I know some of the younger folk may not realise reality is stranger than fiction, but I too have been on a "work mandated drink alchohol bus" where I remember even though I was young, I was terrified the whole time wondering why we were being forced to drink infront of C suite; forced on a hell ride through the black country ( Thats a region in England).
One might think it was naive and odd for me as a young autistic person to be so scared and negative, but sure enough, the next day the best contractor in the company was fired at 9am for calling the CEO an "alright c*nt" during the pub crawl.
The C word being used a token of affection around these parts, was perhaps not the true transgression which was, not to understand, that it was NOT a social function, but a horrifying legal flexing of soft hierarchical power, for purposes of satiating C suite ego, and humiliating everyone beneath them.
I remember at the ad agency I used to work at (somewhere around 2018) we used to have a happy hour every Friday where from 5pm onwards all drinks (including booze) in the cafeteria were free, which led to people of all departments including C-Suite to get together and drink.
I remember it as a good time though, I don’t remember anything ever happening that led to people having repercussions for employees. Then again, this is German drinking culture and the stiffest drink you could have was wine, so people wouldn’t usually get wasted, just tipsy.
The Christmas parties were a different breed though. HR definitely had a lot of work to do after those.
I had a few company events that could easily become the foundation for one of those films where the main characters wake up in the morning in some random Asian country. No matter how crazy people go in these parties, there's always someone watching it and taking mental notes. I stopped getting too drunk in these events since I got into more senior Nowadays my aim is usually to rescue my colleagues and get them home safely:)
Amen. I only got my first job in tech because i put away 6 pints in the pub after the interview.
We conducted interviews after lunch, for this exact purpose. I saw good candidates interview but decline the pub afterwards - they did not get offers.
That company had at least two pub sessions a week, typically running to six rounds or more. We hit our medically-recommended maximum weekly intake by Tuesday; Fridays were carnage.
It was pretty mad in the 90s, but I don't recall anyone ever being forced into it at companies I worked for. A company mandated "alcohol bus" sounds ridiculous then and now.
More unhinged and better, especially in banks. I had one senior stakeholder that would come back from the Pub on a Friday and complete change all his previous decisions.
I think my lunchtime record was 4 1/2 pints. Another IT guy on the same session had keys to the building's small data room so let himself in and had a kip.
More unhinged - but a lot of people preferred it that way. To be really clear it's still pretty unhinged and even a decade ago it was much more unhinged.
UK here too. I've seen so many people fired after a work event with a free bar I'm starting to wonder if it's an HR strategy (eg to weed out the cocky sales people who would end up embarrassing the company. It's a trial run for late nights with clients)
> NOT a social function, but a horrifying legal flexing of soft hierarchical power, for purposes of satiating C suite ego, and humiliating everyone beneath them.
I remember calling the whole board "cunts" to their faces. They all laughed.
Then I remember CEO only in his underwear emptying bottle of whisky into his mouth, shouting "I'll fucking fuck everyone in this bitch!" and then collapsing. His PA and another employee then dragged him to his room.
The 2000s were wild.
Now I consider anything involving alcohol as abusive. If company has a drinking "culture" or going to pub after work, I nope out.
Offsite retreats seem like a bad idea in general, I've never been to one where I felt the team or company worked together better afterwards, and I've seen some spectacularly bad results... like the time the facilitator tried to get to the bottom of tensions between the CTO and head of sales (the classic problem of "Engineering isn't shipping features fast enough" and "Sales is selling features before even consulting with engineering"). The discussion quickly turned shockingly personal and within a month after the retreat both the CTO and head of sales quit. At least they called an end to the retreat early.
I'll offer another antidote. Every single place I have ever worked at that had such retreats had a big layoff within ~6 months.
It's like the CEO or execs see there are a lot of problems and think this will magically fix all the "issues". It doesn't, so they turn to the next solution. Just fire a bunch of staff and start over.
I feel like our offsites, especially in a post-COVID remote world, tend to improve communication and productivity. People get to know their coworkers, and feel much more comfortable working cross-functionality.
I've had some bad experiences, of course, but overall I've found it to be incredibly worth it.
I think there's a difference between getting employees who work remotely from each other into the same room for a week, and a "retreat" offsite where pseudo-theraputic approaches are used to try to get employees to open up or bond socially.
From the article:
> “Vulnerability-Trust exercise”
From your parent comment:
> the facilitator tried to get to the bottom of tensions between the CTO and head of sales
I was referring specifically to these sorts of things. Retreat doesn't always include this, but sometimes it does, and when it does it's a stupid idea.
I've mostly seen "retreat" being used for cases where you go on a pseudo-vacation with collegues paid by your company, with or without pseudo-therapy bullshit.
I've been on a couple of them (without the bullshit) and people did indeed open up and bonded, but I should note that the conditions for this were positive in the first place (i.e. we weren't trying to invert some negative situation).
Nothing that can't be achieved over couple of beers after work, thats how (not only) Czechs do it and it generally works very well. Bonus points if you can get customers for such event too, a lot of things can be figured out quickly instead of corporate meetings.
Huh. Reading your comment and the parent above - maybe retreats aren't "therapeutic", but "exacerbatory" - as opposed to making interpersonal relationships uniformly better (bad -> good and good -> better), they make good relationships better but bad relationships worse?
The most valuable element is probably in forming positive interpersonal relationships where none existed previously. Whether that's people that work remotely and rarely see each other in person, or people who work in the same building but rarely interact
It’s a mix. Partially a systems problem. We used to have that problem, then we changed the way work is selected. Sales is part of the process, so they’re forced to see all the things we could build and help decide which ones were saying no to. They still promise things occasionally but they hedge a lot more now. And our teams delivery rate has increased dramatically because we’re not getting yanked around all the time.
I worked remotely with only seeing my team a few times per year. During our last offsite, I looked around the 80+ person room and realized that I just don't enjoy working with any of these people.
Yeah that was me after 3 years during a company over the panny-D, I just had nothing in common with any of the people working there, the company didn't seem to have much ambitions, definitely did not realize they needed 5-10 more people to do the work they wanted to be done.
+1. I too feel the same thing after 3 years of remote work. Sometimes I even feel that my colleagues are way more dumb than they appeared to look in online.
We have one annually for my company. It's at a casino, with a few scheduled meals and some activities (video game room, trivia done by a professional company).
It's voluntary and employees are allowed to bring their spouse. I think it helps a lot with communication, especially since we are a distributed team and most peoplr don't see each other.
But it's hard for me to know for sure, no one tells the owners the truth. It is voluntary and almost everyone attends. I think most people think of it as a free vacation.
I would guess that the casino is a relatively cheap space that can do entertainment and conferences and food, and it's not being chosen for the gambling aspects
I had very positive experiences with some offsites, where the people 1) had fun 2) felt closer and able to interact more easily with each other (especially when working in a remote environment it's harder to grow closer)
But, like everything else, not all people enjoy them. I have seen people find obvious excuses to avoid them.
I might be reading too closely / projecting, but...
Sounds like an ineffectual CEO who didn't understand that his role, like any manager, is to help resolve interpersonal conflict between his subordinates that they're having trouble working out themselves. Outsourcing that to a random coordinator reeks of conflict-avoidant behavior. That they both quit tells me that neither one thought the other was the sole problem they were dealing with.
I agree, unironically. Not all workplace tensions can be resolved amicably. Often the only solution is for one of the parties to go. The sooner it happens, the better.
These often happened on weekends and I used to simply ask my manager about the days off for this and answer often was a shocked face and a no. So I rarely attended those.
HR justifying their own bloat. The staff and shareholders pay the price. Agency conflict of interest. The fault is with the CEO for not getting HR in line.
I think that ultimately it can help make a better company/team/etc, BUT you need a program / agenda and people that know what they're doing - can't just make it a bro fest.
Alcohol can be fine, but you will discover some people change when drunk, not always for the better. We had a few incidents at a previous company I worked for (involving people getting removed by bouncers or the whole company being banned from a venue - but tbf there was a lot of barf in the hallways and the like), but I gotta say, the people at the one I'm at now are all very conservative and mature when it comes to drinking and offsite behaviour. From what I know so far, anyway.
Looks like a bad offsite handling, both in your case and linked article.
I feel that offsites work best when you let people interact on their own schedule, pace and topics. Trying to force hands via a lot of activities can kind of backfire.
Relationships happen. They are not programmatically built.
Retreats like this just concentrate the social dynamics of the people the organization has hired. I think people’s experience with them is directly correlated with the caliber of people you work with.
All of the stupid shit I’ve seen happen at these events have been done by people who I don’t miss working with
Maybe a retreat would be a good 3rd round interview.
i’ve been to a bunch and all resulted in a big increase in trust between teams especially between tech and sales. i mended a few poor relationships at the last notion one in maui, made some lifelong friends. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe for every shitty one there’s 2 that are great
> Adam Mendler, a workplace expert, told Inc. that this kind of exercise carries real risk when companies invite openness without ever clarifying how that vulnerability will be treated afterward.
I always felt that those trust exercises, "bring your whole self to work", "let us pay for a personality test so we can know each other better" are all ruses to find the most gullible people and then take advantage of them or get rid of them.
Please don't bring your whole self to work, the rest of us don't need that from you. Be polite, congenial and professional. You have the rest of your day to let it rip however you'd like.
I agree with you, and also the company shouldn't be encouraging people to bring their whole self to a mandatory work retreat and then firing people who do.
Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.
Then I hope you have an extremely flat company structure, not just formally but in practice.
Don't try to fast-talk people into opening up. They have a better idea than you what's safe to talk about, about their lives. If they think they can't open up, they're probably right.
I don't own a company, and nobody reports to me. I simply said I want my coworkers to feel safe being themselves. I've had jobs where that was true, and they were better places to work all around, probably because "I feel safe talking about my transition/mental health/divorce" also translates to "I feel safe telling my boss this release needs to be delayed" and "I feel safe admitting I need some help writing this code."
Sure, but that sort of behaviour is plainly abusive unless you're actually working in an explicitly religious setting.
But merely saying "I'm taking next Wednesday off to celebrate Eid" ought to be fine everywhere, as is "this weekend I'm singing in my church choir then going for a picnic".
Similarly, wearing a wedding ring or mentioning that you have a partner should never be a problem, but issuing a company-wide invite to your next sex party likely will be.
"Personal" isn't a synonym for "intimate". It's reasonable to assume that people are able to share the former without forcing their colleagues to deal unnecessarily with the latter.
I'm not saying that people should talk about this all the time, but are you saying you don't want people to feel able to mention key details of their personal life?
I want to be free from being burdened with your unmet social needs and I want to feel safe when rejecting that burden you wish to push onto me. Make some friends or pay for a therapist, your coworkers aren't there to be your social support.
For example? Because usually, people who say this have something in their mind about which they should rightfully be ashamed. Like people who want other people to have lesser rights.
That is right. The hierarchical nature of this setting makes it impossible to be fully open, unless you truly are the most uninteresting person on the planet. If not, open and indiscriminate sharing is going to be a potential liability. Some things in life are very useful to know, and I believe being deliberate about what you share about yourself with whom is one of them.
>I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture
Yes, you want to feel like the people around you feel safe to share it. Everyone with things that are uncomfortable to hear have learned that they're not. They know the polite fiction to talk around it and make you feel like they're open. They're not.
It's more likely incompetence than malice. There's a reason people don't share everything about their personal lives at work, and sometimes leaders think forgetting that will make everyone better off.
Probably so, but it was incredibly ill advised of Netflix to admit to this. That’s what I find the most shocking, far more than the firing itself. I cannot fathom how admitting “yeah we fired them for going to therapy” plays to their benefit.
Yeah when I worked at Deloitte Consulting, we had similar training that said something to the effect of "don't put something in an email that wouldn't feel comfortable as a newspaper headline".
There's a huge difference between being yourself and not having a filter.
I absolutely think people should be themselves at work. In my mind this generally means not acting like a robot or treating other people like toasters. It is psychologically crushing to operate in a they're all workplace where people do that. The best managers I've ever had were those I could discuss my emotions or that of my team with.
That said, there are clear lines about workplace decorum.
It's one thing to say " I find this new Direction very frustrating for reasons x y and z, and the team morale is low", but another thing to say "i think the new leader is a dipshit idiot"
For some reason people think being yourself means having no filter
You are still not being yourself though, if you have to suppress the tendency to call someone a dipshit idiot. It is arguable whether the "self" in that case needs some work or not, but the idea about "being yourself" is being able to express yourself freely without giving it any conscious thought. Think of the setting where you are with close friends, and let the conversation flow freely. Having to filter yourself is the opposite of that. In reality, you can never truly be yourself in an environment that you do not own without risking dire consequences or opposition (even when you own it, this eventually becomes the case). So I think not being yourself is a good and necessary compromise for harmonious functioning within an organ, and there is no need to soften this by saying that having a filter is different from not being yourself.
The real challenge lies in properly tuning the strength of this filter, being deliberate with it and knowing what can be said, and what cannot be said. The people who act like robots err on the side of extreme caution, and are unwilling to invest time and effort into tuning and developing this filter. They also don't realize that this makes it impossible to connect with people, to their own demise.
I'm now in a team where I don't particularly like any of my coworkers due to all the things they have shared over the years which has accumulated in a persistent ick about all of them.
I can work with them fine, I just don't want to share any part of myself with these people and invite commentary from people I do not respect.
Exactly. The 'whole self' also includes a deliberate thinking mind. People often equate feeling free and being yourself with losing all inhibitions and restraint. That may free great for a while, to unburden yourself, but its a strict subset of your capabilities.
absolutely. I learned by example early on from our manager what one should say during something like a "vulnerability-trust exercise." : it should be something like "i'm too detail oriented", "i put too much time and effort into my job" or, max, "i trust/expect people to be similarly overly-diligent, etc.".
For an exec to talk about therapy - that is allowed only to the top dogs, like CEO, who can pass any personal crap upon his reports.
I always observed that as "bring your whole self, as long as your whole self exhibits the exact same behavior and demeanor as every other corporate employee, ideally wrapped in uniquely colored skin for beautiful decorum".
I remember a "beer test" as a hiring practice recommended on HN and blogs. And pointifications about how culture fit is important. And effectively mandatory games playing after work. And "united meritocracy" slogan bullshit.
