Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2016lv | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016lv

I visited Zappos HQ with a university group in 2016. As part of the tour, we visited the executive area, where they all sat in cubicles/rows like anyone else's. They even pointed out Tony's desk, though he wasn't around at the time.

I came away from that tour with two distinct impressions: 1 - Zappos had an amazing company culture; everyone seemed to get along and really enjoy their work. 2 - Tony Hsieh had a surprisingly large collection of half-empty liquor bottles at his desk.

Tony's death is certainly a tragedy for his family and the communities he helped build. I hope even during this pandemic we can all maintain those key relationships in life that keep us in check.

View on HN

>>Tony Hsieh had a surprisingly large collection of half-empty liquor bottles at his desk.

Not just Tony.

My best friend used to work at Zappos. He used to brag to me that every employee/team gets their own mini-fridge, which is stocked with booze and liquor. He said that a common "bonding" experience for different teams in the company is to exchange different types of liquor. This was in early 2010s.

He said drinking on the job is common, but going overboard is discouraged (for obvious reasons). But even he admitted that Zappos clearly understood that in order to attract customer service people to the company (headquartered in Las Vegas), being able to drink on the job, i.e. during the day, would be a great recruitment tool.

I thought it was very cynical, although it obviously worked out well for them. Too bad about Tony though, I hear he was a great guy.

Startups usually have fridge full of booze. We usually use it on fridays or during certain major milestones. Not a big deal

This was the case for most teams I worked on at Google too; I would have an afternoon beer and work from the couch near the mini-fridge at least once a week (I was in my early 20s, so this was less impairing than it probably would be now), and people would usually join me, though not everyone would drink.

That being said, a mini-fridge of booze _per-employee_ is pretty unusual.

SRE was particularly notorious for this.

> every employee/team gets their own mini-fridge

That's not startup normal. Maybe having beer and liquor bottles in the kitchen or snack room or whatever but half empty bottles littering the CEO's desk and every employee or even every team having their own mini-fridge is odd.

I've worked at startups with a "drinking culture" and startups with a "board game culture" and I'll take the board game culture every time. Doesn't mean you can't let loose and drink, too - but drinking as the central activity quickly turns a business into a frat house. I do have some great memories celebrating milestones, new hires, etc with early stage coworkers :D

I’d add that casual alcohol use being normalized is not necessary or positive.

Alcohol use among high school seniors in the US is on the decline, so is use of any “illicit” drug. [1]

I’m no square, but this should be encouraged.

Young people already deal with stress of fitting in at a high-velocity workplace.

Modeling conspicuous substance consumption at work seems pretty backward to me.

Perhaps the most irresponsible illustration of this is Elon Musk who has made his substance use so overt I think it wrongly and perhaps dangerously couples using to entrepreneurial success.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/26/the-concern...

> Alcohol use among high school seniors in the US is on the decline, so is use of any “illicit” drug.

Sounds wholesome, but is probably just the symptom of people going out and socializing less, resulting in increased isolation and loneliness.

hard to say. looking at me and my friends - we've got more time to socialize, plenty of friends, yet people drink less, and definitely use less tobacco(it's really unsexy to smoke cigarettes now, and vaping in public is just embarrassing), because we're more health focused. I have to admit I'm a regular user of psychedelics. drugs are decriminalized where I'm from. unless there will be long term consequences, i don't think it impacted me in any bad way, frankly the opposite, albeit "wasting" some time with friends.

According to Pew, teen alcohol consumption has been in decline since 1997.

> Perhaps the most irresponsible illustration of this is Elon Musk who has made his substance use so overt I think it wrongly and perhaps dangerously couples using to entrepreneurial success.

oh come off it, what substance abuse? he toked on a blunt on JRE once (clearly barely inhaled and even then, so what) and has a few bourbons with his brother on yearly retreats? please provide more info about this, because i've never, ever taken musk to be that sort of guy.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/872260000491593728

Ah yes a glass of red wine is "substance use", as a French that's a good one.

From a french to another, a glass of red wine spiced up with benzos absolutely is substance use, and an extremely dangerous kind.

My bad, I read "Ambient" and thought it was the kind of records he listened to...

Think the supposed problem here is mixing wine with sleeping pills.

Yeah I missed that part, didn't know about "Ambien" and thought it was "Ambient" music with a typo

It's cool when you're in your 20s but not so much when you get older.

