When I was still in my early 20s, at my first office job, drinks after hours (beer, wine) were free from the company kitchen.

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!

Japan here and there is a word for it "nominication" for nomu (to drink) and communication. Instead of Christmas party we have a year end party (bonenkai). Otherwise reads the same. It's common and many people actually like it. There can be negatives, like the pressure to drink too much. But I never heard of anyone getting fired in all my social circle.

Here in Canada I worked at a company that had free alcohol on Fridays, and it got to the point where people would invite their friends - non-employees - to come and drink. They'd all get so blackout drunk they'd pass out in the lounge and the customer service staff would have to climb over them on Saturday morning to get a coffee.

That particular perk was removed after a couple of months.

I've been to a work Christmas party where one of my coworkers got so drunk that she couldn't talk and kept grabbing my arm and walking with me. I don't drink at all, so it was a bit surreal, and, compared to Greeks, Brits are on just a whole other level on the normalisation of alcohol consumption.

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.

Amen. I only got my first job in tech because i put away 6 pints in the pub after the interview.

We conducted interviews after lunch, for this exact purpose. I saw good candidates interview but decline the pub afterwards - they did not get offers.

That company had at least two pub sessions a week, typically running to six rounds or more. We hit our medically-recommended maximum weekly intake by Tuesday; Fridays were carnage.

Indeed, and I kinda miss it. My first couple IT jobs were right in Central London and we would all religiously meet at the pub after work, along with hundreds from other companies of all kinds. The banter was glorious.

While the alcohol consumption can be a bit nuts, the UK has a relatively strong cultural tradition that what happens in the pub stays in the pub. That makes it a useful low-risk way to air work issues that would not be raised in a work meeting, either because criticism would be taken as an offense, or just because the person raising them would not get to speak to the person that needs to hear.

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.

My first job out of university was with a large local news organization. It's the only place I've worked that had beer on tap in its cafeteria (from 11am). You haven't seen workplace alcoholism until you've worked with a county cricket correspondent.

It's dropped off now. It was better in the 90s.

> UK had the most unhinged work drinking culture I had ever seen

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).

Mostly in the past tense now, for better or worse.

At risk of sounding like a grump, once I started at a company where almost everyone is partnered up and has kids, and almost everyone basically has nothing to talk about except their partners and kids, I had the perfect incentive to stay away from almost all social events. Or stick around for an hour at most because of how boring it is.

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.

I just laughed out loud on the train

First compliment in living memory on HN thank you

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.

Huh. Reading your comment and the parent above - maybe retreats aren't "therapeutic", but "exacerbatory" - as opposed to making interpersonal relationships uniformly better (bad -> good and good -> better), they make good relationships better but bad relationships worse?

+1. I too feel the same thing after 3 years of remote work. Sometimes I even feel that my colleagues are way more dumb than they appeared to look in online.

Yeah that was me after 3 years during a company over the panny-D, I just had nothing in common with any of the people working there, the company didn't seem to have much ambitions, definitely did not realize they needed 5-10 more people to do the work they wanted to be done.

I wonder if we should "enjoy" it, or whether it's just that we can't relate to the other people in the slightest when in person? I work from home and very very very rarely do I go into the office, but when I do it's quite pleasant and all but I am glad to be free of the social environment; I am there to solve things and get stuff fixed and working, not make new friends. I don't mean that nastily - I mean I go to work to work; I don't go to socialise. Some people cannot differentiate these two concepts.

Probably see it as the easy way out because actually bringing about change in a culture that is already entrenched is hard work and they don't have the mettle for it. Or don't trust the org to be on board with it.

Easier to just do a reset instead of thinking about how one might bring effective change over a reasonable period of time.

I guess it's a personal thing, but I don't see how everyone going to a casino is a great idea, or developing team relationships.

> I think most people think of it as a free vacation.

I'm shocked that someone does NOT think so!

> I think most people think of it as a free vacation.

It's not free if the company is paying for it.

It’s a mix. Partially a systems problem. We used to have that problem, then we changed the way work is selected. Sales is part of the process, so they’re forced to see all the things we could build and help decide which ones were saying no to. They still promise things occasionally but they hedge a lot more now. And our teams delivery rate has increased dramatically because we’re not getting yanked around all the time.

Sales is welcome to build the products they're selling while engineering builds the ones on the roadmap.

Work should be time-bounded. Weekends should generally be off limit, even if it supposed to be a "fun" work thing.

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.

