“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.
carabiner
Google banned political conversations at work. Tech companies are learning from first principles why work/life separation, traditional office culture exist.
tchalla
Remember this story the next time someone says "join our mission" or "bring your whole self to work". They all come with asterisks.
burnt-resistor
Don't engage in a parasocial relationship with your employer. They're not your friends.
strictnein
" 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.
morkalork
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?
CSMastermind
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.
comrade1234
"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."
ElProlactin
So this is where the money from the price increases goes.
nekusar
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.
ab71e5
So he was fired for sharing he had ketamine based therapy for depression? Why? Like is it promoting drug use or something?
reptation
As Benjamin Studebaker put it, bring your whole self to work just means the whole self should be professional
gregdaniels421
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.
triyambakam
This is why I dislike offsites in general
tlogan
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.
delichon
Turns out it was a trust calibrating exercise that the whole team learned from.
otterley
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.
reactordev
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".
jmyeet
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.
thot_experiment
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)
Related Discussions
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Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
malcolmgreaves
“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.
carabiner
Google banned political conversations at work. Tech companies are learning from first principles why work/life separation, traditional office culture exist.
tchalla
Remember this story the next time someone says "join our mission" or "bring your whole self to work". They all come with asterisks.
burnt-resistor
Don't engage in a parasocial relationship with your employer. They're not your friends.
strictnein
" 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.
morkalork
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?
CSMastermind
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.
comrade1234
"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."
ElProlactin
So this is where the money from the price increases goes.
nekusar
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.
ab71e5
So he was fired for sharing he had ketamine based therapy for depression? Why? Like is it promoting drug use or something?
reptation
As Benjamin Studebaker put it, bring your whole self to work just means the whole self should be professional
gregdaniels421
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.
triyambakam
This is why I dislike offsites in general
tlogan
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.
delichon
Turns out it was a trust calibrating exercise that the whole team learned from.
otterley
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.
reactordev
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".
jmyeet
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.
thot_experiment
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)