So, go outta there with complains about hr slogan and dei.
> He had been warned during his performance review that he should “drop one or two less f-bombs but don’t stop entirely.”
> It goes on to say that at the same retreat Baillie drank a Guinness standing on his head, after sharing that he had learned the trick from his former father in law during a conversation inspired by the trust session.
> “His colleague immediately asked for a demonstration, rather than withhold the openness that the session had encouraged, he performed the trick,” the papers say.
> Sad clown paradox is characterised by a cyclothymic temperament, which encourages the creation of light-hearted humour in a professional setting, despite inner turmoil.
Your company, your coworkers, are not your friends. HR is not there for you, it's to protect the company from you. Do not disclose personal information to those who control your livelihood. Once you leave or if you build up a personal relationship with a coworker, outside of work, then maybe. Even still. I will never divulge what I have been through simply because corporate wants to be "inclusive".
This is a recipe for a sad life. It's avoiding friendship for the fear of betrayal. You get a lot of benefits by being good friends with colleagues. There are, however important things to be aware of:
1- "Though shall not" limit their social life to their colleagues (or any single group that can disappear with a divorce, change of jobs, or hobby, maybe because of an incident).
2- "Though shall not" blindly help people with the hope of being helped in return. Help with generosity, but know the limits: don't sacrifice yourself, and certainly, don't count on people returning the favor as your main plan. It's incredible how much happier we can be just by helping people, if we fire and forget, rather than cling onto.
3- Do not define yourself with your job, your success in there, or with your colleagues' approvals. This is extremely hard, yet extremely important. Diversify what defines you. Be able to mentally afford being bad at some of them. Don't let any of them define who you are. This lets you act with true confidence (not insecurity disguised as overconfidence), which is extremely pleasant for yourself and others.
You seem to contradict yourself, or at least actually support the OP's point. If you don't define yourself with your job, but have other self-identities outside, there is nothing sad about having different takes to the amount of personal information shared in various circles.
Extending on that, I do not agree with "do not define yourself with your job". Why not? It's a big, if not biggest, part of almost everyone's life. What's bad is defining yourself with your job ALONE. Psychological safety comes from having multiple self-identities: be an engineer at work, a volunteer on weekends, amateur radio enthusiast on Thursdays nights, or whatever, and don't mix those!
No, this is a recipe for surviving corporate America. You can have and make friends but be cautious of coworkers that you work directly with. I’ve made friends outside of work. I’ve made friends at work but I do not expect to be friends with everyone I work with.
Disagree. It's just admitting that the company can and will be cynical when it comes to the conflict of interests between them and the employee.
Making friends at the workplace is fine until there is such conflict, then where will they stand? If they will turn they back on you (and most of them will), then how much is such relation worth in the first place?
How's that different from friends at your sports club? How does the risk of your workplace friends not taking your side balance against the benefit of the possibility that they will support you?
Should I give up years of joy and sense of community and belonging for the fear that someday my workplace friends will betray me? And then years more of suffering in my next workplace?
A strategy that minimizes risk rarely maximizes reward.
You see things in binary mode, world is anything but that.
If I am not making friends at work, it doesn't simply equate to "sad life". Maybe it would for you, but then you can question why behaving so, work isn't and shouldn't be one's central piece of existence. Maybe you were never fired, or never saw firing for all the wrong reasons. Maybe you work so much its hard to have an actual life outside of work. At the end it doesn't matter, but folks do see things differently to you and its fine.
This is so sad. I have made amazing friends with my colleagues in the past. My days are made better when they can be funny, we can share moments, and we can support each other in hard times. Even remotely I have managed to stay in touch with them. It is a real friendship, built from a decade of learning just how this other person ticks.
I was rejected in a hiring process because a co-worker worked there. They asked him for feedback in the final hiring decision. I was being considered for a senior staff role. The meeting room had two of my ex-co-workers. One was the person who had referred me and was my tech lead at a previous work place. This (feedback giver) co-worker (my peer; from yet another work place) told them all was great and hunky dory but "he is a work life balance kind of person". I was not hired. Also, my two co-workers there didn't know each other really and didn't know they both had worked with me in the past until that meeting. Company had connected those dots on LinkedIn.
Good riddance. A “work-life balance kind of person” is not a negative characteristic; even more so at a position where your behavior is an inspiration to many people
Even if the people working in HR genuinely want to do the right thing for the employees, and company policies support them doing that, interactions with HR are inherently adversarial.
The people within HR may be friendly, they've probably got friends :). It can be a very people-oriented role. But they are incapable of being your friend when you're interacting with them in their role as representative for the company.
I greatly appreciate my employer's HR folk, they're really lovely, very good at their jobs, and want to help. But if I have to have a formal meeting with them, I would definitely bring along my union rep.
Because HR lies and say the opposite in the majority of companies. "Come to us with any problems, it's safe and anonymous, we are here to help you".
From personal experience I have reported gross treats by senior leadership to an HR rep who was shocked about hearing their HR employee evals being suppressed by only allowing score between 8-10 in a 1-10 score.
The HR rep confirmed it personally that it was happening and a few months later appeared on the other side of the desk with the leadership as they fired me for budget reasons.
This is corporate default. Don't stick your head too much, don't make too much noise, vent off someplace else ie via some cool sports. Doesn't matter how righteous, how correct and good for the company, it will very easily back fire you. Its kafquesque catch-22 all over the place, be a good boy and accept the paycheck with crap it comes along. Or move, but its not always greener on the next site.
The workplace is one of the best places to find your spouse. It's where you spend most of your time and where you're most likely to meet someone with similar interests to you in the same location. It's anti-human to treat the workplace as this clinical saferoom with no relationships.
While totally logical (there are many matching counterparts for most people, its just about being close enough for long enough regardless of place), its not always ideal.
I wouldn't want my wife to work on same team for example. Heck, even same company may be less than ideal, time off each other is usually for the better. Also, if breakup/divorce happens, workplace can easily become a place out of worst nightmare.
I prefer looking at hobbies/passions groups, people there match me way more than people at work, it that doesn't work out its easier to cut off only that group if needed. In my case it was climbing events I was organizing, and I ended up with wife that matches me on basically all important levels
hr and corporate are always your enemies but coworkers can be friends. they are on the same level as you and dealing with the same problems. just be careful who you trust because some of them might turn out to be class traitors and make up some allegations to get you fired.
Never been in an office where there wasn't some solidarity amongst workers and not the owners. I can't imagine how alienating it must be to work somewhere you feel you can't trust anyone except yourself, sounds like a self made hell.
What if he only took it before his career, or before joining Netflix? And is it because his role is not an engineer/designer/etc so the history of having taken medically prescribed ketamine could mean greater risk during the operations designated to him that are of business-type nature?
What if my engineers microdose on ketamine for productivity? And will the HR decides differently if it is lsd, dmt, etc? So because of Steve Jobs these naturally have better "branding" to them?
What if Kevin Baillie made a documentary film out of this and became "the Steve Jobs of ketamine"? Do things on this planet work this way?
> It goes on to say that at the same retreat Baillie drank a Guinness standing on his head, after sharing that he had learned the trick from his former father in law during a conversation inspired by the trust session.
Honestly, the whole thing seems sort of innocuous. He had some particular medical treatment and then drank a Guinness upside down. Maybe there was something else to it but if you're a big corp then you probably should just give a safe answer.
According to ChatGPT it's the skill of taking exactly one sip such that when you put the Guiness glass down the new beer level ends up precisely through the horizontal middle of the "G".
According to LadBible the actual trick was drinking a pint of Guinness while standing on his head.
It seems to be a challenge where you drink a specific amount from a pint in one try such that the bottom of the foam splits the Guinness logo. It's not even a huge amount. It seems to less than 20% of the pint eyeballing it.
Last retreat I went on the CFO drove drunk around 350 miles to get there. The CEO insisted on heavy drinking for everyone. Then he ordered one of everything on the menu the next morning at a Cracker Barrel for himself and wasted a ton of food. I found out he had a cocaine addiction about a month before the company was acquired. They also had orgies in the office break rooms and gave out a machete to everyone as a Christmas gift. Amongst the many crazy times…
My fraternity was more tame and we used to have guys gazing each other in the main room during parties.
I cannot see this ending up well for Netflix. It sounds like it personally offended someone's sensibility and they decided to fire the guy. I expect Netflix to lose this lawsuit, but more importantly, settle it before it ever goes anywhere.
And don't forget the effect on employee morale, retention and hiring. They have now made the international news cycle for firing an employee for sharing after being encouraged to share, and doing a party trick after being encouraged by coworkers to do so
We can only speculate, but it would not be surprising if someone was hunting for a reason to get rid of them and thought this was a good excuse. Personally, I don’t think this is a good excuse and while we don’t have all the facts, it sounds like Netflix conceding the therapy factored into the dismissal is probably something they will very much regret admitting to on the record.
I’ve been working in this industry for 20 years. Nobody gets fired for this, not at Netflix or any of the other studios. Especially a VP. I don’t know how to express how unlikely any of this is. This was an excuse, not the real reason.
isn't this highly illegal, since it is used for medical purpose (mental health) ?
its like firing a person who was sedated by professional Anesthesiologist with Fentanyl during surgery (A friend of mine had a surgery and was administered fentanyl)
Yes, IANAL but it seems very much like grounds for an open-and-shut wrongful termination suit, given that they have admitted it up front. They could be taken to the cleaners for this.
This guy's back pay of income, severance, and benefits could really add up, but that's more a factor of him getting paid a lot in the first place than wrongful termination suits being particularly fruitful. I wouldn't really describe their payouts as being "taken to the cleaners".
"We have found you to be a poor cultural fit in our mission driven high octane growth mindset 10x company. That we reached this conclusion right after you disclosed your medical condition is pure coincidence."
Yes, it seems likely they violated California's Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) and the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) based on the details I have seen so far. The EEOC’s mental-health guidance states both that an employee may choose to discuss his condition with coworkers and that the employer may not discriminate against him for doing so. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/depression-ptsd-other-men...
That's only guidance, not binding law in and of itself, but it means that the employer can only discourage employees from discussing their mental health if they do so in a neutral manner that applies equally to all employees in a non-discriminatory manner, which was self-evidently not the case here.
Notably, the EEOC guidance standards are not wholly unlimited. Employers can take action against an employee if their discussion of their mental health is repeatedly inappropriate or disruptive. e.g., if someone is constantly cornering coworkers to trauma dump suicidal thoughts on them or something like that. But only in truly extreme cases where an accommodation is impossible (e.g., if they are violent) or if they fail to adjust their behavior after receiving feedback that it has become unacceptable. A single incident that does not appear to have even made any other employee uncomfortable certainly doesn't suffice.
Netflix's only real defense here would be to argue that they would have fired him anyway without the disclosure, in response to other issues. That is a challenging defense to make given the admission their lawyer made that the ketamine treatment factored into their decision to fire, but the ADA and FEHA require "but for" causation, i.e. he is protected from firing if they would not have fired him but for the admission of ketamine treatment. I doubt they will succeed given the relative triviality of their other accusations (somewhat excessive profanity in a context where a fair amount of profanity was considered acceptable) and the entirely inoffensive party trick (at least in a context where the CEO has been repeatedly photographed drinking alcohol at company events and the alcohol at this event was provided by the company). I seriously doubt they will be able to point to any similarly situated employees that Netflix has previously fired solely for profanity or consuming alcohol that the company provided to them (and from a PR perspective that would almost be worse for them to admit). Frankly, the profanity feedback also seems like the very common scenario where a manager is required to provide regular feedback but can't think of anything constructive to say because the employee is a high performer, so they reach for something funny and minor just to check the box. In the absence of extensive complaints from coworkers, it is unlikely to overcome the company lawyer's outright admission that the ketamine use was a factor in their decision.
What appears to have happened here is Netflix has awful in-house counsel and/or HR who utterly failed to carry out their duties with even minimal competence. They appear to have simply assumed that all ketamine use is automatically illegal recreational drug abuse without bothering to investigate whether that is true in general or in this particular case before escalating to the most extreme possible reaction. Those employees are the ones who should be fired, not only because of the gross incompetence it takes to so egregiously violate America's otherwise absurdly weak legal protections for workers' rights, but because they did so in a manner that seems practically designed to permanently destroy employee trust in the company while inviting unwelcome public scrutiny of their potentially discriminatory employment practices.
This is a fairly straight forward discriminatory-causation story: Netflix invited vulnerability and thus potential mental health related disclosures, learned of a psychiatric history, reframed treatment as drug misconduct, and then expressly treated it as a termination factor. It's honestly pretty rare to see such an obvious example of this kind of discrimination, usually companies do a better job covering it up with a pretext, and usually their *lawyers* aren't so unbelievably fucking stupid as to admit publicly to the discriminatory decision.
You can't have an HR policy that discriminates against people for receiving mental health treatment from a physician, that is plainly illegal under multiple statutes both federally and in the state of California. This was not a situation where he was on ketamine while at work, and there are no accusations that his ketamine use even affected his work at all, even incidentally or indirectly. Even if it had, Netflix would be required to make a reasonable accommodation for him. But we know it did not affect his work because he received treatment in 2022 and Netflix only found about it in 2026 after he disclosed the treatment. Besides, he is a movie executive, it's not like he is operating heavy machinery. Ketamine is unlikely to have any effect on him that would in any way expose Netflix to liability.
Netflix seems to have simply assumed that all ketamine use is illegal and recreational, without bothering to conduct even the most cursory of investigations, which would have revealed that ketamine is in fact a clinically acceptable treatment for treatment-resistant depression. This is what happens when you have utterly incompetent idiots for in-house counsel and HR.
No drugs even in a medical setting? Man, that's intense. Can't take anesthetics when facing surgery or similar situations. No epinephrine for anaphylaxic shock. Can't take insulin. Pretty rough.
>>> Adam Mendler, a workplace expert, told Inc. that this kind of exercise carries real risk when companies invite openness without ever clarifying how that vulnerability will be treated afterward.
(That's the Inc article)
.
Mandatory "vulnerability" is required to be staged and fake. Legitimate vulnerability -- that comes with legitimate risk -- has to be a free choice or else whoever's pushing it makes themselves vulnerable to consequences.