HR does what senior management tells them to do. The C-level loves it when you blame HR rather than them.

You are forced to share a room with another employee?

Which one? I couldn't find anything in google

Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.

I agree with you, and also the company shouldn't be encouraging people to bring their whole self to a mandatory work retreat and then firing people who do.

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.

I always observed that as "bring your whole self, as long as your whole self exhibits the exact same behavior and demeanor as every other corporate employee, ideally wrapped in uniquely colored skin for beautiful decorum".

I remember a "beer test" as a hiring practice recommended on HN and blogs. And pointifications about how culture fit is important. And effectively mandatory games playing after work. And "united meritocracy" slogan bullshit.

So, go outta there with complains about hr slogan and dei.

The challenge is that your line for filter is another person's line for censorship and a third person's line for "not being yourself".

I'm now in a team where I don't particularly like any of my coworkers due to all the things they have shared over the years which has accumulated in a persistent ick about all of them.

I can work with them fine, I just don't want to share any part of myself with these people and invite commentary from people I do not respect.

Exactly. The 'whole self' also includes a deliberate thinking mind. People often equate feeling free and being yourself with losing all inhibitions and restraint. That may free great for a while, to unburden yourself, but its a strict subset of your capabilities.

You are still not being yourself though, if you have to suppress the tendency to call someone a dipshit idiot. It is arguable whether the "self" in that case needs some work or not, but the idea about "being yourself" is being able to express yourself freely without giving it any conscious thought. Think of the setting where you are with close friends, and let the conversation flow freely. Having to filter yourself is the opposite of that. In reality, you can never truly be yourself in an environment that you do not own without risking dire consequences or opposition (even when you own it, this eventually becomes the case). So I think not being yourself is a good and necessary compromise for harmonious functioning within an organ, and there is no need to soften this by saying that having a filter is different from not being yourself.

The real challenge lies in properly tuning the strength of this filter, being deliberate with it and knowing what can be said, and what cannot be said. The people who act like robots err on the side of extreme caution, and are unwilling to invest time and effort into tuning and developing this filter. They also don't realize that this makes it impossible to connect with people, to their own demise.

You seem to contradict yourself, or at least actually support the OP's point. If you don't define yourself with your job, but have other self-identities outside, there is nothing sad about having different takes to the amount of personal information shared in various circles.

Extending on that, I do not agree with "do not define yourself with your job". Why not? It's a big, if not biggest, part of almost everyone's life. What's bad is defining yourself with your job ALONE. Psychological safety comes from having multiple self-identities: be an engineer at work, a volunteer on weekends, amateur radio enthusiast on Thursdays nights, or whatever, and don't mix those!

>”this is a recipe for a sad life”

No, this is a recipe for surviving corporate America. You can have and make friends but be cautious of coworkers that you work directly with. I’ve made friends outside of work. I’ve made friends at work but I do not expect to be friends with everyone I work with.

Disagree. It's just admitting that the company can and will be cynical when it comes to the conflict of interests between them and the employee.

Making friends at the workplace is fine until there is such conflict, then where will they stand? If they will turn they back on you (and most of them will), then how much is such relation worth in the first place?

#2 I believe that there is at least one entire culture on the planet that comports itself this way, whose emergent macro outcomes can be debated.

You can make friends but don’t assume that they are simply because you share a common trauma of being cooped up in the same building.

I’ve made friends at work. I wouldn’t call them friend friends but I’ve made friends at work.

Good riddance. A “work-life balance kind of person” is not a negative characteristic; even more so at a position where your behavior is an inspiration to many people

Yeah this person saved you.

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".

Once upon a time, when the tech talent pool was smaller, there was this really caustic individual I used to work with that loved to argue. They would never give praise or say something like "oh that's cool!" but would rather debate everything. A few years later, I'm now working at a different company and someone comes to me asking to help them review a resume. It was that individual. I was clear about what talent this individual brought but I also added my anecdote about their behavior at the previous company. I gave them room though to find out for themselves. During the interview with that individual, they asked a few questions that would elicit this kind of behavior and they did not disappoint. They did not get the job.

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.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet and the coworker did you a favor.

Genuine question. Can you tell me why people love saying this so much?

Workplaces that are dictated by a boss or C-suite are anti-human as well, as they are dictatorial, not democratic.

I heard this from older generations. Sadly this is no longer true as we all work remotely now.

In the US, it's an extremely dangerous place to look for a spouse. I've seen some ugly situations. Maybe it's better to look for a spouse when the job market favors employees - that way, when you need to leave after the breakup, you can find a new job.

