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Comment by vegetablepotpie | Hacker News Reader

> The court ruled that Mr T was exercising his "freedom of expression" by refusing to participate in the company's social activities, and that performing this "fundamental freedom" could not be a reason for his dismissal.

It makes me upset that something basic like not wanting to drink lots of alcohol with your co-workers has to be justified with a legal framing of "freedom of expression". And Mr. T was fired in 2015, it took 7 years for this case to be concluded in the French court system. Not that French is an important qualifier, I fully expect the American legal system to take that long as well. It also makes me upset that the media's framing it as being not "fun".

In actuality, most people don't have the funds, the time, and the gumption to go through with a legal battle. You of course need to find a new job, but in the meantime you have financial obligations, and those don't wait 7 years to be satisfied.

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Unpopular opinion: life is too short to waste it working with people you don't like. If your team is a bunch of assholes, just find a different company that will be less miserable, shake hands and bid farewell.

Many people live somewhere without other employment options and can't relocate. Otherwise, yeah, that's the obvious solution.

Thankfully remote work resolves this problem.

Really? Another "just do X" comment? Again, great when it's an option, but not as common as your own experience might suggest.

We've a way to go if this is an unpopular opinion.

Stay and put up is terrible advice. Rotten companies deserve to fail.

On the contrary, anywhere this is a popular opinion is a place the has a long way to go.

"Just find another job" either assumes that everyone can do this or that those who can't don't deserve a better environment. The former is not true, the latter is a form of discrimination.

That's not too far from a reductio ad absurdum though really.

> life is too short to waste it working with people who don't like to inject heroin into their eyeballs whilst riding dolphins bred in captivity around Seaworld. Just find a different company that will be less miserable.

I like a drink occasionally with friends after work. Some choose not to come. Some drink soft drinks. Some stay out until I can see the regret on their faces the next day. Everyone makes their own version of "fun".

What gets my back up most in a work environment is mandatory fun. Someone has designed an activity, a workshop, a day that is all about having FUN!!!!1! Except its their version of fun and we all have to play along or else you're the problem.

That's what bothers me.

It's not about life being short or people being "fun" or not. It's about my interpretation of what it means for me, and everyone else's interpretation of what it means for them.

I think the "unpopular opinion" you are responding to is making the argument that if you don't want to engage in "mandatory fun", just quit and get a new job.

I don't necessarily 100% agree with that opinion (I'm glad there is recourse against sexual harassment in the workplace), and I have a ton of sympathy for employees in more coercive job environments where there are few jobs and it's difficult to just quit and get another one. In this case, though, I highly doubt "Cubik Partners" is the pinnacle of consulting in Paris. If it were me, I would have said "fuck these guys" and peaced out.

This would indeed be the best approach in a country with a functional work market & culture. France is not that, or at least not at the time this happened (I hope it's getting better now). This will come at a major shock to anyone used to US/UK tech work culture.

In France, animosity between workers and management is constant, expected and considered normal. The jobs market is extremely illiquid (and unemployment was quite high at one point) which means once someone lands a job, they keep it and fight for it, even if the position is a bad fit. This overall ruins the experience for everyone involved except maybe lawyers and paper-pushers. The worst is that it's a positive feedback loop, where risk of this happening means that companies are even more reluctant to hire and/or implement unreasonable requirements that make job switching harder and ultimately make the market even less liquid.

In a well-functioning jobs market leaving and finding another job is indeed the easiest answer. But if you can't do that and have a mortgage to pay, your only option is to stick around and fight back.

I may like them, but still not want to go out and drink with them.

In fact, in my over 35 years of work, the number of co-workers I wanted to go drink with is precisely zero. That doesn't mean I didn't like them.

I think your opinion is not unpopular, but it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. In this court case you can have plenty fun at work, but still prefer to do something else when work is over. You spend a huge part of your day with your coworkers, so maybe after work it is perfectly reasonable to want to spend it with other people, such as your family or non-work friends.