> Baillie claims he explained the reason why he had taken the drug but was investigated by Netflix. On March 18, 2026 a company investigator brought the incident up, “in a manner suggesting suspicion of recreational drug use,” the suit reads.
So the nominal issue is recreational drug use rather than ketamine therapy. It's also not clear that he was fired for the therapy itself. And I doubt Netflix would fire someone just for therapeutic (or even recreational) drug use unless it has a negative impact on the workplace performance. If it was proper & legal therapy (e.g, https://www.betterucare.com/), Netflix wouldn't fire a person since it would have positive impact on their workplace performance. But if Netflix fired an employee for a valid cause, I would expect the employee to try to counter with any option that would get them a severance or settlement.
It's likely that we're not hearing the full story and the news sites are just writing clickbait articles from one-sided excerpts of the lawsuit that the ex-employee filed.
Given he made $1 million+ per year as an executive, it's possible they needed a pretense to fire him "for cause" under a contract that otherwise stipulated some sizeable severance greater than the cost of litigation and settlement.
Did you miss he received the therapy under medical supervision and Netflix’s attorney flat out admitted “the ketamine therapy issue has factored into the termination”.
I've no idea what happened. Treating allegations in a lawsuit as undeniable true or "flat out admissions" is a bad idea, though. Doing that would have you believing that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, after all, he claimed in a lawsuit he is.
Are you under the impression that lawyers have never included things that later turned out to be false or unprovable in their initial filing of a lawsuit? If lawyers are so infallible, why would one have openly admitted to firing someone for a legal medical treatment they received?
I think that, per the parent who you initially replied to's point, that taking a tabloid's clickbait excerpts from one-side of a lawsuit is a terrible way of understanding the truth of a dispute.
am i wrong but doesnt the article say the dude worked at "eyeline" which seems to be consistently described in a quick search as a "netflix owned vfx company" which would not really make this guy a "netflix employee". no more so that somebody working at "x" is now a "spacex" employee. Eyeline has its own ceo and presumably culture, but "rando vfx company you've never heard of fires a guy" doesnt grab headlines i guess...
no comment on the actual content or context just a nit on everyone saying this was netflix did a thing... this seems like netflix owned company eyeline did a thing based on the actual article and a couple
of the eyeline press releases from when they got bought and recently rebranded.
If you work for a wholly owned subsidiary, the parent company has complete control and the executives have no further hindrance to hiring or firing you than they would ton anyone else, anywhere else within the rest of the company. The CEO is always beholden to the board, and if the board of the wholly owned subsidiary isn't literally the same board as the parent company, then everyone the board is appointed by the parent company.
But the title seems to imply it was about over sharing, while the rest of the article seems focused on the culture of constant alcohol and drugs which likely has more to do with the way things ended.
Hard to say what is true with a publication like this.
The stereotype is real. A guy I work with is part of what they call the Divorced Dad Club. He’s 56 and gets together with a bunch of other divorced dads to do ketamine and play video games. They’re all in the mid 50s, white, and in tech. And keep getting played by puffy lipped 30 somethings.
Keep work life and personal life separate. No exceptions. If a company tries to encourage you to do otherwise I’d strongly suggest you find a new employer.
Most people prefer to work with humans, not robots. Common experiences and getting to know people are a huge part of that.
Sharing stories and getting to know people humanizes them. It's much easier to hate "that team in another country" you've never met than that person you've had a meal together with and learned about their hobbies.
There's a huge difference between learning that your colleague also happens to play chess, and sharing the vulnerability of how you handled personal grief in your life.
Your workplace is a community, not a friendship circle, and not a family. Community life has always had a certain level of formality to help paper over the differences between people in the community while still fostering a positive, inclusive environment.
I think that's something people have increasingly forgotten. My grandparents were active in their church for decades. They didn't talk about my grandmother's serious mental health struggles with the other parishioners.
People in the past had stronger community institutions, and I think a part of that was that nobody expected to bring their whole self to bowling club or the neighborhood potluck.
It's a balance though, isn't it? Like, sure, don't bring your whole self to every single bowling game, you're there to bowl so focus at the task at hand. Nobody is going to have a good time if every bowling game devolves into every little emotional issue anyone in the group is having.
But that doesn't mean those relationships originally started at the bowling club need to stay purely about bowling, a big part of community is to then open up when the context is right and when the other person is open to the sharing. It's how you grow your community, how you grow your circle. Don't expect every person in your bowling league wants to become your best friend ever, but it's also not healthy to assume that everyone there only ever wants to just bowl and only cares about bowling.
I've had a lot of people from work relationships that stayed purely work relationships. I've had some become friends. I've had several become important people in my life. If I forced myself to silo off work contacts are only ever work contacts, I don't think I'd be nearly as happy as I am today. I know I'd be a lot more lonely and probably a good bit less successful.
We talk about this huge loneliness epidemic and yet so many people are like "I would never talk to my fellow coworkers about anything personal, ever." Huh I wonder why we're so lonely. We're all convinced we shouldn't be personal with the people we spend a massive amount of our lives with.
I don't think you're fundamentally disagreeing. Your work community can be a source of friendships (and sometimes but more rarely, more than friendship), but you shouldn't confuse the two. Finding out your colleague also plays chess can segue into an invitation to play chess outside of work, and launchpad that into building a friendship. But that's not the same as playing chess together at work (get back to work?), let alone being emotionally vulnerable as an intentional part of building relationships with people who you're trying to trust with that vulnerability.
The latter sounds good (if you could have that with your colleagues, then it can only help, right?), but then again, the linked article is literally about someone violating that and firing the subject of the article. It is simply not possible to build emotional intimacy with every coworker, let alone under forced circumstances, so attempts to do so are more or less predictably going to lead to pain.
I mostly feel that people should be more selective about who and how they open up to in general in life. There's a lot to talk about that's not your past experiences with depression, and those don't need to be talked about to 99% of people, and discussing them too early is an easy way to burn bridges before they're even built.
I definitely talk to my coworkers about what I did this weekend, or travel, or the weather (I'm halfway around the world from my home country, so comparing the weather is a constant topic of conversation). I have a coworker I carpool with and we talk some about how I'm settling in to life here. But, I will never discuss my history of mental illness with any of these people. At best I will make a vague allusion to seasonal blues.
Not saying you can’t discuss basic details like did you do anything interesting this weekend, but these things like “share deep personal details” as mentioned in the article have no place at work.
Not to mention a lot of things get solved/decided over beers at happy hour. Coworkers shouldn't be your best friends but you're a fool if you're not friendly with them. Like you said, people aren't robots and a business isn't a machine.
If I’m going to be seeing the people I work with as much as I see my family, I’m going to try to make some friends. I’d argue the bigger risk is not making friends at work given the loneliness epidemic, especially among middle aged and older men.
I doubt the events at the retreat were the only cause for his firing. Creative folks are usually given much wider leeway compared to the bean counters.
It feels like somebody in senior management had it in for Baillie. And the ketamine story provided a sufficient cause.
Your work colleagues are not your family. Your superiors are not your friends. Treat every company as if they were going to look for a reason to fire you right now unless you can reasonably argue that they don't
in the creative arts business, the work that sells tends to come from people carrying something. a difficult history, a chemical affiliation, some level of quirkiness/flaws, or all of the above.
perfect flawless plain-vanilla creatives tend go work for Hallmark channel and product absolute drab cr*p.
not sure why Netflix HR would want to sabotage their own internal culture that drives their content success strategy.
The issue here isn’t that this guy shared something about his personal life it’s the particular personal details. It’s possible to share information about your personal life without talking about your drug use or your therapy or your drug use at therapy.
It is irritating that people expect you to understand what reasonable personal sharing is without explaining explicitly and goodness knows I screwed this up when I was younger but “don’t talk about your personal life at all” is bad advice.
The article implies it was from sharing his experience using Ketamine therapy for depression, which likely would have been done with a doctor. Which makes this seem much weirder to my ears.
It always surprises me when people don't understand that the employee-employer relationship is an adversarial one. Unless you're in a democratic co-op or similar your employer is the enemy and you should never forget that. The correct move is to try to screw them in every legal way at every turn because that is what they are doing to you. Never divulge any information that increases your attack surface, always try to extract the most money for the least effort. This is capitalism 101.
You must not allow them to fool you into thinking that these aren't the rules they're playing by. David Sirlin's "Playing to Win" is a good treatise on how to be good, and perhaps the most important lesson is to play the game by the rules as written, and not by some other set of rules that exists only in your head.
(Though in this case the victim was senior enough that I suspect he was playing the game to the best of his ability, trying to humanize himself to gain the upper hand in some other manipulation game and misplayed, kicking things into the legal arena, as one does)
This sounds like an exhausting perspective on the world. I’d rather be hurt by assholes than never allow myself to be vulnerable with anybody. You can mitigate the potential downside without thinking everybody is out to get you or thinking everything is a power game.
Not at all work cultures are toxic, but many have toxic elements.
It's very culture-dependent. You have to read the room, pick up clues from current behaviour and previous history, and try to calibrate accordingly.
There's a broad correlation between management stupidity and chaotic leadership and toxicity but sometimes you can still end up in pockets of sanity - or insanity if the surrounding culture is good but there are one or more Cluster B types on a team.
I'm vulnerable with plenty of people, just not employers (in general). The incentive structures, especially at a company that's more than a few people are such that it is in their best interest to get as much from you for as little as possible, that's the entire point of the system.
Until this present universe I didn’t really care about that because retaining the job wasn’t a top priority. If you got fired over something like this you took it as a good way to go do something somewhere else.
Now of course it’s hard to say if the original employment shape is still valid.
I would say that the more-exhausting way to live would be to be unaware of this, to accept the “we’re a family here” lie at face value, and to be passed over and screwed over at frequent intervals without knowing or understanding why.
You don’t have to go full Patrick Bateman corp-bro, but keeping in mind the phrase “we don’t fire family” and adjusting your approach based on that counter-example can help you to keep things appropriately transactional and not be taken advantage of.
The least exhausting way to work a job is to find people to work with who are smart, well adjusted, and genuinely interested in cooperating to make money together.
The entire point of capitalism is free enterprise and freedom of association. The way to apply that to employer / employee relationships is to recognize that you are not a serf bound to a single employer and keep half an eye on your options in case you ever tire of your current relationship.
A mutually beneficial agreement can still be adversarial? If you're getting shaken down by the mafia it's beneficial for you to pay them protection money.
This is why you should refuse to participate in these "trust and honesty sessions". You don't owe your employer or colleagues any insight into your personal life and the HR people who often run these sessions are there for the company, not for you and generally should not be trusted with personal info.
Bad move. Those corporate events serve the purpose to find "bad apples" (from the employer's perspective), to either shape you into what they want or cut you off.
Never sacrifice your privacy in such an environment.
I'm shocked Netflix hasn't just settled to keep this quiet, because the entire situation makes them look not only like an abusive, discriminatory employer but even worse, horrifically incompetent at being abusive and discriminatory. Plenty of companies treat their employees like shit, that's not news. But any competently managed company knows how to do so without incurring massive legal liability like this, and it speaks to a remarkable lack of professionalism and basic competence at the leadership level and within the legal and HR teams.
If the accusations are true as reported, their in-house counsel fucked up terribly by assuming all ketamine use is illegal and recreational without bothering to conduct the very cursory investigation required to determine that it is in fact a perfectly legitimate option for treating treatment-resistant depression. That single error drove them to fire an otherwise exemplary employee for an obviously illegal reason in a manner that screwed him out of significant compensation including severance.
This was an obvious, unforced error by their legal team. Competent lawyers and competent corporate leadership would recognize that the relatively small amount of money they may save by litigating this issue is not worth the damage it is very predictably inflicting on their corporate culture and public brand. The lawyer who publicly admitted that ketamine factored into their decision should be immediately fired because he is demonstrably a terrible fucking lawyer, and he seems to be representative of the quality of legal advice Netflix is receiving, because any attorney with half a brain would have immediately recognized both the underlying legal error that incurred liability for the company and the business context that makes immediate heavily NDA'd settlement the optimal strategy for defending, even were the original legal error not so egregious.
My main takeaway from this situation is that Netflix is managed by remarkably incompetent leaders who are advised by even more remarkably incompetent lawyers.
Very disappointing to see people rush to cynicism, with no effort at all to put blame on Netflix. I get it, you're stupid if you think your employer has your best interests at heart. Why does that mean they get a pass?
"It's difficult for me to share this but I care about Netflix, some would say, too much. My mother died recently and rather than go to the funeral I worked through the last season of goop lab because I know the synergy of Netflix and Gwyneth Paltrow will enrich our subscribers lives like nothing before. Thank you for listening but I think I ate some bad fish at the retreat and need to go lie down in my room."
Google banned political conversations at work. Tech companies are learning from first principles why work/life separation, traditional office culture exist.
It seems the message of schizophrenic corporate America is, "don't bring your humanity to work". Because what is politics but an expression of how society should be. Even more ridiculous is this trust exercise, their idea is for employees to show their human side to improve employee-employee relationships for higher productivity, but wait, not too much of the human side!
No wonder all the CEOs are crazy about AI. All the intelligence, none of the human.
You indeed shouldn’t bring your humanity to work. You should bring what’s required to do the job. That’s the deal, you do the job and the employer pays you for it. Stopping making where you work the same as where you live.
what a terrible take. so many jobs involve ethical and moral responsibility, and so many jobs (especially in tech, where you are making products which shape lives on the global scale) are best fulfilled through compassion, human understanding, and yes also the desire to make the world a better place.
i have been fortunate in my career to have had many roles where i was able to create a better product and solution through the aforementioned ideals.
so much of what we build is made better by diverse thought, diverse ability, diverse ethnicity, and more. i believe being genuine is one of the most important things one can do when they are touching the lives of millions.
Meh, some people’s politics have very little to do with humanity and how society should be. In general, best approach is to avoid GRAPE topics in general.
> Multi-millionaire Netflix executive, known for profanity-laden tirades and shotgunning beers at corporate events, claims without evidence he was terminated for medically sanctioned ketamine use
“Trust” exercise is doublespeak in corporate settings
Come to think of it, Orwell’s 1984 perfectly encapsulates what corporations actually do — even in his own time. Down to the groupthink, wrongthink, doublethink, doublespeak, all of it. Synergy! Concerned. Trust.
