Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

Offsite retreats seem like a bad idea in general, I've never been to one where I felt the team or company worked together better afterwards, and I've seen some spectacularly bad results... like the time the facilitator tried to get to the bottom of tensions between the CTO and head of sales (the classic problem of "Engineering isn't shipping features fast enough" and "Sales is selling features before even consulting with engineering"). The discussion quickly turned shockingly personal and within a month after the retreat both the CTO and head of sales quit. At least they called an end to the retreat early.

> Adam Mendler, a workplace expert, told Inc. that this kind of exercise carries real risk when companies invite openness without ever clarifying how that vulnerability will be treated afterward.

I always felt that those trust exercises, "bring your whole self to work", "let us pay for a personality test so we can know each other better" are all ruses to find the most gullible people and then take advantage of them or get rid of them.

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".

Remember this story the next time someone says "join our mission" or "bring your whole self to work". They all come with asterisks.

This is why you should refuse to participate in these "trust and honesty sessions". You don't owe your employer or colleagues any insight into your personal life and the HR people who often run these sessions are there for the company, not for you and generally should not be trusted with personal info.

" 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.

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.

Remember: your coworkers aren't your family, your boss isn't your buddy and HR isn't on your side.

As Benjamin Studebaker put it, bring your whole self to work just means the whole self should be professional

So he was fired for sharing he had ketamine based therapy for depression? Why? Like is it promoting drug use or something?

Some executives observe religions that abstain from alcohol. They see you with one beer at a company party and judge everything you do on that.

Keep work life and personal life separate. No exceptions. If a company tries to encourage you to do otherwise I’d strongly suggest you find a new employer.

Turns out it was a trust calibrating exercise that the whole team learned from.

I didn't know Netflix was such a stick-up-the-ass garbage place to work at. What an incredibly dumb thing to fire someone over.

I don't even explain why I'm taking a day off or a half day or whatever.

It's no one else's business to decide if they agree the reason is valid. Don't volunteer stuff like that especially when it would be something they'd likely agree with. Don't validate their right to decide or even be aware of anything like that. Next time maybe your need might not be so convinvcing to anyone else, but you've already established they have a right to know and a right to veto, so then trying to be private stands out as different from other times.

It doesn't mean being inflexible or uncooperative either. If there is actually some problem, they can negotiate and try to make the case and convince you that they really need you just that much just that day, and you can voluntarily decide to change your plans, but without ever volunteering what those were. And make it cost. Keep score. Claim a return favor.

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)

So this is where the money from the price increases goes.

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.

Don't engage in a parasocial relationship with your employer. They're not your friends.

Kind of crazy Netflix spend so much on engineers while piracy sites give a better UX and more shows for free and with better privacy.

I'm surprised Netflix doesn't get sued more for their employment practices.

They are REALLY happy to fire people.

But it seems like they're on record firing someone for a legal medical treatment... in California no less.

He was already doing pretty well and will get a decent additional payday out of this.

I'm torn here because it does seem like Netflix brought this on themselves. At the same time the litigious nature of American workplaces are part of the reason large corporate environments are so soul-crushing, with language meant to deliberately obfuscate what's actually happening.

This is why I dislike offsites in general

"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."

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.

“A retreat may feel more relaxed than the office, but it is still a workplace, and the power dynamics don’t disappear,”

Ah, so sad :( Another story of a person who believed other people in the workplace too much.

These kinds of exercises are unfortunately a waste of time. If you’re honest, you’re walking into a minefield. But if you’re not being open, then no one is really getting to know anyone else in any meaningful way. In the end, a bunch of money and time is spent with zero value gained.

And given that this was about someone sharing their experience with a medical procedure to help them process the death of a parent, the company will probably lose the lawsuit, wasting even more money.

What a tragic waste of resources. Also, my heart goes out to this person. Loosing a parent is terrible.

So like that interview candidate being asked about the hardest day of their life and answering honestly about a miscarriage or did this guy do something inappropriate with some ping pong balls in a Guinness-record way?

Google banned political conversations at work. Tech companies are learning from first principles why work/life separation, traditional office culture exist.

I wonder if this is a generational thing. I grew up before social media and have long taken the position that I never post anything to the Internet that I wouldn't want public. I don't have a secret Reddit account or anonymous Twitter profile where I post stuff that could be fired, charged or worse.

This goes moreso for work. I assume anything you do can and will be used against you. I have zero trust. You're being a sanitized version of yourself. Do people not know this?

It's part of the reason I hate these working bonding activities. Well, that and being neurodivergent. There are fiarly standard questions and I have prepared answers that may or may not be the truth. Just like with interview questions. Sorry, but none of you are my friends or can be trusted. You might be shocked how often confiding in a coworker is used against you.

The trick with coworkers is saying just enough so they think they can trust you without saying anything that might get you fired or have other consequences. You can't say nothing. That's almost worse. But you have to basically invent a persona, particularly if you're neurodivergent because the default position of neurotyhpical people is to not like you.

And at the end of the day so much of your work life is governed by whether or not people like you. And I hate it.

So for a trust exercise, I'd come up with something everybody has likely done or is at least sympathetic to. Like, nothing to do with stealing. That might get you fired. Here's an example: "when I was in high school, I lied to my parents and drove to another state for a party and got drunk with my friends".

It's better to base your sanitized answer on the truth but I'm not above wholesale lies. They're just harder to remember so you have to be light on details but not too light.

I am not sure how old he was, but I would guess he was under 40 and relatively inexperienced.

Part of the purpose of these exercises is to train management, especially executives, to remain fully focused and make decisions solely on performance and the business, even when someone asks them to show emotion. Anyone who is in executive management position should understand that.

He failed the test.