It’s true that some of my experience could be related to Oakland as a whole, which is an exceptionally diverse city. But I’ve visited other gyms and workout facilities in my area, and none of them look anything like the YMCA. They all lack the wide range of age, race, gender, and ability. I’ve also visited YMCAs in other states, most recently in Michigan and North Carolina, and they had a very similar vibe to my own. I’ve come to conclude that whatever I lose out on from not going to an upscale or hyperspecialized gym, the YMCA makes up for, because it gives me a much broader sense of community and allows me to interact with people—in real life, no less—who I otherwise wouldn’t. Does this solve all of the world’s problems? Of course not. But I think it’s a small step in the right direction.
- spend more time in civic spaces like libraries and public parks. Or just being outside in public with an open mind.
- speaking of civic involvement, active participation in your local government will for sure broaden your social circles.
- religious organizations -- at least, good ones -- are cross-sectional in this way too. Quoting MLK Jr, "... any [church] that violates the "whosoever will, let him come" doctrine is a dead, cold thing, and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity."
- community work, like habitat for humanity or the like, will put you in a new sphere of folks too.
I'm glad I read the article, I thought this was about the death of sysadmins at first glance.
Speaking to the content though; and it may seem dismissive or odd but: I tend to make friends with random people I meet. For instance going the extra mile to be friendly with service workers (remembering names, asking about family and following up later, generally having good memory for birthdays etc) has landed me a fair crop of friends.
People are rarely in the service industry long and they tend to be wildly different, person-to-person, and they have extended friend groups too which if you get very friendly may end up increasing your circles even further.
It sounds weird typing this out, like I consider them some kind of resource to be tapped, but what I'm trying to get across is to be kind to people and friendship will happen. I've never gone looking for friends and almost my entire friend group (outside of IRC) has nothing to do with tech.
Some of the people I was just friendly with and became friends with are now personal trainers, nutritionists, nurses and architects. It's almost a problem because we have very little in common, we can only share lamentation about things like open offices and the country we live in. :P
This may be my lack of social skills speaking, but would you mind sharing a little more information on how this works in practice?
In general when I interact with service workers, we tend to be focused on the service at hand - there isn't very much spare time for making friends. And I can't help but feel they are being paid to be friendly. (I am not from the US, if this makes any difference)
Also, how much time would you say you spend with new friends? I find that between work, family, personal projects, and a stable of few but close friends, my time is pretty well spoken for. But the idea of having more friends is certainly a nice one.
As a service worker, here's the thing: the power dynamic is asymmetric. If you ask about my family, I can't treat you like i do a stranger who asks me. That is, it's none of your business. I have to keep in mind that my goal is to keep you as a paying customer and avoid you getting mad at me and complaining to my boss.
My goal is for you to buy the things you want and get out of my store for you to come back another day. I won't be rude and I'll try my best to help you, but I don't take my customers home with me to have a beer because I like my work to be separate from the rest of my life.
Be really careful that you aren't abusing a captive audience when you do this.
This sounds awesome, and I'm glad it's worked well for you. Too many people dehumanize "service workers", or abuse them in their role as the face of a company that cares even less for its employees than its customers.
This can be a pleasure for both sides if done respectfully, I want to caution the reader that this walks a very fine line next to harrassment, particularly where the person you're interacting with is of a different gender. If it doesn't come naturally to you, don't try it.
Monoculture basically just means upper middle class men in tech coupled with the argument of implicit negation that less diverse == bad. This self flagellation from the PMC and tech is just really... I don't know what to make of it, but I would say is harmful. If you really want to break out of your professional cohort, pick up a hobby which requires other people like sports/music/civic activities/religion/car meets/quilting/neighborhood gardening/whatever. You'll find most of those folk tend to be somewhat like minded as well, but how we spend our free time basically boils down "doing what I enjoy doing around others that respect me on some level". You do you, and let's not get too caught up with having the correct friends.
I didn’t read it as a moral argument. It’s simply that if you only hang out with people that are very similar to you, you are very unlikely to encounter a diverse set of viewpoints and are more vulnerable to group think.
This isn’t isolated to tech, it would apply to any insular community. To use a tech analogy, if you trained a machine learning model based on the preferences and viewpoints of only people who worked in tech, you’d end up with an overfitted and not very general model.