I don't even explain why I'm taking a day off or a half day or whatever.
It's no one else's business to decide if they agree the reason is valid. Don't volunteer stuff like that especially when it would be something they'd likely agree with. Don't validate their right to decide or even be aware of anything like that. Next time maybe your need might not be so convinvcing to anyone else, but you've already established they have a right to know and a right to veto, so then trying to be private stands out as different from other times.
It doesn't mean being inflexible or uncooperative either. If there is actually some problem, they can negotiate and try to make the case and convince you that they really need you just that much just that day, and you can voluntarily decide to change your plans, but without ever volunteering what those were. And make it cost. Keep score. Claim a return favor.
Your co-workers can be your friends. But we're not obligated to be. If you're my friend and colleague, sure, vent to me. If we're not, I don't give a flyig fuck about your views on geopolitics or gender or whatever, particulalry if you owe me a deliverable, doubly so if you've chosen a hot-button issue nobody actually has any new takes on other than blind agreement or condemnation. (And unless they’re voiced outside work in a way that affects me, I don’t have a right to care about it either.)
I only become real friends with my peers at a company AFTER one of us leaves the company. Oh I'll be friendly, grab lunch with you, talk about tame hobby stuff.. but that's the end of it. I'm not coming to your summer bbq, I'm not inviting you to my birthday party and the only time I'm seeing you on the weekend is if we're both in the office trying to get something done.
Prrreeeeeach. Not quite on topic here, but when I started working at Big Co., they sent 3 weekly Teams invitations each for hula hooping and desk yoga sessions. That infuriated me to no end because I knew how ineffective so many of my new coworkers were there and that they were making more than some of my coworkers who were actually providing value. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have infuriated me because the people attending those people were probably having less of a negative impact doing that rather than re-opening a solved issue or whatever the fuck useless thing they were doing.
People need to stop abusing "parasocial." It meant forming a one way "connection" with people who don't even perceive you, like TV hosts on the other side of the screen. This case is by definition not a parasocial relationship because obviously the employer heard him saying things!
In day-to-day work life or a meet-and-greet, yeah. But this was an executives-only retreat where they were apparently encouraged to drink and made a big deal out of getting everyone to open up to each other.
“A retreat may feel more relaxed than the office, but it is still a workplace, and the power dynamics don’t disappear,”
Ah, so sad :( Another story of a person who believed other people in the workplace too much.
These kinds of exercises are unfortunately a waste of time. If you’re honest, you’re walking into a minefield. But if you’re not being open, then no one is really getting to know anyone else in any meaningful way. In the end, a bunch of money and time is spent with zero value gained.
And given that this was about someone sharing their experience with a medical procedure to help them process the death of a parent, the company will probably lose the lawsuit, wasting even more money.
What a tragic waste of resources. Also, my heart goes out to this person. Loosing a parent is terrible.
I would strongly discourage anyone from making things up. I have participated in these exercises, and many people simply said, “I really have nothing to share that would interest you.” Those were the people others respected the most.
They might share personal things with close friends, but they had a clear definition of what friendship meant.
In other words, be a person of character.
It is perfectly fine not to be friends with everyone. Just be respectful and honest. Do not lie. Say, “I cannot tell you that because of this or that,” or simply remain silent.
Although it seems like this would be an extreme take to someone who's luckily kept a steady job despite not keeping their personal life out of their work life, I completely agree. It's not worth it.
I think everyone gets a pass for something kid related, and to a lesser—probably unequal—extent, something spouse or family related, everything else can and will be used against you unless you're just humming along as the most normal predictable person.
As far as people at work are concerned, you've never smoked pot, you're not taikng stimulants even though they're prescribed, you won't even drink coffee after 5pm, and you've definitely never had insomnia.
Have one drink with the team if you're inclined to, and then gtfo, go drink with real friends.
Managers only care about perception and control, and if anything at all doesn't fit into their directive or world view, it'll go into their mental spreadsheet of blemishes like a vindictive romantic partner next time you fight.
"Hey there was a bug last release in some code with your name on it, might be time to go to bed at a reasonable hour!?". Ya thanks, I'll note your advice for next time that happens I'm sure it'll help. Why did you approve the change again?
You can also politely decline to share. You are not obligated to share personal stories to your coworkers and employer for camaraderie’s sake, and they should have no reasonable expectation that you will. Sure, it may be difficult to overcome the peer pressure in the moment, but it is your right, so fight for it.
No. It's like with cops. There is no safe thing to say. The least damaging thing is simply say nothing. Even that costs, but it costs the least and there is nothing better you can do.
So like that interview candidate being asked about the hardest day of their life and answering honestly about a miscarriage or did this guy do something inappropriate with some ping pong balls in a Guinness-record way?
I read that but assumed that wasn't why they fired him. I don't understand, why would you fire someone for receiving some kind of medical treatment?
Ignoring the obvious legal landmines, what does that have to do with the job?
I assumed there was some other reason for the firing. If that was the reason (or if that's what the victim is alleging) then I think the article needs to be more clear, it all reads like vague gossip to me and it wasn't at all clear to me that that was what this was about.
I wonder if this is a generational thing. I grew up before social media and have long taken the position that I never post anything to the Internet that I wouldn't want public. I don't have a secret Reddit account or anonymous Twitter profile where I post stuff that could be fired, charged or worse.
This goes moreso for work. I assume anything you do can and will be used against you. I have zero trust. You're being a sanitized version of yourself. Do people not know this?
It's part of the reason I hate these working bonding activities. Well, that and being neurodivergent. There are fiarly standard questions and I have prepared answers that may or may not be the truth. Just like with interview questions. Sorry, but none of you are my friends or can be trusted. You might be shocked how often confiding in a coworker is used against you.
The trick with coworkers is saying just enough so they think they can trust you without saying anything that might get you fired or have other consequences. You can't say nothing. That's almost worse. But you have to basically invent a persona, particularly if you're neurodivergent because the default position of neurotyhpical people is to not like you.
And at the end of the day so much of your work life is governed by whether or not people like you. And I hate it.
So for a trust exercise, I'd come up with something everybody has likely done or is at least sympathetic to. Like, nothing to do with stealing. That might get you fired. Here's an example: "when I was in high school, I lied to my parents and drove to another state for a party and got drunk with my friends".
It's better to base your sanitized answer on the truth but I'm not above wholesale lies. They're just harder to remember so you have to be light on details but not too light.
I'm torn here because it does seem like Netflix brought this on themselves. At the same time the litigious nature of American workplaces are part of the reason large corporate environments are so soul-crushing, with language meant to deliberately obfuscate what's actually happening.
I am not sure how old he was, but I would guess he was under 40 and relatively inexperienced.
Part of the purpose of these exercises is to train management, especially executives, to remain fully focused and make decisions solely on performance and the business, even when someone asks them to show emotion. Anyone who is in executive management position should understand that.
I know some of the younger folk may not realise reality is stranger than fiction, but I too have been on a "work mandated drink alchohol bus" where I remember even though I was young, I was terrified the whole time wondering why we were being forced to drink infront of C suite; forced on a hell ride through the black country ( Thats a region in England).
One might think it was naive and odd for me as a young autistic person to be so scared and negative, but sure enough, the next day the best contractor in the company was fired at 9am for calling the CEO an "alright c*nt" during the pub crawl.
The C word being used a token of affection around these parts, was perhaps not the true transgression which was, not to understand, that it was NOT a social function, but a horrifying legal flexing of soft hierarchical power, for purposes of satiating C suite ego, and humiliating everyone beneath them.
I remember at the ad agency I used to work at (somewhere around 2018) we used to have a happy hour every Friday where from 5pm onwards all drinks (including booze) in the cafeteria were free, which led to people of all departments including C-Suite to get together and drink. I remember it as a good time though, I don’t remember anything ever happening that led to people having repercussions for employees. Then again, this is German drinking culture and the stiffest drink you could have was wine, so people wouldn’t usually get wasted, just tipsy.
The Christmas parties were a different breed though. HR definitely had a lot of work to do after those.
I had a few company events that could easily become the foundation for one of those films where the main characters wake up in the morning in some random Asian country. No matter how crazy people go in these parties, there's always someone watching it and taking mental notes. I stopped getting too drunk in these events since I got into more senior Nowadays my aim is usually to rescue my colleagues and get them home safely:)
UK had the most unhinged work drinking culture I had ever seen.
Amen. I only got my first job in tech because i put away 6 pints in the pub after the interview.
We conducted interviews after lunch, for this exact purpose. I saw good candidates interview but decline the pub afterwards - they did not get offers.
That company had at least two pub sessions a week, typically running to six rounds or more. We hit our medically-recommended maximum weekly intake by Tuesday; Fridays were carnage.
It's dropped off now. It was better in the 90s.
It was pretty mad in the 90s, but I don't recall anyone ever being forced into it at companies I worked for. A company mandated "alcohol bus" sounds ridiculous then and now.
Yes, fair. I think the default for a pub lunch would be to drink, but it was never mandatory.
Coxnfused. Was it more unhinged in the 90s or less compared to now?
More unhinged and better, especially in banks. I had one senior stakeholder that would come back from the Pub on a Friday and complete change all his previous decisions.
I think my lunchtime record was 4 1/2 pints. Another IT guy on the same session had keys to the building's small data room so let himself in and had a kip.
More unhinged - but a lot of people preferred it that way. To be really clear it's still pretty unhinged and even a decade ago it was much more unhinged.
Being from the UK I’m pretty sure they mean more unhinged.
To be fair I did enjoy the ‘unhingedness’ but I’m also appreciating that being at least a decade younger was also great.
There was more drinking in the 90s.
You can decide whether that was better or worse.
i'd believe the C-word is naturally made for the C-suite
put them into a Cartesian Closed Category and you an emulate the whole thing with LLMs.
UK here too. I've seen so many people fired after a work event with a free bar I'm starting to wonder if it's an HR strategy (eg to weed out the cocky sales people who would end up embarrassing the company. It's a trial run for late nights with clients)
> NOT a social function, but a horrifying legal flexing of soft hierarchical power, for purposes of satiating C suite ego, and humiliating everyone beneath them.
Very well described!
I remember calling the whole board "cunts" to their faces. They all laughed. Then I remember CEO only in his underwear emptying bottle of whisky into his mouth, shouting "I'll fucking fuck everyone in this bitch!" and then collapsing. His PA and another employee then dragged him to his room. The 2000s were wild.
Now I consider anything involving alcohol as abusive. If company has a drinking "culture" or going to pub after work, I nope out.
Offsite retreats seem like a bad idea in general, I've never been to one where I felt the team or company worked together better afterwards, and I've seen some spectacularly bad results... like the time the facilitator tried to get to the bottom of tensions between the CTO and head of sales (the classic problem of "Engineering isn't shipping features fast enough" and "Sales is selling features before even consulting with engineering"). The discussion quickly turned shockingly personal and within a month after the retreat both the CTO and head of sales quit. At least they called an end to the retreat early.
I'll offer another antidote. Every single place I have ever worked at that had such retreats had a big layoff within ~6 months.
It's like the CEO or execs see there are a lot of problems and think this will magically fix all the "issues". It doesn't, so they turn to the next solution. Just fire a bunch of staff and start over.
I feel like our offsites, especially in a post-COVID remote world, tend to improve communication and productivity. People get to know their coworkers, and feel much more comfortable working cross-functionality.
I've had some bad experiences, of course, but overall I've found it to be incredibly worth it.
I think there's a difference between getting employees who work remotely from each other into the same room for a week, and a "retreat" offsite where pseudo-theraputic approaches are used to try to get employees to open up or bond socially.
I think “retreat” is used pretty colloquially and doesn’t imply pseudo-therapy.
From the article: > “Vulnerability-Trust exercise”
From your parent comment: > the facilitator tried to get to the bottom of tensions between the CTO and head of sales
I was referring specifically to these sorts of things. Retreat doesn't always include this, but sometimes it does, and when it does it's a stupid idea.
"Retreat doesn't always include this, but sometimes it does, and when it does it's a stupid idea."
Unless maybe done by professionals?
I never have been to one such retreat, but I know human conflicts and I know what difference it can make, if skilled people can mediate.
Such professional therapy should probably be administered privately and during the course of a regular workday.
Professional individual therapy is something different from professional mediation between people with conflicts.
I've mostly seen "retreat" being used for cases where you go on a pseudo-vacation with collegues paid by your company, with or without pseudo-therapy bullshit.
I've been on a couple of them (without the bullshit) and people did indeed open up and bonded, but I should note that the conditions for this were positive in the first place (i.e. we weren't trying to invert some negative situation).
Nothing that can't be achieved over couple of beers after work, thats how (not only) Czechs do it and it generally works very well. Bonus points if you can get customers for such event too, a lot of things can be figured out quickly instead of corporate meetings.
Huh. Reading your comment and the parent above - maybe retreats aren't "therapeutic", but "exacerbatory" - as opposed to making interpersonal relationships uniformly better (bad -> good and good -> better), they make good relationships better but bad relationships worse?
The most valuable element is probably in forming positive interpersonal relationships where none existed previously. Whether that's people that work remotely and rarely see each other in person, or people who work in the same building but rarely interact
I would very much agree with this. If you’re at an offsite and it goes that badly, things probably weren’t solid to begin with.
> classic problem of "Engineering isn't shipping features fast enough" and "Sales is selling features before even consulting with engineering"
That's not a problem, in the sense that there was never any possible debate: if I make a promise on your behalf, I am a di*k.
It’s a mix. Partially a systems problem. We used to have that problem, then we changed the way work is selected. Sales is part of the process, so they’re forced to see all the things we could build and help decide which ones were saying no to. They still promise things occasionally but they hedge a lot more now. And our teams delivery rate has increased dramatically because we’re not getting yanked around all the time.
I worked remotely with only seeing my team a few times per year. During our last offsite, I looked around the 80+ person room and realized that I just don't enjoy working with any of these people.
