While I will <i>absolutely</i> concede that being born a middle-class white Caucasian male in the US is an objectively advantageous and generally privileged situation to be born in to...<p>You're going to lose me at the notion that I'm somehow exercising "white privilege" by consuming/offering alcohol at/around/near work functions or venues.<p>If the author is already making the reader concede an implicit agreement that there is an "inclusion/diversity" problem, then I'd argue the problem exists at a deeper, more fundamental level.<p>This reeks of selection bias and circular reasoning when you say that things that occur in a non-diverse environment are immediately perfect examples of non-diversity because "look at this non-diverse group of people partaking in $thing".<p>I'm even fine with saying it's non-inclusive, <i>except</i> that has to cut across all demographics, including white males. There are plenty of white males employed in tech who find the idea of socializing/drinking with co-workers absolutely contrary to what they feel is fun or engaging.<p>As a thought experiment: let's say all tech companies, from startup to FAANG, as of today, went completely "dry" for any and all work-hosted functions, as well the same policy for all corporate offices/locations.<p>Would diversity get any better? And if not, how can you say it was making it worse?
After I completed Techstars in 2013, they asked all of us for feedback. My #1 piece of feedback to Techstars was to please stop with alcohol at every event. I had several reasons, most of which aren't really touched on here, but are nonetheless important:<p>1) I can't hear a damn thing or talk at a normal level to investors or mentors in a bar that is playing loud dance music. (Techstars often held events at local bars.) It is uncomfortable to sit in a barstool and literally yell about your business to someone. I can't imagine this is a gender thing. Most of us, especially introverts, wouldn't be comfortable in that situation.<p>2) Many people see bars as hookups or pickup spots. The environment is geared toward that. I was in a committed relationship at the time and I'm now married (I'm a woman.) I don't want hookups; I'm there to meet investors or mentors.<p>3) As in above, even at the office, alcohol blurs boundaries and encourages people to do things they otherwise wouldn't (like yell uncomfortable jokes or hit on other people.) It's not a good look for those of us who are there to work.<p>4) If you don't like alcohol or don't drink, you miss out on the opportunities to "meet and mingle." I can remember many events I declined because they were alcohol-focused (wine tastings, for instance.) I strongly feel I missed out on potential connections to investors and mentors because of this. I now go more often to these types of events because I feel they further my business, but I wish I didn't have to.<p>I am not as concerned with statistics as I am with alienation. It's not just women or minorities; I've met plenty of straight, white males who don't like drinking either, or feel pressure to drink more than they otherwise would thanks to these events. Removing alcohol from these events does us <i>all</i> good.
Neo-puritans are very strange people. I feel like it wouldn't be too difficult to go find prohibitionist rhetoric from the 1890s that essentially recapitulates exactly this post.<p><i>Instead of a bar or keg at the office, consider an exercise room with equipment that tracks, ranks, and encourages competition.</i><p>Ableism! Ageism! and a healthy serving of Hobbsean ruthlessness to boot. That'll clear up those pesky diversity issues in short order.
> 59.8% of respondents who drank in the past 30 days identified as White/Caucasian<p>That's very representative of the country as a whole, wherein white, non-hispanic people make up approximately 61% of the population.[1] Rather than supporting the author's point of view, that statistic seems a good apology for an opposing viewpoint.<p>> How many of you reading this hang out at crack houses or opium dens? I realize this is an extreme example, but I’m being serious...we don’t go to these places because we don’t use those substances...<p>Actually, ...[2]<p>I believe the author has it backwards. Alcohol use isn't contributing to bad work environments; bad work environments are contributing to alcohol abuse.<p>[1]: <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk" rel="nofollow">https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/07/25/use-of-illicit-drugs-becomes-part-of-silicon-valleys-work-culture/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/07/25/use-of-illicit-drugs-...</a>
> Before we can have a healthy conversation about this, I assume you’ll agree that our industry has an inclusion and diversity problem. If this isn’t the case, you can stop here; I doubt I’m going to convince you of anything in this post.<p>I guess I have to stop reading there. :/
I'm not sure this is a systematic issue vs a workplace by workplace issue. Certainly some companies have a lot more of a drink focused culture than others. Additionally, some teams (lookin' at you, Sales) have the stereotype of having that kind of environment.<p>As far as addressing drinking, I think the thing to tackle is being compassionate and empathetic to all sorts of issues, not just alcohol abuse in particular. Do you have members on the team that have a disability? Do people practice a religion that requires quiet space throughout the day? How will you accommodate those people?
