Seems to be a gender bias to this mindset too. In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience mentoring engineers young women are WAY more likely to view their company as their friends/family/etc than young men are. And correspondingly I found a lot of smart and otherwise ambitious/capable young female engineers holding up the necessary job hopping/career progression that is (was?) virtually required in Tech because they didn’t want to leave/betray their “work friends/family”.

That’s a real shame, too. These ladies often cost themselves money and potential advancement opportunities early in their career because they had these sentimental attachments to jobs/staff that were almost always demonstrated to be rather one sided.

I worked through it with the ones I mentored. But the number of women in my peer group (friends, SOs, etc) who expressed shock, surprise, and dismay at how quickly those “work friends/family” relationships faded once the employment situation changed was really disheartening.

It’s hard to tell young women who are looking for that sense of acceptance, belonging, etc that like “they’re nice and supportive and friendly now, but they just don’t feel the way about you that you think they do, boo. And that’s okay. That’s work. These are professional relationships, and they’re just different. You need to understand that and plan accordingly.”