Yeah that was me after 3 years during a company over the panny-D, I just had nothing in common with any of the people working there, the company didn't seem to have much ambitions, definitely did not realize they needed 5-10 more people to do the work they wanted to be done.
+1. I too feel the same thing after 3 years of remote work. Sometimes I even feel that my colleagues are way more dumb than they appeared to look in online.
We have one annually for my company. It's at a casino, with a few scheduled meals and some activities (video game room, trivia done by a professional company).
It's voluntary and employees are allowed to bring their spouse. I think it helps a lot with communication, especially since we are a distributed team and most peoplr don't see each other.
But it's hard for me to know for sure, no one tells the owners the truth. It is voluntary and almost everyone attends. I think most people think of it as a free vacation.
> I think most people think of it as a free vacation.
I'm shocked that someone does NOT think so!
I guess it's a personal thing, but I don't see how everyone going to a casino is a great idea, or developing team relationships.
I worked at a company that was pathologically thirsty and had only hard drinkers above entry-level.
For those people, just drinking was the bonding. It reinforced the tribal affiliation.
Casinos often provide free drinks. QED
I would guess that the casino is a relatively cheap space that can do entertainment and conferences and food, and it's not being chosen for the gambling aspects
I had very positive experiences with some offsites, where the people 1) had fun 2) felt closer and able to interact more easily with each other (especially when working in a remote environment it's harder to grow closer)
But, like everything else, not all people enjoy them. I have seen people find obvious excuses to avoid them.
Sounds like it was productive!
I might be reading too closely / projecting, but...
Sounds like an ineffectual CEO who didn't understand that his role, like any manager, is to help resolve interpersonal conflict between his subordinates that they're having trouble working out themselves. Outsourcing that to a random coordinator reeks of conflict-avoidant behavior. That they both quit tells me that neither one thought the other was the sole problem they were dealing with.
I agree, unironically. Not all workplace tensions can be resolved amicably. Often the only solution is for one of the parties to go. The sooner it happens, the better.
Not one but 2 managers removed. Amazing result.
No it wasn't. Those kinds of conflicts always have blame for the rest of the execs too.
These often happened on weekends and I used to simply ask my manager about the days off for this and answer often was a shocked face and a no. So I rarely attended those.
Work should be time-bounded. Weekends should generally be off limit, even if it supposed to be a "fun" work thing.
HR justifying their own bloat. The staff and shareholders pay the price. Agency conflict of interest. The fault is with the CEO for not getting HR in line.
My experience is that its usually good for communications and cooperation, but not nearly as helpful as management envision.
I think that ultimately it can help make a better company/team/etc, BUT you need a program / agenda and people that know what they're doing - can't just make it a bro fest.
Alcohol can be fine, but you will discover some people change when drunk, not always for the better. We had a few incidents at a previous company I worked for (involving people getting removed by bouncers or the whole company being banned from a venue - but tbf there was a lot of barf in the hallways and the like), but I gotta say, the people at the one I'm at now are all very conservative and mature when it comes to drinking and offsite behaviour. From what I know so far, anyway.
Looks like a bad offsite handling, both in your case and linked article.
I feel that offsites work best when you let people interact on their own schedule, pace and topics. Trying to force hands via a lot of activities can kind of backfire.
Relationships happen. They are not programmatically built.
Reminds me of that super cringy one that Wizards of the Coast did early on
Film it and you have a Netflix series. It sounds better than most reality TV.
Works well where I work. Some ground rules to help are:
* Do the bulk during work hours.
* Be 100% accepting of people who don't wanna spend free time on it. Or compensate.
* Add in loads of general fun.
* Let the employees be in charge of what constitutes fun.
* Go light on the actual work.
* Plan well ahead, respect people's own schedules.
Retreats like this just concentrate the social dynamics of the people the organization has hired. I think people’s experience with them is directly correlated with the caliber of people you work with.
All of the stupid shit I’ve seen happen at these events have been done by people who I don’t miss working with
Maybe a retreat would be a good 3rd round interview.
i’ve been to a bunch and all resulted in a big increase in trust between teams especially between tech and sales. i mended a few poor relationships at the last notion one in maui, made some lifelong friends. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe for every shitty one there’s 2 that are great
this could pretty much be it's own editorial, if you're feeling journalistic
> Adam Mendler, a workplace expert, told Inc. that this kind of exercise carries real risk when companies invite openness without ever clarifying how that vulnerability will be treated afterward.
I always felt that those trust exercises, "bring your whole self to work", "let us pay for a personality test so we can know each other better" are all ruses to find the most gullible people and then take advantage of them or get rid of them.
Please don't bring your whole self to work, the rest of us don't need that from you. Be polite, congenial and professional. You have the rest of your day to let it rip however you'd like.
I agree with you, and also the company shouldn't be encouraging people to bring their whole self to a mandatory work retreat and then firing people who do.
Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.
Then I hope you have an extremely flat company structure, not just formally but in practice.
Don't try to fast-talk people into opening up. They have a better idea than you what's safe to talk about, about their lives. If they think they can't open up, they're probably right.
I don't own a company, and nobody reports to me. I simply said I want my coworkers to feel safe being themselves. I've had jobs where that was true, and they were better places to work all around, probably because "I feel safe talking about my transition/mental health/divorce" also translates to "I feel safe telling my boss this release needs to be delayed" and "I feel safe admitting I need some help writing this code."
I really don't want to hear about your religion, and I don't want to see your Jesus Loves You gifs posted to the all tech Slack channel.
Sure, but that sort of behaviour is plainly abusive unless you're actually working in an explicitly religious setting.
But merely saying "I'm taking next Wednesday off to celebrate Eid" ought to be fine everywhere, as is "this weekend I'm singing in my church choir then going for a picnic".
Similarly, wearing a wedding ring or mentioning that you have a partner should never be a problem, but issuing a company-wide invite to your next sex party likely will be.
"Personal" isn't a synonym for "intimate". It's reasonable to assume that people are able to share the former without forcing their colleagues to deal unnecessarily with the latter.
Isn't this just an attitude you get when working in a bad environment or with people you don't like?
Why are there people that want this in the office? Don't want this.
I'm not saying that people should talk about this all the time, but are you saying you don't want people to feel able to mention key details of their personal life?
I want to be free from being burdened with your unmet social needs and I want to feel safe when rejecting that burden you wish to push onto me. Make some friends or pay for a therapist, your coworkers aren't there to be your social support.
As long as it's a subculture that is tacitly approved by the group and by management.
For example? Because usually, people who say this have something in their mind about which they should rightfully be ashamed. Like people who want other people to have lesser rights.
Ethical non-monogamy is one example.
Employers who expect to know things about employee's personal lives are despicable.
I expect to accomplish my tasks. I can be friendly, polite and humorous but you don't need to know anything about how I live.
The main factor is a boss or supervisor can act on their judgement of an employee and employees do not have the same leverage.
That is right. The hierarchical nature of this setting makes it impossible to be fully open, unless you truly are the most uninteresting person on the planet. If not, open and indiscriminate sharing is going to be a potential liability. Some things in life are very useful to know, and I believe being deliberate about what you share about yourself with whom is one of them.
Their humanity does not serve the bottom line.
>I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture
Yes, you want to feel like the people around you feel safe to share it. Everyone with things that are uncomfortable to hear have learned that they're not. They know the polite fiction to talk around it and make you feel like they're open. They're not.
>>> bring your whole self to work
This one always seemed like an "invitation" to demonstrate that you have the correct life experiences and attitudes.
Like those holistic admissions essays that sprung up when universities got banned from explicitly treating applicants differently based on race.
It's more likely incompetence than malice. There's a reason people don't share everything about their personal lives at work, and sometimes leaders think forgetting that will make everyone better off.
Probably so, but it was incredibly ill advised of Netflix to admit to this. That’s what I find the most shocking, far more than the firing itself. I cannot fathom how admitting “yeah we fired them for going to therapy” plays to their benefit.
Because at some point their emails about the firing will be subpoenaed, and if they lie about it now it's going to bite them harder later.
They still didn't have to outright confess to the crime though. When talking to journalists you're allowed to say "no comment".
That's why we got training at Google that more or less told us not to put these kinds of things in writing.
Remember: the e in e-mail stands for evidence.
Yeah when I worked at Deloitte Consulting, we had similar training that said something to the effect of "don't put something in an email that wouldn't feel comfortable as a newspaper headline".
And the s stands for secure
"Remember: the e in e-mail stands for evidence."
Were you told this literally?
And the O in RTO stands for Oral-communication-only
There's a huge difference between being yourself and not having a filter.
I absolutely think people should be themselves at work. In my mind this generally means not acting like a robot or treating other people like toasters. It is psychologically crushing to operate in a they're all workplace where people do that. The best managers I've ever had were those I could discuss my emotions or that of my team with.
That said, there are clear lines about workplace decorum.
It's one thing to say " I find this new Direction very frustrating for reasons x y and z, and the team morale is low", but another thing to say "i think the new leader is a dipshit idiot"
For some reason people think being yourself means having no filter
You are still not being yourself though, if you have to suppress the tendency to call someone a dipshit idiot. It is arguable whether the "self" in that case needs some work or not, but the idea about "being yourself" is being able to express yourself freely without giving it any conscious thought. Think of the setting where you are with close friends, and let the conversation flow freely. Having to filter yourself is the opposite of that. In reality, you can never truly be yourself in an environment that you do not own without risking dire consequences or opposition (even when you own it, this eventually becomes the case). So I think not being yourself is a good and necessary compromise for harmonious functioning within an organ, and there is no need to soften this by saying that having a filter is different from not being yourself.
The real challenge lies in properly tuning the strength of this filter, being deliberate with it and knowing what can be said, and what cannot be said. The people who act like robots err on the side of extreme caution, and are unwilling to invest time and effort into tuning and developing this filter. They also don't realize that this makes it impossible to connect with people, to their own demise.
I'm now in a team where I don't particularly like any of my coworkers due to all the things they have shared over the years which has accumulated in a persistent ick about all of them.
I can work with them fine, I just don't want to share any part of myself with these people and invite commentary from people I do not respect.
Exactly. The 'whole self' also includes a deliberate thinking mind. People often equate feeling free and being yourself with losing all inhibitions and restraint. That may free great for a while, to unburden yourself, but its a strict subset of your capabilities.
absolutely. I learned by example early on from our manager what one should say during something like a "vulnerability-trust exercise." : it should be something like "i'm too detail oriented", "i put too much time and effort into my job" or, max, "i trust/expect people to be similarly overly-diligent, etc.".
For an exec to talk about therapy - that is allowed only to the top dogs, like CEO, who can pass any personal crap upon his reports.
"Bring your whole self to work" was HR virtue signaling to the people favored by DEI, when it was still en vogue.
I always observed that as "bring your whole self, as long as your whole self exhibits the exact same behavior and demeanor as every other corporate employee, ideally wrapped in uniquely colored skin for beautiful decorum".
I remember a "beer test" as a hiring practice recommended on HN and blogs. And pointifications about how culture fit is important. And effectively mandatory games playing after work. And "united meritocracy" slogan bullshit.
So, go outta there with complains about hr slogan and dei.
> He had been warned during his performance review that he should “drop one or two less f-bombs but don’t stop entirely.”
> It goes on to say that at the same retreat Baillie drank a Guinness standing on his head, after sharing that he had learned the trick from his former father in law during a conversation inspired by the trust session.
> “His colleague immediately asked for a demonstration, rather than withhold the openness that the session had encouraged, he performed the trick,” the papers say.
This reads like a sitcom.
This guy rocks. Fired for being fun
Sounds like a case of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_clown_paradox
> Sad clown paradox is characterised by a cyclothymic temperament, which encourages the creation of light-hearted humour in a professional setting, despite inner turmoil.
Your company, your coworkers, are not your friends. HR is not there for you, it's to protect the company from you. Do not disclose personal information to those who control your livelihood. Once you leave or if you build up a personal relationship with a coworker, outside of work, then maybe. Even still. I will never divulge what I have been through simply because corporate wants to be "inclusive".
This is a recipe for a sad life. It's avoiding friendship for the fear of betrayal. You get a lot of benefits by being good friends with colleagues. There are, however important things to be aware of:
1- "Though shall not" limit their social life to their colleagues (or any single group that can disappear with a divorce, change of jobs, or hobby, maybe because of an incident).
2- "Though shall not" blindly help people with the hope of being helped in return. Help with generosity, but know the limits: don't sacrifice yourself, and certainly, don't count on people returning the favor as your main plan. It's incredible how much happier we can be just by helping people, if we fire and forget, rather than cling onto.
3- Do not define yourself with your job, your success in there, or with your colleagues' approvals. This is extremely hard, yet extremely important. Diversify what defines you. Be able to mentally afford being bad at some of them. Don't let any of them define who you are. This lets you act with true confidence (not insecurity disguised as overconfidence), which is extremely pleasant for yourself and others.
You seem to contradict yourself, or at least actually support the OP's point. If you don't define yourself with your job, but have other self-identities outside, there is nothing sad about having different takes to the amount of personal information shared in various circles.
Extending on that, I do not agree with "do not define yourself with your job". Why not? It's a big, if not biggest, part of almost everyone's life. What's bad is defining yourself with your job ALONE. Psychological safety comes from having multiple self-identities: be an engineer at work, a volunteer on weekends, amateur radio enthusiast on Thursdays nights, or whatever, and don't mix those!
>”this is a recipe for a sad life”
No, this is a recipe for surviving corporate America. You can have and make friends but be cautious of coworkers that you work directly with. I’ve made friends outside of work. I’ve made friends at work but I do not expect to be friends with everyone I work with.
>> a sad life
> corporate America
Sounds like you're saying the same thing.
Disagree. It's just admitting that the company can and will be cynical when it comes to the conflict of interests between them and the employee.
Making friends at the workplace is fine until there is such conflict, then where will they stand? If they will turn they back on you (and most of them will), then how much is such relation worth in the first place?
How's that different from friends at your sports club? How does the risk of your workplace friends not taking your side balance against the benefit of the possibility that they will support you?
Should I give up years of joy and sense of community and belonging for the fear that someday my workplace friends will betray me? And then years more of suffering in my next workplace?
A strategy that minimizes risk rarely maximizes reward.
