Everyone Wants Everything to Be a Barbecue

By this, I mean: every assembly of people tends toward unstructured, meandering conversation about topics unrelated to the purpose of the assembly.

Once upon a time, I started an engineering job at a recently-built, well-equipped research building on a large university campus. I expected this to be a serious place where people worked hard. But I soon discovered that people at desks near mine wanted to talk, throughout the workday, about matters unrelated to work. They were friendly and interesting, so in the moment, I couldn’t help myself from joining the chatter about hiking and restaurants and other trivia. Somehow I was both at work and at a barbecue. I joined against my better judgment, knowing that people on the other side of the cubicle divider wished to hear less chatter. (Those people wore what passed for noise-canceling headphones at the time, and they arrived at work very early.)

From other experiences in fully-remote jobs, any occasional in-person meetups with colleagues were 100% barbecue by default. Perhaps there is management advice that getting your entire remote team in the same room is more important than whatever they actually do there. But after the first evening of carousing, I often felt that we should spend some of our limited time, with all the relevant parties present, building a shared sense of medium-term priorities (we seldom did this remotely), and working through decisions that would unblock progress. I would open up the issue tracker on the projector screen, and over the next few minutes, coworkers would step out to the hallway, to resume enjoying the barbecue that I was trying to ruin.

Code Commons was, among other things, an indoor barbecue. This was intentional. Coming out of the pandemic, I wanted to put otherwise-isolated computer-touchers in each others’ proximity every wednesday afternoon. A lot of focused helping and collaboration did happen there, but so did a lot of banter about video games. After a point, I felt burned out from the chatter. I would try to ignore it and make progress on my actual job, but it was half-focused and halting. At a barbecue, it’s hard to not barbecue.

After joining hundreds of informal co-working gatherings, where friends with computer-touching jobs gather to work in each others’ company, I believe these are nearly all thinly-disguised barbecues unless the organizers set explicitly-different norms.

Is this bad?

I think it’s mostly somewhat bad.

Charitably, community is important. “Everything is a combination of itself and an attempt to build a community”. But there exists a rich universe of shared human endeavor that is incompatible with meandering, unstructured conversation about whatever fun thing comes to mind. And I suspect, from first-hand experience and knowledge of secular trends, that this universe is harder for people to inhabit than it used to be.¹

In a work context, pairing activities (programming, troubleshooting, or planning) are valuable because they serve the organization’s mission in a way that builds a shared context and shared sense of accomplishment. There is a weird fraternal bond resulting from “we worked on this problem for 4 hours together”. From this shared experience of struggle, you have mutual trust and better communication going forward. It is impossible to do this at a barbecue.

Short of explicit collaboration is body doubling. If you have tasks that you’re prone to flinching away from (because they feel hard or unpleasant), these tasks feel easier to both start and continue when you’re near someone else who is doing similar tasks. You are typically not even talking, but somehow, the presence of someone else who is (credibly!) staying on-task keeps you on-task as well.

In-person workplaces² naturally provide a supportive background radiation of body-doubling, at least to the extent that people there are working. This environment is a huge benefit to knowledge workers who have at-least-subclinical-or-situational ADHD (which is to say, most knowledge workers). If you instead take them to a barbecue and expect them to focus, they flounder.

Some people, and I count myself among them, are very susceptible to joining the barbecue against our better judgment. If we arrived here with different intentions, we are losing the plot and entering the Dark Playground.

What to do?

Perhaps: anticipate and redirect the natural impulse to barbecue. Set norms. It seems best if the organizers of a gathering (or managers of a workplace) do this, ideally at the beginning. To a lesser extent, it is possible to influence culture in an attendee / contributor role, but if you aren’t in charge and everyone shows up expecting a barbecue, try to override that at your peril.

In the past year, I’ve joined a meditation group whose core activity is quite structured: silent meditation followed by a talking circle with carefully-defined rules of when and how to speak. This contemplative space would be ruined by unstructured back-and-forth conversation, but we only ask people to hold it for an hour. At the end, we direct folks to a nearby bar for ‘returning to normal’, although the barbecue begins the moment folks stand up from their cushions, and this seems okay.

Long ago, teenage cmart was at his first ‘real office’ job, when two (older) coworkers were talking about cars. Our manager stepped into the cubicle area, and spoke calmly but assertively to all of us: “Let’s keep the conversation work-related”. In the 20 years since, I’ve worked at places where folks would have received this intervention as harsh and uncool, and maybe resented the boss afterward. But in the context of this big company, people respected the boss, so we just turned off the grill.

As far as I know, this boss could not see our Skype chats where we exchanged, among other subversions, the ‘smoking’ emoticon every day at 16:20. Yes, emoticon! This was several years before people in the USA called them ’emoji’. Why is there a spatula and ketchup in my hands!?

But I think the overall least-barbecue workplace of my career was at a now-defunct consultancy which hosted explicit weekly barbecues! Every Monday at 12:30 was Company Lunch, with catered food and free-ranging conversation. Outside of that lunch hour, the office culture was quite focused, but not in an ‘admonishment from manager’ or ’no talking’ kind of way. You just had the sense that people were there to get shit done, solve problems for clients, and get home before dinner. Most of the conversation was to these ends.

I worked at this place three separate times over ten calendar years. Resigned and came back twice, with other stuff in between. It was not the place to build my career in a specific desired direction, but the work culture was that good. (Exactly why is out of scope here, but I believe that no amount of money can reproduce this reliably.)

If co-working with friends, be explicit about what tasks you want to finish before you leave for the day. If you have an arbitrarily-urgent-seeming goal (with even mild social pressure to perform), that provides some inoculation against barbecue. Also consider draconian pomodoros. Long ago, I made a timer that is impossible to pause. It gives two five-minute breaks per hour, at the top and 30 minutes past. The breaks are for talking, but also for moving your body and relaxing your eye muscles.

Maybe the pandemic broke some norms against barbecue-ness? Everyone spent a year touching a computer on their own. During the ZIRP era, many of my friends ended up with cushy remote computer-touching jobs. We emerged from all this with different habits and ways of relating.

In the second half of my thirties, I’ve been to so many barbecues. I want to be choosy going forward. Maybe a few per month, and fully enjoy them with no dark-playground aspect. But mostly, I want to get out into that rich universe of shared human endeavor.