The point here is that mandatory fun time isn’t a leisure activity if you are forced to do it, it is overtime work. If your not getting paid overtime to participate, then it is free labor. And you are never obliged to do free labor no matter how much fun you have with your co-workers otherwise.

We need people to fight, otherwise it become endemic. And not everyone is a programmer who can switch every 6-12 months into a new job and feel no effect on their career.

That's a privilege not everyone has; many people's competences/talents don't allow them to job hop that easily

The thing is, I might like my colleagues at work and still not want to go out with them (because I simply don’t like going out).

> the media's framing it as being not "fun"

This seems to be a direct quote from the defendant ('specifically his refusal to adhere to the company's "fun" value') not a framing of the media. At least not more than your own:

> something basic like not wanting to drink lots of alcohol with your co-workers

(Of course after-work activities should never be mandatory, otherwise they'd be work, and the practices in this case especially seem terrible.)

Right. You can only imagine the amount of fury that would drive a person to follow through on a thing like this. I mean, kudos to him for his success here against professional depravity, but litigation is awful, and often it’s better to just let the bastards win.

"often it’s better to just let the bastards win"

The bastards count on this and relish it.

>Not that French is an important qualifier, I fully expect the American legal system to take that long as well.

I appreciate your noble intent, but "French" actually is an important qualifier. American courts are quite expedient relative to their French counterparts, especially in civil matters. I would expect such a case to take 3 years in the US, tops.

More to your point, this is where France's workplace protections are generally pretty good. It's hard to fire workers for anything other than gross negligence or incompetence, and the courts are generally biased in favor of the employee (which comes with its own set of problems, to be sure).

I agree with the sentiment, but it took so long because it went all the way to the Court of Cassation, the French equivalent of the Supreme Court.

IANAL, but closest French equivalent to Supreme Court is Conseil Constitutionnel. Cours de cassation is about breaking judgments because they were not made to the letter of the law. They do not pronounce general opinions about the law itself.

I think this is a case where the French parliamentary system doesn't map onto American institutions very well. IIRC, the Conseil Constitutionnel intervenes at the time of ratification of a law; it's a forward-looking body, unlike the US Supreme Court that judges law ex post facto (like the Cours de Cassation).

The same reason people don't report sexual harassment - and there is another reason on top of that: whistle blowers are potentially going to blow their career. Damages should be in the millions. Especially when the pattern is going to be younger people get harassed, so they have more career left.

France has strong labor unions. Likely, it wasn't Mr. T who handled the case but his union's lawyers. They may even have decided to litigate rather than settling out of court to create a precedent that would cover future labor disputes.

Well I have been in many meetings where folks would continuously drop F bombs just to shut others up or to be strongly opinionated. Many years ago these behavior would have been deemed as unprofessional , now in some places people don’t bat an eyelid when these happens. I see this culture as toxic which ultimately harms full inclusion.

Depends on the place, circumstance, people, i.e. context. I (and my teammates) regularly drop F-bombs when troubleshooting/debugging issues with coworkers I've worked with for 5+ years. Nobody bats an eye. Do we do it in all-hands meetings? Of course not. Having said that, being a jerk intentionally to shut someone up is unacceptable in a meeting regardless of whether it's done with swearing or not.

Inclusion doesn't mean treating everyone like fragile butterflies. My neighbor is a 3rd level support agent for an enterprise storage hardware company that's very well known. He's been there for decades as has most of his team. They recently hired a new agent who took offense to my neighbor and one of his long-time coworkers chirping at each other (in good fun) on a team meeting call. No one took offense except this new person who took it straight to HR. It didn't take long for this new person to get on everyone's bad side and was then let go. Learn to read the situation.

What you call fragile butterfly is called being professional. Learn to distinguish.

And that's why culture-fit matters. There are places that are 'uptight' professional and others that are much more relaxed (most fall somewhere between the two.) No judgement of either environment types.

What's non-inclusive specifically about F-bombs? It might not be great decorum, but that seems a bit heavy.

That it discourages people who consider throwing F bombs as unprofessional to participate and is this non inclusive.

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