At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

That said, I think quota policies are bullshit.

Labor is the biggest cost at tech companies, so one can understand desperate attempts at getting a handle on that cost. As long as you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater...

That is not a general statement, bro. Not generally "very good people" are left, but people who are very good at achieving certain ratings. It can very well happen that for instance your top coders are actually in the bottom 10% because they don't know "how to human". People who only focus on social skills rarely end up in the bottom 10% tho. So this whole system depends on having very meritocratic rating systems or you end up actually increasing the speed of getting parasites in and normal people out.

If you only make new bad hires, the 90% good population will stay the same, and the newly hired 10% will be fired.

If you make n good hires, such that that they're better than some peer in the previous 90% population, then the worst n peers will be shifted into the 10% firing population, and replaced with the better new hires in good 90% pop.

So, assuming your metric is solid, and replenishment occurs, the strategy should be successful.

After a few rounds you the only people left will be those loyal and belong to the inner circles of the cartel boss.

Who ever believes these firings happen on work performance is deluding themselves.

> I had the extraordinary opportunity to talk to the manager for the role, their manager, and two people who had previously been in the role (Netflix wasn't aware that I knew those people).

He knew people that worked there already.

AFter a few rounds (2-3) people usually have enough clues that they won't join a shitty team.

For instance if the team's management is full of parasites who have no technical skills at whatever they are supposed to do, then it will be very unclear from the outside what they are actually doing. If the recruiter can't explain it, it's likely that the team has not much skill.

Another example I faced is getting the same technical task in follow-up interviews (e.g. first phone call with one engineer, then a face-to-face with another engineer, both giving the same task). It shows that the organisation is not well since the engineers didn't know about each other's interview, otherwise engineers usually share their experiences and prepare each other.

If they are such solid performers, they can get jobs in other FAANGs who pay just as well. Netflix pays well, but does it pay so much better that I should put up with this BS?

I doubt.

In fact, by keeping up this abusive charade, Netflix is guaranteeing that many of the best candidates will never apply. So my guess would be that their employees aren't the best, but perhaps the best candidates willing to accept this BS.

Also, I won't have to live in Los Gatos.

That's not what Netflix's own spokesman say:

> Richard Siklos, a Netflix spokesman, said the company only fires employees for performance reasons

Only "performance reasons", not "misalignment of goals".

> Perhaps someone doesn’t want to change or just keeps behaving in a way that they’ve been asked not to.

Saying someone "just keeps behaving in a way that they’ve been asked not to" is a very negative thing to say. As a hiring managing, hearing that about a candidate would cause me not to hire them.

> It’s usually very positive about them

Something is very distorted if you think saying about someone that he "just keeps behaving in a way that they’ve been asked not to" and similar stuff that make a person unemployable is "very positive about them".

And once more, this contradicts everything else in the article. You can't have your cake and eat it, too: if Netflix is saying (through it's spokesman and multiple other execs in the article) that firing is always due to performance reason, then that's not a "very positive" statement about the person being fired. It's actually a very negative statement.

I don't see arguments in the thread that being generally insufferable at work is not a performance problem.

Most of the comments are about the fact that you can easily lose your job for being disliked arbitrarily by exactly one person: your direct superior.

This can happen to people who are good performers and team players.

One obvious example: professional differences, where an employees generally disagrees with his superior's approach. None of them is necessarily wrong, they just have different professional styles.

One less benign example: the manager is incompetent, the employee is a top performer, so the manager is intimidated and tries to push the employee out.

That being said, most political office stuff is very much personal, at least for one party involved. And than it gets nasty. And yes, with review processes being incredibly intransparent, without a real chance for the reviewed to defend himself, bad reviews are an easy way to get rid of people.

You cannot write that that person is not at the level of their peers, that she was not able to communicate with the stakeholders in a company-wide email, with no opportunity for the fired person to comment.

In my book, that is all very unfair. I hope you are not used to that behavior, either actively or passively.

> Let me take a stab at this: money is good.

Better than everywhere else, including other FAANGs, where you don't have to tolerate such policies?

If people don't want this, I think it's up to the organization to do this, as opposed to the vigilant wall of an ethic. Presumably the organization doesn't want little cliques, and should structure their incentives properly.

Now that I think about it, it was a bizarrely nepotistic environment. An engineering manager would hire their friends, many speculated as at least partial insurance against being fired. But once that manager was gone, job security for those people was also gone.

Weird how people put up with madness like that when your field is in high demand.

