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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

We all agree that building a better internet is important, but do the suggested policies actually lead to better products? Will the diversity gained from a "no well-actually" policy outweigh the quality lost from people being unwilling to suggest improvements? Are the gains from a team drinking together bigger or smaller than those from having people who wouldn't join such a team?

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So I think the no "well-actually" policy is because people saying "well actually" prevents people suggesting improvements because they don't want to say something that might sound stupid. The hacker school manual goes into greater detail.

Having teambuilding events around drinking increases homogeneity, because that kind of event is most attractive to your average 20-something white male, and least attractive to a lot of other groups (e.g. people who don't drink from preference or religion, people who don't want to hang around with drunk people for various reasons etc). So the gains from diversifying team building should far outweigh the loss of this one narrow kind of event.

>> "Are the gains from a team drinking together bigger or smaller than those from having people who wouldn't join such a team?"

Why does the team have to drink together? Why not go out for dinner, play pool, have an office BBQ? I like to drink but I've never wanted to do it with my superiors. The risks involved if it goes wrong (i.e. you get too drunk and say something stupid) are too high.

Drinking together builds trust in a way that sober events don't, precisely because of those "risks". Doing it regularly creates an environment where it's much harder for parts of the team to lie (maybe not even intentionally) or keep secrets from each other, and it adds a channel of communication where criticism is more welcome or at least excusable/deniable. When I've seen companies fail it's largely been because communication broke down and the people on one end knew what the people on the other end were doing wrong but had no way to tell them.

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