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Comment by alfon | Hacker News Reader

Not much different than a fully stocked fridge with alcoholic beverages. Consume responsibly, we're all adults.

I agree to a point. Although, alcohol (when consumed responsibly) has a social element to it, so companies having a "beers on Friday after 4pm" just feels different than "here's nicotine so you can be more productive and make us more money." They are serving different functions.

> just feels different than "here's nicotine so you can be more productive and make us more money."

More likely these companies just offered to give them some free vending machines and some office manager said sure why not. Not everything is a careful corporate strategy.

Beers on Friday after 4pm is rarely done because management really cares about the employees. It's a type of team building, improves employee morale and humanizes management. All lead to improved productivity in the long term.

If my boss gives me a stimulant to be more productive, especially a relatively harmless one like nicotine, I would gladly take it, as I like stimulants and am an adult capable of making decisions for myself. If I didn't, I would just refuse, just how I might refuse the free coffee by boss offers me.

I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants. That would be bad, indeed.

> It's a type of team building, improves employee morale and humanizes management. All lead to improved productivity in the long term.

Yes, but the important distinction is that its intention is to bring people together face-to-face, not isolate them to their desks for continued work. Just because the end goal is "productivity" broadly speaking, doesn't mean the mechanisms are socially/morally equivalent.

> I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants.

I agree, and I hope my comment didn't imply I thought that was the case.

I don't see how offering nicotine (or caffeine, or amphetamine) is morally wrong if it's not mandatory. In fact, given 2 companies that only differ in what they offer - free beer on Fridays for 1 hour or free stimulants all the time - I would choose the second one in a heart beat. Many people wouldn't, and that's their choice. I just don't see how one approach is better ethically than the other at all.

That's unnecessarily cynical. I've been in plenty of companies where the staff, managers included, enjoy going for a pint together. I'm in the UK, maybe it's cultural.

I agree, I made it too black and white. I should've said that some, probably most (in my opinion), of such decisions are made with productivity in mind, whether it's in the form of team cohesiveness or favorable view of management, but some are just because managers have the best interest in mind for their subordinates.

OTOH, if you've witnessed how most managers talk about their employees to one another, it's with a cold calculating language. Sure, a manager may feel bad for firing an employee, but first and foremost is the business analysis of whether it makes sense to do so - just pure math and predictions.

Personally, if I was in a management position and an employee asked me for a cigarette, I would happily give it to them. In fact, a few times a week I give a few cigarettes to 1 person who is not my employee, but who I talk to from time to time. I don't gain anything from this and I give them cigarettes because they are on a tight budget.

Also, if I, as a hypothetical manager, realized a lot of my employees would take an offer for free coffee, cigarettes, pure nicotine, beer or another drug, I would give it to them as long as it didn't hurt productivity too much. Of course some drugs like alcohol could hurt short term productivity, but it would make them happier overall, which would have positive long term effects. If asked why I do this, I would say that I'm both giving them out of my good will and to increase productivity, which would be true.

One could pretty easily argue that free coffee, tea, energy drinks and energy bar snacks are all productivity driven perks.

Tech companies are less receptive to alcohol than they used to be. There was a post (can't find it now) from a VC firm saying something like, "We encourage our companies to throw no alcohol parties; there's less risk of all kinds, and overall it's less messy."

After MeToo it was all gone. A lot of the incidents that were problematic from that era almost all had some alcohol involved.

A fully stocked fridge with alcoholic beverages also doesn't belong in a work place.

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