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I'm a foreign CTO working in Bangkok and being fully fluent in Thai showed me that it's exactly the same practice in SEA regions: Got to close a deal with a government official? They'll head to the "bathtub massage" area Huai Kwang. Need to bond with a local Business man? Deal closes there as well. Bond with male work mates? On to the bathtub place! Everyone knows it, there's jokes about it and this particular business has licences to run legally, even though prostitution is normally illegal in Thailand. I turned down several invites to such activities and got the usual gay jokes behind my back.

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Heck in the US 20 years ago, a coworker of mine was assigned to a job where his first account was some old school east coast bank. One night dude calls "OMG man we are at dinner and the sales guy didn't show up so it's just me and them and they want to hit the strip clubs a couple blocks away after this." I had no good advice as I was a n00b too so I told him to call his boss. He was told "keep them happy" so he spent thousands on dinner, drinks, and strippers for most of the night on the corporate card (cash for the strippers...).

He was sure he would get fired or something. The following Monday his boss told him he heard that everyone had a great time, gave him a pat on the back and noted "I probabbly should have told you they party pretty hard."

I helped a sales focused tech company as their CTO for a few years. The sales team met at the bar for lunch and after work. Drugs were everywhere. The CFO kept a liquor cabinet in his desk drawer. There were parties all the time. Orgies were not uncommon.

They ended up being acquired before they could get full on wolf on wallstreet going but it was damn near close.

I drank with them but never took it any further. It’s a really unhealthy life both physically and emotionally.

Why would they get acquired? They were doing good work in-between the partying?

The sad thing about this is that if you are doing this real goal driven it might be your main source of income.

You spend your company's money on private immoral fun of customers, customers spend their company's money on your products/services instead of the otherwise not so different competition. The key part is that nobody actually invests their private money, but the value they get out of it is private. That's why it works and that's why it's usually illegal, and like most illegal things it happens anyway until someone at the top gets really pissed with you/your department/your company specifically.

I wonder how much things would.change were all of this legal. I mean, booze and stripping is already legal; consider also legal prostitution and cocaine.

Is this just having physiological fun together, or having an evidence of illegal conduct for each other, potentially usable as a weapon?

They 24X'd revenue in 12 months.

Whatever they did produced results.

Any profit or income?

It's like that famous saying: "People who attend coke fueled orgies together, do multi-million dollar deals together".

Partying with the right people?

People buy from people they like, I guess? I'm not in sales but it's a lot easier to bond with someone while having dinner together and drinks, than it is in an office meeting room.

This appears to be extremely common, especially in some fields, such as advertising. In one of my former companies (in the UK) the sales people (whom I've usually seen either with heavy hangover or outright drunk/drugged) called this 'drugs and hookers -driven sales' (or something aong these lines), and were extremely successful in getting the new contracts signed.

~20 years ago I was a sales engineer to the extremely good salesman. We had submitted a substantial quote followed by invoice to one of the tier I carriers in US, but for reason or the other, it wouldn't get processed / paid. Rumor has it that the (now retired) VP blocking the payment at carrier in roundabout ways told to our sales exec that he will be going to Toronto at a given date and that he has never spent a night with sisters. Allegedly arrangements were made, and as soon as he was back, that PO was approved.

Till today, I do not know if that's how it expired. The salesman never admitted to anything. And in all ways he was one the most organized and professional salesman I've ever worked with. And in that vain, I want to believe this is how it also happened.

I was also a sales engineer 20 years ago. There was a ton of drinking involved, but never anything wilder. I was honestly a bit surprised how tame the after-hours excursions were given what I'd heard from friends at other companies with similar clients. Ability to drink heavily was a requirement of anyone on the sales team though.

I did get a lot of nice dinners and bbq lunches. Seriously, every client had a favorite bbq place they had to show off. Weird in retrospect.

It is really nice that they got him in touch with his estranged family!

Never spent a night with sisters? Just to clarify, was that literal?

I think sister here means prostitute, but I'm not native English either.

He wanted two prostitutes that were related, i.e. sisters.

I guess it was.

Sister prostitutes probably. Maybe not 100% legal.