The tragedy strikes when you associate your workplace with belonging because here, at-will employment means you never truly belong.
You see things in binary mode, world is anything but that.
If I am not making friends at work, it doesn't simply equate to "sad life". Maybe it would for you, but then you can question why behaving so, work isn't and shouldn't be one's central piece of existence. Maybe you were never fired, or never saw firing for all the wrong reasons. Maybe you work so much its hard to have an actual life outside of work. At the end it doesn't matter, but folks do see things differently to you and its fine.
#2 I believe that there is at least one entire culture on the planet that comports itself this way, whose emergent macro outcomes can be debated.
Interesting... Can you elaborate? I did not get the reference.
This is so sad. I have made amazing friends with my colleagues in the past. My days are made better when they can be funny, we can share moments, and we can support each other in hard times. Even remotely I have managed to stay in touch with them. It is a real friendship, built from a decade of learning just how this other person ticks.
Really hope I didn't have to ever give that up.
You can make friends but don’t assume that they are simply because you share a common trauma of being cooped up in the same building.
I’ve made friends at work. I wouldn’t call them friend friends but I’ve made friends at work.
I was rejected in a hiring process because a co-worker worked there. They asked him for feedback in the final hiring decision. I was being considered for a senior staff role. The meeting room had two of my ex-co-workers. One was the person who had referred me and was my tech lead at a previous work place. This (feedback giver) co-worker (my peer; from yet another work place) told them all was great and hunky dory but "he is a work life balance kind of person". I was not hired. Also, my two co-workers there didn't know each other really and didn't know they both had worked with me in the past until that meeting. Company had connected those dots on LinkedIn.
[delayed]
Good riddance. A “work-life balance kind of person” is not a negative characteristic; even more so at a position where your behavior is an inspiration to many people
Well, I live in India. “Being available” and making others do the same is the national managerial obsession.
People should reject this mentality and live their life.
[delayed]
Sounds like you dodged a bullet and the coworker did you a favor.
Exactly this. No matter how they dress it up, HR is there to protect the company, not you.
Genuine question. Can you tell me why people love saying this so much?
Even if the people working in HR genuinely want to do the right thing for the employees, and company policies support them doing that, interactions with HR are inherently adversarial.
The people within HR may be friendly, they've probably got friends :). It can be a very people-oriented role. But they are incapable of being your friend when you're interacting with them in their role as representative for the company.
I greatly appreciate my employer's HR folk, they're really lovely, very good at their jobs, and want to help. But if I have to have a formal meeting with them, I would definitely bring along my union rep.
[delayed]
Because HR lies and say the opposite in the majority of companies. "Come to us with any problems, it's safe and anonymous, we are here to help you".
From personal experience I have reported gross treats by senior leadership to an HR rep who was shocked about hearing their HR employee evals being suppressed by only allowing score between 8-10 in a 1-10 score. The HR rep confirmed it personally that it was happening and a few months later appeared on the other side of the desk with the leadership as they fired me for budget reasons.
This is corporate default. Don't stick your head too much, don't make too much noise, vent off someplace else ie via some cool sports. Doesn't matter how righteous, how correct and good for the company, it will very easily back fire you. Its kafquesque catch-22 all over the place, be a good boy and accept the paycheck with crap it comes along. Or move, but its not always greener on the next site.
[delayed]
HR stands for Human Resources, as in how the company manages ones of its resources, the humans. Is this not obvious at all?
The workplace is one of the best places to find your spouse. It's where you spend most of your time and where you're most likely to meet someone with similar interests to you in the same location. It's anti-human to treat the workplace as this clinical saferoom with no relationships.
Workplaces that are dictated by a boss or C-suite are anti-human as well, as they are dictatorial, not democratic.
If I were so terrified I couldn't share anything personal at work, I would be happy to be fired as it sounds like a miserable place to work
[delayed]
I heard this from older generations. Sadly this is no longer true as we all work remotely now.
While totally logical (there are many matching counterparts for most people, its just about being close enough for long enough regardless of place), its not always ideal.
I wouldn't want my wife to work on same team for example. Heck, even same company may be less than ideal, time off each other is usually for the better. Also, if breakup/divorce happens, workplace can easily become a place out of worst nightmare.
I prefer looking at hobbies/passions groups, people there match me way more than people at work, it that doesn't work out its easier to cut off only that group if needed. In my case it was climbing events I was organizing, and I ended up with wife that matches me on basically all important levels
Is this your life? Quit.
You first
hr and corporate are always your enemies but coworkers can be friends. they are on the same level as you and dealing with the same problems. just be careful who you trust because some of them might turn out to be class traitors and make up some allegations to get you fired.
Found the dude who’s super fun to work with.
Never been in an office where there wasn't some solidarity amongst workers and not the owners. I can't imagine how alienating it must be to work somewhere you feel you can't trust anyone except yourself, sounds like a self made hell.
At least you get paid I suppose.
Yeah I agree. I'm still very careful who I trust but it doesn't hurt to try and build a network.
Sounds like a fate worse than getting fired.
Do people not know how to make friends and develop trust. The solution is the same judgment process any human should go through.
Only an idiot would automatically assume coworkers are friends.
Only an idiot would assume coworkers can't become friends.
What if he only took it before his career, or before joining Netflix? And is it because his role is not an engineer/designer/etc so the history of having taken medically prescribed ketamine could mean greater risk during the operations designated to him that are of business-type nature?
What if my engineers microdose on ketamine for productivity? And will the HR decides differently if it is lsd, dmt, etc? So because of Steve Jobs these naturally have better "branding" to them?
What if Kevin Baillie made a documentary film out of this and became "the Steve Jobs of ketamine"? Do things on this planet work this way?
" including one incident where Baillie performed a Guinness-related party trick after colleagues asked him to show it off."
Is this just splitting the G? If so, it's the most mundane thing in the history of alcohol related party tricks.
> It goes on to say that at the same retreat Baillie drank a Guinness standing on his head, after sharing that he had learned the trick from his former father in law during a conversation inspired by the trust session.
From another article: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/netflix-exec...
Honestly, the whole thing seems sort of innocuous. He had some particular medical treatment and then drank a Guinness upside down. Maybe there was something else to it but if you're a big corp then you probably should just give a safe answer.
Mate needs to move down to Australia, he would have been promoted after showing that off.
But in Australia, he would have just been drinking it normally.
...I'm fired, aren't I? I'll see myself out.
Yeah you’ll never catch me drinking a Guinness while standing on my head at a company event.
Mostly due to a total lack of coordination.
I will try to catch you, I'll just fail due to my equal lack of coordination. Never bring a pint of Guinness to a trust fall.
what is splitting the G? I'm not a big drinker
According to ChatGPT it's the skill of taking exactly one sip such that when you put the Guiness glass down the new beer level ends up precisely through the horizontal middle of the "G".
According to LadBible the actual trick was drinking a pint of Guinness while standing on his head.
https://www.ladbible.com/entertainment/netflix/netflix-execu...
I appreciate you taking the time to look it up so the rest of us don’t have to.
Nor am I but I found this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL35y1nTkxQ
It seems to be a challenge where you drink a specific amount from a pint in one try such that the bottom of the foam splits the Guinness logo. It's not even a huge amount. It seems to less than 20% of the pint eyeballing it.
Last retreat I went on the CFO drove drunk around 350 miles to get there. The CEO insisted on heavy drinking for everyone. Then he ordered one of everything on the menu the next morning at a Cracker Barrel for himself and wasted a ton of food. I found out he had a cocaine addiction about a month before the company was acquired. They also had orgies in the office break rooms and gave out a machete to everyone as a Christmas gift. Amongst the many crazy times…
My fraternity was more tame and we used to have guys gazing each other in the main room during parties.
>They also had orgies in the office break rooms and gave out a machete to everyone as a Christmas gift
Hopefully not at the same time, otherwise there would be opportunity for many kinds of unfortunate mishaps.
The image of these two occurring at the same time haha
>They also had orgies in the office break rooms
Bring your hole self to work
Reminds me of the tik tok of the guy who just starts giving out new machetes in packages to homeless people.
Remember this story the next time someone says "join our mission" or "bring your whole self to work". They all come with asterisks.
I cannot see this ending up well for Netflix. It sounds like it personally offended someone's sensibility and they decided to fire the guy. I expect Netflix to lose this lawsuit, but more importantly, settle it before it ever goes anywhere.
And don't forget the effect on employee morale, retention and hiring. They have now made the international news cycle for firing an employee for sharing after being encouraged to share, and doing a party trick after being encouraged by coworkers to do so
Source article: https://nypost.com/2026/07/26/us-news/netflix-exec-goes-ball...
This is probably the first time I've ever said that a NY Post article was a useful source of information on a story.
Thanks, we've switched to that from https://www.inc.com/amaya-nichole/netflix-company-retreat-sp... above.
So he was fired for sharing he had ketamine based therapy for depression? Why? Like is it promoting drug use or something?
We can only speculate, but it would not be surprising if someone was hunting for a reason to get rid of them and thought this was a good excuse. Personally, I don’t think this is a good excuse and while we don’t have all the facts, it sounds like Netflix conceding the therapy factored into the dismissal is probably something they will very much regret admitting to on the record.
I’ve been working in this industry for 20 years. Nobody gets fired for this, not at Netflix or any of the other studios. Especially a VP. I don’t know how to express how unlikely any of this is. This was an excuse, not the real reason.
So they couldn't come up with an excuse that would have been a legitimate reason?
Also HR has bad employees / agent once in a while.
isn't this highly illegal, since it is used for medical purpose (mental health) ?
its like firing a person who was sedated by professional Anesthesiologist with Fentanyl during surgery (A friend of mine had a surgery and was administered fentanyl)
Yes, IANAL but it seems very much like grounds for an open-and-shut wrongful termination suit, given that they have admitted it up front. They could be taken to the cleaners for this.
This guy's back pay of income, severance, and benefits could really add up, but that's more a factor of him getting paid a lot in the first place than wrongful termination suits being particularly fruitful. I wouldn't really describe their payouts as being "taken to the cleaners".
It is a lot more complicated than that. The details matter. Were they doing it at work? Did their usage patern or disclosure show poor judgment?
It is very likely Netflix's argument would be more complex.
not that I'm aware of, no. Maybe in some states sure, but not in most.
"We have found you to be a poor cultural fit in our mission driven high octane growth mindset 10x company. That we reached this conclusion right after you disclosed your medical condition is pure coincidence."
Yes, it seems likely they violated California's Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) and the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) based on the details I have seen so far. The EEOC’s mental-health guidance states both that an employee may choose to discuss his condition with coworkers and that the employer may not discriminate against him for doing so. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/depression-ptsd-other-men...
That's only guidance, not binding law in and of itself, but it means that the employer can only discourage employees from discussing their mental health if they do so in a neutral manner that applies equally to all employees in a non-discriminatory manner, which was self-evidently not the case here.
Notably, the EEOC guidance standards are not wholly unlimited. Employers can take action against an employee if their discussion of their mental health is repeatedly inappropriate or disruptive. e.g., if someone is constantly cornering coworkers to trauma dump suicidal thoughts on them or something like that. But only in truly extreme cases where an accommodation is impossible (e.g., if they are violent) or if they fail to adjust their behavior after receiving feedback that it has become unacceptable. A single incident that does not appear to have even made any other employee uncomfortable certainly doesn't suffice.
Netflix's only real defense here would be to argue that they would have fired him anyway without the disclosure, in response to other issues. That is a challenging defense to make given the admission their lawyer made that the ketamine treatment factored into their decision to fire, but the ADA and FEHA require "but for" causation, i.e. he is protected from firing if they would not have fired him but for the admission of ketamine treatment. I doubt they will succeed given the relative triviality of their other accusations (somewhat excessive profanity in a context where a fair amount of profanity was considered acceptable) and the entirely inoffensive party trick (at least in a context where the CEO has been repeatedly photographed drinking alcohol at company events and the alcohol at this event was provided by the company). I seriously doubt they will be able to point to any similarly situated employees that Netflix has previously fired solely for profanity or consuming alcohol that the company provided to them (and from a PR perspective that would almost be worse for them to admit). Frankly, the profanity feedback also seems like the very common scenario where a manager is required to provide regular feedback but can't think of anything constructive to say because the employee is a high performer, so they reach for something funny and minor just to check the box. In the absence of extensive complaints from coworkers, it is unlikely to overcome the company lawyer's outright admission that the ketamine use was a factor in their decision.
What appears to have happened here is Netflix has awful in-house counsel and/or HR who utterly failed to carry out their duties with even minimal competence. They appear to have simply assumed that all ketamine use is automatically illegal recreational drug abuse without bothering to investigate whether that is true in general or in this particular case before escalating to the most extreme possible reaction. Those employees are the ones who should be fired, not only because of the gross incompetence it takes to so egregiously violate America's otherwise absurdly weak legal protections for workers' rights, but because they did so in a manner that seems practically designed to permanently destroy employee trust in the company while inviting unwelcome public scrutiny of their potentially discriminatory employment practices.
This is a fairly straight forward discriminatory-causation story: Netflix invited vulnerability and thus potential mental health related disclosures, learned of a psychiatric history, reframed treatment as drug misconduct, and then expressly treated it as a termination factor. It's honestly pretty rare to see such an obvious example of this kind of discrimination, usually companies do a better job covering it up with a pretext, and usually their *lawyers* aren't so unbelievably fucking stupid as to admit publicly to the discriminatory decision.
Workers rights are "woke" and thus we're not doing them anymore in the US. He should have claimed he was fired for being white.
If HR policy says no drugs then that’s a wrap. Allowing an employee to violate HR policy probably puts the company in all sorts of legal risks.
You can't have an HR policy that discriminates against people for receiving mental health treatment from a physician, that is plainly illegal under multiple statutes both federally and in the state of California. This was not a situation where he was on ketamine while at work, and there are no accusations that his ketamine use even affected his work at all, even incidentally or indirectly. Even if it had, Netflix would be required to make a reasonable accommodation for him. But we know it did not affect his work because he received treatment in 2022 and Netflix only found about it in 2026 after he disclosed the treatment. Besides, he is a movie executive, it's not like he is operating heavy machinery. Ketamine is unlikely to have any effect on him that would in any way expose Netflix to liability.
