On alcohol and tech culture

Kara Sowles wrote an excellent piece that was posted on Model View Culture today on alcohol and inclusivity, speaking to how alcohol is used as currency too often in tech culture these days and the pressure to drink (often to excess) is exclusive of those who don't want to drink, for whatever reason. (If you haven't read it, go do that now. I'll wait.) Even though I'm quite fond of beer, both the making and the drinking of it (and making usernames about it), I found myself nodding along with every single point she made.

I don't have any problems with alcohol in and of itself, but I do have problems with how I've seen it used as a gauge for someone's value in the tech industry. I have heard far too many stories that go something along the lines of, "Well, he passed every single interview with flying colors, but he wouldn't have a beer with us at lunch, so we didn't hire him," or, "She wouldn't come out for drinks after the interview, that's so weird, who doesn't drink?". I've even heard a story like the former where the twist ending was, "but then he explained that he wasn't drinking because he was so hungover from the night before so clearly he can drink so we did hire him." Um. If you are making hiring decisions based on somebody's willingness or ability to drink, you are making bad hiring decisions. Not because those people are necessarily bad hires, but because you are making those decisions for the wrong reasons.

You are not hiring people to be your drinking buddies or your friends.

Or perhaps I should say, you shouldn't be hiring people to be your friends. Large parts of the tech industry seem to pride themselves on having a work culture where people are friends. Not just friendly, but actual friends. Maybe it's part of the backlash against how 'boring' and 'stuffy' corporate America is, so they want to prove how much more fun and cool they are than those people who have mortgages and go home to their kids instead of doing shots until 3am because WOOOO SHOTS AMIRITE. Not that there's anything wrong with liking your coworkers, but you should be hiring people because of their professional skills, not their liver-punishing ones. Somewhere along the way, the difference between "someone I can get along with in a professional context" and "someone I like in a personal context" got a bit confused and twisted around under the nebulous guise of "culture fit".

It's not just alcohol I've seen this happen with, though alcohol has certainly been the worst offender. This kind of exclusivity can arise from any shared preference when people assume that anyone who doesn't share it is "weird". It can happen with coffee- suddenly anyone who doesn't make multiple trips to the office cold-brew keg is as much an outsider as someone who doesn't drink beer. (Luckily my coworkers are cool and when they go out to get coffee they invite me along to see if I want to grab some tea, or just take a walk with them, which is lovely.) I've seen it happen with ping-pong and foosball and fantasy sports. It can happen to even the most well-intentioned people when they get so invested their coworkers sharing their interests that they lose sight of the fact that some people don't and that's perfectly fine.

If you have these sorts of social activities in your office, really stop to consider if they're opt-in or opt-out. I've found that that's been a key difference in groups where I feel comfortable and included versus groups where I don't. By opt-out, I mean that this interest or activity is assumed to be the default and people have to make a concerted effort to not partake, which often means standing up and saying, "No, I don't want to do X" which far too often leads to people not taking no for an answer or asking why, which as Kara pointed out, can compel people to reveal personal information that they might not want to. Even something innocuous, like choosing a song you like to share with your coworkers at the end of the day, can be exclusive for people who maybe just don't want to participate for whatever reason if there isn't an easy way for them to say no.

I much prefer activities that are opt-in. Instead of having to say "No, I don't do X", put people in a place where they can say "Yes, I'd like to do X!" and maybe also only let that be known to the other people who do X instead of having to say no to the whole company. It lets people self-select, which I think is good for social things as well as professional ones. Etsy has a bunch of different groups that people can join, from things like board games to rock climbing to talking about text editors or sharing cat pictures, but they're all opt-in. There's no pressure to join any one of them. There's nobody asking "why not" if you choose not to join any. (It's awesome.)

Because ultimately, as much as we might like our coworkers, and as close as we might feel after spending long hours together getting that big project out the door, their personal lives are none of our business. It's not your business if someone doesn't drink, or why they don't drink, or why they don't drink coffee, or why they don't play ping-pong, or any of that. And growing a culture around these shared activities, healthy or unhealthy, makes it too easy to turn away people who don't look or act or think just like us. If you want someone to drink with and agree with everything you say, go to the bar with your friends. If you want to use technology to make great products and solve real problems, maybe focus a little more on that and a little less on how much people do (or don't) drink.