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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

He should have insinuated being a recovered alcoholic instead, that works for me when I feel I'm being unduly pressured.

As someone who doesn't care for drinks, the quickest way to shut-down all that drinks-are-vital-to-our-culture talk is to declare that I used to have a problem with the drink, but I'm sober now, and watch them stammer something about the event being optional.

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Not the OP, but some people are offended by the mere mention of drinks, and that looked like the case there. I personally don't like to go out for drinks, and this can be detrimental to my career, but I wouldn't impose my preference on others.

Honestly - some people just don't like the feeling (me) and some other people (south east asians in particular) are allergic and overly sensitive to booze. There are really, really easy ways to talk yourself out of drinking situations.

> There are really, really easy ways to talk yourself out of drinking situations.

Absolutely, but in my experience no other reason shuts down attempts at negotiating/cajoling/follow up questions/suggestions to "just show up and grab a soda" faster than pleading the alcoholism. It appears AA gets more unquestioning deference compared to any other personal/health/religious reasons

Makes sense though- when you have a religious objection to alcohol, someone drinking it near you isn't going to cause actual extreme bodily harm to you.

That's fine if it's true, if not, why tell lies?

Just tell them you don't like drinking. We organize the same kind of meetings over at where I work, and if someone says they don't like drinking, we tell them that water is fine, if they say they don't want to join for whatever or no reason, then we say fine and let them know that the meeting will be always open to them.

> That's fine if it's true, if not, why tell lies?

So that we can all skip this step:

> we tell them that water is fine

and jump directly to:

> we say fine and let them know that the meeting will be always open to them.

Good point. We'll change the meeting description to include this note about water (or anything else), this way we can skip the whole conversation and go straight to the meeting.

Isn't a better approach to pick types of meetings that don't have these outcast properties?

It's much easier to take the habits of early employees and call that "Company culture" without considering the reasoning or consequences. If Engineer #1 used to go on drinks on Wednesdays to cope with stress after the weekly release, 100 engineers later it becomes engrained as "company culture" to drink on Wednesdays at the same bar (which was on the way to his home) even though releases are now done on Thursdays and the bar is out of the way for most people.

Is there such a thing? Sometimes it's better to stick with what you like instead of spending days figuring out how to include everyone. We'll just adapt the meeting if we see someone doesn't fit.

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