Netflix seems to have simply assumed that all ketamine use is illegal and recreational, without bothering to conduct even the most cursory of investigations, which would have revealed that ketamine is in fact a clinically acceptable treatment for treatment-resistant depression. This is what happens when you have utterly incompetent idiots for in-house counsel and HR.
HR policy is not the law
No drugs even in a medical setting? Man, that's intense. Can't take anesthetics when facing surgery or similar situations. No epinephrine for anaphylaxic shock. Can't take insulin. Pretty rough.
Ketamine is an FDA approved drug.
>>> Adam Mendler, a workplace expert, told Inc. that this kind of exercise carries real risk when companies invite openness without ever clarifying how that vulnerability will be treated afterward.
(That's the Inc article)
.
Mandatory "vulnerability" is required to be staged and fake. Legitimate vulnerability -- that comes with legitimate risk -- has to be a free choice or else whoever's pushing it makes themselves vulnerable to consequences.
From https://nypost.com/2026/07/26/us-news/netflix-exec-goes-ball...
So the nominal issue is recreational drug use rather than ketamine therapy. It's also not clear that he was fired for the therapy itself. And I doubt Netflix would fire someone just for therapeutic (or even recreational) drug use unless it has a negative impact on the workplace performance. If it was proper & legal therapy (e.g, https://www.betterucare.com/), Netflix wouldn't fire a person since it would have positive impact on their workplace performance. But if Netflix fired an employee for a valid cause, I would expect the employee to try to counter with any option that would get them a severance or settlement.It's likely that we're not hearing the full story and the news sites are just writing clickbait articles from one-sided excerpts of the lawsuit that the ex-employee filed.
Given he made $1 million+ per year as an executive, it's possible they needed a pretense to fire him "for cause" under a contract that otherwise stipulated some sizeable severance greater than the cost of litigation and settlement.
Did you miss he received the therapy under medical supervision and Netflix’s attorney flat out admitted “the ketamine therapy issue has factored into the termination”.
Did you miss that that's according to the one sided exceprt from a lawsuit an ex-employee filed?
I notice you’re not calling them a liar.
I've no idea what happened. Treating allegations in a lawsuit as undeniable true or "flat out admissions" is a bad idea, though. Doing that would have you believing that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, after all, he claimed in a lawsuit he is.
Do you think the fired employee’s lawyer would have included it if they couldn’t prove it?
Are you under the impression that lawyers have never included things that later turned out to be false or unprovable in their initial filing of a lawsuit? If lawyers are so infallible, why would one have openly admitted to firing someone for a legal medical treatment they received?
I think that, per the parent who you initially replied to's point, that taking a tabloid's clickbait excerpts from one-side of a lawsuit is a terrible way of understanding the truth of a dispute.
Yes, that actually happens in real lawsuits. It is not even rare.
Did you miss that a company attorney acknowledged "the ketamine therapy issue has factored into the termination?"
Only according to the lawsuit filed by the fired party.
As Benjamin Studebaker put it, bring your whole self to work just means the whole self should be professional
am i wrong but doesnt the article say the dude worked at "eyeline" which seems to be consistently described in a quick search as a "netflix owned vfx company" which would not really make this guy a "netflix employee". no more so that somebody working at "x" is now a "spacex" employee. Eyeline has its own ceo and presumably culture, but "rando vfx company you've never heard of fires a guy" doesnt grab headlines i guess...
no comment on the actual content or context just a nit on everyone saying this was netflix did a thing... this seems like netflix owned company eyeline did a thing based on the actual article and a couple of the eyeline press releases from when they got bought and recently rebranded.
If you work for a wholly owned subsidiary, the parent company has complete control and the executives have no further hindrance to hiring or firing you than they would ton anyone else, anywhere else within the rest of the company. The CEO is always beholden to the board, and if the board of the wholly owned subsidiary isn't literally the same board as the parent company, then everyone the board is appointed by the parent company.
It sounds like Netflix dividends have consisted of beers and private parties where AI bros brag about their race cars and tripping on Special K.
Turns out it was a trust calibrating exercise that the whole team learned from.
And all it will cost them will be a huge settlement!
I didn't know Netflix was such a stick-up-the-ass garbage place to work at. What an incredibly dumb thing to fire someone over.
I can't speak to Netflix one way or the other.
But the title seems to imply it was about over sharing, while the rest of the article seems focused on the culture of constant alcohol and drugs which likely has more to do with the way things ended.
Hard to say what is true with a publication like this.
The stereotype is real. A guy I work with is part of what they call the Divorced Dad Club. He’s 56 and gets together with a bunch of other divorced dads to do ketamine and play video games. They’re all in the mid 50s, white, and in tech. And keep getting played by puffy lipped 30 somethings.
Being infantry might’ve been a better calling than a divorced dad.
Remember: your coworkers aren't your family, your boss isn't your buddy and HR isn't on your side.
Some executives observe religions that abstain from alcohol. They see you with one beer at a company party and judge everything you do on that.
Or, if you’re a teacher: https://beerandwhiskeybros.com/2011/02/08/teacher-fired-over...
(I liked the last note, at the end of the entry)
Keep work life and personal life separate. No exceptions. If a company tries to encourage you to do otherwise I’d strongly suggest you find a new employer.
Most people prefer to work with humans, not robots. Common experiences and getting to know people are a huge part of that.
Sharing stories and getting to know people humanizes them. It's much easier to hate "that team in another country" you've never met than that person you've had a meal together with and learned about their hobbies.
There's a huge difference between learning that your colleague also happens to play chess, and sharing the vulnerability of how you handled personal grief in your life.
Your workplace is a community, not a friendship circle, and not a family. Community life has always had a certain level of formality to help paper over the differences between people in the community while still fostering a positive, inclusive environment.
I think that's something people have increasingly forgotten. My grandparents were active in their church for decades. They didn't talk about my grandmother's serious mental health struggles with the other parishioners.
People in the past had stronger community institutions, and I think a part of that was that nobody expected to bring their whole self to bowling club or the neighborhood potluck.
It's a balance though, isn't it? Like, sure, don't bring your whole self to every single bowling game, you're there to bowl so focus at the task at hand. Nobody is going to have a good time if every bowling game devolves into every little emotional issue anyone in the group is having.
But that doesn't mean those relationships originally started at the bowling club need to stay purely about bowling, a big part of community is to then open up when the context is right and when the other person is open to the sharing. It's how you grow your community, how you grow your circle. Don't expect every person in your bowling league wants to become your best friend ever, but it's also not healthy to assume that everyone there only ever wants to just bowl and only cares about bowling.
I've had a lot of people from work relationships that stayed purely work relationships. I've had some become friends. I've had several become important people in my life. If I forced myself to silo off work contacts are only ever work contacts, I don't think I'd be nearly as happy as I am today. I know I'd be a lot more lonely and probably a good bit less successful.
We talk about this huge loneliness epidemic and yet so many people are like "I would never talk to my fellow coworkers about anything personal, ever." Huh I wonder why we're so lonely. We're all convinced we shouldn't be personal with the people we spend a massive amount of our lives with.
I don't think you're fundamentally disagreeing. Your work community can be a source of friendships (and sometimes but more rarely, more than friendship), but you shouldn't confuse the two. Finding out your colleague also plays chess can segue into an invitation to play chess outside of work, and launchpad that into building a friendship. But that's not the same as playing chess together at work (get back to work?), let alone being emotionally vulnerable as an intentional part of building relationships with people who you're trying to trust with that vulnerability.
The latter sounds good (if you could have that with your colleagues, then it can only help, right?), but then again, the linked article is literally about someone violating that and firing the subject of the article. It is simply not possible to build emotional intimacy with every coworker, let alone under forced circumstances, so attempts to do so are more or less predictably going to lead to pain.
I mostly feel that people should be more selective about who and how they open up to in general in life. There's a lot to talk about that's not your past experiences with depression, and those don't need to be talked about to 99% of people, and discussing them too early is an easy way to burn bridges before they're even built.
I definitely talk to my coworkers about what I did this weekend, or travel, or the weather (I'm halfway around the world from my home country, so comparing the weather is a constant topic of conversation). I have a coworker I carpool with and we talk some about how I'm settling in to life here. But, I will never discuss my history of mental illness with any of these people. At best I will make a vague allusion to seasonal blues.
I once had a coworker tell me about his young son's circumcision. Not really something that should be discussed in the office...
My high school government teacher told us about his vasectomy.
Not related to the thread but your comment just reminded me of that.
Not saying you can’t discuss basic details like did you do anything interesting this weekend, but these things like “share deep personal details” as mentioned in the article have no place at work.
Not to mention a lot of things get solved/decided over beers at happy hour. Coworkers shouldn't be your best friends but you're a fool if you're not friendly with them. Like you said, people aren't robots and a business isn't a machine.
Not yet anyways. Not all of them.
If I’m going to be seeing the people I work with as much as I see my family, I’m going to try to make some friends. I’d argue the bigger risk is not making friends at work given the loneliness epidemic, especially among middle aged and older men.
I doubt the events at the retreat were the only cause for his firing. Creative folks are usually given much wider leeway compared to the bean counters.
It feels like somebody in senior management had it in for Baillie. And the ketamine story provided a sufficient cause.
Funnily enough, that reminds of one scene in the Comedy Central TV show "Corporate", episode S01E05 titled... "Corporate retreat"[0].
I didn't know those trust/sharing exercises were real.
[0]https://www.imdb.com/fr/title/tt7289250/?ref_=ttep_ep_5
Your work colleagues are not your family. Your superiors are not your friends. Treat every company as if they were going to look for a reason to fire you right now unless you can reasonably argue that they don't
in the creative arts business, the work that sells tends to come from people carrying something. a difficult history, a chemical affiliation, some level of quirkiness/flaws, or all of the above.
perfect flawless plain-vanilla creatives tend go work for Hallmark channel and product absolute drab cr*p.
not sure why Netflix HR would want to sabotage their own internal culture that drives their content success strategy.
So this is where the money from the price increases goes.
Please solve ??? for X = K(special)
Do X -> ??? -> Profit
The issue here isn’t that this guy shared something about his personal life it’s the particular personal details. It’s possible to share information about your personal life without talking about your drug use or your therapy or your drug use at therapy.
It is irritating that people expect you to understand what reasonable personal sharing is without explaining explicitly and goodness knows I screwed this up when I was younger but “don’t talk about your personal life at all” is bad advice.
What this really makes clear is that you should neither trust people you work with nor share personal information with them.
The article implies it was from sharing his experience using Ketamine therapy for depression, which likely would have been done with a doctor. Which makes this seem much weirder to my ears.
It always surprises me when people don't understand that the employee-employer relationship is an adversarial one. Unless you're in a democratic co-op or similar your employer is the enemy and you should never forget that. The correct move is to try to screw them in every legal way at every turn because that is what they are doing to you. Never divulge any information that increases your attack surface, always try to extract the most money for the least effort. This is capitalism 101.
You must not allow them to fool you into thinking that these aren't the rules they're playing by. David Sirlin's "Playing to Win" is a good treatise on how to be good, and perhaps the most important lesson is to play the game by the rules as written, and not by some other set of rules that exists only in your head.
(Though in this case the victim was senior enough that I suspect he was playing the game to the best of his ability, trying to humanize himself to gain the upper hand in some other manipulation game and misplayed, kicking things into the legal arena, as one does)
This sounds like an exhausting perspective on the world. I’d rather be hurt by assholes than never allow myself to be vulnerable with anybody. You can mitigate the potential downside without thinking everybody is out to get you or thinking everything is a power game.
Not at all work cultures are toxic, but many have toxic elements.
It's very culture-dependent. You have to read the room, pick up clues from current behaviour and previous history, and try to calibrate accordingly.
There's a broad correlation between management stupidity and chaotic leadership and toxicity but sometimes you can still end up in pockets of sanity - or insanity if the surrounding culture is good but there are one or more Cluster B types on a team.
I'm vulnerable with plenty of people, just not employers (in general). The incentive structures, especially at a company that's more than a few people are such that it is in their best interest to get as much from you for as little as possible, that's the entire point of the system.
yes, employment is exhausting. To do other that what the poster says is accepting risk.
Until this present universe I didn’t really care about that because retaining the job wasn’t a top priority. If you got fired over something like this you took it as a good way to go do something somewhere else.
Now of course it’s hard to say if the original employment shape is still valid.
That sounds like an exhausting way to live.
I would say that the more-exhausting way to live would be to be unaware of this, to accept the “we’re a family here” lie at face value, and to be passed over and screwed over at frequent intervals without knowing or understanding why.
You don’t have to go full Patrick Bateman corp-bro, but keeping in mind the phrase “we don’t fire family” and adjusting your approach based on that counter-example can help you to keep things appropriately transactional and not be taken advantage of.
The least exhausting way to work a job is to find people to work with who are smart, well adjusted, and genuinely interested in cooperating to make money together.
>>> This is capitalism 101.
No, it's really not.
The entire point of capitalism is free enterprise and freedom of association. The way to apply that to employer / employee relationships is to recognize that you are not a serf bound to a single employer and keep half an eye on your options in case you ever tire of your current relationship.
My freedom to choose an employer is orthogonal to the incentive structures within in that relationship.
If it's adversarial then why are they willingly entering into a mutually beneficial arrangement?
A mutually beneficial agreement can still be adversarial? If you're getting shaken down by the mafia it's beneficial for you to pay them protection money.
This is why you should refuse to participate in these "trust and honesty sessions". You don't owe your employer or colleagues any insight into your personal life and the HR people who often run these sessions are there for the company, not for you and generally should not be trusted with personal info.
Are we really discussing NYPost article? Even freaking Daily Mail is considered to be more trustworthy among tabloids.
Bad move. Those corporate events serve the purpose to find "bad apples" (from the employer's perspective), to either shape you into what they want or cut you off.
Never sacrifice your privacy in such an environment.
Kind of crazy Netflix spend so much on engineers while piracy sites give a better UX and more shows for free and with better privacy.
Sorry how is that relevant to the linked article?
I just thought when I saw the guy made a million bucks a year.
Second order consequences. Piracy sites are more customer-focused, large corps skew more towards performing productivity for the internal hierarchy.
you should never discuss your personal life at work or with your coworkers.
