The COVID-19 induced quarantine of the past year has reminded me of this previously unpublished blog. I wrote it some years ago about my growing feelings of isolation on the job (i.e. replacing human interactions with emails, phone calls, IMs, and time-tracking software).


TL;DR - Culture is essentially a network of humans – not just individual humans, but the bonds that join them together. The strength and effectiveness of those bonds are to a large extent defined by the happiness of those humans.

If you can find a job that you truly enjoy, then you are indeed a fortunate person.

A high school teacher of mine used to say that.

He was one of those unique teachers that everybody loved. Through his humor and his warmth and his wisdom he had a way of bringing together people in his classroom that normally wouldn’t socialize. The preps, the jocks, the stoners – even introverted nerds like me – we all felt welcome and accepted in his classroom.

It was like The Breakfast Club but without the drama or irony.

My entry into the workforce turned out to be absolutely miserable.

For my first internship, my boss constantly referred to me in the third person. “Ask the student,” he would tell a colleague (right in front of me). “He knows.” Most of the time I sat alone in our office without anyone to talk to. It was lonely and not remotely motivating.

My next internship involved spending my days alone testing hardware. Technically I had a manager and a team, but I rarely interacted with them. Instead I received directions through voice mail and reported problems to an online test and bug tracking system. I felt absolutely isolated. On my last day of work, I spent my going away lunch with a bunch of people I barely knew.

I would think about what my high school teacher had said, but the idea of loving my job had become an alien concept to me. I’d wake up each morning and have nothing to look forward to. Mondays were the worst.

“Another forty-five years until retirement,” I would lament to myself.

Anecdote: I think that this is one of the saddest photos that I have ever seen.

It shows a baby rhesus macaque that has been raised in total isolation. The experiment demonstrated that the baby monkeys consistently chose the cloth-covered “mothers” to the bare-wire “mothers.”

And then something changed. I took my final internship building software for a tech startup. The work was exciting and for the first time I had a face-to-face relationship with a team of people. We’d discuss interesting design problems. I even had people to eat lunch with.

Late one night me and my teammates finally had a fully working prototype up and running. The hardware, the software – it was all working!!!

Quietly and with a level of humbleness one of the guys said, “we made this.”

That “we made this” moment was an important experience for me. I was no longer “the student.” I was a somebody. I was doing important work.

And I had people to share my accomplishments with.

I’d never felt this way about a job before. As the kid who was always picked last for baseball, this new sense of belonging meant a lot to me.

Anecdote: Creating new and interesting cheesecakes is a hobby of mine. I once brought one to a friend’s birthday party, and it was so well received that people were urging me to quit my day job.

Years ago while working for a small startup, I’d use my colleagues as guinea pigs. If I’d created an interesting cheesecake I wanted feedback on, I’d leave samples in the lunchroom.

People knew it was me and would tell me what they thought.

The sharing of food is a natural way that people show affection for one another. Sometimes I miss doing it.

I graduated and had the opportunity to work with more great people. I’m introverted, but I am not antisocial. I like getting to know a small and stable group of people, but I am not gregarious.

I liked spending my lunch break getting to know my colleagues. I liked hearing about weddings, births, first-days-of-school for youngsters. I liked to build an understanding of people’s senses of humor and then think of ways to make them laugh.

I know that these aren’t the things I get paid to do, but they are the perks that make jobs enjoyable.

Eventually I forgot what my teacher had said to me because I forgot what it was like to have a miserable job.


Darkness crept back into the forests of the world.

  - Galadriel


I made my home in the telecommunications industry. Television, telephone, wireless networks. My career and my friends were there. For years, my career life was great.

Then things started to change. The technology that I loved seemed to turn against me. As telecommunications became cheap and reliable, I saw teams becoming disperse. I might be here, but the team is actually there (i.e. in a different state/country/hemisphere).

I’ve had jobs in recent years where I’ve felt very isolated again, where I spent more time working with email addresses and telephone numbers than I did with actual people.

I ate lunch by myself at those jobs. And I had nobody to share my cheesecakes with.

That shared “we made this” experience seems to have vanished from a lot of modern workplaces.

Anecdote: I was recently thinking upon Archimedes running naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!”

I used to find this story humorous and inspiring, but lately it just sounds lonely.

Because Archimedes had no peers to share his accomplishment with.

I see articles floating by in my LinkedIn feed with titles like “Your Next CEO May be a Robot” or “Your Next Boss May be an Algorithm.” This sounds absolutely horrific to me. I actually like working with good bosses and good CEOs.

I see job ads looking for someone with my skills to work here, but the team is actually there. To me, that means working with phone numbers and email addresses instead of people.

As I write this, it is clear that my high school teacher wasn’t just giving advice. He was also expressing his own joy in the job that he had.

My metric for measuring a job is the people. People give my work validation. People give my career meaning.

Without people, there will never be that “we made this” moment.

Sometimes I wonder, where did everybody go?