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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