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.

While totally logical (there are many matching counterparts for most people, its just about being close enough for long enough regardless of place), its not always ideal.

I wouldn't want my wife to work on same team for example. Heck, even same company may be less than ideal, time off each other is usually for the better. Also, if breakup/divorce happens, workplace can easily become a place out of worst nightmare.

I prefer looking at hobbies/passions groups, people there match me way more than people at work, it that doesn't work out its easier to cut off only that group if needed. In my case it was climbing events I was organizing, and I ended up with wife that matches me on basically all important levels

You first

Yeah I agree. I'm still very careful who I trust but it doesn't hurt to try and build a network.

coworkers are your competition for that promotion though, how do you reconcile being someone's friend when they are your enemy? This is how corporate america thinks. I don't but the vast majority of seniors I know are trying to get to principal and there's only so many slots.

Sounds like a case of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_clown_paradox

> Sad clown paradox is characterised by a cyclothymic temperament, which encourages the creation of light-hearted humour in a professional setting, despite inner turmoil.

Mate needs to move down to Australia, he would have been promoted after showing that off.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=648pLkS0AE0

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...

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.

The image of these two occurring at the same time haha

If you’re looking for employment that’s as stable as a minor-league cartel, sure.

Coke, machetes, and drunk driving gets your passion moved?

Concisely, seek help.

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.

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.

not that I'm aware of, no. Maybe in some states sure, but not in most.

Legally, yes.

Medically…no. It does not seem to be equivalent, especially with any amount of regular repetition.

"We have found you to be a poor cultural fit in our mission driven high octane growth mindset 10x company. That we reached this conclusion right after you disclosed your medical condition is pure coincidence."

Yes, it seems likely they violated California's Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) and the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) based on the details I have seen so far. The EEOC’s mental-health guidance states both that an employee may choose to discuss his condition with coworkers and that the employer may not discriminate against him for doing so. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/depression-ptsd-other-men...

That's only guidance, not binding law in and of itself, but it means that the employer can only discourage employees from discussing their mental health if they do so in a neutral manner that applies equally to all employees in a non-discriminatory manner, which was self-evidently not the case here.

Notably, the EEOC guidance standards are not wholly unlimited. Employers can take action against an employee if their discussion of their mental health is repeatedly inappropriate or disruptive. e.g., if someone is constantly cornering coworkers to trauma dump suicidal thoughts on them or something like that. But only in truly extreme cases where an accommodation is impossible (e.g., if they are violent) or if they fail to adjust their behavior after receiving feedback that it has become unacceptable. A single incident that does not appear to have even made any other employee uncomfortable certainly doesn't suffice.

Netflix's only real defense here would be to argue that they would have fired him anyway without the disclosure, in response to other issues. That is a challenging defense to make given the admission their lawyer made that the ketamine treatment factored into their decision to fire, but the ADA and FEHA require "but for" causation, i.e. he is protected from firing if they would not have fired him but for the admission of ketamine treatment. I doubt they will succeed given the relative triviality of their other accusations (somewhat excessive profanity in a context where a fair amount of profanity was considered acceptable) and the entirely inoffensive party trick (at least in a context where the CEO has been repeatedly photographed drinking alcohol at company events and the alcohol at this event was provided by the company). I seriously doubt they will be able to point to any similarly situated employees that Netflix has previously fired solely for profanity or consuming alcohol that the company provided to them (and from a PR perspective that would almost be worse for them to admit). Frankly, the profanity feedback also seems like the very common scenario where a manager is required to provide regular feedback but can't think of anything constructive to say because the employee is a high performer, so they reach for something funny and minor just to check the box. In the absence of extensive complaints from coworkers, it is unlikely to overcome the company lawyer's outright admission that the ketamine use was a factor in their decision.

What appears to have happened here is Netflix has awful in-house counsel and/or HR who utterly failed to carry out their duties with even minimal competence. They appear to have simply assumed that all ketamine use is automatically illegal recreational drug abuse without bothering to investigate whether that is true in general or in this particular case before escalating to the most extreme possible reaction. Those employees are the ones who should be fired, not only because of the gross incompetence it takes to so egregiously violate America's otherwise absurdly weak legal protections for workers' rights, but because they did so in a manner that seems practically designed to permanently destroy employee trust in the company while inviting unwelcome public scrutiny of their potentially discriminatory employment practices.

