Three issues here.<p>One, "like a family" is a <i>process</i>, not an atomic label. It's not something you can just stick anywhere. Families are dynamic and a lot of work, frankly. Humans are messy.<p>Two, even if the label meant something, it doesn't mean the same thing to each person that uses it. Sounds like some of these folks are jerks. This might be because of an idea of what family means that's much darker than other people's. Also there are a lot of jerks in the world. The writer doesn't seem to like a lot of people they work with either. That's all fine and well. Families choose many times to disengage and only be together during certain special events. The question is whether or not these kinds of families are what the slogan means. Who knows? Sounds more like a crutch used by management than a real concept that everybody can grok.<p>Three, the author is playing right along. It looks to me like they're doing this passive-aggressive thing where the actively don't want to be like whatever this "family" label means to others at work and they also don't want to spend time with those folks. That's what they should say, to others. You just don't flip around a vague slogan and get something more useful. By translating it into the already vague "family" moniker, they're cheating themselves out of the opportunity to grow. "I don't like you people. You make me work too much, you're a bunch of assholes and I'm leaving." is a painful thing to say, and I'd wait until I have another job to say it, but rephrasing it as "I don't want to be like a family..." is just couching it in the same bullshit everybody is using. If you want to be that way, fine, just realize that you're doing the same thing as you feel is being done to you, i.e. using vague language to dodge difficult conversations.