According to a recent survey conducted by anonymous tech survey company Blind on Valentine’s Day, more than one in four employees in Silicon Valley have had a love affair at work. Blind reports that among 5,600 tech employees who chimed in, 30% have “had a romantic relationship with a co-worker.” Blind says that numbers for the Bay Area are the same as those for tech workers in other regions of the country.
Microsoft was the most lovestruck company in Blind’s survey, with 56% of staff members reporting having had a romantic entanglement with a co-worker. Google was among the least loving companies, with only around 25% of employees reporting similar affairs. Numbers at Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix were roughly comparable and hovered around 30%.
Don’t call HR just yet. According to Blind, only 5%–6% of workplace romances in the tech world occurred between supervisors and their underlings. The vast majority were among employees at the same level within an organization. And these workplace romances seem to go rather well, overall. According to Blind, only 23% of Bay Area tech employees who had a workplace love affair regretted doing so.
Several anonymous respondents reported a tough dating scene in Silicon Valley and around the Bay. One female staff member at Amazon wrote:
As an objectively attractive woman in my mid-20s, I expected the dating scene to be great when I moved to SF a year ago due to the supposedly higher ratio of men/ women. My dating experience here has actually been the least successful amongst my experience in all other metropolitan cities (NYC, Boston, London…). I’m confused.
Others chimed in, writing that “You spend more than ⅓ of your life at work. How else are you going to meet someone? No one has time for anything else” and “Who hasn’t [dated a co-worker]? People tend to meet people who are close to them. Happens in school, church, work, neighborhood. I totally avoid it now that I’m a full time worker plus this field is not very well blended gender wise.”
Those responses likely highlight the main driver of workplace affairs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the Bay Area’s tech scene: Silicon Valley staff members work a lot, and tech work can be demanding. That — combined with a high cost of living — likely makes it challenging for many tech workers to meet people outside work. And so they turn their energy internally, meeting and connecting with colleagues.
Not all of these are necessarily sordid, soap-opera-style affairs. From the wording of Blind’s question, staff members who are in a committed relationship or who are married and work at the same company would likely be included in the count. Especially at companies like Microsoft, which tend to attract older and most established workers, many of the people reporting workplace romance may be married to each other and may have come to the company together.
If you’re dating in the Bay Area and just can’t find love, maybe try looking within your own company. And if that fails, as one Facebook employee writes, “leetcode will always love [you] back.”
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