Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise
nypost.com
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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.
To be fair I did enjoy the ‘unhingedness’ but I’m also appreciating that being at least a decade younger was also great.
You can decide whether that was better or worse.
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.
Didn't stay long because I got a PE offer at an American firm in their London office very quickly, and the culture there was so staid and lonely in comparison.
Part of the reason why we have an office bar with a bartender too set up at my current office. I don't drink, but nothing like drinks to help with bringing people together right after work.
University in the UK is (or was) a great training ground for livers.
Sounds like a law suit waiting to happen.
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.
Pubs sound even worse.
Assuming that a love of social interaction equates to programming skill would be a mistake, as would assuming that lack of love of social interactions equates to programming skill. The two sets of skills are unrelated, but in a company of people who don't enjoy socialising, forcing a social interaction is counterproductive.
To be fair, I find US forced company events like this way more unbearable than UK/European ones. In the US, the incessant combination of excessive alcohol with neurotic self-awareness gets you to another level of hell.
In another FAANG, the L7s were complaining that the level of office machinations that were occuring stateside was off the charts compared to the offices overseas.
UK afterwork pub culture should be under UNESCO cultural protection at this point, I'm always surprised it's lasted this long. One would have to admit it's fended off the decreasing consumption of alcohol in the new generation impressively even though they may despise the tradition.
I'm not familiar with European ones, but I agree that forced company events like this is the US are unbearable. I rejoiced once I hit a point in my career where I could safely skip attending them.
You can clearly see who are the consulting people, and who are the HR/marketing ones based on who's got fake smiles, and who looks like they are dead inside.
Not only it's more of a redflag than anything, but also, since they are all doing it, what's the goal?
If a contractor partakes they are deemed to be a permie, and their soul is taxed for eternity, or the end of the tax year, whichever one comes first.
That's one hell of a lawsuit you're opening yourself up to there. People who don't drink have significant overlap with protected classes.
1. Which ones? I used to be able to stereotype with the best of them, but I cant quickly come up with any protected class that is assigned as teetotalers.
2. Saying you're not hiring someone because they don't drink is a perfectly valid reason for not hiring someone, even if it's a cover for not hiring them because of protected class membership. The laws protecting protected classes are super weak. It is virtually impossible to prove that is the sole reason they weren't hired. All you need is an actual other reason to not hire them--and of course don't put into writing that the real reason is their protected class membership.
Religious or spiritual belief.
Many religions discourage or disallow drinking.
I believe a recovered/recovering alcoholic could be considered a protected class.
Many medical conditions or medications cannot be combined with alcohol.
And just more broadly, some people have lives, family where they can't just be expected out on the piss in the afternoon.
Admitting it on forum is the in. Just like admitting you've been working while up on ket.
The excuse is always culture fit, if that even gets recorded anywhere...
Then COVID came around and I also moved to Finland where that sort of thing is just unheard of.
The company has moved to Bermondsey now, and to be fair the drinks-after-work culture seems to still going fairly strong around this part of town.
The biggest spanner in the works has been my cohort all having kids and not having the spare time to socialise after work.
Definitely miss all that. My liver & pancreas don't miss it though, so it's probably for the best.
Of course, there's nothing enforcing that managers respect it. The main mechanism is that many managers realise it's in their interests to be able to hear unvarnished truths, and for their team to be able to relieve their feelings outside work instead of inside. And for them to be able to get to know their team better. But not all have the integrity or humility to do so.
I prefer the term 'enlightened'.
Here in Blighty, if somebody got rat-arsed at an office party, photocopied their arse and puked in the Yucca plant, they would be regarded as an absolute legend (providing they didn't make a habit of it).
> 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!
Now I consider anything involving alcohol as abusive. If company has a drinking "culture" or going to pub after work, I nope out.
It became pretty clear that drinking culture in a lot of places develops around people having a lot in common, and certainly becomes worse when one of those things in common is 'enjoying drinking'.
I don't mind this. I had all of my 20s and most of my 30s for drinking after work. Now it's not really something I care about.
The Christmas parties were a different breed though. HR definitely had a lot of work to do after those.
Only took part once (because I was new, first week and all), saw how openly employees spoke to the directors (luckily nothing came of it), and never again in my life ever consumed alcohol in front of a boss.
As GP said, it's a full on soft power thing - always keep your wits about you when in the presence of colleagues and bosses.
There is no safe space at work; you can be fired!
Obviously there were no repercussions, and when I mentioned something the next day, I got "you're not supposed to talk about that stuff in the office", which was interesting context for me. The drunk colleague and I went on to become really good friends.
That particular perk was removed after a couple of months.
