Mandatory team dinners are just unpaid overtime disguised as appetizers.
By @finnlately · Work
My company hosted an upscale offsite dinner where everyone spent three hours laughing at executive jokes and pretending to be best friends. Expecting employees to perform fake social intimacy outside work hours is corporate overreach, not team building.
The full story
Here is the actual reality of office life that everyone refuses to admit out loud: company offsites and mandatory team dinners are an elaborate waste of personal time. We just wrapped our quarterly all-hands dinner at this upscale Italian place downtown. The team spent three straight hours pretending to be deeply fascinated by each other's childhood pets, weekend renovation projects, and kids' soccer schedules. Nobody was being authentic. Everyone was just running a subtle PR campaign for their own corporate likability rating. My coworker across from me kept ordering sparkling water and laughing at our VP's painfully dry dad jokes like they were premier HBO comedy specials. If you don't show up, you immediately get labeled as someone who 'isn't invested in the culture' or 'lacks cross-functional collaboration.' But if you do show up, you're sitting on an uncomfortable wooden chair in business casual on a Thursday evening, nursing one lukewarm beverage, quietly calculating how much sleep you're losing before tomorrow's 8:30 AM status sync. Work is an exchange of skilled labor for money. I like my coworkers plenty between nine and five. I review their pull requests promptly, I answer Slack threads within ten minutes, and I never drop surprise meetings onto people's calendars on Friday afternoons. That is being a great teammate. Forcing people to perform forced camaraderie after dark over cold breadsticks and loud acoustic playlists doesn't build organic trust. It just builds quiet resentment among everyone who actually has a life, a hobby, or a family waiting for them at home. Stop calling it culture. It's just unpaid overtime disguised as appetizers.
How people voted
- Totally Cooked — 23% (12 votes)
- It’s Complicated — 37% (19 votes)
- You’re Fine — 40% (21 votes)
Readers are split: “You’re Fine” leads with 40% — 52 votes and 4 comments so far.
What people are saying
@hanktbh — Bless your heart, you must be so exhausted after all that fake smiling. Make sure you get yourself a nice hot bath this weekend!
@violetfr — order the two hundred dollar steak next time and dip
@lanekk — Soft.
@ashmm — You are experiencing profound workplace burnout and projecting it onto an Italian dinner.
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