*in that vein

I think he meant “transpired”, too, not “expired”.

I think this is not uncommon, even nowadays. Noone likes to admit it because being politically correct and stuff. Even at company parties at big corporations, some Sales and Marketing folks tend go a bit overboard - and employees hooking up with each isn't unusual during such festivities either.

> employees hooking up with each isn't unusual Of course they do. Employees are not slaves. They are free to bond as they like.

Isn't this a cultural difference in the US that's different from Europe, in that colleagues don't get involved?

The problem is that in the current #metoo environment, that would be taking a massive legal risk. Sweden recently passed a legislation that requires a proof of consent, or otherwise treats any sexual relationship as rape by default...

I have seen this a few times here on HN and it's just totally incorrect. The new law still places the burden of proving that consent was not given on the victim. Some papers reported it incorrectly but have published corrections.

First result on google: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/consent-law-r...

I don't have a view on whether this reflects the Swedish law correctly but if it does, I don't believe that changes anything nor that I am incorrect. Unless the other party established explicit, provable consent (he says-she says won't help in court), we are in absence of consent, and therefore rape territory. You can't prove absence of anything.

Colleagues get involved a lot, but it's often fraught/stigmatized--but not too much. Most Europeans I know feel similarly: it happens, but is a less-than-great idea for a lot of reasons, chief among them that if it goes badly you might still end up having to work closely with the person, or choose between them and the job.

It's extremely common, they just keep it quiet from HR. If they end up getting married it becomes known and is acceptable in the open.

> Even at company parties at big corporations, some Sales and Marketing folks tend go a bit overboard - and employees hooking up with each isn't unusual during such festivities either.

Heh, you should see company parties in northern Europe.

I think that's largely a myth or at least an exaggeration. I've worked in both Norway and Sweden (and currently live in Sweden) and I've never seen an office party get even close to going way overboard. Office parties in the US and the UK I've seen have been 'worse'.

I work in a Fortune500 company in a Nordic branch.

It's extremely easy to hook up. There's like a mentality that "since you work here" you're already pre-screened :)

Summer parties at the office often devolve into something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIf1fydxrfo

Global gatherings are, indeed, very crazy.

Maybe it's something like this: "If you can't be corrupt anymore, at least you can be sexually corrupt!"

It's extremely easy to hook up.

Sure, but in my experience most of those hookups happen normally and after normal adult interactions, and not as the unintended fallout of an out of control party.

Prescreened?

By hr:)

>I've worked in both Norway and Sweden (and currently live in Sweden) and I've never seen an office party get even close to going way overboard

Perhaps you're not invited to the good ones...

Well, that has been my secret fear since I was about 13...

Same here, so I can't really feel much superior :-)

Maybe it's more of a Danish thing but that description is pretty accurate of the parties here: getting blackout drunk and hooking up is bread and butter.

You do know that this is normal don't you? Very tame by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't know. After we were bought by a west coast company the stories like that stopped. While I worked with sales teams, I also worked with engineering teams so I wasn't on the front lines in that way. Did the events end, I don't know.

God bless the best coast.

Extremely normal for sales (in my experience)

Totally. My dad worked in sales at IBM and it seemed like a regular occurrence to take clients to strip clubs. This all happened on huge 10-100+ million dollar contracts and of course was all charged to the company credit card.

This is true.

> I turned down several invites to such activities and got the usual gay jokes behind my back.

I'm surprised they didn't just invite you to a place that caters for both.

I think you missed the point; he didn't turn down the invites because he's gay, they called him gay because he turned down the invites...

I think you missed the obvious joke

If you've been to Thailand, there's no reason for it to be said jokingly, at all.

Yeah, I didn't mean it disparagingly or jokingly. Some places in Thailand quite openly cater to all proclivities. (Once when I was backpacking there, some guy came out of a side alley and approached me saying "young girls, beautiful girls!" and when I said no thank you, immediately switched to "young boys, beautiful boys?")

So this automatically excludes any woman, I guess?

