> every employee/team gets their own mini-fridge

That's not startup normal. Maybe having beer and liquor bottles in the kitchen or snack room or whatever but half empty bottles littering the CEO's desk and every employee or even every team having their own mini-fridge is odd.

I've worked at startups with a "drinking culture" and startups with a "board game culture" and I'll take the board game culture every time. Doesn't mean you can't let loose and drink, too - but drinking as the central activity quickly turns a business into a frat house. I do have some great memories celebrating milestones, new hires, etc with early stage coworkers :D

I’d add that casual alcohol use being normalized is not necessary or positive.

Alcohol use among high school seniors in the US is on the decline, so is use of any “illicit” drug. [1]

I’m no square, but this should be encouraged.

Young people already deal with stress of fitting in at a high-velocity workplace.

Modeling conspicuous substance consumption at work seems pretty backward to me.

Perhaps the most irresponsible illustration of this is Elon Musk who has made his substance use so overt I think it wrongly and perhaps dangerously couples using to entrepreneurial success.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/26/the-concern...

> Alcohol use among high school seniors in the US is on the decline, so is use of any “illicit” drug.

Sounds wholesome, but is probably just the symptom of people going out and socializing less, resulting in increased isolation and loneliness.

hard to say. looking at me and my friends - we've got more time to socialize, plenty of friends, yet people drink less, and definitely use less tobacco(it's really unsexy to smoke cigarettes now, and vaping in public is just embarrassing), because we're more health focused. I have to admit I'm a regular user of psychedelics. drugs are decriminalized where I'm from. unless there will be long term consequences, i don't think it impacted me in any bad way, frankly the opposite, albeit "wasting" some time with friends.

According to Pew, teen alcohol consumption has been in decline since 1997.

> Perhaps the most irresponsible illustration of this is Elon Musk who has made his substance use so overt I think it wrongly and perhaps dangerously couples using to entrepreneurial success.

oh come off it, what substance abuse? he toked on a blunt on JRE once (clearly barely inhaled and even then, so what) and has a few bourbons with his brother on yearly retreats? please provide more info about this, because i've never, ever taken musk to be that sort of guy.

Ah yes a glass of red wine is "substance use", as a French that's a good one.

From a french to another, a glass of red wine spiced up with benzos absolutely is substance use, and an extremely dangerous kind.

My bad, I read "Ambient" and thought it was the kind of records he listened to...

Think the supposed problem here is mixing wine with sleeping pills.

Yeah I missed that part, didn't know about "Ambien" and thought it was "Ambient" music with a typo

It's cool when you're in your 20s but not so much when you get older.

It becomes less and less cool as you age, because that is when you learn how many of cool adults you grew up with were hidden-to-you alcoholics or turned into full blown alcoholics. And as you age people speak more freely about negative things that happened all along you had no idea about as a kid and young one.

It becomes less and less cool as you age and realize you really gotta be careful not to go the same route.

This was the case for most teams I worked on at Google too; I would have an afternoon beer and work from the couch near the mini-fridge at least once a week (I was in my early 20s, so this was less impairing than it probably would be now), and people would usually join me, though not everyone would drink.

That being said, a mini-fridge of booze _per-employee_ is pretty unusual.

SRE was particularly notorious for this.

A small startup where my friend worked (~200 employees) ended up locking up their liquor cabinet except for Friday afternoons. Sadly, one of the employees was alcoholic and was going there too often.

If you watched Valley of the Boom, the Netscape build team sections talk about the booze culture. This has persisted into SRE team culture. This is not new. I agree, no big deal.