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've had some bad experiences, of course, but overall I've found it to be incredibly worth it.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
It's at a casino because it's near our facility, has conference rooms, event spaces, entertainment, and the weather doesn't matter.
Sometimes some people sit at a table and play while hanging out and that's fine. But it's not really about drinking or gambling. Just having a little fun together and getting to know each other and our +1s on a more personal level.
For those people, just drinking was the bonding. It reinforced the tribal affiliation.
Casinos often provide free drinks. QED
> I like to spend the company budget on blow and hookers, therefore it makes sense for me to invite all the employees to a strip club as it is a little more restrained.
Mentality.
I'm shocked that someone does NOT think so!
It's not free if the company is paying for it.
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.
* 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.
You should “enjoy” making things with those other people. You should have cohesive competence with each other that enables you to crush out the work that comes your collective way.
You don’t have to “enjoy” the other person’s company, in a would-I-have-a-frosty-beverage-with-them way. You might! These are not mutually exclusive, but they are also not required to be simultaneous properties held of effective work relationships.
Most people were younger than me. Over time, the company laid off or pushed out many of the experienced and smart colleagues I had joined to work with, replacing them with less experienced employees.
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.
But, like everything else, not all people enjoy them. I have seen people find obvious excuses to avoid them.
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.
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.
Easier to just do a reset instead of thinking about how one might bring effective change over a reasonable period of time.
I don't see any point of this. Such a waste of time and jet fuel. I would rather have those meetings at worksite and get a nice discount for the resort and go there with my own schedule and on my own terms.
Oh man, this went south quickly after a few beers, the retreat was shortened, some people never talked to others anymore and the whole team broke apart.
The thing is that nobody was nasty, the first volounteers did nit give a fuck about what was told about them, so others took the step, the people sitting around git bolder (but still telling the truth) and at some point it all collapsed.
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.
Remember: the e in e-mail stands for evidence.
Were you told this literally?
The joke ain't Google specific, I might have picked it up working in finance. If you bing the phrase, you'll find plenty of hits in published articles.
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.
For example, I currently deal with the knife and gun collector crowd, hunting fans, weed guys, even genz sneaker aficionados bring the ire of various classes or camps that are more dominant at workplaces.
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.
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.
One persons level of comfort is not the same as others, so just saying I want people to be comfortable having their religious opinions respected is not a simple request.
Some religious opinions are basically oppression of others. I refuse to allow people to be bigots in my presence regardless of their reasoning.
Also as someone who was a member of church which had anti-christian ideals, pointing out the hypocrisy can be the only way for them to question what they are in. Doing and saying nothing helps no one.
Work environments are professional environments.
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.
To me, either the culture bubble is extremely strong in your area, or being able to admit alignment with ideas shared by a major political party in an area where another party is more popular is an very low bar.
On the scale of topics that I conceal about myself, politics is as easy as talking about the weather.
Work is not a safe space. The people who say they want everyone to feel safe in their speech usually (actually, almost always) want people who agree with them on
> family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing,
Except, even if you did, you could always be just a little purer. You could show off to your coworkers how you were a better ally than them, maybe they would be as good as you if only they “did the work" harder.
https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/memory-hole-archive-... captures the experience pretty well
The answer for years was to just keep your mouth shut while the hysteria subsides. It still is likely the right answer. In theory bringing everything to work would be great in a perfectly liberal environment, but we just don't live in that world. The illiberal and the intolerant will just gain leverage over you in a competitive environment such as the workplace.
Silence is always the preferable choice in those matters.
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.
If you're racist or passionately hate such and such people, obviously that's not what was meant. Nobody wants this.
So, go outta there with complains about hr slogan and dei.
This was a practice that our company had to be explicitly coached away from. Early 2010s. Def before DEI was popular, which feels more like later 2010s.
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
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.
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 might act different if I am at a house party versus playing with my newborn, but I consider those both to be me, just in different situations.
Similarly, if I'm playing chess, I don't following the rules as contrary to my identity. I see myself as a flexible and adaptive problem solver.
I think you are on to something though and can imagine a person having a different self-identity that is less adaptive.
I mostly curious why people seem to expect a world free of this challenge, and look for obviously wrong black and white rules to avoid dealing with that reality.
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.
CliftonStrengths, home of the Corporate Autism Test. Just which of those 35 Signature Themes(tm) will be the ones that get pulled out that look like the giant autistic red flag?
laughs in Ideation, Connectedness, Belief, Intellection, and Input
one activity was for each member of our department to grade the overall "personality" of our department using several personality dimensions (e. g., kindness, competitiveness, etc.)
what I think i learned was that each of us projected our dominant personality traits onto the whole group.
eg, the hyper competitive climber said our department was cutthroat.
the guy who avoided conflict said it was a happy department with few disagreements.
etc.
beyond that insight, I didn't learn much.
