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I know some of the younger folk may not realise reality is stranger than fiction, but I too have been on a "work mandated drink alchohol bus" where I remember even though I was young, I was terrified the whole time wondering why we were being forced to drink infront of C suite; forced on a hell ride through the black country ( Thats a region in England).
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.
I remember at the ad agency I used to work at (somewhere around 2018) we used to have a happy hour every Friday where from 5pm onwards all drinks (including booze) in the cafeteria were free, which led to people of all departments including C-Suite to get together and drink.
I remember it as a good time though, I don’t remember anything ever happening that led to people having repercussions for employees. Then again, this is German drinking culture and the stiffest drink you could have was wine, so people wouldn’t usually get wasted, just tipsy.
The Christmas parties were a different breed though. HR definitely had a lot of work to do after those.
UK had the most unhinged work drinking culture I had ever seen.
UK here too. I've seen so many people fired after a work event with a free bar I'm starting to wonder if it's an HR strategy (eg to weed out the cocky sales people who would end up embarrassing the company. It's a trial run for late nights with clients)
> 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!
I had a few company events that could easily become the foundation for one of those films where the main characters wake up in the morning in some random Asian country. No matter how crazy people go in these parties, there's always someone watching it and taking mental notes. I stopped getting too drunk in these events since I got into more senior Nowadays my aim is usually to rescue my colleagues and get them home safely:)
Narrator: The CEO wasn't in fact, an "allright c*nt" after all.
I don't drink at work. It's simple as that. I treat every retreat as work trip. I am professional. No gossip, nothing.
i'd believe the C-word is naturally made for the C-suite
I remember calling the whole board "cunts" to their faces. They all laughed.
Then I remember CEO only in his underwear emptying bottle of whisky into his mouth, shouting "I'll fucking fuck everyone in this bitch!" and then collapsing. His PA and another employee then dragged him to his room.
The 2000s were wild.
Now I consider anything involving alcohol as abusive. If company has a drinking "culture" or going to pub after work, I nope out.
I love the way you wrote that. Also your profile is hilarious.
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".
> He had been warned during his performance review that he should “drop one or two less f-bombs but don’t stop entirely.”
> 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.
" 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.
Remember this story the next time someone says "join our mission" or "bring your whole self to work". They all come with asterisks.
Last retreat I went on the CFO drove drunk around 350 miles to get there. The CEO insisted on heavy drinking for everyone. Then he ordered one of everything on the menu the next morning at a Cracker Barrel for himself and wasted a ton of food. I found out he had a cocaine addiction about a month before the company was acquired. They also had orgies in the office break rooms and gave out a machete to everyone as a Christmas gift. Amongst the many crazy times…
My fraternity was more tame and we used to have guys gazing each other in the main room during parties.
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.
So he was fired for sharing he had ketamine based therapy for depression? Why? Like is it promoting drug use or something?
I cannot see this ending up well for Netflix. It sounds like it personally offended someone's sensibility and they decided to fire the guy. I expect Netflix to lose this lawsuit, but more importantly, settle it before it ever goes anywhere.
I have witnessed this happen before. This was approximately ten years ago, but we had a similar thing, a new hire team building exercise. And during it, one of the new hires told a story about how they saved money by taking loads of reams of paper and stuff home from their old office in order to save money. And they were let go during the lunch break. I still feel a bit sorry for them, but I guess saying out loud you were happy to steal stationery didn't go down very well, so it makes sense, but still, it was such a tiny mistake for a 20-year-old. I wasn't in charge of management at the time, but I think I'd have just taken him aside and explained how bad it sounded.
From https://nypost.com/2026/07/26/us-news/netflix-exec-goes-ball...
> 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.
Turns out it was a trust calibrating exercise that the whole team learned from.
As Benjamin Studebaker put it, bring your whole self to work just means the whole self should be professional
>>> 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.
(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.
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.
am i wrong but doesnt the article say the dude worked at "eyeline" which seems to be consistently described in a quick search as a "netflix owned vfx company" which would not really make this guy a "netflix employee". no more so that somebody working at "x" is now a "spacex" employee. Eyeline has its own ceo and presumably culture, but "rando vfx company you've never heard of fires a guy" doesnt grab headlines i guess...
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.
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.
The stereotype is real. A guy I work with is part of what they call the Divorced Dad Club. He’s 56 and gets together with a bunch of other divorced dads to do ketamine and play video games. They’re all in the mid 50s, white, and in tech. And keep getting played by puffy lipped 30 somethings.
Remember: your coworkers aren't your family, your boss isn't your buddy and HR isn't on your side.
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.
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.
> Firing an employee for doing exactly what they were instructed to do during a mandatory retreat
Google banned political conversations at work. Tech companies are learning from first principles why work/life separation, traditional office culture exist.
So this is where the money from the price increases goes.
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)
What this really makes clear is that you should neither trust people you work with nor share personal information with them.
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.
What if he only took it before his career, or before joining Netflix? And is it because his role is not an engineer/designer/etc so the history of having taken medically prescribed ketamine could mean greater risk during the operations designated to him that are of business-type nature?
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?
“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.
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.
The issue here isn’t that this guy shared something about his personal life it’s the particular personal details. It’s possible to share information about your personal life without talking about your drug use or your therapy or your drug use at therapy.
It is irritating that people expect you to understand what reasonable personal sharing is without explaining explicitly and goodness knows I screwed this up when I was younger but “don’t talk about your personal life at all” is bad advice.
in the creative arts business, the work that sells tends to come from people carrying something. a difficult history, a chemical affiliation, some level of quirkiness/flaws, or all of the above.
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.
Funnily enough, that reminds of one scene in the Comedy Central TV show "Corporate", episode S01E05 titled... "Corporate retreat"[0].
I didn't know those trust/sharing exercises were real.
Both of these are completely one sided. The .inc piece is barely even has the one side, it's almost entirely expert quotes.
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.
I doubt the events at the retreat were the only cause for his firing. Creative folks are usually given much wider leeway compared to the bean counters.
It feels like somebody in senior management had it in for Baillie. And the ketamine story provided a sufficient cause.
“Trust” exercise is doublespeak in corporate settings
Come to think of it, Orwell’s 1984 perfectly encapsulates what corporations actually do — even in his own time. Down to the groupthink, wrongthink, doublethink, doublespeak, all of it. Synergy! Concerned. Trust.
"psychological safety" in the workplace? Auzla always lies. HR always lies. HR always lies.
Your work colleagues are not your family. Your superiors are not your friends. Treat every company as if they were going to look for a reason to fire you right now unless you can reasonably argue that they don't