Anecdotally not the only dodgy business practice that excludes women. In Europe some companies (often state-owned) or public administrations are known to be free-masonry strongholds, and being a member of the right lodge is pretty much a necessary step to progress a career. Problem: despite pretending to be progressive, most lodges are either men or women only.

FWIW there is much disapproval in East Asia of these antics, and the guanxi culture emanating from China.

Sadly American business culture seems to be also drinking these guanxi- and gravitas-obsessed kool aids, and less disapproving (from what I have seen) than East Asia.

Others who are more connected and experienced would know more than I do.

>FWIW there is much disapproval in East Asia of these antics, and the guanxi culture emanating from China.

"Disapproval" in the same way that some groups were for tee-totalling in the US. Some small minority is against the practices, but they are extremely prevalent all across Asia (and China has little to do with it, besides being the new big customer in lots of those cases -- Japanese do the same kind of stuff, Koreans, etc.).

I don't know, corruption and prostitution is pretty easy to find in SEA and China, even in SG, but it's not that way in East Asia in my experience.

Even in Hong Kong I find you're likely to run into people who say something like: "Mainlanders just want to be successful through making some deals with their friends, we aren't like that."

>Even in Hong Kong I find you're likely to run into people who say something like: "Mainlanders just want to be successful through making some deals with their friends, we aren't like that."

Isn't Hong Kong known for it's prostitution scene?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Hong_Kong#Hist...

I think what those HKese wanted was to distinguish themselves from their more uncultivated mainlanders (like a yankee vs redneck thing, but with being an ex-British Colony thrown in).

Otherwise, HK has long before uniting with China been known as a haven for prostitution, smuggling, drugs, and so on. The archetypical "seedy harbor town". I doubt very much has changed since...

Then there's the westerners there, that could be even worse:

"The first time I walked down the main drag in Wan Chai in Hong Kong, I couldn't believe what I saw; all the mama bars there and prostitutes openly in the street outside trying to get guys to go in. Within the first week I'd already been offered cocaine, though I didn't take it at that stage. When I did, it was easy to get. I know 100 guys between the ages of 20 and 50, and I'd say around 30 of them were regular cocaine users. Not all were working in banking, but most were, of the ones I knew. They were all Westerners."

https://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/03/world/asia/hong-kong-bank...

East Asians are self-aware enough not to flaunt their dealings to foreigners, since they know how up-tight foreigners are about such things.

I've lived in Korea for many years, spent a lot of time in Japan, and do a lot of business in Hong Kong. Prostitution, particularly in room salon settings, is the primary setting for most intra-Asian business. Business drinking volumes are also off the charts, particularly in Korea.

I just know about the heavy drinking, which yea is how it is in SK and Japan.

Perhaps I'm naive or not important enough to know about these things. In SEA the prostitution is in your face and even in SG they will stand streetsidr asking you to come in; but in East Asia it must all be behind closed doors I guess because I've just never been privy to that sort of thing.

I'm likely biased in my experiences because I'm not into those types of things personally, would never use a prostitute.

>but in East Asia it must all be behind closed doors I guess because I've just never been privy to that sort of thing.

Sorry, but what do you mean with "East Asia"? China is East Asia, and this is very much a thing. So is Korea and Japan.

"Since Japanese law defines prostitution as "intercourse with an unspecified person in exchange for payment," most fūzoku offer only non-coital services, such as conversation, dancing, or bathing, to remain legal.[2] Nevertheless, polls by MiW and the National Women's Education Center of Japan have found that between 20% and 40% of Japanese men have paid for sex."

" Kabukicho, an entertainment and red-light district in Shinjuku, Tokyo, measures only 0.34 km2, and has approximately 3,500 sex parlors, strip theaters, peep shows, "soaplands", 'lovers' banks, porno shops, sex telephone clubs, karaoke bars and clubs, etc.[32] (...) It was reported in 2003 that as many as 150,000 non-Japanese women were then involved in prostitution in Japan."

I just meant East Asia excepting China/NK

If your stats are true that 20-40% of Japanese men have paid for sex than I am incredibly naive, however I dont believe the stats are that high

Isn't this pretty common in East Asia though? I've heard similar stories about South Korea, and the salaryman culture there is supposed to be pretty bad.

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