Throughout my career I've always loved drinking with the older (45-50+) engineers. Lots of great war stories and unfiltered bits of context and history around why things are the way they are.
I'm going to be that old engineer sooner rather than later. So yea, I agree... let's keep that going.
I love paintball. You can definitely play without physical prowess — plenty of people sit in the back of speedball fields to "spray or pray" or call out upstream opponent positions to their team. Likewise with the woodsball setting even more so. It's much less physically demanding than one might think... you can be successful at recreation level without running. I've never been athletic but I was stable able to play local tournament-level paintball. I'd love to have it as a company outing.
That culture definitely has a problem, but it's unrelated to having some social events, among many others and separate from the workplace or conference area, where drinking is involved. Even if they're bar crawls.
I don't disagree with the overall point (have experienced it myself, for sure, at times).
"instead walked around DC, sober, talking and enjoying the great weather with my beautiful wife" why does it have to be pointed out that his wife is "beautiful"? Seems a little hypocritical to me. And some of the stuff he picks on people having done (like posting a Twitter msg with a picture pf a bunch of empty beer bottles) is really scraping the barrel.
As a 57 year-old backend engineer I would like to keep the bar crawls, thanks.