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Comment by pertymcpert | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone care about having a beer at lunch? Is that unusual?

Because "keeping it reasonable" doesn't scale so BigCos frequently dis-allow drinking during/immediately prior to work as a blanket policy in order to have grounds for firing anyone who does it to excess.

Also drinking on lunch break is unprofessional (even if you don't do it to excess) in a lot of blue collar fields. How many white collar people lamenting the lack of beer at lunch would turn around and lose their shit if their crane operator had a couple beers? That's a double standard no workplace needs.

Well there is safety critical work, it's not hypocritical that we dont allow drinking where we know it kills people.

Whats hypocritical is that safety critical work pays worse than being a useless busybody with an inflated title.

Gotta remember, the Americans are extremely prudish.

For a country that introduced the concept of talking in elevators and urinals? I'd say drinking in the afternoon is a lesser evil, if at all.

I guess we're digressing, but I don't think the US introduced urinals. And I fail to see how talking in elevators is incompatible with being a prude (or is there some subtle sexual innuendo that's flying over my head here?)

I think they meant “talking in urinals”

Ah, I'm an idiot – thanks :-)

Case in point: A city clerk near where I live recently made the TV news for drinking a Corona during a Zoom meeting.

https://turnto10.com/news/local/woonsocket-city-clerk-seen-d...

"A bad look", that's so stupid. Who the hell cares if you have a beer? It's not like you're chugging a bottle of whiskey.

Where I work no one would even blink. I typically turn my camera off when eating, but I don't think anyone would care if I didn't.

Seriously, this is a firing offense at my company.

It mostly centers around driving company vehicles in writing but the company makes no effort to hide the religious roots right on the public website.

I've lived all over the United States. The local culture varies drastically. Where I work, no one would even blink if I opened a beer in the office, let alone on a video call. They typically send us DoorDash vouchers whenever we have to do lunch calls.

Gotta remember, some humans will eagerly paint another group with a broad brush due to jealousy, fear or ignorance.

You forget that the US is incredibly heterogenous and the distribution of moral flavors varies widely. I have found Europeans to be prudish in certain domains when compared to mass US opinions (e.g. relatively conservative attitudes toward casual drug use in Scandinavia)

Made me chuckle too. In Montreal or Frankfurt the question would be "Why would you have lunch without your favourite beverage"?

The Puritans influence seems to have a long reach. (?)

Not in a casual setting, but when you're on lunch break and going back to work/a conference/whatever else you're doing professionally after that, it is unusual (and not only in the US, even the Germans, who love beer, tend to only indulge in it after "Feierabend").

At least in Bavaria, it's perfectly acceptable to have a beer mixed with lemonade ("Radler") during lunch.

Got taken over by a foreign company, first thing was a complete ban on alcohol, second was an attempt to replace all our systems with Windows. We produce software for Linux, our customers run Linux, the first few weeks were not very impressive.

Saw another corporate takeover from another point of view, that of the acquiring company. The company being acquired used Windows, C#, MSSQL etc for everything. At first nothing was changed, they could use their technology and we could use ours (we used free open source technologies). But they weren't very profitable or efficient. They paid large amounts of money for licenses. Some years later they had managed to move some of their stuff to the cloud but they were now in that particular cloud vendor lock in, paying a lot of fees there. Five years later, almost everything there was shut down and development moved to headquarters to be done with almost a blank slate by mostly new hires.

Buying companies is hard. I'm pretty sure this was a big net negative for the buyer.

I accept that it isn't easy and the requirements were lessened, weeks after they tried to enforce them. One of my dev. systems now dual boots into windows, it will probably be stuck in update hell if I ever need it.

In London it seems to be that if the pints get too many and your boss is with you, you don't return to work :)

My team is in Canada. When I visited them (pre-pandemic) it was routine for the group to have a beer at lunch and maybe even two on a Friday. I've literally never seen anyone do that on any team I've worked on in the States and I've heard it both implied and stated directly, depending on the boss, that doing so could lead to termination. I ordered a beer a few times on those trips and it felt scandalous!

Yeah, the lunch beer is gently frowned upon in most places in the US.

I come from a country where lunch is a sandwich behind your computer. Sounds bad but it means you get to clock out at 5.

Five isn't early though..

It can be.

If it is five in the morning yes. Otherwise early would be earlier than the norm which in most of the world is four (16).

In that industry, yes.

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