It really depends on your workspace. At a lot start ups people would find it strange if you never shared anything about your life.
Yea this I agree,
I'm shocked Netflix hasn't just settled to keep this quiet, because the entire situation makes them look not only like an abusive, discriminatory employer but even worse, horrifically incompetent at being abusive and discriminatory. Plenty of companies treat their employees like shit, that's not news. But any competently managed company knows how to do so without incurring massive legal liability like this, and it speaks to a remarkable lack of professionalism and basic competence at the leadership level and within the legal and HR teams.
If the accusations are true as reported, their in-house counsel fucked up terribly by assuming all ketamine use is illegal and recreational without bothering to conduct the very cursory investigation required to determine that it is in fact a perfectly legitimate option for treating treatment-resistant depression. That single error drove them to fire an otherwise exemplary employee for an obviously illegal reason in a manner that screwed him out of significant compensation including severance.
This was an obvious, unforced error by their legal team. Competent lawyers and competent corporate leadership would recognize that the relatively small amount of money they may save by litigating this issue is not worth the damage it is very predictably inflicting on their corporate culture and public brand. The lawyer who publicly admitted that ketamine factored into their decision should be immediately fired because he is demonstrably a terrible fucking lawyer, and he seems to be representative of the quality of legal advice Netflix is receiving, because any attorney with half a brain would have immediately recognized both the underlying legal error that incurred liability for the company and the business context that makes immediate heavily NDA'd settlement the optimal strategy for defending, even were the original legal error not so egregious.
My main takeaway from this situation is that Netflix is managed by remarkably incompetent leaders who are advised by even more remarkably incompetent lawyers.
I feel like this thread is full of two camps:
People who think it's sweet that their colleague is taking vacation to visit family at the end of august this year.
And people who understand exactly why they told that lie.
"psychological safety" in the workplace? Auzla always lies. HR always lies. HR always lies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpYs-aM8I8U
God forbid anyone invoked with movies do drugs! They might stumble upon a creative thought!
Very disappointing to see people rush to cynicism, with no effort at all to put blame on Netflix. I get it, you're stupid if you think your employer has your best interests at heart. Why does that mean they get a pass?
"It's difficult for me to share this but I care about Netflix, some would say, too much. My mother died recently and rather than go to the funeral I worked through the last season of goop lab because I know the synergy of Netflix and Gwyneth Paltrow will enrich our subscribers lives like nothing before. Thank you for listening but I think I ate some bad fish at the retreat and need to go lie down in my room."
Google banned political conversations at work. Tech companies are learning from first principles why work/life separation, traditional office culture exist.
It seems the message of schizophrenic corporate America is, "don't bring your humanity to work". Because what is politics but an expression of how society should be. Even more ridiculous is this trust exercise, their idea is for employees to show their human side to improve employee-employee relationships for higher productivity, but wait, not too much of the human side!
No wonder all the CEOs are crazy about AI. All the intelligence, none of the human.
Yes, this so-called trust exercise sounds more akin to a mutual blackmail pact.
At the same time they want to leverage all the "humanity" they can to get you to work more for less.
We're a family here, after all. You wouldn't leave your colleagues hanging, would you?
You indeed shouldn’t bring your humanity to work. You should bring what’s required to do the job. That’s the deal, you do the job and the employer pays you for it. Stopping making where you work the same as where you live.
what a terrible take. so many jobs involve ethical and moral responsibility, and so many jobs (especially in tech, where you are making products which shape lives on the global scale) are best fulfilled through compassion, human understanding, and yes also the desire to make the world a better place.
i have been fortunate in my career to have had many roles where i was able to create a better product and solution through the aforementioned ideals.
so much of what we build is made better by diverse thought, diverse ability, diverse ethnicity, and more. i believe being genuine is one of the most important things one can do when they are touching the lives of millions.
Meh, some people’s politics have very little to do with humanity and how society should be. In general, best approach is to avoid GRAPE topics in general.
Remember why they erased the separation in the first place: to get massive unpaid overtime.
I swear it's the era of chesterton's fence. Boundaries in life, whether personal or professional, are largely protective for everyone. https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/new-article-how-i-learned-...
It's probably more likely that every era is the era of chesterson's fence.
Chesterson, being a good Catholic, probably knew about this adage Proverbs 22:28 (KJV): "Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set."
And explained the usefulness of it
Allow me to correct the headline for you:
> Multi-millionaire Netflix executive, known for profanity-laden tirades and shotgunning beers at corporate events, claims without evidence he was terminated for medically sanctioned ketamine use
I'm disappointed that this has none of the drama of the Plex retreat in Honduras.
Do tell.
This?
https://www.inc.com/leila-sheridan/plex-tech-company-retreat...
“Trust” exercise is doublespeak in corporate settings
Come to think of it, Orwell’s 1984 perfectly encapsulates what corporations actually do — even in his own time. Down to the groupthink, wrongthink, doublethink, doublespeak, all of it. Synergy! Concerned. Trust.
I don't even explain why I'm taking a day off or a half day or whatever.
It's no one else's business to decide if they agree the reason is valid. Don't volunteer stuff like that especially when it would be something they'd likely agree with. Don't validate their right to decide or even be aware of anything like that. Next time maybe your need might not be so convinvcing to anyone else, but you've already established they have a right to know and a right to veto, so then trying to be private stands out as different from other times.
It doesn't mean being inflexible or uncooperative either. If there is actually some problem, they can negotiate and try to make the case and convince you that they really need you just that much just that day, and you can voluntarily decide to change your plans, but without ever volunteering what those were. And make it cost. Keep score. Claim a return favor.
This is why I dislike offsites in general
Don't engage in a parasocial relationship with your employer. They're not your friends.
> They're not your friends
Your co-workers can be your friends. But we're not obligated to be. If you're my friend and colleague, sure, vent to me. If we're not, I don't give a flyig fuck about your views on geopolitics or gender or whatever, particulalry if you owe me a deliverable, doubly so if you've chosen a hot-button issue nobody actually has any new takes on other than blind agreement or condemnation. (And unless they’re voiced outside work in a way that affects me, I don’t have a right to care about it either.)
I only become real friends with my peers at a company AFTER one of us leaves the company. Oh I'll be friendly, grab lunch with you, talk about tame hobby stuff.. but that's the end of it. I'm not coming to your summer bbq, I'm not inviting you to my birthday party and the only time I'm seeing you on the weekend is if we're both in the office trying to get something done.
Prrreeeeeach. Not quite on topic here, but when I started working at Big Co., they sent 3 weekly Teams invitations each for hula hooping and desk yoga sessions. That infuriated me to no end because I knew how ineffective so many of my new coworkers were there and that they were making more than some of my coworkers who were actually providing value. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have infuriated me because the people attending those people were probably having less of a negative impact doing that rather than re-opening a solved issue or whatever the fuck useless thing they were doing.
People need to stop abusing "parasocial." It meant forming a one way "connection" with people who don't even perceive you, like TV hosts on the other side of the screen. This case is by definition not a parasocial relationship because obviously the employer heard him saying things!
Fake news! Communism! Literally!
I dunno, ketamine treatment for depression isn't that weird.
Announcing your medications at a public work function is kind of weird though, regardless of what they are. Is that just me?
Yes but getting fired for it is grounds for a big juicy lawsuit. So if you've got a rainy day fund why not?
Yeah, that's just TMI.
I don't think anyone ever pressed for more details after a coworker said "I had some issues with my health".
People show empathy, and move on. No need to ask for details.
In day-to-day work life or a meet-and-greet, yeah. But this was an executives-only retreat where they were apparently encouraged to drink and made a big deal out of getting everyone to open up to each other.
seems to be ok to talk about if you're elon musk.
How despicable do you have to be to fire someone for undergoing treatment for depression.
“A retreat may feel more relaxed than the office, but it is still a workplace, and the power dynamics don’t disappear,”
Ah, so sad :( Another story of a person who believed other people in the workplace too much.
These kinds of exercises are unfortunately a waste of time. If you’re honest, you’re walking into a minefield. But if you’re not being open, then no one is really getting to know anyone else in any meaningful way. In the end, a bunch of money and time is spent with zero value gained.
And given that this was about someone sharing their experience with a medical procedure to help them process the death of a parent, the company will probably lose the lawsuit, wasting even more money.
What a tragic waste of resources. Also, my heart goes out to this person. Loosing a parent is terrible.
Make shit up. Don't talk about your personal life at a company function, ever.
Hell, lie and make an embarrassing but completely legal story. Or something stupid like you were totally embarassed in HS or college.
But, never ever share your actual personal lives in a corporate setting. Not one time.
I would strongly discourage anyone from making things up. I have participated in these exercises, and many people simply said, “I really have nothing to share that would interest you.” Those were the people others respected the most.
They might share personal things with close friends, but they had a clear definition of what friendship meant.
In other words, be a person of character.
It is perfectly fine not to be friends with everyone. Just be respectful and honest. Do not lie. Say, “I cannot tell you that because of this or that,” or simply remain silent.
The problem is that responding that way could be seen as anti-social and counter to the cultural identity of the organization.
Companies will use everything and anything against you when they believe it’s time for you to go.
Thats why I said to make up something mildly embarrassing and completely average normal happening.
Unless you admit it, you wont be caught in a lie. And you seem "normal" to whatever litmus test of sharing something.
Although it seems like this would be an extreme take to someone who's luckily kept a steady job despite not keeping their personal life out of their work life, I completely agree. It's not worth it.
I think everyone gets a pass for something kid related, and to a lesser—probably unequal—extent, something spouse or family related, everything else can and will be used against you unless you're just humming along as the most normal predictable person.
As far as people at work are concerned, you've never smoked pot, you're not taikng stimulants even though they're prescribed, you won't even drink coffee after 5pm, and you've definitely never had insomnia.
Have one drink with the team if you're inclined to, and then gtfo, go drink with real friends.
Managers only care about perception and control, and if anything at all doesn't fit into their directive or world view, it'll go into their mental spreadsheet of blemishes like a vindictive romantic partner next time you fight.
"Hey there was a bug last release in some code with your name on it, might be time to go to bed at a reasonable hour!?". Ya thanks, I'll note your advice for next time that happens I'm sure it'll help. Why did you approve the change again?
You can also politely decline to share. You are not obligated to share personal stories to your coworkers and employer for camaraderie’s sake, and they should have no reasonable expectation that you will. Sure, it may be difficult to overcome the peer pressure in the moment, but it is your right, so fight for it.
No. It's like with cops. There is no safe thing to say. The least damaging thing is simply say nothing. Even that costs, but it costs the least and there is nothing better you can do.
I'm surprised Netflix doesn't get sued more for their employment practices.
They are REALLY happy to fire people.
But it seems like they're on record firing someone for a legal medical treatment... in California no less.
He was already doing pretty well and will get a decent additional payday out of this.
So like that interview candidate being asked about the hardest day of their life and answering honestly about a miscarriage or did this guy do something inappropriate with some ping pong balls in a Guinness-record way?
Could always read the article to find out, since it answers your question.
I'm not trying to attack you but did you read the article? Because I read it and I don't know the answer to either question either.
I mean....
"He said he underwent physician-supervised ketamine therapy in late 2022 to treat depression following his mother’s death.
At a January company retreat this year at a Netflix-owned property in California, Baillie shared this experience "
...
"A company attorney acknowledged that “the ketamine therapy issue has factored into the termination.”"
I read that but assumed that wasn't why they fired him. I don't understand, why would you fire someone for receiving some kind of medical treatment?
Ignoring the obvious legal landmines, what does that have to do with the job?
I assumed there was some other reason for the firing. If that was the reason (or if that's what the victim is alleging) then I think the article needs to be more clear, it all reads like vague gossip to me and it wasn't at all clear to me that that was what this was about.
The people to whom you are responding were talking about the lack of details in this article about the Guinness "trick", not the ketamine.
They don't give any real details
"He said he underwent physician-supervised ketamine therapy in late 2022 to treat depression following his mother’s death.
At a January company retreat this year at a Netflix-owned property in California, Baillie shared this experience "
...
"A company attorney acknowledged that “the ketamine therapy issue has factored into the termination.”"
I wonder if this is a generational thing. I grew up before social media and have long taken the position that I never post anything to the Internet that I wouldn't want public. I don't have a secret Reddit account or anonymous Twitter profile where I post stuff that could be fired, charged or worse.
This goes moreso for work. I assume anything you do can and will be used against you. I have zero trust. You're being a sanitized version of yourself. Do people not know this?
It's part of the reason I hate these working bonding activities. Well, that and being neurodivergent. There are fiarly standard questions and I have prepared answers that may or may not be the truth. Just like with interview questions. Sorry, but none of you are my friends or can be trusted. You might be shocked how often confiding in a coworker is used against you.
The trick with coworkers is saying just enough so they think they can trust you without saying anything that might get you fired or have other consequences. You can't say nothing. That's almost worse. But you have to basically invent a persona, particularly if you're neurodivergent because the default position of neurotyhpical people is to not like you.
And at the end of the day so much of your work life is governed by whether or not people like you. And I hate it.
So for a trust exercise, I'd come up with something everybody has likely done or is at least sympathetic to. Like, nothing to do with stealing. That might get you fired. Here's an example: "when I was in high school, I lied to my parents and drove to another state for a party and got drunk with my friends".
It's better to base your sanitized answer on the truth but I'm not above wholesale lies. They're just harder to remember so you have to be light on details but not too light.
wait what ???
I'm torn here because it does seem like Netflix brought this on themselves. At the same time the litigious nature of American workplaces are part of the reason large corporate environments are so soul-crushing, with language meant to deliberately obfuscate what's actually happening.
I am not sure how old he was, but I would guess he was under 40 and relatively inexperienced.
Part of the purpose of these exercises is to train management, especially executives, to remain fully focused and make decisions solely on performance and the business, even when someone asks them to show emotion. Anyone who is in executive management position should understand that.
He failed the test.
He was born in 1978 (source: IMDB). He was a VP and other articles say his annual salary was $1.1MM.
He was not a beginner.
Edit: Also, “under 40” is ridiculous for a bar of being experienced / mature.
I guess he just failed the test. Maybe the bar should be 55.