It becomes less and less cool as you age, because that is when you learn how many of cool adults you grew up with were hidden-to-you alcoholics or turned into full blown alcoholics. And as you age people speak more freely about negative things that happened all along you had no idea about as a kid and young one.

It becomes less and less cool as you age and realize you really gotta be careful not to go the same route.

A small startup where my friend worked (~200 employees) ended up locking up their liquor cabinet except for Friday afternoons. Sadly, one of the employees was alcoholic and was going there too often.

If you watched Valley of the Boom, the Netscape build team sections talk about the booze culture. This has persisted into SRE team culture. This is not new. I agree, no big deal.

Wait what are you kidding!? Drinking DURING the day was encouraged? So the famed company culture is to let everyone get drunk as long as they're all hitting targets? Recipe for disaster for anyone who stays a significant amount of time. It seems cool when you're young then after 10 years people start getting serious problems like alcoholic neuropathy. Very sad situation all round.

I don't think they meant binge drinking. In many cultures, drinking is fine throughout the day, and it does not imply continuing until drunk.

What's the point in drinking any alcohol at all unless you want to achieve some level of impairment?

Some people do enjoy the taste, or the warming feel you get. I will sometimes have a small glass of whiskey in the evening just for that sensation, not to feel any intoxication.

The warming feeling is mild intoxication?

No. Intoxication is generally considered to be mental impairment or a change of mental state, like mood, inhibition, etc. The warming feeling you get from alcohol is due to alcohol dilating blood vessels, moving more warm blood to your extremities and skin. It is a real physical reaction, not a mental perception. So while you might also be intoxicated, the warm feeling is not intoxication per se.

If it’s giving you a physical reaction then it’s also going to give you a mental one. They go hand in hand

Well, no. It is a drug and drugs do different things to different systems at different levels. You can't just assert that a drug must be doing B because it is doing A at the exact same dosage.

I've worked a few times in Germany for onboarding new teams for a company I worked at previously. It's pretty normal to have some lunches with a beer, beer is a very cultural thing for Germans and having a beer during a lunch out with the team is completely normal, no one is impaired, no one is drinking 2-3 liters of beer in one sitting. Even here in Sweden where alcohol drinking is much more frowned upon I've had lunches (usually on Fridays) with my teams where we would have a beer or two.

There are very different degrees of what and how much to drink, it can be a socially responsible and enjoyable activity, it's relaxing to let go from the whole super-professional office culture and have a beer and cheers with colleagues.

The world isn't black-and-white.

I live in Germany and I don't drink beer at lunch. I never worked anywhere where people did. People drink beer for a buzz. I also have a beer at work on a Friday if I'm in the office but no work is getting done after it. I especially disagree that it is relaxing to have a beer at lunch and then go back to work and unless you are planning on doing nothing for the rest of the day.

This comment belies a misunderstanding of how alcohol affects the body - that it merely creates a gradient from "not impaired" to "impaired".

Clearly there is more to alcohol than just impairment. Alcohol is both a stimulant and a sedative. It's widely recognized as a social lubricant. All of these properties, in moderation, can be beneficial to many kinds of work.

You get sleepy after one beer. Horrible feeling. I mean it’s nice at first but not for long.

Obligatory apropos xkcd...

https://xkcd.com/323/

Studies have shown that light drinking has a positive effect on work performance, especially in creative areas. I had no idea that this was frowned upon and I'm from Texas, but that's probably just because I've lived my entire life in tech. Lots of startups provide copious access to booze and some even have full bars onsite. IIRC, oil executives drank liquor back in the day as well.

The situation with Tsieh is really sad and probably not a result of him being an alcoholic or drinking at work or anything else. Depression rates have tripled during the pandemic, and deaths are way up from overdose caused by people coping with isolation.

And this is supposed to be the company we look up to for guidance on building a culture?

Not to mention its failed experiment with holocracy, which is a great way to de facto promote the worst.[1]

[1] https://pando.com/2016/01/19/delivering-hopelessness-38-zapp...

IMO holocracy can work, just not in a capitalist corporate environment. Money is power and people don't forget that because management throw buzzwords around.

At AWS we had (still have?) Tatonka nights, where you go to a fast-food place (was it the Wingdome in Seattle?) and you race to eat 25 fried chicken wings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com