Your brain is trained on viewpoints you are exposed to as well, and you risk over fitting your brain to a narrow set of viewpoints if you never leave an insular community.
I don't want to befriend people who are different from me for some weird moral reason or because I want the "correct" friends. I just think it's boring to be surrounded entirely by people who are too much like me.
for me it’s far more an argument against tedium than any highfalutin moral scolding.
i spend all week dicking around with my fellow pedants solving fiddly problems. I don’t want to play board games or factorio all weekend because i want to have a weekend that feels like not-work.
I hold this view from a selfish place, programmers and other technical people can get really tiring to hang out with, especially after being steeped in technical bs all day.
Alternative worldviews are refreshing and rejuvinating.
I dont even care about the hive mind aspect, its the relentless tedium of 'rationality' that thrives amongst the type, its just not human to try to be "right" all the time.
Lol, I wish I had that problem. Where I live, it's finding like-minded geeks that requires actual effort. IT people are largely social pariahs, unless they are on the business side of things. And it's really been the case for most of my life, over two different countries.
It's just that the Bay Area is an economic district, that's all. There are districts in Europe where everyone is somehow involved in making pipes and faucets, others where everyone works in the clothing industry, even some where everyone is into the business of fantasy miniatures....
SF "makes bits", so chances are that if you throw a stone there you'll hit 3 developers, 2 "product guys", and 4 devops (insert a basement-dweller-sysadmin-joke here). I actually found it pretty exciting the few times I was over there - a land where nerds don't have to be ashamed of "being in IT"! Talking coding and gadgets over dinner is socially accepted! How refreshing!
Obviously there is a degree of class selection in place, but it was always such. Did your parents know a lot of homeless people or fruit-pickers? I wouldn't think so.
In an Internet world, you can find friends who are a perfect fit, so you might never need to find others.
I was visiting my grandparents a couple weeks ago and they were baffled at how young people never know their neighbours. And it is true. I know the one neighbour that has lived to the right of my parents house. Nowhere else that I have lived have I even known the names of the people across the hall.
I tend to just have 6 friends at any given time who consume 3 hours a day in total. There isn’t room for more people without sacrificing other conversations. And yes, most are software engineers/otherwise in tech.
My brother-in-law is a plumber. Guess what? All of his buddies are in the trades. My mom was a school teacher. Guess what? All her friends were school teachers. When I was a software developer, I ran in circles with a lot of other tech people. Now that I'm in real estate, we hang out with a lot of other real estate agents (especially given that my partner was formerly in real estate and all her closest friends were in the business too).
Point being - for a good many people, given well-documented challenges of making adult friends, our work / industry creates a natural social circle.
Our best friends from outside those work circles came from when she ran an AirBnB back in the day and met people from all over the world.
Half of my friends are landscapers. Why? Hobbies and volunteer work.
A friend of mine was best friends with someone she sold a piece of crafting equipment to. Showed up and didn't leave for four hours.
If all you do is eat, sleep, and drink software, then you aren't going to know anybody outside of software. It's one of the things we mean when we say that doing software as a profession and your main hobby can be harmful.
Doing other things doesn't mean you never work on software outside of work. It means you do it when you have other things sorted out.
>I’m barely 150 pounds and don’t like traumatic brain injuries. Preferably a more elegant sport that doesn’t require a bunch of awkward equipment. Maybe Ultimate or rock climbing– Wait, crap.
hit the gym and do some weight-lifting, solve two problems at once. Also just go out and hit the bars. (okay maybe not the greatest advice right now). Unlike the author my parents were solidly working class so I always was very aware of straddling two very different social circles, between academia and tech work and the people I grew up with. There's no reason to live in either bubble really and in a big city it's not that hard to have a healthy social circle, just requires leaving your comfort zone.
As someone who has this problem to a lesser extent than the author, the question is how to have that healthy social circle.
I’ve never met anyone at a gym or bar before. Other than hitting on girls at bars, I’ve never seen anyone else in my social circle meet anybody else at any gyms or bars. I’ve certainly never seen anyone approach me at a gym or a bar. Has your experience been much different?
I don’t mind leaving my comfort zone, but to do what, exactly?
I am 145 lbs, live in San Francisco, I used to be a programmer (basically retired now). I met the mother of my son while bouldering at Mission Cliffs. She has nothing to do with the tech sector. Bouldering requires just a pair of shoes.
