Do people actually suck at small talk now, or just notice it more

I'd push back slightly on the selection effect being the whole story. We've definitely lost reps, yeah, but I've also watched what happens when you suddenly need synchronous conversation after months of async-only work. People get rusty in specific ways that feel different from just "uncomfortable." I ran a post-mortem last year where a senior engineer couldn't articulate a thing they'd debugged alone for three weeks. Clear in Slack threads, incomprehensible in person. Not shyness—just... the muscle had atrophied. You can write something carefully in DMs but talking through it in real time requires a different kind of thinking. Same person, same knowledge, but the *performance* looked bad because they hadn't done it in a while. The client dinner thing reads to me less like selection and more like nobody had bothered to establish a norm. If those three had been doing in-person client dinners monthly they probably wouldn't have reached for their phones. But if they haven't had one in two years and suddenly there's one on the calendar, yeah, of course they bail into their phones. That's not a skill decay so much as a coordination problem. Which honestly might be worse—at least if it was just selection we could just hire different people.

I've watched something adjacent happen with incident response. When pages went out at 2am, everyone had to be in the war room together, talking in real time, figuring it out. People either learned to communicate under pressure or they burned out. Now with async postmortems and Slack threads, the people who were always uncomfortable with synchronous problem-solving under stress just... don't show up to those conversations in the same way. And we think we've lost something, when really we've just stopped forcing people through the crucible. The thing that actually concerns me is the flip side of your observation. Yeah, the people who liked small talk still do fine. But there's a skill that lives in the *friction* of unscripted moments — noticing when someone's discomfort is worth pushing through versus when it's time to exit, reading a room when you can't just bookmark it and come back later. That doesn't decay evenly. The people who got good at it through repetition and mild social failure are aging out. The younger people I work with are genuinely sharper with async communication, but I've noticed they sometimes miss when a five-minute real conversation would save two days of Slack threading. It's not worse, it's different in a way that compounds. The reps thing you mention is probably the real story. Less practice in one domain, more in another. But "reps" assumes you're keeping score, and we're not — we're just optimizing locally for comfort.

I'd push back slightly on the selection effect framing. The reps thing is real, but I've watched something more specific happen at my company over the last five years: we went from a single office to mostly remote with quarterly all-hands. The engineers who were mediocre-but-functional at small talk in 2019 actually seem noticeably worse now. Not the naturals, yeah, but the middle 60% who used to get by on ambient practice. The difference I see is that small talk isn't just a skill you either have or don't. It's a skill that atrophies hard if you stop doing it weekly. You forget the micro-rhythms, the recovery moves when a thread dies. I noticed it during our last in-person week — people were rusty in a way that felt different from "uncomfortable." Uncomfortable is stable. Rusty is "I used to do this and now I'm choppy at it." Some of those people actually got better as the week went on, which suggests it wasn't pure personality. Remote work probably didn't create people who hate small talk so much as it created a generation that never got the thousand small repetitions that make it feel automatic. The phones at the client dinner weren't an exit ramp for people who always hated it — they were an exit ramp for people who found it *tolerable* when it was their only option, but not tolerable enough to seek it out voluntarily.

I'd bet what we're actually going to see is a bifurcation. The people with decent small talk skills will stay fine or get better (because they'll seek out in-person stuff deliberately, so they'll get denser reps). The people who've fully remote-native for five or six years, who've built entire careers on async communication and carefully composed messages? They're going to hit a wall around 30 or 35 when they need to move into roles that require sustained relationship work. Not because they're incapable, but because they genuinely won't have practiced synchronous reading-the-room skills since college. The thing nobody wants to admit is that "just talk to people" was never a skill everyone had equally — it was a skill everyone got forced to develop because the alternative was being isolated. Now we're sorting for people who want to talk, and that's fine, except it means the people who would've become adequate through grinding it out in hallways for ten years are instead becoming excellent async operators and fragile in person. That's not obviously bad, but when you need to close a deal or manage a team, it matters. My prediction: in five years we'll see this reflected in hiring, where companies add explicit "comfort with ad-hoc synchronous communication" as a job requirement, which will sound absurd and also be genuinely necessary for certain roles.