When a recruiter’s TikTok calling out candidates for carrying iced coffee into job interviews sparked a viral debate, the internet immediately split over what actually counts as “professional” anymore.

On its face, the uproar feels a little ridiculous. We’re talking about a beverage. But I also get the recruiter’s point. A sweating, condensation-covered cup on someone else’s desk? Not the best first impression. Walking into an interview with your coffee in hand can make it feel like this is just another stop between errands. And if you have twenty minutes to kill before walking into the lobby, you can probably finish your latte outside.

So yes, I think bringing the drink into the interview is unprofessional.

But what makes the debate interesting isn’t the caffeine. It’s how quickly a $7 iced coffee became a referendum on someone’s work ethic. Because we aren’t really arguing about coffee. We’re arguing about what we’re supposed to look like when we’re working.

For a long time, the script for looking professional was pretty clear: dress the part, sit up straight, speak formally, keep your personal life separate and, above all, look busy.

Then Gen Z entered the workforce, watched Millennials burn themselves out on hustle culture and 9 p.m. emails, and collectively thought: yeah, maybe we don’t want that. That doesn’t mean we want to work less. It means we want less performance around the work.

Gen Z isn’t necessarily trying to piss off Millennials. We’re just less willing to blindly follow the script they inherited.

We sit sideways in chairs. We work in dark rooms. We take meetings from couches. We wear headphones. We have a very different relationship with availability. And, yes, some of it probably looks a little bizarre from the outside. To traditionalists, these behaviors can easily read as disengaged, lazy or unprofessional.

But the goal was never to look professional. The goal is to be professional. If great work gets delivered on time by someone sitting like a shrimp in a dark room with headphones on, does the position of their spine really matter?

That doesn’t mean every weird Gen Z workplace habit is automatically good. Some are probably just weird. But it does raise a fair question: how many of the things we’ve historically used to measure professionalism actually tell us anything about how good someone is at their job?

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We’re entering the workplace expecting more from it: more flexibility, more boundaries, more transparency, more respect for our time and more room to actually have a life outside of work.

That doesn’t mean expecting less from ourselves. If anything, it means wanting to be judged more on the work we actually produce than how convincingly we can play the role of “good employee.”

And that’s where I think the distinction matters. Setting a boundary around your hours isn’t unprofessional. Showing up unprepared and disengaged is.

I’m all for questioning the performance of professionalism. I just have no interest in throwing basic etiquette out with it. Sometimes a workplace rule is outdated and arbitrary. And sometimes, come on guys, just finish your coffee before the interview.

To me, that is the more interesting shift happening in the workplace. Gen Z isn’t asking for the bar to be lower. We’re asking for the bar to measure something that actually matters.

Do you do good work? Are you reliable? Do you communicate? Do you respect other people’s time? Maybe that’s what professionalism should have been measuring all along.