The author of this post is just a whiner. It's never been easier to meet people outside of your bubble than now.
My solution was to find an international/group home. Your roommates friends become your friends and suddenly you are in a diverse group.
Over the last year I stayed with 9 people in 1 house. 2 school teachers, 1 in CSR, 1 lecturer, 1 grad student, 3 in tech (and only 1 in big-tech: Me) and 1 in pharmacy.
To-be-fair, I was in Boston . But, my peers ended up in far more homogeneous peer groups when they just stayed with people they knew or other 1/2 random strangers.
Pick-up sports or Adult-sports-leagues have worked well for this purpose too. I play(ed) soccer, but Basketball or the like would also work.
Lastly, just date someone not-in-tech. Dating apps are great for this. If it turns into a relationship, your partner will make sure their friends become your friends. It is a story as old as time. Although dating-outside-tech can be tricky for some. Not every group is as open to brutally honest and logic-1st/ empathy-2nd style of communication in tech.
Try volunteering. I had this exact conversation yesterday on a firetruck on the way back from a hazard reduction burn, that one of the things we all valued most about our volunteering experience was that we were exposed to people we wouldn't normally hang out with in our professional or social circles.
That said, on this particular truck three people out of the crew of four were programmers. We thankfully pulled up the conversation about the merits of Jupyter Notebooks for BI tooling before the fourth crew member, who is studying forensics, got so bored her eyes rolled right out of her head.
Clearly not considered: new acquaintances may be filtering out the author. I was in SF less than a week and found locals were friendlier if they didn't know I worked in tech, doubly so with the Bay area natives.
If you don't want to be pigeon-holed as the stereotypical Tech worker ('the ones ruining SF'), then show you have other interests and qualities. Author has done a fine job of defining the edges of that particular mould. The fix is the same as the other comments - break the mould, get outside the comfort zone.
Hacker News (or indeed anywhere online) is probably not going to be the space to resolve this issue! Those who weren't at the dinner party are not here to provide insight!
> "Obviously not football, since I’m barely 150 pounds and don’t like traumatic brain injuries."
That's exactly something a programmer (or an academic) would say. I box and I hear the same words from my coworkers.
If you stopped treating your brain as the most important fucking organ in your body (not that it isn't), you might open yourself up to hobbies that emphasize other aspects of your person. You would probably meet new kinds of people in those activities.
The football comment struck me as wildly out of touch. In my entire life I’ve never heard of any organized adult football- its obviously way too dangerous and inconvenient to be anything but a pro or school sport.
Do a combat sport. I've been doing various combat sports for 20 years now and I hardly ever run into people in tech. Plus, it's incredibly fun, useful (self-defense) and interesting; there is a lot of strategy and creativity involved.
Jiu Jitsu is super popular most everywhere now, but Judo is really fun too, as well as wrestling. Striking sports are great as well, but you can't really go live in practice in a striking sport. You can spar in striking at 50% a few times a week (and that's pushing it), but you can roll at 100% in Jiu Jitsu up to every day. I always found the latter much more fun.
I get round this by doing amateur theatre. Most of my friends are from theatre and they're a varied bunch. Doctors, Teachers, Vets and Lawyers are the most common professions but also lots of random jobs such as train Conductor, HR manager, entrepreneur, music instructor, charity worker and marketing execs.
There are a few techies but it's rare, and those that are tend more towards management type roles that IC engineers.
Unfortunately theatre is likely the last industry that'll recover from covid but once it does I thoroughly recommend it.
I have childhood friends whose personal life was literally changed (for the better) by theatre. For some of them, their "real job" is now basically a side activity to their theatre stuff. But it takes a certain type of personality, I think. Actors can be super-annoying to me.
Well, it sounds like the author is 1) single and 2) above 30.
That's going to screen most "families" out of your social circle and that's a LOT of people. Most folks (tech and non-tech) start getting pressured to have families by the age of 30.
However, the whole premise of the article is that only being surrounded by techies is bad. Why?
Would he feel the same if he was only surrounded by musicians?
I found that doing activities not related to nerd culture really helps you connect with non-programmers. Dancing, sports, volunteering (aside from Code for America, which is great, but filled with programmers) all help.
