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Comment by EnKopVand | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that have changed quite significantly in our life time is that you can’t drink or be drunk at work anymore.

I worked a decade in the public sector, and some of my older coworkers (they are 55-60) now could tell stories from when the server room was genuinely used to take naps when people needed to sober up a little. And this was everyone from the craftsman workers to the mayor.

It’s sort of how you see a picture from people sitting in a cinema in the 80ies with cigarettes lit, it’s so foreign to most of us that it’s crazy to think that this was the norm a few decades ago.

Obviously more people are going to take their drinking home when the drinking doesn’t start at work, and now that we’ve been through a few lockdowns our habits have changed quite a bit as well.

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Sometimes I’ll go out to a coffee shop around lunchtime and one of the nearby coffee shops is next door to a pub. By about 1pm on most weekdays that pub is usually packed with people wearing suits (or who were likely wearing suits but removed their jackets). It’s a bit a mystery to me what sort of jobs they have where that is acceptable.

Nobody can get drunk from couple of beers ... especially the colored spring water they sell in the UK.

The beer in the UK is quite strong though compared to Spain where I live now where it's basically all lager.

Where do you live where it is considered really weak?

Eastern Europe. Not that our beer is much stronger but we don't bother to consider it alcohol. It's just something you drink during the day.

I’m definitely at the tired, unmotivated, and imprecise stage after one 5% beer.

I assumed it's estate agents and if London the old school insurance guys like at Lloyd's. Otherwise the back office folks like accountants that no one checks on :)

It wasn't even that long ago, in 2011-2012 i worked at a place which "pub lunched" multiple times a week. Hell, our yearly IT budget had its 1st draft written in a bar on a Tuesday morning.

The world has changed but it came to some industries far faster then others. Advertising and Marketing seemed to be the biggest hold outs.

> Advertising and Marketing seemed to be the biggest hold outs.

I'm working in that area on the tech side. Most corporate places these days are dead, soulless paper pushing jobs manned by drones. In contrast, the advertising, marketing and entertainment (movies, music, ...) industry depends on their people not being mindless drones, so they are heavily incentivized to allow their employees whatever they need to get their job done.

Obviously that has led to a number of issues, particularly with sexualized aggression and abuses of power/authority (#metoo being just the tip of the iceberg), so we're seeing some of the freedoms of the holdouts being taken back... but I'm pretty confident the industry as a whole will not be "corporate transformed" any time in the near future.

In the eighties and nineties it was certainly the case that Friday lunchtime was nearly always spent in the pub - other days also, but less frequently so. In one particular project this effectively turned into a four and a half day week, and the expression 'going back to the office to log off / collect my coat' became a running joke. This was software development but in many other industries, particularly creative ones, this was very much the norm. In my experience this started to change mid-late nineties.

As others have commented, the symbiotic bond with the boozer that was ingrained in the culture has largely vanished, and young people in the UK would rather hang out with their friends in other places and ways, and drink far less than their elders did/do.

Although it's the common explanation that young people just don't do that anymore. I think it's one of the symptoms of the fact that younger generations just don't have the disposable cash anymore to go out.

There are also competing activities ie. the growth of the fitness industry. People have made habits of working out at the gym after work. I could never imagine not having a fitness/athletic/martial arts hobby in my life, and thus I reduce drug/alcohol/bad food consumption to optimize for performance in those hobbies.

I don't think it is just the disposable income. As competition has become more global there is far more stress to be at the top or stay at the top which tends toward trying to optimize all sorts of choices.

In my high school years, if you were smart enough you aced everything and that was all. Our valedictorian had a rowdy social life and there were few ideas that you had to show any real skills to the level expected in a local member of industry then, let alone today.

I remember this, back when I was working in the 90s, I worked with some ex BT engineers, they would go to the pub practically every lunch time. I soon learned to curtail it myself as I found myself coming across as overly aggressive in emails.

After that, I got a job where my mentor was a borderline alcoholic, we were always travelling for work, he would take customers out for long lunches pretty much every day, 3-4 pints was normal, then, in the evenings, he always seemed to know a pub where he could get a lock in, I was hungover a lot of the time.

"Bordline alcoholic..."

Sometimes I'm just impressed by people who can drink that much and hold down a job, especially past the age of 25. Assuming the neighborhood fireworks stop within an hour, I'll get about six hours of sober sleep. I already know tomorrow will be a little tougher. I can't imagine going from lunch to lock-in and then going to work the next day.

> I can't imagine going from lunch to lock-in and then going to work the next day.

For a very long time in history, the pace of work was more tolerable: most in the "upper chain" were people who worked the shit jobs at the beginning of their careers themselves instead of by clueless MBAs who joined management right after university, had utterly no idea what the worker base was doing and only were able to crunch numbers and rule by fear. Also, there usually was no computerized database or other way on which to track efficiency of workers, which means that the expected pace was effectively set by the workers themselves - and they accounted for having had a couple beers the night before, since that was was everyone did, and no one wanted to be the one arsehole that ratted out everyone else to management.

The first change was anything that could be industrialized, where the pace of work was dictated by the machines, which obviously led to (sometimes extremely violent) strikes and literal labor fights. Classic trades and office jobs still ran under the "old order of things" for decades. And then, maybe a decade ago, the age of IT began - now everyone and their dog employs efficiency-gaming at all parts of the chain, and here we have a problem for the mentioned old guard.

Obviously, a part of the "efficiency gains" of the last decades was cutting down on actual laziness or on mind-blowingly complex processes. But the way things are going, I think people will want an "out" to better times in the past - basically, capitalism is once again going to discover it the hard way that people are humans, not machines, and as such need frequent downtime to mentally relax, even if it's just a beer or cigarette breaks.

When you are used to it a couple of pints won’t even phase you. As a consultant I remember going out to have drinks with my coworker around 8pm and going back to the office at 11pm to finish a presentation. It was very much business as usual but to be honest I was basically working all the time when I was not partying. Some of the people there clearly were bordering functional alcoholism but that was part of the culture.

My first job out of university was with a local news group. The canteen had a bar which was pretty busy throughout the week. It seemed pretty much accepted that if you were a cricket reporter, for example, you’d spend most of the day in a beer tent. We worked in the digital media department watching as the internet ate the classified ads industry, wondering how all this could be sustainable.

Anyway their pension scheme later collapsed.

Children of the 60s and 70s were probably the last in the UK that could get away with long lunches, client meetings in the pub and no work Friday's. I worked in IT sales and marketing in my twenties and saw this quite often and it was only until I started working at places where things were more 'agile' that a tee-total culture kicked in.

My first job (in my gap year) in the mid 80s was in the research labs of a major chemical corporation. There was an onsite bar next to the canteen. A pint on a Friday lunchtime was the done thing... then back to working with all sorts of nasty chemicals!

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