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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
It's not, although rules vary by state. Medical professionals can prescribe it even though it's a Schedule III drug. I get ads for these presumably legitimate therapy services online all the time on major social networks.
I think that’s the key, if it was prescribed to him by a doctor then probably not an issue. If it was just one of those don’t ask don’t tell therapy retreats then they may have a problem.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
"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."
“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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Reminds me of that super cringy one that Wizards of the Coast did early on
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.
this could pretty much be it's own editorial, if you're feeling journalistic
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.
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".
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.
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 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.
Exactly this. No matter how they dress it up, HR is there to protect the company, not you.
" 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.
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.
Remember this story the next time someone says "join our mission" or "bring your whole self to work". They all come with asterisks.
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.
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?
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.
"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."
not that I'm aware of, no. Maybe in some states sure, but not in most.
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.
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.
It’s illegal, that’s all it is I believe.
It's not, although rules vary by state. Medical professionals can prescribe it even though it's a Schedule III drug. I get ads for these presumably legitimate therapy services online all the time on major social networks.
should Netflix fire all women on maternity leave, since they most likely were administered fentanyl during delivery ?
why isn't Netflix firing anyone who had even a minor surgery or even tooth extraction done, since it most likely involved opioids
Medical professionals can also use fentanyl among other drugs that aren't legal for recreational use.
It's not illegal if it's through a licensed channel.
I think that’s the key, if it was prescribed to him by a doctor then probably not an issue. If it was just one of those don’t ask don’t tell therapy retreats then they may have a problem.
Firing someone for taking a prescribed therapeutic medication for a medical condition? Yeah, that’s illegal.
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.
As Benjamin Studebaker put it, bring your whole self to work just means the whole self should be professional
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember: your coworkers aren't your family, your boss isn't your buddy and HR isn't on your side.
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.
So this is where the money from the price increases goes.
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.
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.
How despicable do you have to be to fire someone for undergoing treatment for depression.
“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.
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)
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.
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.
yes, employment is exhausting. To do other that what the poster says is accepting risk.
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.
If it's adversarial then why are they willingly entering into a mutually beneficial arrangement?
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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
"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."
“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'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.”"
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.
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 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 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.