Also, regularly socializing with non-programmers seems to be a check against some of the anti-social habits we're all prone to pick up
There is a definitive social glue that will introduce yourself to lots of people with a wide spectrum of different interests and is a crazy, always smiling, thing called dog
Dogs are NOT for everybody. Having a dog is a 10-15 years commitment and shouldn't be done by impulse, specially if you work from home. Could bark at 4AM, the owner will need to remove a lot of s*t and wake up early each day of the weeks, (Sundays also) and definitely can damage seriously your capability to focus in remote working from home.
But nothing prevents you to volunteer to walk a pooch or just borrow one once a month from a friend or grandma to go out and take a walk. A friendly middle sized dog will love to tell everybody how awesome is their father. Is the second best visiting card that a human can show after babies (Money would be the third).
[+] [-] hprotagonist|5 years ago|reply
- join the YMCA or other community gym:
It’s true that some of my experience could be related to Oakland as a whole, which is an exceptionally diverse city. But I’ve visited other gyms and workout facilities in my area, and none of them look anything like the YMCA. They all lack the wide range of age, race, gender, and ability. I’ve also visited YMCAs in other states, most recently in Michigan and North Carolina, and they had a very similar vibe to my own. I’ve come to conclude that whatever I lose out on from not going to an upscale or hyperspecialized gym, the YMCA makes up for, because it gives me a much broader sense of community and allows me to interact with people—in real life, no less—who I otherwise wouldn’t. Does this solve all of the world’s problems? Of course not. But I think it’s a small step in the right direction.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2403867/ymca-local-gyms-good-w...
- spend more time in civic spaces like libraries and public parks. Or just being outside in public with an open mind.
- speaking of civic involvement, active participation in your local government will for sure broaden your social circles.
- religious organizations -- at least, good ones -- are cross-sectional in this way too. Quoting MLK Jr, "... any [church] that violates the "whosoever will, let him come" doctrine is a dead, cold thing, and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity."
- community work, like habitat for humanity or the like, will put you in a new sphere of folks too.
[+] [-] dijit|5 years ago|reply
Speaking to the content though; and it may seem dismissive or odd but: I tend to make friends with random people I meet. For instance going the extra mile to be friendly with service workers (remembering names, asking about family and following up later, generally having good memory for birthdays etc) has landed me a fair crop of friends.
People are rarely in the service industry long and they tend to be wildly different, person-to-person, and they have extended friend groups too which if you get very friendly may end up increasing your circles even further.
It sounds weird typing this out, like I consider them some kind of resource to be tapped, but what I'm trying to get across is to be kind to people and friendship will happen. I've never gone looking for friends and almost my entire friend group (outside of IRC) has nothing to do with tech.
Some of the people I was just friendly with and became friends with are now personal trainers, nutritionists, nurses and architects. It's almost a problem because we have very little in common, we can only share lamentation about things like open offices and the country we live in. :P
[+] [-] dctas|5 years ago|reply
In general when I interact with service workers, we tend to be focused on the service at hand - there isn't very much spare time for making friends. And I can't help but feel they are being paid to be friendly. (I am not from the US, if this makes any difference)
Also, how much time would you say you spend with new friends? I find that between work, family, personal projects, and a stable of few but close friends, my time is pretty well spoken for. But the idea of having more friends is certainly a nice one.
[+] [-] Noos|5 years ago|reply
My goal is for you to buy the things you want and get out of my store for you to come back another day. I won't be rude and I'll try my best to help you, but I don't take my customers home with me to have a beer because I like my work to be separate from the rest of my life.
Be really careful that you aren't abusing a captive audience when you do this.
[+] [-] paledot|5 years ago|reply
This can be a pleasure for both sides if done respectfully, I want to caution the reader that this walks a very fine line next to harrassment, particularly where the person you're interacting with is of a different gender. If it doesn't come naturally to you, don't try it.
[+] [-] war1025|5 years ago|reply
> - live in San Francisco, Berkeley or Oakland
With those criteria, assuming you are in the tech field, you're probably making an order of magnitude more than your age-group peers.
It seems entirely reasonable that you wouldn't bump into the non-tech crowd since they can't afford the same lifestyle as you.
Over here in the Midwest, software jobs pay much more in line with other college-educated professions.