>Instead of a bar or keg at the office, consider an exercise room with equipment that tracks, ranks, and encourages competition.<p>Can you see how your own logic can be applied to this suggestion turning it into a "systemic inclusion problem" for people who don't want to hang out in the exercise room or publicly compare their physical abilities with their coworkers? It's nonsense. People will do what they choose to do and personal choices will _never_ be equally represented in any population.
We recently rented an office at a WeWork location. I was first surprised to find that beer was available on tap, and then that it was limited to four beers per day---presumably due to abuse in the past. I wasn't actually at that office, so I can't comment on the atmosphere, but this seems to me to be encourage a frat-boy / heavy drinking culture. I've seen similar in certain parts of start-up land. As something who doesn't like alcohol I do find this off-putting, and if I was looking for a job I would stay away from places that advertised easy availability of alcohol as a perk.<p>I don't think this the culture of all of tech. Indeed tech is too big to have one culture. But it is in my experience the culture of part of it.
> It is time our industry recognizes that alcohol has no place in healthy, diverse, and inclusive environments.<p>If your working environment has issues with people getting trashed and behaving unprofessionally at company functions where alcohol is served, I would posit that the problem will not disappear in the absence of alcohol.
> Before I begin, I want to say that I’ve spent around 10 years curating this opinion.<p>I don't know what to make of this. Did it require 10 years to write this article? Or is it just "I know what I'm talking about, I've spent 10 years having this opinion"?
Are there really companies that have alcohol available in the office? That seems very odd to me. I am English, which is very much a drinking culture, but every company I have worked at in the last 20 years has had an explicit policy on not drinking alcohol during working hours. This doesn't prevent people having one during their lunch break if they want to, but if you have enough to be noticeable you're probably going to be in trouble; and drinking in the office is definitely frowned upon.
I definitely have worked places where co-workers enjoyed staying late and then heading to a bar afterwards, and honestly I did feel a bit left out because drinking at bars held zero appeal to me. Personally, that is more due to my autism-related aversions to crowds and loud sounds, but knowing that the few bar experiences I've had usually involve a strange man trying to talk to me for a romantic reason if I stray away from another man for two minutes... that really does put the nail in the coffin. It would have been nice if there were other options offered, but really it's even more optimal for me just to work somewhere without any expectation of regular post-work socialization and bonding at all. And working remotely does that for me. I don't feel like I'm missing out or not "one of the team" any more.<p>I'm really not bothered by people sharing a beer or two at the office or lunch though. Nobody gives me a hard time for saying no, as it just means more to go around for others.<p>As long as there are good options, with equal career opportunity growth, available to people who don't prefer cultures where social drinking is the norm, I think it's not a big deal so long as companies are up front with it. I do worry that some people may get a gig on a team at a big company that has that culture though and feel excluded or otherwise be seen as not a team player for not participating, but that can honestly happen with many different things (ie, vegans/vegetarians/religious people needing food options, parents needing kid-friendly schedules) so I don't think not drinking is especially unique - though it is perhaps very often ignored.
All of these stats look to be from American sources. Did you consider the overall rest of the world, when you used the all-encompassing statement "<i>The Tech Industry Has a Drinking Problem</i>"?<p>If not, then I think that, whilst you might have had the best intentions in mind, you really miss the mark for actually covering the <i>whole</i> industry.<p>In other words: How apt are your statistics, anecdotes, and points of view to be applicable in countries where the drinking age is <i>far</i> lower than in the states? What is the actual ratio of those countries having alcohol at company events versus after-work events, coordinated by workers at 'x' company? How much more or less-likely are those countries to have drinking problems (statistically, speaking) in their populace?<p>You seem to ignore this, whilst simultaneously stating that an entire industry has a problem - using a sample-set from a small portion of its total whole.<p>I'm not sure if you're being intentionally disingenuous or if this results from jingosim or if you just haven't considered any of this but it comes across as askewed American exceptionalism: We have this problem and so, by that logic, the whole world must.
> ...And It Is Hurting Diversity<p>Is this really the best angle that they could find? One would assume that a drinking problem - even when confined outside of actual "work" - would impact <i>basic professionalism</i> well before diversity. See, e.g. the way that a widespread "drinking culture" may have contributed to the recently-unearthed cases of harrassment at top "tech" firms.
In my experience, alcohol is mostly served to techies because they aren't very social while sober. Yes, it is stereotype but I've found it to be 100% true. :) Even with techies, deep technical discussions are very hard to have because they are so shy. Many of them needs to be inebriated to dare discussing whether they prefer hash-based disk indices or tree-based ones.
