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Sorry, but I’m bringing my iced coffee to the job interview
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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Ha, I've been following this whole thing and it's just so funny to me. It's such a younger generation thing, maybe I'm older and so I've just "played the game" a lot. The whole thing is should you be able to take your drink of choice? Of course! However, would I do that? Hell freaking no I wouldn't.
Going into an interview from the first glance they're judging you to see if you're a good fit. Granted you're also judging them but let's be honest, it's pretty lopsided. If I go in I want them to see my best foot forward, it means I'm putting on a show for the next hour (or more nowadays) so that you want to hire me. I'm not bringing in anything that alters that view of me. Iced coffee, hot coffee, nothing. Maybe a neat folder of a couple spare resumes and a notebook I can take notes in. I plan ahead, I'll usually be at a coffee shop before the interview anyway (it helps make sure I'm there on time, get there 30-60 mins ahead of time and chill at a coffee shop), and then walk over for the interview.
Bringing a drink or anything extra is just something that now they're thinking about, and you don't want them thinking about you in that way. It's something else that you put on the table, you're taking sips of, for cold drinks it's condensing and leaving a ring, and then you have to ask for a trash. All benign things but again, you're in their house and why would you want to bring any negative attention at all to them? I've had interviewers who were obviously just having bad days say no to me for arbitrary bullshit already, why add to that? It all seems like an unnecessary gamble for no reason at all.
Now if they offer coffee or a drink when you get there (hopefully they do) I'm all for it. They offered, it's free game. Go wild. Just don't get picky.
I know this is a wall of text but I'll also say that as an interviewer I don't care at all if they do, as long as they're professional and it doesn't get in the way. If it's distracting, you're shaking the ice, or slurping out the last bits, or whatever, yeah it's going to distract me. I'm not going to be annoyed because you brought coffee, but I will be annoyed if you aren't appearing to take an interview seriously.
And now unfortunately bringing it after this whole social media thing is basically wearing a target on your... front? face? that says "I'm making a statement" and will absolutely label you a troublemaker to any HR person (because you know every HR person has seen this). It's also probably tainted it for 5-10 years as they'll keep remembering this.
It's wild to say that drinking something will make you look bad to an interviewer. It's even more wild to write paragraphs of text defending it.
Never said I defended it, in fact first thing I said was that you should be able to. I said I've played the game for a long time and have learned the arbitrary rules, and honestly do pretty well in interviews. Feel free to do whatever you want, as I said to others, it's your job prospects, not mine.
I have twelve years of experience working at a bunch of different companies. I'll be okay.
I am a hiring manager for a small engineering team. I don't think I would notice as long as there wasn't extra attention drawn to the drink for some reason.
It's a stupid reason to not hire someone, it's a stupid reason to not get hired. Best to avoid the whole thing. People are so worried about how they should be able to do whatever they want, but people have been passed over for less. If you can afford to miss out on a job, go nuts.
Same. I am going to start talking about how much I fucking love iced coffee in phone screens from now on.
If some HR fuckwit wants to make this a thing then I will allocate a solid portion of my smug to it.
If you accidentally spill coffee everywhere, you've just brought a lot of extra attention to it. Best not to risk it.
as someone who has also been involved hiring for engi roles
i would give zero shits, long as the person was pleasant in resolving the accident
if anything being able to see their behaivor under stress is a good thing
As an engineer, if you were offered drinks and you ask for decaf coffee, you'd probably get judged more than if it was just water. And this is coming from someone that drinks a fair bit of decaf
lord help tour company if tour hiring agents care more about that than ability
it’s because you want a talented individual
this shits from fortune 500 hr gits hiring warm bodies
Having needed to hire for engineering teams, I think the iced coffee would be a big deal if the position was client facing and wouldn't be if it was internal.
The answer for me of "who defines professionalism" is the client. If the effective end client is me, I don't care. I'm pretty lax and chill.
However, if I'm hiring for a client facing role and you bring an iced coffee, you are saying that you don't know or don't care about client expectations and that is a red flag. I work in an industry where it is still the expectation to wear a suit and tie to certain client meetings. If you can't play the game with me, how can I trust you to play the game with the client?
You mean the client expectations which were created last week over a fake social media controversy by people who literally have nothing better to do than shitpost on LinkedIn? Sorry we do enough actual work that we aren't up on LinkedIn meta.
Brother, I promise you I can sell a customer on the idea that we are just that fucking good, that our iced coffee rebellion is exactly what they are looking for. Because we actually are very fucking good at what we do.
No. I just know to not being a drink into a client meeting. Throw it out beforehand.
People promise things all the time.
I have been working professionally, at a high level for 20 years and have never heard any commentary about bringing drinks to meetings until literally this week. Get off of it. It's not a thing.
Could be different professions, different markets, different cultures. You also came to me.
Dress codes like that are racist. As a Native American I should be allowed to have my hair and clothing in a traditionally Cherokee style if I want to and if your clients have a problem with that then they are racist fucks who can go fuck themselves.
At the end of the day “the customer is always right” doesn’t mean I should be expected to sell my scruples for your ROI.
I wasn't talking about hair? I feel like we're starting to mix appearance requirements with non-appearance presentation.
And I don't care about hair other than it would be considered "neat" in the culture it came from. Given the multicultural mix of where I work, people wear a wide variety of different hair styles including afros, turbans, beards, and marks on their forehead. Even worked with a non-federally recognized Native American engineer who wore his hair long in a ponytail.
You just said that iced coffee was enough to let you know someone wasn’t serious about client expectations and that you still work at a place that requires a suit and tie on occasion. I’ve never worked somewhere that had a dress code, even one that didn’t apply all the time, that didn’t mention hair.
