Sobriety for Engineers — 60-day Protocol Built for High-Stress Tech Culture
This is the core specification. It makes sobriety the default branch — through ship weeks, post-mortems, and the office keg — until not-drinking stops being a decision you re-make every night.
In tech, drinking is culture. Happy hours, post-launch parties, bonding over beers. You started using alcohol to deal with stress and now you can't ship without it.
informative · cohort median · n=1,840
This memo specifies a recovery protocol for engineers and PMs (ages 28–45). It is written for review, not belief: every requirement is testable, every result reported, every slip logged as a regression. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Conformance is voluntary and self-paced over its 60-day window.
Not character flaws. A small set of recurring conditions with one lazy handler bolted to all of them. If any of these appear in your week, this memo was written for you.
You drink before big launches to calm anxiety. You drink after failures to numb shame. You drink because everyone else in tech drinks. 'Work hard, play hard' means drinking is identity, not choice.
handler: alcohol() — see §2
Your company has a keg in the office. Your team goes to happy hour 3x/week. Everyone's doing it. You can't just opt out without being weird. So you keep drinking and your tolerance keeps going up.
handler: alcohol() — see §2
You're worried about your health (liver panels, weight), your productivity (brain fog, hangovers), your future (early mortality). But stopping feels impossible because it's so woven into tech culture.
handler: alcohol() — see §2
Observe the triggers, replace the function, review like a retro — the loop you already run on shipping software, pointed for once at the thing draining you.
NOTE. The key words MUST, SHOULD, and MAY are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [1].
Your company drinks. That doesn't mean you have to. We map your triggers: Which situations make you drink? Work stress? Social pressure? Boredom? Loneliness? We build alternatives for each.
You still go to happy hours. You just drink club soda and lime (looks like a drink). Or you go for the first 30 minutes, then leave. Or you skip it. You decide. The protocol makes it normal.
What happened this week? What worked? What didn't? Root cause: was it the protocol, or was it a harder week? We iterate. Like actual debugging.
You do not have a willpower bug. You have one overloaded handler catching every exception. This matrix registers a required behavior per situation, so the bottle stops being the default catch.
| situation | required behavior | level |
|---|---|---|
| pre-launch anxiety | run the 10-min reset before you reach for a drink | MUST |
| team happy hour | show up; club soda and lime; leave when you are done | SHOULD |
| client dinner | one drink is permitted; zero is cleaner | MAY |
| post-incident / bad ship | write the post-mortem sober; log the urge in the retro | MUST |
| drinking alone to numb | ping the cohort thread or call one person instead | MUST NOT |
| on-call week | protocol holds; no streak penalty for a hard week | SHOULD |
conformance is self-reported in the weekly retro · slips are regressions, not failures
Long enough for sobriety to stop being a project and become how your weeks compile. Each checkpoint below is a tagged release; even a bad week is a regression entry, not a relapse.
You've survived 2–3 team happy hours sober. You found that people don't care as much as you think they do. Productivity is noticeably up. Brain fog is clearing.
Sobriety becomes the default branch. It holds through a ship week, an on-call rotation, and a launch that slips — without a relapse.
Sobriety is normal now. You still go to social events but you're in control. Health markers improved (liver, weight, sleep). You're shipping better code.
Three engineers, three cycles, one specification. Handles anonymized; roles and deltas reported as run.
“I do not adopt anything I cannot read first. This was the only program that handed me a spec instead of a slogan. I reviewed it, found it sound, and shipped it.”
“The conformance matrix did the work. “Client dinner: one MAY, zero SHOULD” — once it was written down, it stopped being a negotiation every single time.”
“Treating a slip as a regression with a changelog entry, not a moral failure, is the only framing that ever held for me. We root-caused the week, not my character.”
Every one of these has come up in review before. Straight answers, no fine print, no shame copy.
Some might notice. Most won't care. The ones who do care are probably struggling with their own drinking. You model something better by simply not participating.
status: resolved
You're a professional. You can have one drink and stop. Or zero. Clients respect competence, not how drunk you get. If they judge you for drinking responsibly, that's a red flag about the client.
status: resolved
You'll sleep better, think better, remember your nights better. That's better fun. The 'we were so wasted' stories get old around age 30 anyway.
status: resolved
Cutting back doesn't work for some people. This is about stopping, not moderating. Different approach, different outcome. Give full abstinence 30 days and see what happens.
status: resolved
A 60-day specification that survives a launch week and an on-call rotation — because it was written to. The quiz takes two minutes, maps your real triggers, and returns a candid 60-day specification you can run solo or with a cohort. No higher power, no shame copy, no upsell mid-quiz.