This is a fairly straight forward discriminatory-causation story: Netflix invited vulnerability and thus potential mental health related disclosures, learned of a psychiatric history, reframed treatment as drug misconduct, and then expressly treated it as a termination factor. It's honestly pretty rare to see such an obvious example of this kind of discrimination, usually companies do a better job covering it up with a pretext, and usually their *lawyers* aren't so unbelievably fucking stupid as to admit publicly to the discriminatory decision.

Workers rights are "woke" and thus we're not doing them anymore in the US. He should have claimed he was fired for being white.

You can't have an HR policy that discriminates against people for receiving mental health treatment from a physician, that is plainly illegal under multiple statutes both federally and in the state of California. This was not a situation where he was on ketamine while at work, and there are no accusations that his ketamine use even affected his work at all, even incidentally or indirectly. Even if it had, Netflix would be required to make a reasonable accommodation for him. But we know it did not affect his work because he received treatment in 2022 and Netflix only found about it in 2026 after he disclosed the treatment. Besides, he is a movie executive, it's not like he is operating heavy machinery. Ketamine is unlikely to have any effect on him that would in any way expose Netflix to liability.

Netflix seems to have simply assumed that all ketamine use is illegal and recreational, without bothering to conduct even the most cursory of investigations, which would have revealed that ketamine is in fact a clinically acceptable treatment for treatment-resistant depression. This is what happens when you have utterly incompetent idiots for in-house counsel and HR.

HR policy is not the law

No drugs even in a medical setting? Man, that's intense. Can't take anesthetics when facing surgery or similar situations. No epinephrine for anaphylaxic shock. Can't take insulin. Pretty rough.

Ketamine is an FDA approved drug.

They'll have no problem hiring, maybe one or two employees who deliver 10x will get demoralized and quit but this will not change a thing realistically re: their work force.

Did you miss that that's according to the one sided exceprt from a lawsuit an ex-employee filed?

The sharing and alcohol were company provided, the game of Guinness is almost certainly a silly one where after your first sip the foam lands in the middle of the G. And based on my own experience if you were to fire everyone who has ever taken psychedelics there wouldn't be many people left in at least SF and NYC tech. He shared the in California legal drug he used to deal with his mother's death. To be honest, the reason is so dumb, it feels like someone was just looking for anything to use against him..

It sounds like Netflix dividends have consisted of beers and private parties where AI bros brag about their race cars and tripping on Special K.

What's wrong with being in your mid 50s?

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.

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.

Not at all work cultures are toxic, but many have toxic elements.

It's very culture-dependent. You have to read the room, pick up clues from current behaviour and previous history, and try to calibrate accordingly.

There's a broad correlation between management stupidity and chaotic leadership and toxicity but sometimes you can still end up in pockets of sanity - or insanity if the surrounding culture is good but there are one or more Cluster B types on a team.

I'm vulnerable with plenty of people, just not employers (in general). The incentive structures, especially at a company that's more than a few people are such that it is in their best interest to get as much from you for as little as possible, that's the entire point of the system.

yes, employment is exhausting. To do other that what the poster says is accepting risk.

My freedom to choose an employer is orthogonal to the incentive structures within in that relationship.

A mutually beneficial agreement can still be adversarial? If you're getting shaken down by the mafia it's beneficial for you to pay them protection money.

Second order consequences. Piracy sites are more customer-focused, large corps skew more towards performing productivity for the internal hierarchy.

I just thought when I saw the guy made a million bucks a year.

Yes, this so-called trust exercise sounds more akin to a mutual blackmail pact.

At the same time they want to leverage all the "humanity" they can to get you to work more for less.

We're a family here, after all. You wouldn't leave your colleagues hanging, would you?

You indeed shouldn’t bring your humanity to work. You should bring what’s required to do the job. That’s the deal, you do the job and the employer pays you for it. Stopping making where you work the same as where you live.

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.

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-...

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.

I only become real friends with my peers at a company AFTER one of us leaves the company. Oh I'll be friendly, grab lunch with you, talk about tame hobby stuff.. but that's the end of it. I'm not coming to your summer bbq, I'm not inviting you to my birthday party and the only time I'm seeing you on the weekend is if we're both in the office trying to get something done.

Fake news! Communism! Literally!

Announcing your medications at a public work function is kind of weird though, regardless of what they are. Is that just me?

This?

https://www.inc.com/leila-sheridan/plex-tech-company-retreat...

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.

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.

They don't give any real details

I guess he just failed the test. Maybe the bar should be 55.