As a result, I'm the only programmer in my friend group, and most of the people make the same ballpark of money as I do.
[+] [-] srtjstjsj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw51319|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EVdotIO|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] landryraccoon|5 years ago|reply
This isn’t isolated to tech, it would apply to any insular community. To use a tech analogy, if you trained a machine learning model based on the preferences and viewpoints of only people who worked in tech, you’d end up with an overfitted and not very general model.
Your brain is trained on viewpoints you are exposed to as well, and you risk over fitting your brain to a narrow set of viewpoints if you never leave an insular community.
[+] [-] plorkyeran|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selestify|5 years ago|reply
He could pick a hobby he doesn’t enjoy, but that would defeat the point of a hobby...
[+] [-] hprotagonist|5 years ago|reply
i spend all week dicking around with my fellow pedants solving fiddly problems. I don’t want to play board games or factorio all weekend because i want to have a weekend that feels like not-work.
[+] [-] scsilver|5 years ago|reply
Alternative worldviews are refreshing and rejuvinating.
I dont even care about the hive mind aspect, its the relentless tedium of 'rationality' that thrives amongst the type, its just not human to try to be "right" all the time.
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
It's just that the Bay Area is an economic district, that's all. There are districts in Europe where everyone is somehow involved in making pipes and faucets, others where everyone works in the clothing industry, even some where everyone is into the business of fantasy miniatures....
SF "makes bits", so chances are that if you throw a stone there you'll hit 3 developers, 2 "product guys", and 4 devops (insert a basement-dweller-sysadmin-joke here). I actually found it pretty exciting the few times I was over there - a land where nerds don't have to be ashamed of "being in IT"! Talking coding and gadgets over dinner is socially accepted! How refreshing!
Obviously there is a degree of class selection in place, but it was always such. Did your parents know a lot of homeless people or fruit-pickers? I wouldn't think so.
[+] [-] BerislavLopac|5 years ago|reply
Would that be Nottingham? ;)
[+] [-] perl4ever|5 years ago|reply
Not that long ago, I read a news story about a homeless guy. He used to be a pro baseball player.
So, I guess maybe my parents didn't know a lot of homeless people because they didn't play pro sports...
Which is to say, there's something odd about the way you see the world, or the way I do. One or the other.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|5 years ago|reply
I was visiting my grandparents a couple weeks ago and they were baffled at how young people never know their neighbours. And it is true. I know the one neighbour that has lived to the right of my parents house. Nowhere else that I have lived have I even known the names of the people across the hall.
I tend to just have 6 friends at any given time who consume 3 hours a day in total. There isn’t room for more people without sacrificing other conversations. And yes, most are software engineers/otherwise in tech.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
1. dependent
2. independent
3. interdependent
I think when people are young, they're trying really hard to leave #1 behind and be #2... to the exclusion of #3.
#3 might be where you meet your neighbors.
[+] [-] jimrandomh|5 years ago|reply
* A grad student neuroscientist (which actually means "Matlab programmer")
* A statistician (which actually means "R programmer")
* Various other kinds of scientists and mathematicians, whose day-to-day work is actually programming
* A rabbi (who is applying to programming boot camps)
* A number of unemployed people, trying to learn to program in various ways (from self-study to degree programs to bootcamps)
Most of these would not be counted, but if I talked to them at a dinner party, I would count them as programmers.
[+] [-] in3d|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poulsbohemian|5 years ago|reply
Point being - for a good many people, given well-documented challenges of making adult friends, our work / industry creates a natural social circle.
Our best friends from outside those work circles came from when she ran an AirBnB back in the day and met people from all over the world.
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
A friend of mine was best friends with someone she sold a piece of crafting equipment to. Showed up and didn't leave for four hours.
If all you do is eat, sleep, and drink software, then you aren't going to know anybody outside of software. It's one of the things we mean when we say that doing software as a profession and your main hobby can be harmful.
Doing other things doesn't mean you never work on software outside of work. It means you do it when you have other things sorted out.
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
hit the gym and do some weight-lifting, solve two problems at once. Also just go out and hit the bars. (okay maybe not the greatest advice right now). Unlike the author my parents were solidly working class so I always was very aware of straddling two very different social circles, between academia and tech work and the people I grew up with. There's no reason to live in either bubble really and in a big city it's not that hard to have a healthy social circle, just requires leaving your comfort zone.
