to make lunch. I mean that, make it. You started an hour before lunch, went to the kitchen and made a meal. Generally a full hot meal. We got every variety you could think of - people enjoyed the time out creating someting different, something else for their co-workers to enjoy, and it Worked.

We got to sit outside, in the garden, next to the pool, and eat lunch (and yes, there was beer). And if it was Friday, well. Then we started a fire, and had some more beer. And there may have been instruments. And our respective children running about.

Not bad for a bespoke dev company. Not bad at all.

To address some of the other points raised in the comments -

No-one was forced to be there, if they wanted to go out for lunch they could. Few did, and rarely. More important than an individual's 'desire to associate' is whether they fit in. If they don't, they likely don't belong on that team. Ditto for if they can't communicate honestly (positively or negatively) about/with peers/managers.

Unfortunately, eating lunch with a group of people every day tends to get very expensive. You either need to be working at a big company with a cafeteria (pass) or for a fancy place like FogCreek, otherwise it's $10-20/day to eat out all the time. Besides, I like to swing home and hang out with the cats sometimes, or work on a side project at my desk, or whatever.

How does a small company like Fog Creek handle ordering, delivery, and clean up each day? In the photo it appears that everyone is eating off of china with silverware. Do they maintain a cafeteria?

This article could have extolled shared lunches without othering the people who sometimes eat alone as sad and less than human.

Well, when I read the Twitter headline I was sure that this is a link I'd like to share with my coworkers. After reading it however it seems not to have much of content.

Some other reasons beside the obvious social ones:

1. If you aren't working on the same project you can use these lunch-discussions to generate ideas.

2. You can ask for feedback on any descision from people that are not actually involved in your project.

3. If you are working at a company where you can actually influence the company's principles, rules and processes you can make your job even better by improving the company's behavior. Which is far more fun if you are not doing it alone.

There are probably more reasons. This article is really missing some substance beside the psychological impact of social interactions. Common lunch can also provide value to the company itself.

I usually need to pinch a mega loaf right around lunchtime. I would love to do it earlier, but getting ready and commuting all use up too much time in the morning. Call me anti-social, but I treasure the "me time" that allows me to get it done w/o an unexplained long absence from my desk. Likewise, if I were expected to show up at the communal lunch table, I'm sure I would always be late and be met with snide remarks such as "everything come out all right?" and "out with the old in with the new, eh?" and other such witticisms. No, give me my very special session in the restroom followed by some time with my Kindle and a sack lunch in a quiet grotto, and I'm OK with the forced togetherness of the rest of the workday.

Why does Joel hate introverts?

I've often felt ostracized at my employer just for not following the rite/folklore of lunch together. Joel has a conflict of interest. As owner of course he stands to benefit if his employees went for lunch together, because inevitably they'd be talking about work, maybe even solving work-related problems in the process. While lunch is a great occasion for socializing - it'd be best to be up to the individual on how to spent that time.

I am 49 years old and I work as freelance consultant on e-commerce projets. Honestly, it is impossible for me to work (which means mostly sitting) for 3-4 hours in the morning and 4-5 hours in the afternoon and also sit during lunch. If I do that I will either fall asleep or be unproductive for most of the afternoon. At lunch I spend at least one hour walking, running or biking. At the least I must get outside, whatever the weather.

It's not always so easy for everyone to eat together however. People have different work schedules - different deadlines to meet, some may be working from home at times or while on a business trip, and for some, such as myself, lunch is really something I just kind of grab and go, don't really sit down for 30 min to 1hr and eat lunch. That's just my habit, it's a working lunch (although I make up for it at dinner)

While some people certainly enjoy it, this kind of culture might be horrible for others.

I would detest it; I like to choose who I spend my spare time with, and for lunch that's often alone. Sometimes I go and have lunch with someone I consider a friend. Being just the two of us at least opens the window for good discussions.

Nothing against coworkers, really.

