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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, they shouldn't be about work at all. It should be a bonding experience. Better if there is a non-work task to be solved, or to work for, together.

Alternatively, make it leisure.

Everything else is mostly BS.

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As a technical person, I bond by working with someone and talking about technical stuff during the course of our work. Forced social activity has always alienated me from coworkers because I can't relate with people that want to talk about their personal lives or sports or whatever and I suck at pretending.

I would take a pay cut for a company that promises to not force this shit on me.

I would try saying not engaging in the forced social activity, find a quiet corner with people you like and do what works for you. I used to think I couldn’t get away with it. Years later I appreciated as long as you don’t flaunt it, people are very accommodating.

Same here.

And you know what? I usually know the names of coworkers' significant others, children, and pets. And what their favorite foods are. And some hobbies and interests. Because those just come up in the course of work even when it's not forced. Especially if meeting with people is through a videoconference window into their homes.

I think what works really well for these sorts of offsites is to make leisure activities really flexible and let people self-select. We went to one where you could absolutely go to a bar if you wanted, or go hiking with some other folks, or play boardgames with another, etc.

There was probably a soft expectation that you were doing something to socialize, but it wasn't a dictated activity, and frankly if some people wanted to code something with a group that wasn't 100% part of a regular days work that would have probably been fine too.

I don't go to a bar or do stuff like that. At most maybe we can watch a movie or something but even that isn't an experience I want to share with a coworker. Even working on a cool app with someone is nice but not if they are a coworker unless somehow we genuinley became friends as in the kind that stay friends after they leave that company.

Employees do work in exchange for compensation. We are not servants to jump at the whim of our master managers and do random shit like kayak or shoot guns. You wanna build a team, ask them to work together on a project.

Boundaries are important and my entire life is not shares with employers and colleagues.

i am also a technical person and work on small teams generally. my take on team weeks/retreats is that they’re unique opportunities to get to know the people you work with more closely and what motivates them.

doing the same work you do 40 weeks of the year, just in person, is a severe wasted opportunity. pair programming remotely over video will accomplish the same thing.

i also want and expect technical conversations to happen during that time. what i’ve found works great is that you do other stuff, hackathons, lightning talks, and yeah, some of the stuff you hate, forced socialization or activities. in my experience this leads to great conversations and ideas over dinner and leaves us all excited to get back home to get back to the “regular” work.

Let me ask you this, why do I have to get to know people? Because I certainly don't want people at work to get to know me and when forced I have to make stuff up basically. We are not a "family", family don't get to fire each other lol. Most of you on HN are programmers, so let me ask why you need to know about a persons life to code with them? In my experience even at work people go out of their way to avoid technical discussions. Many even refuse to do their job unless you become their best friend. I expect mangement to weed bullshitters like that out not encourage it by mandating forced bullshitting basically.

That’s usually a big part of it. Typically people in these positions don’t interact closely, but may be competing for resources or promotions. You want to discourage a culture where people are trying to kill each other.

Getting everyone together helps with that and takes people out of their daily context. For a company that prints money, sending everyone to some luxury resort is worth it. Where I work, we went to a local picnic grove and had barbecue for a day.

> they shouldn't be about work at all

Other tax systems may vary, but in the UK if you have an offsite and it's not overwhelmingly for work (think agendas, sessions, meetings, etc. as proof) - the employee gets taxed on the value as if it was income.

There are ways for the employer to meet the additional tax burden, but far easier to just add in a work component and call it an offsite.

Sometimes with spot bonuses though the employer can “gross up”, and I’ve more rarely (but a non-zero number of times) seen that applied to other “taxable benefits”. By grossing up they are essentially just paying you additional compensation sufficient to nullify the taxable impact on the employees wallet.

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