Where I work the company will occasionally treat everybody to a meal (dinner or lunch) and it is quite nice. It typically counts towards your time (if it is a lunch) and it is optional.
I think the difference lies in who has to pay. If the employee is bringing their lunch or having to pay out of pocket then it may not as go well as if it is paid for by the company. In my eyes, the former is equatable to what you called "mandated 'happy hour'" while the latter is more a way to show appreciation for the work that the employees do.
I hate this kind of "work hard, play hard" attitude.
I'm here to get work done, NOT make buddies.
Let me work hard and get my stuff done, then while you're out pounding the Jagerbombs maybe I can get some more stuff done. You know, because "getting stuff done" is my job. My job is not, "get sh*faced with my coworkers". The latter activity does not add (objectively measured) shareholder value.
Far better and far more important STILL than 90% of startups that don't go anywhere anyway. And from a huge part of the 10% that do have any success, come to think of it.
Far more important contributors to CS and technology have worked in IBM and similar companies than in startups. Including the guys that built UNIX (AT & T) and the pals at Xerox Parc. Not to mention people wanting the even more lax and easy going environment of academia, from Knuth to Djikstra.
Decades of important research in any CS related area, and tens of thousands of original results (patented even) are far superior to messing with RoR and NoSQL trying to build a Heroku for rollerskaters or Facebook for Slugs, pulling all-nighters and screwing your work-life balance over.
Not to mention that a reasonable work-life balance is far more progress for the whole of society than any start up product. In their deathbed no one regrets not going more to the company lunch.
Introverted or not, being able to sit down and converse with your teammates is important. I wouldn't want to work with someone who either couldn't or didn't feel it important to do so.
That's what meetings are for, right? Or even just the ability to walk to someone's office/cube/desk, and talk to them about important things. You can establish a culture of communication within a team that doesn't intrude on personal time.
There is a lot of use in say, complaining that a way you are going about a problem will work, but seems too damn hard. Say for example, I see a 4 hour solution to a problem that should really be solved in 30 minutes. Often coworkers who know some systems better, or have a different way of viewing the problem will see a much easier way to solve it by leveraging tools I don't know about or approaches I didn't think of.
Certainly, these informal discussions over lunch aren't strictly necessary, and certainly, having some alternate way of making these discussions happen is very useful, but they are just often helpful.
It's also not the case that having lunch with coworkers is by any means mandatory, or that taking the lunch for yourself is frowned upon.
Seems to me there is a great deal of time other than lunch to allow us to bond. Why do some people feel intent on taking my time away to do something they won't give of their time to let me do; as in your meetings are far more important than bonding but my lunch time isn't.
Been there, done that. Its like another management fad that poorly managed companies try to graft unto their dysfunctional culture. They of course fail at it because they don't understand it really is they who are the problem, not the employees.
They of course fail at it because they don't understand it really is they who are the problem, not the employees.
It could be a little bit of both. That said, I am curious if you could say what situation / circumstances would make you want to spend more time with your co-workers and/or enjoy the idea of doing lunch together, etc. IOW, in your experience, what is the root of (what I perceive as) the adversarial "us vs them" mentality between employee & employer?
I ask because if/when they day comes that our startup gets off the ground and we have money and employees, I really want to have the kind of culture where everyone feels like part of one team, where employees, founders, managers, whoever, can go out together, have lunch, go out for drinks after work, etc. and actually enjoy it, not feel like it's something that's being forced on them (it never would be forced, of course). I have my own take, based on my years of experience in all sorts of companies, but I like hearing other perspectives on this - because I believe there is value in that "bonding" or "gelling" between colleagues in a firm.