But it's hard to comfortably talk about anything else than work or perhaps some impersonal superficialities with people who aren't your friends in the deepest sense of the word. And I certainly do mind talking about work or impersonal superficialities when I'm supposed to have a nice time off to enjoy some food. It takes a special group where all members can talk openly about themselves without boring or irritating others; not going to happen at work.

One knows a friend when one sees one, and they're rare to come by. So the situation where most of your coworkers would also happen to be your friends is nearly impossible unless you only have one or two coworkers. I have one friend at work, another who's a very good acquaintance, but often I just hook up with some other friend not from where I work.

Interesting read, though as always, a little extreme. Eating lunch with co-workers 2-3 times a week is sufficient - sometimes you have a life outside of work too!

Also, I can vouch for the fact that cafeterias at Microsoft are NOT cheap - quite the opposite actually. You can get a better deal almost anywhere outside campus.

LOL @ "Excuse me, I’d love to introduce myself to you, but it’s very important that I update my cabbage."

My, this sparked a lot of discussion.

When I worked at a company, I used lunch as a chance to go out into the sun and maybe meet a random nice girl. Don't date people at work, they say ... and they're probably right. Sometimes I would invite my co-workers to a new place. Why eat in the same cafeteria all the time?

I basically used lunch as a social building time. but that's just me, I'm kind of bored just eating by myself.

You can achieve the same effect with smoking pauses:

1. your mouth isn't stuffed and you can and want to talk during smoking. It's reflexive - as soon as you light the cigarette you're looking for a conversation;

2. you have more pauses per day;

3. the pauses are shorter;

Are there any downsides? Well, some say it's unhealthy... Anyway, I'm not smoking anymore, but back when I was, we solved lots of problems and came up with tons of ideas while smoking.

I spend my lunch hour at the gym. Since I've started this routine, I workout more frequently, feel like my workday is shorter, and love not having my workout hanging over my head after hours (when I need the time for helping kids with homework). If I don't go to the gym, I'll run errands or work on my own projects. I get enough socialization during meetings.

I can't stand the sound of other people eating. I would gladly eat lunch with my co-workers if I was allowed to wear headphones.

I think this is very important and not because of the fact that you're more likely to talk shop when eating with your team. What is more valuable IMHO is that you'll get to know your teammates better as _people_: what they like, their hobbies, their tastes their culture (if you're in such an team) etc. It's insanely interesting and valuable: it will make communication much smoother and misunderstandings much less frequent. A team needs to gel and having common experiences outside of strict "work" settings is really important for that. BTW, this can't be forced but can be facilitated by creating the right conditions and I think that's what Joel's post is about. One more thing: having lunch with people only loosely connected to your day-to-day activities is also very interesting and can lead to serendipitous insights about things totally in your area of expertise.

My experience has usually been that lunch with coworkers is awkward. Most people just sit on their iphones and no one really talks. The conversations seem forced. Maybe I have worked at the wrong places but this is my experience at the places I have been.

Being a geek and of an extremely different mind and culture than most of my peers, I usually find myself alone. I just fail to integrate since I'm quite different. Being alone, at lunch for example, was very stressful.

Lately, I found a friend of the same mind (or close) and he also don't succeed to integrate smoothly into the community (although better than me, but has a girl friend). I then discovered that he does spend a good amount of his time alone. He'll just get a coffee and sit their browsing on his smart phone.

After that, I take it easy finding myself alone, even if there are lot of people near me gathering, talking and laughing... It doesn't bother me any more, I'm actually better off with it.

Huh. I've never worked somewhere where people do anything other than grab some food and eat it at their desks. Who has time to actually go out for lunch?

One advantage of the open, trading-floor layout is that you can chat with the people around you, if you want.

I use my lunchtime for personal pursuits, like reading articles by Joel Spolsky.

Points 8 and 9 are a result of not communicating and acting assertively. Stop partaking in, allowing, and accepting aggressive, passive, and passive-aggressive behavior and communication. This is what the higher ups in a company need to foster. I highly suggest reading "Life Would Be Easy If It Weren't for Other People" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803968655/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Video about snacks/dinner at Valve: http://www.dump.com/2011/04/24/valve-behind-the-scenes-the-s...

