Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

Please don't bring your whole self to work, the rest of us don't need that from you. Be polite, congenial and professional. You have the rest of your day to let it rip however you'd like.

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.

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.

This sounds like an exhausting perspective on the world. I’d rather be hurt by assholes than never allow myself to be vulnerable with anybody. You can mitigate the potential downside without thinking everybody is out to get you or thinking everything is a power game.

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.