This post doesn't present any evidence that drinking is more of a problem for the tech industry than any other industry. Purely anecdotally it seems to me that the service industry (restaurants and bars), medicine, journalism, law and aviation are all worse.<p>I don't drink myself and haven't found it to be a problem (although I did drink in the past).
It's not the "tech industry". It's a certain segment of the "tech industry". The same segment that hires like a fraternity hazing. That segment cultivates this. That segment <i>wants</i> this. Is that good or bad? I dunno. I don't want any part of it, but that's my choice.
The writer needs to be exposed to more varieties of tech companies. I've worked at quite a few tech companies and never had any pressure to drink. And even at those few social events, I just ask for a soda or virgin cocktail and nobody made a fuss.
Its not just alcohol. In the last few years I've counted too many startup CEO's who use speed, mushrooms, LSD and MDMA as if they are standard tools of the trade. It seems like there was a lull during the early part of the 2000's, but recently a resurgence in the use of mind-altering drugs in this industry seems to have occurred.<p>I fear that there will be a period, up ahead, where it all comes crashing down. Cybernauts may think they've got everything under control, but in my opinion this point of view requires a great deal of ignorance of the decades past, not to mention dire hubris.
Absolutely true. I drink, but I also commute by car - so that rules out drinking socially at work.<p>My recent offices have been good about mixing the mandatory-fun-days between drinking and dry establishments.<p>We did have to chat to an enthusiastic social organiser about why a cocktail mixing class wasn't going to be a great team-building experience with half our team missing.<p>And, yes, I've been guilty of lazily organising pizza and beer dev events when I really should know better. I'd rather have it called out than have people feel uncomfortable.
Christ, what next? Ping pong tables create an inclusivity problem? Music played in the lobby? Catering? Anything that can conceivably differentiate individuals is fair game for these inclusivity nuts. People's tastes are different, what brings people together is going to be different, and people of some kind or another are going to be left out one way or another. You can't have diversity and complete inclusivity at the same time, they ultimately contradict each other.
The tech industry's substance abuse issues like drinking or other drugs are a terrible issue.<p>This comes from a industry wide occupational burnout issue. Major names like Cisco, Twitch, or Nvidia have staff who are >50% burnt out.<p>The lack of diversity has absolutely nothing to do with anything here.
I think the OP is onto something, but I'll argue that the OP is leaning too heavily on their convictions instead of using facts to make their case.<p>The first problem I noticed is that they seem to warrant that 4 or 5 drinks per week is "problem drinking." This is not true. First, the point at which drinking is a problem varies from person to person[1]; taller and/or heavier people can drink more than shorter and/or lighter people. Second, the rate at which one drinks is a important factor that isn't considered in OP's opinion piece. Me drinking 4 or 5 beers over the course of a weekend will produce a much different outcome (and a much sadder weekend) than me drinking 4 or 5 beers within an hour (without drinking water in between or after) or even 1 beer per day for the entire work week (which is probably the most telling sign of problem drinking, though it is a very weak sign).<p>The next problem is the introduction itself. The author asserts that the reader is informed of some abstract "diversity and inclusion" problems within tech and automatically dismisses anyone who thinks differently. (How do you fix the fact that white males are much more likely to apply for a tech job than white females or people of color? Is this a symptom or a cause for our diversity problems? These discussions don't matter to the author, however, because the author is automatically right and doubts that they can convince you otherwise. BTW, I generally agree that tech has a diversity problem.)<p>The last problem that I'll call out here is that the author suggests that companies install workout facilities or do non-alcoholic activities every other week instead of installing kegs or going to bars. First, installing exercise rooms is MUCH MUCH MUCH more expensive than sourcing kegs from your local brewery. It also increases insurance costs and liabilities (because people can get seriously hurt if they use the treadmill wrong, for example). Second, why can't companies just host multiple events instead of banning drinks for a week (and alienating people who like bars or beers or whiskeys or whatever)? What's going to stop people from hitting the bar after doing $non_alcoholic_thing? Third, nobody is holding a gun to anyone's heads telling them that they have to drink. Bars have non-alcoholic options. Choosing to drink is a _choice_.<p>[1] <a href="https://talbottcampus.com/problem-drinking-vs-alcoholism-whats-the-difference/" rel="nofollow">https://talbottcampus.com/problem-drinking-vs-alcoholism-wha...</a>