What is the best way to meet new people during lunch at a company cafeteria?

This summer, I visited a friend at Google and stayed for lunch (the food is incredible, better than most five-star restaurants btw). That day I noticed the same problem this article highlights. Either groups are meeting during lunch, or the remaining "loners" are reading the latest tech news on their computers and appear completely unapproachable. So if you don't want to eat alone and want to make new friends, what is the optimal way to overcome these barriers?

This might work better where people have their own offices with doors that close. Where I work we are all in one room and so constantly sharing banter on and off all day.

I so wholeheartedly and completely agree with Joel. Things that really "make" a team:

1) Having lunch together 2) Having booze together 3) Going out together regularly

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My lunches are spent at the gym. Nothing helps me focus on work better than getting away for an hour or so.

If this is a useful part of corporate culture here (it rarely is) that's one of the first reasonable arguments I've heard AGAINST telecommuting. In general, I think I'd opt for a telecapable workforce, but there's certainly some reasonability to adhoc meetings at lunchtime.

I thought Joel stopped blogging?

You know, my 1st instinct is to disagree vehemently with the sentiment here.

But if I reflect upon past job experiences, more often we (at least a good bit of the team) ate lunch together, the greater and more harmonious the team experience was.

I always felt there is something special about sharing food with others, it gives a sense of bonding rarely seen elsewhere. For building up a great company culture, food plays in my opinion a pretty big role on many layers.

As @paul says: "limited life experience + overgeneralization = advice"

Does Joel pay his staff for attending the lunches?

An alternative might be afternoon tea.

I am right now unable to have lunch with co-workers. I've always done the group lunch and would always make every possible effort to get as many people involved as possible.

The problem is that at some point, I simply run out of people :( I am not that much of a social person who comes up to random people and socializes with them very well, so its really hard for me now, I'm not getting my daily dose of talking to people, its maddening.

Talking about work or not is irrelevant. What is important is that the conversation is completely friendly, enjoyable by all, not stressful, and does not in any way require immediate action. Also it means that at any point we can go off on a completely different direction talking one moment about building software and the next about how cats decide that your keyboard is a backscratcher.

To be honest, the lack of socializing is demoralizing and depressing :(

Joel's somewhat right and somewhat wrong. He's both. And for the record, I'll say right now, without reading even reading it yet, that whatever edw519 says on this topic is going to be golden and I'll agree with it. ;)

With that said, as I was reading the article, I kept thinking to myself, "The conditions where what Joel is saying hold true, and have the most benefit, are ones where you have a bunch of young adults, say early 20's or late teens, with lots of energy, lots of free time, a fairly simple life outside of work, little roots, and a sort of bright-eyed and arguably naive sense of wonder about things. Because then, by golly, you're just gonna lurv having lunch in a cafeteria with all your other young coworkers because you can goof around and talk about the latest Ruby PHP AJAX Agile blah blah blah blah or pop culture thing." And so I keep reading, and then there's this photograph of, ostensibly, their staff at the cafeteria table. And I see a lot of early 20's or late teens folks. Nailed it. Case closed.

Which isn't to say that older adults wouldn't like it. They do, clearly, sometimes. But when you're older and/or more experienced, or have a wider variety of interests, or more demands on your time, you're much more likely to want to either (a) spend time with friends/family during that period (meet them?), or (b) zone/veg out, or (c) knock out some non-work chores (appointment scheduling, calling people back, etc.), and so on. And bantering about tech stuff, again, further, in every spare moment, really grows old after a while. Once a geek, always a geek, but after you've done it for a decade or more, day in, day out, as a day job, a lot of people want to "claw back" as much non-tech/non-geek stuff then can into their lives, wherever they can find it. Speaking from direct experience anyway: doing mass grubs with all my corporate coworkers was kinda fun in my early 20's, but really loses its attraction by your 30's and beyond. Many people are just not that interesting to hang out with. And geeks, especially younger geeks, are often associated with annoying conversations and choice of topics -- though they usually mellow out with age.

wtf