Some CEO of a successful company writes a book claiming his management wisdom led to his company success and then a bunch of CEOs read the book and try to replicate the same success because they don't have any original ideas themselves. In this instance the CEO was GE's Jack Welch and his policy was 'rank and yank'

Similarly, some CEO will write that you must have a mission statement and distill your management philosophy into 3 or 4 words preferably starting with the same alphabet. Next thing every CEO has their own tag lines: 'Agility, Accountabilty, Ambition' or 'Passion, Persistance, Performance' or <insert words from thesarus>. My previous company CEO spent thousands of dollars on polished metal tangram squares with her three words embossed on them given to every-single-employee at the company.

More recently, this person I know brought it up when interviewing at Netflix (not wanting to work in such a culture), and was reassured by the hiring manager that no, such things do not happen, that all feedback/criticism is 1:1 and never in a public setting.

Now, the article says

> At some team dinners and lunches there are rounds of “real-time 360,” executives say, where everyone goes around and gives feedback and criticism about others at the table.

What has your experience been?

It seems likely to me this is actually true (as independently corroborated by both my friend's friend, and this article), and the manager denied it to a potential future employee, which seems not a very nice thing to do.

And surely there's a selection bias at play: anyone who has a problem with such a culture (e.g. someone who doesn't want to be criticized in public as a matter of course, or someone who doesn't want to be fired one day unexpectedly) would leave, so by definition those who remain are those who are fine with such a culture and don't see it as a problem.

Technically, I was caught in the campus-wide 10% across-the-board layoffs, but it's very clear why I was made eligible for that list.

Funny that it happened to be the same month that I was recovering from surgery to remove my cancerous thyroid gland.

My guess is that "Thank God HR was on top of that problem" is not a common phrase in meetings. Neither is "Wow, HR did a fantastic job creating that job posting, and every single candidate that they've brought in has been at least plausible." If they aren't braindead, you just take them for granted.

Systems like that tend to get neglected.

At least with startups, I think money is too cheap and is flowing to underqualified people, managementwise. The VCs see a business person and a tech person, call it a startup and try to eke out a real company. Meanwhile, employees learn the meaning of shit flowing downhill and how culture comes from the top. Anyway, these cheap-money bosses are more often than not predictably bad at org-charting. Just add "flat hierarchy" and 3rd party HR, and 90% of the time it'll be a shitshow that at best elicits a chuckle when you mention how you work. [exaggerated for effect]

Obligatory "sick systems" reference: https://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html

There are certainly companies out there with a lot of problems, and there are a lot of toxic people. But if it seems that every single manager and hiring person that you encounter is an asshole and a jerk, there is an alternative explanation. Just saying.

The fundamental problem is a misalignment of incentives: what is good for any individual manager - getting a bigger budget and more staff reporting to them - it not necessarily what is good for the organisation as a whole, nor for any other individual within it, or even the shareholders or customers.

I think most big companies would find that much firing accountability at the all levels uncomfortable.

Only attorneys in labor disputes will be asking to show minutes from meetings.

They are trying to make a parallel for the expectations and rigor involved in maintaining peak performance.

In my experience, what happens is there is a technology shift -- the company leadership decides they want to use the cloud (or use containers, or start moving their codebase to ${LANG}, etc.) and there is a group of employees that will lead this effort by learning and working with the new technologies, and there is another group that will actively oppose taking responsibility to learn about the new technology, and may actively work to sabotage or slow down the process.

One of the reasons I always insist on working as a contractor is so that the company can end things whenever they want. Importantly, though, the risk of that happening is reflected in my rate.

Since from my perspective the risk of being let go as a 1099 vs. as a 1040 is roughly equal, and the compensation is roughly double, it seems like an easy trade-off.

And a fella can buy an awful lot of health insurance for 100% of his salary...

I use it often on news websites as it allows you to by-pass most soft paywalls.

I learned of its existence through other users pasting similar links with articles that involve paywalls.

Previous instances of posting outline links to get around client-side only paywalls have not been fussed at, so I interpreted that to mean acceptance of the practice.

Someone educate me?

Impressive use of the passive voice to pretend that there is some central authority deciding how words are meant to be used. People don't agree on how words are meant to be used and there is no reason to give preference to one over the other. Either ban it or not, don't have a skin color test to determine if someone should be fires or patted on the back after they drop a racial slur on the phone.

That Wikipedia article even mentions that people in the in group are often offended by the use of the word.

Also cooperatives and flat structures don't mean there isn't an executive management or facilitator role, it just means that they are equal to other workers. An executive or facilitator's role would be to help keep the company on track and keep a consistent vision and resolve disputes quickly but there would be a democratic process for hiring and firing rather than a hierarchical one. Take a look at the quaker way of "finding the sense of a meeting" for consensus decision making.