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.
What I did was to build my own grass field(started company with my team) and it has been fucking great. We made a better product and made enough of a name of ourselves, that while I lost the battle that time with the former leadership, I fought long enough to see them all lose their jobs.
As a CEO myself now, I choose not to have an HR rep and try to do better for my people.
Also this is in EU so as a warning to others,like me then, who thought HR in the US could do this but not here.
Do they also go around repeating the sky is blue?
>>It was always a saying with Joe that there was a sucker born every minute, and all through his business career he acted on that basis, and generally found a good crop of them
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.
Edit: which also means you're not wrong, if you've got claims that trigger damage control then HR are even less your friend.
My first manager job I was very naive, I went to HR to get help with directs. It was a bad idea, it put me and my direct at risk... never again.
The sad truth is that the managers who actually care and want to solve problems for people (personal and technical) usually get the wrong end of the HR stick first.
My question was not about if it is true or not, but why people like saying it so much.
Through multitudes of anecdotes, this group often apparently holds that conflict could be solved by going around someone, their supervisor, say, and invoking HR as if they had authority over the situation and would obviously correct the injustice. Having misplayed their hand, they end up feeling victimized through organizational discipline or firing and abandoned by the would-be savior HR. With the moral injury now upon them, they tell everyone this warning as if it were a great lie to be exposed.
Our bosses tend to be the primary relationship to manage in organizations. Just the way power works, and it mostly poses a problem when one party doesn't realize it and thinks relationships are optional.
HR is a tool. They have helped me with tons of things, but there are things they aren't good for.
Really hope I didn't have to ever give that up.
I’ve made friends at work. I wouldn’t call them friend friends but I’ve made friends at work.
I treat everyone I work with with respect but I also don't go so far as to let them into the inner circle. I wish people could just respect people but I've seen too many office politics sessions to know better. I wished to make friends with some coworkers outside of work but it never amounted to much.
They were asked if you'd fit in and they gave the most diplomatic, polite feedback that they knew would be be taken as a no. Their comment was a pretty clear admission that this was not a "work life balance kind of company".
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.
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?
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.
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.
Professional networks are a massive important part of growing/building a career. This is especially true in an environment where there are mass layoffs constantly.
Building personal and trusting relationships is a huge part of developing that network.
This doesn’t mean you should turn every coworker into your therapist, but the other extreme is also bad for both your career and your person.
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.
> corporate America
Sounds like you're saying the same thing.
At least you get paid I suppose.
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.
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
Also, in IT there's not a very diverse group of people to search from. When it comes to women, the ratio of hetero men to hetero women is insanely not favorable.
> 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.
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.
If innerX and outerX are same, I told you so, its obvious.
Psychoanalysis in a nutshell.
Is this just splitting the G? If so, it's the most mundane thing in the history of alcohol related party tricks.
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...
Please don't do this. Quote a source, not an LLM that bullshits.
I feel you just need to get comfortable with the idea that an 80% confident answer is better than none, since the correction can always be searched for and posted by anyone who requires 100% confidence. I spend half of my day requesting and sifting 80% confident answers, so the idea that they have no value compared to hard sources makes no sense to me.
> ‘splitting the G’ is the act of taking your first sip so precisely that the creamy white head of your drink drops clean through the centre of the “G” in the Guinness logo printed on the glass.
Asking ChatGPT for "trivial" questions like this is absolutely bonkers. This is a question that a search engine can answer immediately and accurately. There is no reason to gamble whatsoever.
Suggesting that we must "get used to the idea that an 80% confident answer is better than none", despite a properly sourced answer being easier to obtain instantly via a search engine, is bizarre, and only a reflection of how much brainrot these things are causing.
First, I was able to search for this by pasting in the comment, because I also wanted to know about whether splitting the G was what he did. So I got two answers in one search.
Select and right-click is not much faster than my shortcut of copy => Opt-Z => paste. "Ask Gemini" is also there on right click but ChatGPT is my "ask any question" workflow that covers any request.
If I did Google it, I would rather take Google's AI answer than parse out either of the top two results. Neither answers without clicking through, the second offers me disambiguation I simply don't care about.
* foodrepublic.com https://www.foodrepublic.com › Drink › Beer and Wine Feb 18, 2025 — The art of splitting the "G" is well-respected in Ireland so much so that a pub owner in Galway offers a second pint free to anyone who manages to do it on ...
* Is this splitting the G? : r/Guinness Reddit · r/Guinness 7 comments · 2 years ago There are two ways to do it. First one is what you've nearly achieved, for the head of the pint to end on the horizontal line of the G (hence the name).Read more
It's simply more efficient to be 20% skeptical of an instant answer than to try to reach 100% confidence with a bunch of clicks and reading. Even when all the readers of my comment have to be skeptical as well.
