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Comment by jlesk | Hacker News Reader

As a Netflix employee, I wouldn't really describe our culture as cutthroat at all. My experience in 5 years has almost entirely devoid of politics.

For example, from our culture page: "We have no bell curves or rankings or quotas such as “cut the bottom 10% every year.” That would be detrimental to fostering collaboration, and is a simplistic, rules-based approach we would never support."

https://jobs.netflix.com/culture

Our culture can feel intimidating, especially if you have any degree of imposter syndrome, but with very few exceptions, my colleagues and managers have always been supportive and really great to work with.

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>>We have no bell curves or rankings or quotas such as “cut the bottom 10% every year.

This is possible in companies growing rapidly or bringing in lots of money.

In 1990s, It was very common in Indian IT services firms to openly talk about salaries and promotions, as getting the best of both was easy for every one. Enter 2000s and all of this came to an abrupt end, stack ranking emerged out of nothing as people competing for limited resources compared themselves with each other.

Its not that hard to pay and promote when things are going well. Its only when the scarcity kicks when the real issues start.

This is spot on! The same goes for so many other companies. When the pie is growing, everyone gets a bigger piece, there is lots of whitespace to move into, mid-level folks can stretch into more senior roles, faster and more effectively than it takes the company to hire external senior people, and so on.

Interesting. I have a few friends who have interviewed and talked with people there and it's always been described to me as a place that does cut the bottom performers every year. When you hiring only "rock stars" those bottom 10% may still be great.

I'm glad to hear that may not be true as it's always put me off from attempting to work there.

Do you trust a random commenter on HN on the Internet than a few of your own friends? This is something I wonder about. I weigh the opinion of random reddit posts than people I know in real life. How did I get that way?

Perhaps something here is that this is an identifiable person who actually works at netflix making a semi-permanent and public statement.

Contrasted to a friend who heard something passing on information that they were not expecting to be held accountable for.

I might trust my friends more, if my friend and someone on the internet had the same information, but might trust someone on the internet more if they had better knowledge.

Also, they did say "might not be true", and it certainly makes sense to use new knowledge to adjust the probabilities of belief.

> Do you trust a random commenter on HN on the Internet than a few of your own friends?

No and yes? The problem is I didn't have any friends who worked directly for Netflix this is mostly what they had heard from others and what one supposedly asked about during his interview a few years back.

So yeah I trust them but they also got their information second hand which, when compared to "stranger on the internet claiming to be working at Netflix" I don't see a huge difference in.

> Our culture can feel intimidating, especially if you have any degree of imposter syndrome

Could you elaborate?

I imagine that it's like playing on a professional sports team. If you can't hack it in the NBA, NHL, NFL, etc, you'll know inside of you. Guys that make it to The Show have very little doubt in themselves as to what they're capable of doing, and even the superstars are mostly working their butts off to get even better, and that goes double for the benchwarmers. See any YouTube video on Kobe Bryant's work ethic. But even the benchwarmers know that they belong if they put in the work.

> Our culture can feel intimidating, especially if you have any degree of imposter syndrome

Is the management aware that because of this you're missing some great talent out there? Maybe they should consider changing a stance a bit...

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