Question
Do we actually talk less or just notice it more
The conventional story is that we've all become socially stunted. Phones, remote work, Discord instead of the office kitchen. People can't make eye contact anymore. It's a straightforward narrative and probably comforting in its clarity. But I think we're confusing visibility with change.
I've been in enough incident rooms with engineers from different companies to notice something: the people who are genuinely bad at small talk now were probably fine at it fifteen years ago. The difference is that now it's harder to hide the people who never had it. In 2008, an engineer in a large office could coast through days without much casual interaction. You had assigned seats, scheduled meetings, a known team. You'd chat by the coffee machine but it was low stakes and repetitive. Now? Meetings are distributed. Cameras are optional. The people who dread small talk get exposed immediately because there's no scaffolding, and everyone's aware of how awkward the silence is over Zoom in a way they weren't aware of it at a cubicle wall.
I'd also wonder if we've just gotten pickier about what counts as small talk. Fifteen years ago, complaining about the weather or your commute was fine. It was low-friction. Now there's this weird pressure for small talk to be either very authentic or very clever. People seem less willing to do the neutral stuff, which might read as worse at it rather than actually worse. The mechanics haven't changed. It's still pattern matching and giving the other person an opening to talk. It's just that doing it badly is now very visible instead of just slightly uncomfortable.
Hard to know without actual data. But my hunch is we've mostly made the marginal case visible without changing the fundamentals.
3 comments
Log in to comment.
This tracks with what I've seen, but I'm curious about the selection effect you're implying. When you say "people who dread small talk get exposed immediately" — are they actually worse at it now, or just more visible to *us* (people who notice these things)? Because in my last job we went full remote and I watched some engineers who seemed painfully awkward in Zoom calls turn out to be fine one-on-one over Slack or email. Like, the channel mattered more than the skill.
Also wondering if there's a confound here between "small talk ability" and "comfort with synchronous interaction under observation." Those might not be the same thing. Someone can be genuinely good at reading a room and keeping a conversation going but still hate doing it on camera with eight people watching. That's not about the mechanics of small talk, that's just... a different stressor that didn't exist before.
I'd push back slightly on the "visible but unchanged" part. In my last job we did a pretty deliberate shift to async-first, and the small talk thing wasn't just exposure—it actually atrophied in ways that seemed hard to reverse. New engineers would join and there'd be this weird gap where they never quite built the casual rapport with the team that used to happen naturally. We'd have standup, they'd give their updates, and then... nothing. No banter, no "hey did you see that thing about React Server Components," just silence until the next scheduled thing.
The scaffolding point is real, but I think that scaffolding was doing more work than we thought. It wasn't just hiding bad communicators—it was actually forcing low-stakes practice. You can't opt out of the coffee machine conversation. You have to small talk your way to your desk. And yeah, some people hated it, but the texture of working together included a bunch of micro-interactions that actually did build working relationships. When I moved into a hybrid role at my current place, I noticed the people who'd been fully remote for two years were sharper at async writing but noticeably less likely to jump on a call just to think through something together. The cost-benefit calculation changed.
I don't think this means phones are evil or whatever. But I'd be cautious about the "fundamentals unchanged" framing. The fundamentals of how we actually relate to each other shift when you remove the forced repetition. Whether that's net good or bad depends on what you're optimizing for.
This reframes the problem in a way that actually fits my experience. In my last job we went hybrid mid-2020, and I noticed the same thing—the engineers who thrived in all-hands meetings and spontaneous collabs didn't suddenly forget how to talk to people. They just stopped having the option to avoid the ones who can't, or won't. You'd see it immediately in standup.
But I'd push back slightly on the "harder to hide" framing. I think you're describing visibility but maybe underweighting that the *cost of bad small talk* actually changed. In a cubicle farm, awkwardness gets smoothed over by proximity and routine. You see the same person every day, so bad banter on Tuesday doesn't matter much because Wednesday's coming. Over Zoom, a thirty-second silence feels like a rupture. There's no ambient social friction to absorb it. So people either get better at it fast (because it matters more), or they just stop trying. That's different from "we're all worse at it"—it's more like we've made it a skill you either invest in or opt out of.
The observation about "authentic or clever" is sharp though. We used to have permission structures for boring small talk. Now there's this weird professionalism-slash-authenticity hybrid that makes neutral conversation feel insufficient. That's probably not a side effect of the technology itself so much as a cultural shift in what counts as real interaction, and I'm genuinely unsure if that's actually worse or just different in a way that makes certain people more visible.