[+] [-] selestify|5 years ago|reply
I’ve never met anyone at a gym or bar before. Other than hitting on girls at bars, I’ve never seen anyone else in my social circle meet anybody else at any gyms or bars. I’ve certainly never seen anyone approach me at a gym or a bar. Has your experience been much different?
I don’t mind leaving my comfort zone, but to do what, exactly?
[+] [-] diego|5 years ago|reply
The author of this post is just a whiner. It's never been easier to meet people outside of your bubble than now.
[+] [-] screye|5 years ago|reply
Over the last year I stayed with 9 people in 1 house. 2 school teachers, 1 in CSR, 1 lecturer, 1 grad student, 3 in tech (and only 1 in big-tech: Me) and 1 in pharmacy.
To-be-fair, I was in Boston . But, my peers ended up in far more homogeneous peer groups when they just stayed with people they knew or other 1/2 random strangers.
Pick-up sports or Adult-sports-leagues have worked well for this purpose too. I play(ed) soccer, but Basketball or the like would also work.
Lastly, just date someone not-in-tech. Dating apps are great for this. If it turns into a relationship, your partner will make sure their friends become your friends. It is a story as old as time. Although dating-outside-tech can be tricky for some. Not every group is as open to brutally honest and logic-1st/ empathy-2nd style of communication in tech.
[+] [-] davidbanham|5 years ago|reply
That said, on this particular truck three people out of the crew of four were programmers. We thankfully pulled up the conversation about the merits of Jupyter Notebooks for BI tooling before the fourth crew member, who is studying forensics, got so bored her eyes rolled right out of her head.
[+] [-] LurkerAtTheGate|5 years ago|reply
If you don't want to be pigeon-holed as the stereotypical Tech worker ('the ones ruining SF'), then show you have other interests and qualities. Author has done a fine job of defining the edges of that particular mould. The fix is the same as the other comments - break the mould, get outside the comfort zone.
[+] [-] altitudinous|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thekashifmalik|5 years ago|reply
That's exactly something a programmer (or an academic) would say. I box and I hear the same words from my coworkers.
If you stopped treating your brain as the most important fucking organ in your body (not that it isn't), you might open yourself up to hobbies that emphasize other aspects of your person. You would probably meet new kinds of people in those activities.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|5 years ago|reply
And I'm pretty sure he could find plenty of other activities that don't involve a high risk of brain damage.
[+] [-] porknubbins|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prettycolors|5 years ago|reply
Jiu Jitsu is super popular most everywhere now, but Judo is really fun too, as well as wrestling. Striking sports are great as well, but you can't really go live in practice in a striking sport. You can spar in striking at 50% a few times a week (and that's pushing it), but you can roll at 100% in Jiu Jitsu up to every day. I always found the latter much more fun.
[+] [-] ck425|5 years ago|reply
There are a few techies but it's rare, and those that are tend more towards management type roles that IC engineers.
Unfortunately theatre is likely the last industry that'll recover from covid but once it does I thoroughly recommend it.
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ummonk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|5 years ago|reply
That's going to screen most "families" out of your social circle and that's a LOT of people. Most folks (tech and non-tech) start getting pressured to have families by the age of 30.
However, the whole premise of the article is that only being surrounded by techies is bad. Why?
Would he feel the same if he was only surrounded by musicians?
[+] [-] jpzisme|5 years ago|reply
Also, regularly socializing with non-programmers seems to be a check against some of the anti-social habits we're all prone to pick up
[+] [-] tayo42|5 years ago|reply
maybe, counter intuitively I was playing mtg in SF and didnt run into many programmers.
[+] [-] pvaldes|5 years ago|reply
Dogs are NOT for everybody. Having a dog is a 10-15 years commitment and shouldn't be done by impulse, specially if you work from home. Could bark at 4AM, the owner will need to remove a lot of s*t and wake up early each day of the weeks, (Sundays also) and definitely can damage seriously your capability to focus in remote working from home.
But nothing prevents you to volunteer to walk a pooch or just borrow one once a month from a friend or grandma to go out and take a walk. A friendly middle sized dog will love to tell everybody how awesome is their father. Is the second best visiting card that a human can show after babies (Money would be the third).