Regardless, I find it hard to square the idea that iced coffee wouldn’t fly but an Afro would. But maybe I just live around a lot of racist people.
I live in an area with a lot of various immigrant groups, so the hair requirement gets limited to neat and tidy without specifying length. There is also a lot more leeway if you aren't seeing a client or you're out in the field.
It sounds like you live around a lot of racist people, but also an unresponsive legal system. The number of successful lawsuits in my state regarding discrimination have generally beat out any desire to measure hair in the industry I work in.
I legitimately cannot conceive of any situation where I would care what kind of drink a candidate brought with them. All I care about is that you make the right shapes on the white board and don't give Trump supporter.
I get recruited a lot and occasionally agree to do an interview just to stay on my toes, and I am 100% going to bring a mega-gulp sized ice coffee, and wear a tshirt that says "Iced coffee fan" the next time I do this.
Actually I might order catered iced coffee for the entire office.
Can't break the stupid norms if we just keep confirming to them. I used to think I was born too late, but the older I get the more I realize I am way more fit for this current generation. They managed to rally the masses I never could.
Hey I say go for it. You're risking your chance at the job, but it's not my life.
Their loss, not mine. Inagine the stupid shit they're firing people for there.
The employer is also risking their chance to hire me.
If you have the means and ability to pick your jobs and that's the hill you want to die on, more power to you.
I agree with all that, but I'd say a hot coffee avoids all of that. It won't leave a ring, there's no noisy ice you might chew on, and it's sipped slowly, so it's not very distracting. Just don't slurp, or leave it behind.
The "honestly ask questions about the organization during the interview" advice is such bullshit. Your questions can and will be used against you. If you are sniffing around after a toxic work culture, a toxic work culture will sniff that out and reject you.
It reminds me of all the straight men who read a gay sex columnists advice about the importance of communication in a relationship then think its OK to ask their wife how they would feel about a three-way with her sister.
I can never understand how relationships are supposed to function at all if one person would take issue with honest communication. That's not a relationship I would want to be in. But idk, maybe I just don't understand straight people.
Well, this is from a straight male perspective and the issue here is a straight women, so maybe it's the blind leading the blind, but basically straight women want to be the only woman their male partner is interested in and anything that threatens that is extremely destabilizing. Confessing you want to fuck her sister, someone who is in your life and very possibly available, and also very possibly a relational threat (because there's a lot of commonality already), would be planting a seed of doubt in her mind. On top of that, because the damage is obvious, such a question raises the possibility that the male partner is either cruel or callous or inconsiderate or really desperate to sleep with the sister.
Anyway, it's good that this is an old comment, because someone argue that women can be just as sexually free and promiscuous as men, to which I say, yes, absolutely they can and it's fine if they are, but they're much less likely to be.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a queer polyamorous woman so very much in a different world (perhaps within your "much less likely" category :p). I do see where you're coming from; I guess there is a difference between being honest if asked something like "do you want to fuck my sister?" (maybe stupid question to ask if a yes would be hurtful, but imo very important to not lie), and your original example of asking carelessly and unprompted if it would be okay to do so, which does raise a lot of questions as you say.
I do think it's fundamentally unrealistic even within monogamy to expect your partner to never be interested in anyone else, but probably realistic to expect them not to take steps towards being with someone else without a very careful conversation first. And that conversation is much better done before there is any particular person in mind, otherwise it can come across as "I want to date this other person more than you, but also I like the security of this relationship" etc etc.
I'm a monogamous hetero cis man, and I've never had to advocate or filter for a polyamorous relationship. There is a pro-forma declaration of monogamy pretty early when I'm dating, but I feel like the contract has already been written and communicated in a million small and subtle ways before then, and from my limited experience, that the contract is non-negotiable.
I'm guessing there are subtle signals we put out that indicate where we stand on things, and maybe those signals mutually filter people out before a conversation even needs to be had, so maybe we're all working with self-selected population bias...
That said, the common complaint of straight cis women in dating is that there are a lot of fuckboys out there, who are just interested in sex, and surely the men quickly realize that being upfront about what they want is disqualifying on a near population-wide level, so they quickly learn not to communicate what they really want.
Hetero pessimism, in a nutshell.
Yeah, the problem is (speaking from experience as well as theory), mononormativity is so strong a force that poly people often get pressured into monogamous relationships (consciously or not), and then only realise that they feel differently from mono people when already in a monogamous relationship. Usually there has been a declaration of monogamy, but assenting to that is not exactly always a free choice, especially since the cultural norm is that that is the only way a relationship can progress. So it's not pure implicit signals leading to self-selection, and explicit contract-making doesn't solve the problem.
It does seem like this happens; it's also pretty bleak. It seems to lead to a lot of lying and deception, and destruction of the social fabric. Norms among queer and poly people seem to me to be more functional, but I am surely biased. See also !are_the_straights_ok@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Isn't that exactly the point?
Depends on your preferences.
Do you like to sleep inside and eat food you bought at the grocery story?
or
do you enoy waking up in the outdoors and finding breakfast in the dumpster behind Dunkin Donuts?
But you make a good point. If I'm going to work in a toxic environment, I might as well not risk not working in a toxic environment by pretending I won't work in a toxic work environment.
You're just suggesting preemptive compliance. Go ahead and bend over backwards for the first employer to give you a few minutes of attention. The same one that will give you the boot the second they smell a hint of dissatisfaction with your shit pay and toxic work environment.
Sounds like a win to me. I don't see the problem.
But some questions need to be answered dagnamit!
Congrats; you just got your company sued for discrimination under the ADA.