Forecast
People aren't actually worse at small talk; they're just doing it less and feeling it more
Most people frame this as a skills decline, but I think it's actually selection bias plus anxiety. Fifteen years ago you had mandatory small talk because there was no alternative. You'd run into colleagues at the office, stand in line at the bank, wait in a doctor's office without your phone showing you the WiFi password. You practiced constantly whether you wanted to or not.
Now the people who are bad at small talk just... don't do it. They order online, work from home, message instead of calling. So when they encounter a situation that requires it—a client dinner, running into someone at a conference—it feels foreign because they genuinely haven't done it in years. But that's not a decline in ability. That's just atrophy from disuse. The people who still do it regularly (sales engineers, hospitality, management-track folks in traditional orgs) are fine at it. Some are great.
The part that's real: we're way more self-conscious about it now. You can feel the weirdness of small talk more acutely when you're not embedded in a culture that normalizes it constantly. In my last job we were hybrid and people would get visibly uncomfortable with hallway chat. At my current place, fully remote, I watched someone literally prepare talking points for a conference coffee break. That's not worse small talk skills. That's higher surface tension around a thing they don't do often enough to have it be unconscious.
4 comments
Log in to comment.
I'd push back slightly on the "skills haven't declined" part. Yeah, selection bias is real—the people who opt out aren't practicing. But I've noticed something else in infrastructure teams specifically: a lot of the institutional knowledge about *how to actually talk to people across departments* has evaporated because we don't run into them anymore.
Used to be you'd debug a production issue and end up in a room with ops, network, database, and application teams simultaneously. You learned really fast how to explain what you were seeing to someone who didn't share your mental model, and how to listen to what they were actually worried about versus what they said they were worried about. Now a database person messages a Slack thread and maybe never talks to the person on the other end. The anxiety about conference small talk is real, but I think there's also actual skill loss in the translation work—knowing how to make your problem make sense to someone outside your domain without being defensive about it.
Maybe that's still just selection bias plus atrophy though. Hard to untangle. Either way, putting someone fully remote for two years and then asking them to navigate a client dinner is rough. The talking points thing doesn't surprise me at all.
I'd push back on the "it's just atrophy" framing. I managed a team through an office-to-remote transition and watched something weirder happen: people got *better* at async written communication and worse at the improvisational stuff small talk actually requires.
It's not that they stopped practicing small talk. It's that they started practicing a different skill set that actively interferes. When you spend eight hours a day crafting Slack messages—carefully considered, deletable, searchable—and then suddenly you're in a hallway with someone, your brain is still in "compose thoughtfully" mode. You've trained yourself away from the real-time improvisation small talk demands. It's not like you can hit backspace on "so how was your weekend" while someone's looking at you.
The sales engineers and hospitality folks you mention do stay fluent, but I'd argue they're not just practicing more. They're practicing *in real time with real stakes*, constantly. That's genuinely different from someone who lost the skill through disuse. They're fighting against actively developed competing habits. I've seen people fail spectacularly at small talk after years of being perfectly fine at it, not because they got rustier, but because they got *better* at something else. The brain optimized for the wrong domain.
I've watched the inverse happen. We migrated a team from open office to mostly remote and yeah, some people got awkward in the occasional in-person meeting. But the people who were already bad at small talk? They got worse. Not because they forgot how—because they stopped having to develop the actual skill.
There's a difference between practicing something you already know how to do and building it from scratch. Guy on my team, smart engineer, spent five years fully remote. When we had an onsite and he needed to onboard a new hire, he'd sit in silence for twenty minutes waiting for the person to ask questions instead of, you know, explaining anything conversationally. He wasn't rusty. He'd never learned how to read a room or adjust his pace or notice when someone's checked out. The mandatory office interaction used to do that work for him.
Selection bias cuts both ways though. The people who were already comfortable with small talk self-selected into roles where they do it. The people who hated it got to avoid it entirely, which meant they never had to overcome the initial discomfort and discover they were actually fine at it once they did it a few times. That's not just atrophy—that's never developing the muscle in the first place, then blaming the lack of practice.
You're describing atrophy, but I think there's a subtler thing happening that's worth separating out. The anxiety piece isn't just about frequency—it's also about the absence of low-stakes practice. When small talk was mandatory and constant, you got a lot of failed attempts that nobody remembers or cares about. You'd have a bad conversation at the bus stop, then forget it happened by Thursday.
Now when you do encounter small talk, there's more weight on it because it's consciously chosen (you're at a *conference*, this is intentional professional time) rather than ambient friction you're just moving through. So the same skill gap gets amplified by stakes. Someone who hasn't done it in five years probably is genuinely rustier—muscle memory is real—but also, they're aware they're being observed now in a way the hallway chat person never was. That changes what "being bad at it" even means.
The person preparing talking points is onto something though, if backwards. They're trying to solve an anxiety problem with structure, when what would actually help is the opposite: a bunch of low-stakes failure. Hard to get that when the interaction is scarce enough to feel important.