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.
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.
...I'm fired, aren't I? I'll see myself out.
Mostly due to a total lack of coordination.
My fraternity was more tame and we used to have guys gazing each other in the main room during parties.
Hopefully not at the same time, otherwise there would be opportunity for many kinds of unfortunate mishaps.
Bring your hole self to work
Coke, machetes, and drunk driving gets your passion moved?
Concisely, seek help.
In the context, this is funnier than your “joke” was!
Joining a fraternity makes you jointly and severally liable for anything your frat brothers do. It's the very opposite of working or investing in a limited liability company. Makes sense for a fraternity to be more tame...
This is probably the first time I've ever said that a NY Post article was a useful source of information on a story.
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)
It is very likely Netflix's argument would be more complex.
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.
Medically…no. It does not seem to be equivalent, especially with any amount of regular repetition.
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.
Ketamine is an FDA approved drug.
1) Get invited to a trust exercise retreat.
2) Share that you have done ketamine in a controlled therapy environment.
3) Share a bunch of other things not in article <speculation>
4) Get fired for having a drug addiction.
We are to assume that #2 caused #4 ... but without all the facts it could have been something in #3 + #2 , again speculation.
> 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.
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 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.
(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.
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.
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.
(I liked the last note, at the end of the entry)
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.
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.
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.
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 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 related to the thread but your comment just reminded me of that.
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.
Yeah, but if you make a point of never shooting the shit with your coworkers how will you ever really come across this kind of info?
I do ultimately agree forcing this kind of thing isn't usually good, and it definitely sounds like this retreat went sideways due to poor management. People probably shouldn't be doing things like keg stands at a company retreat, management should have stopped things well before people were pressured into such activities. And yeah, a company-wide forced "tell everyone your darkest secrets for trust" thing, forget that you're only going to get a watered down example. Management shouldn't be putting people in that kind of position.
Goes back to my point, things need to be balanced. It's good and healthy for a workplace to help people form these kinds of friendships in small nudges, but overly forcing connections that aren't forming naturally just isn't good. And excessive drinking at company events just leads to issues, that's for sure.
Asking coworkers about their hobbies is well within the domain of small talk that serves as the exploration for what you have in common with someone else. Small talk is universally acceptable, not only in the context of communities that you're already a part of, but even as part of striking up a conversation with strangers.
Again - private grief is not small talk, and even if you have expert-level small talk skills, that doesn't mean that you will build friendship with everyone.
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.
For some reason, PhDs think they can treat every coworker without a PhD like a grad student, and that they can treat grad students like crap. I took a significant reduction in pay to work for academia thinking I was going to work in a great environment working on finding cancer cures alongside good people. At the end of this year, I'm leaving to finish some post-bacc classes and never working for a nonprofit again. Not just because of the culture, but also because I'm sick of working in a low-accountability environment where incompetence is tolerated and people optimize their work around visibility rather than things that really make the world better.
I know from experience that the private sector has just as many perverse incentives and just as much dysfunction, but at least I'll get paid 2-5x as much and retire sooner.
> Firing an employee for doing exactly what they were instructed to do during a mandatory retreat
You’ll get more interviews and higher salaries with a simple lie.
Or you get fired for telling the truth.
I’m 1000% lying from now on.
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
No wonder all the CEOs are crazy about AI. All the intelligence, none of the human.
We're a family here, after all. You wouldn't leave your colleagues hanging, would you?
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.
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)
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.
Now of course it’s hard to say if the original employment shape is still valid.
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.
-Henry George
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I didn't know those trust/sharing exercises were real.
How can two reports about this go up without any comment from Netflix? They are not even entertaining the idea of another side to the story.
It feels like somebody in senior management had it in for Baillie. And the ketamine story provided a sufficient cause.
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.
Never sacrifice your privacy in such an environment.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Companies will use everything and anything against you when they believe it’s time for you to go.
Unless you admit it, you wont be caught in a lie. And you seem "normal" to whatever litmus test of sharing something.
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 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.
Mental health discussions, especially among men, should be less fraught. Like “I have a cold”
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.
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.”"
"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.”"
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.
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.
Sounds like an awfull time.
Do X -> ??? -> Profit
I guess this is to say that when you have these offsites it is in your best interest to attend and assimilate. Never relax!
> 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
Note to self: if looking for a job, check that they do not do “Survivor-style experiences”, bloody hell.
So I say the areas I use it.
Rejected: We need people who can work without AI.
Felt so dumb. I’m never telling the truth again.
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 not a beginner.
Edit: Also, “under 40” is ridiculous for a bar of being experienced / mature.