How do they quantify understanding how to get things done in that org? I know with my job, I'm learning how the institution hinders growth, except through certain channels. That meta-knowledge is absolutely essential... yet seemingly ignored.
Maybe it's to do with the fact that there are plenty of jobs in tech right now and Netflix apparently pays very well, enough for a future employee to accept that disadvantage. Partly it's also because of the transparency of it all. Another thing is that it can benefit the employee too, long term. I've worked in many different companies and there were always a bunch of 'holders-on' who held everyone back and didn't even seem happy themselves. I often thought they and the team would be much better off if they found work somewhere else where either they'd feel challenged to develop themselves further, or where their current skills were good enough.
I still would not choose to run a company that way myself, but provided that 'performance' is measured in a somewhat accurate way, provided that the compensation offsets this risk, provided that there is honesty about it all, and provided that there are alternative jobs one can find afterwards, well, then I'd at least be curious to see if it works in practice.
(and decreasing 'institutional knowledge' is one very big advantage, in my opinion.)
What's transparent about it? The process is totally opaque -- some executive evaluates whether they feel you're meeting their standards, which may or may not be obvious, and then decides to let you go if they feel you aren't. I don't think it could be any less transparent.
As it stands, the person making the decision could be doing so for totally arbitrary reasons. It doesn't appear that there's an established process or criteria in place beyond "I don't feel like I'd hire X now" -- the rationale "Because Executive Y says so" is not transparent in the slightest.
But anybody who has been paying attention has known that any job is "just a stint" since at least the 90's, if not the 80's. A big part of the Re-engineering[1] push of the 90's involved reducing costs, at least in part by reducing head-count. And before that, you had the 80's LBO[2] craze, which resulted in dramatic layoffs at many companies.
As a Gen-X'er who grew up in the 80's, I have never expected to have a life-long career at a single company, and I can't imagine many - if any - of my peers imagining that either. In this regard, there's nothing unique at Netflix. All jobs are essentially "temp" jobs in this day and age.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
But if the labor market were compressed more like in Europe, all companies could afford that behavior, without having to spend abnomally higher in salaries, and that would be a problem.
This echoes one of the chapters in Fire Someone Today, a book with a seemingly heartless title, written by the CEO of a Bible software company. They had an underperforming employee that everyone liked & no-one wanted to fire, so they moved him through different roles to find something that suited him. After moving him through the entire company with negative results, they finally conceded they had to fire him. The punch line: the employee flourished as soon as he was fired - his dream had been to join the ministry, but he'd worried about quitting a stable job to do so.
The rest of the book is pretty good, about 20 anecdotes from running a software business.
https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Someone-Today-Surprising-Busines...
I'm generally in favor of firing underperforming employees, but this punchline feels uncomfortably close to ex post facto justification.
Lots and lots and lots of people get fired and don't flourish, in fact they drop like a brick and hit rock bottom. While everything turned out for the best this time, I worry about the lesson being imparted here.
Sure, but speaking from the perspective of the company and everyone else in it, it's better if those low-performers hit rock bottom outside the company, rather than hit rock bottom while employed and bring the rest of the company down.
But it hurt group morale on every team they were shuffled to. Hard working teams quietly build up resentment against dead weight.
In retrospect, I would have been better off getting the board's permission to institute 6~12 month severances for company initiated terminations instead of the 3 month one that we had. Or done an extended paid leave - or something.
I think the reason I didn't (I don't even remember at this point) was one of my early employees - a star performer by every measure - said something like: "Hey! Why would you be paying them 12 months salary for being a loser?" (Not that he was incompassionate - he wasn't - but making the point the way that anyone from the Bronx might make that point.)
I don't think I ever figured out what to do with that other than deciding that being the boss sucked and I never wanted to do it again.
Not saying that keeping dead wood on is good for anyone either, just that most management wouldn't put the feelings of an employee even in the same ballpark as the interests of the company.
If it makes you feel any better, I'd rather work for you!
I don't know if this is true. (It might be). Most manager types that I've have talked with struggle with how to do it it well.
The "path to wisdom" in technical skills (which are more my forte) seem to be lots of practice around things that start out being practiced ... mechanically. And each and every Ubuntu 14.04 server in my cluster is pretty much like the others.
I think that people are harder. Even with just two, who believe they love each other - there wouldn't be a career in marriage counseling if it was easy.
Ignoring the traditional heirarchy looking bits that show up on org charts: coordinating and synchronizing the members of a team and teams with one another is certainly not anything that most coders want to spend their day doing. They don't even want to write documentation! So, it's an important function: conducting a group exercise, like a dance, made up of a bunch of talented and self-directed humans. Especially when something new is being created and no one brain has the whole picture. (Thinking about it now, it boggles me that we even try.)
We (society) are going through a strange transitional time right now. Like the 1850s~1930s in the US when we were transitioning from Ag to Industrial and it had the civil war on one end, a bunch of crazy elections from 1890 or so in the middle, and the New Deal at the end.
I think that managers aren't trained to be coordinators in this new world: who would train them? And beyond that, we take our best tech leads and promote them: losing a great technical contributor and gaining a badly skilled coordinator.
Anyway: thanks for the kind words. Since I left BigCo as an engineer back in the day to start my NewCo, and got big (and crashed), I've been unemployable by BigCos and very hesitant to start anything again. I kind of "fell off the rails".
But some things have gotten worse since then: employers are scared employees will sue them if managers have an empathetic conversation with an employee, and co-evol employees thinking that typical managers don't give a shit. (Mutual arising) It isn't healthy and I don't like the direction.
But, not my problem any more! I just fix up people's patent portfolios for them. And sometimes make a widget prototype for them ("Here, have an invention") and they can make it, produce it, support it, sell it, etc...
When they called for research on UBI, everyone focused on what you're focusing on...the hubris that SV thinks it can automate everyone else's jobs. But the point I mention above is, to me, the more powerful one. Freeing people to follow their passions will enable people to give up their 9-5s without first having to save up. Creating a startup is a giant leap into the unknown with only the hope that you'll land safely. UBI is a parachute in case you miss your landing.
The system works because the severance is very generous, and it's not considered a career risk to leave Netflix.