Working at Netflix Sounds Like Hell
gizmodo.com
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I don't know what it's like from the executive or middle management side of things, but from the engineering side of things, I liked the fact that people were transparent about their mistakes and there were always detailed write-ups about any technical incidents.
Incident post-mortems were always incredibly good for that reason, and I never felt like my job was on the line if I admitted to messing up somewhere.
I liked it a lot there, good work/life balance and never really felt stressed. If anything, I didn't think there was enough interesting work to go around as the company was growing a lot bigger.
But as an engineer, I wouldn't mind going back.
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and, just as paying well attracts workers, supportive/interesting/personal-growth-oriented/comfortable working conditions attract workers. but I gather Netflix doesn't want to take advantage of that strategy.
OTOH, could it be that Netflix's management approach actually squeezes more performance out of the very same talent pool every other company has to draw from? is Netflix on to something?
So the question is how many people can suffer through this kind of hell grinder at $500K/yr.
Is this not the definition of a psychopath?
This really does sound like hell to me. Then again a lot of modern corporate culture especially in tech seems to be moving toward this type of hell. Basically a form of social Darwinism.
Life and more specifically happiness is not efficient. Maximizing profit and growth and performance might work better unencumbered by emotions, survival of only the fittest, but does that lead to happiness?
If that behavior extends outside of things you _should_ control (e.g. you try to control your friends and acquaintances), then it can be considered psychopathic or sociopathic. If you're just trying to minimize harm to things you control, then I'd argue that it's normal.
The CEO of a company is very much interested in running things efficiently. Without more information, there's really nothing to suggest this CEO has a mental disorder.
So, if anything, I give it to Netflix that at least they're being honest about it, as opposed to lots of other "we're changing the world", cultish organizations that talk a lot about how "we're all a big family", but then when the going gets tough all that goes out the window in the interests of "maximizing shareholder value".
In my experience, over time, freeloaders tend to become vocal and lobby for policy changes (within the team, not corporatewise) that helps keep them there. I've seen them oppose technically sound decisions because they're not sure they can handle the complexity, or (and more commonly) because it involves skills they don't want to learn. Skills well within their reach if they just tried - some of them had those skills in school and they merely need to get a book and review what they once knew.
Generally, if you're a motivated person, but in a team with a significant number of "freeloaders", your ability to raise the bar of the team will be limited. I left my last team because of it.
Where do you work and how do I get a job there?
I've only worked in big corporations - and I rarely see this attitude. Many people became engineers because it was seen as a way to make a decent living. The number among them who actually enjoy technical stuff (say, well enough that they would do it in their spare time if they had all the money in the world) is negligible. And then even amongst those, big corporations with mediocre management can do a great job of demotivating you. I've certainly been there - where I decide "Screw all this. At this point I'm doing it only for a paycheck (i.e. no job satisfaction). I'll just put in the minimum to keep my employer happy and use my extra time to do fun technical stuff at home".
In my experience, the "median" management helps you go down that path. You really need them to actively foster technical interest.
Western Europe country. I wouldn't suggest my company though. Where I currently work is Slack-off Fest 9000, but it's also a big corp.
Maybe you should check out meetups, hack fests, hackathons, coworking spaces, hacker spaces, maker spaces around you. There you can meet the real engineers. They earn maybe even just 50-75% of your colleagues. But they always give 120%.
And these also exist in big corps, but true, it's rarer there. The highest motivated engineers I see in big corps are people who don't care about engineering that much, but are certainly working their ass off to ship whatever stupid idea their manager had latest. The thing will not work in a customer environment, but it's good for a demo, and more does their manager not need.
I also led teams of engineers in the start-up world. Usually all you need to do is keep the political bullshit away from them, show them the sufferings of the customer, and provide them with enough money that they don't starve to death (and can afford 1-2 raspberry pis, and/or a nerf gun).
We have extremely quiet people at work, few know what they do, but they're actually extremely productive, rarely make waves (good or bad), and help keep longer term goals.
The "Rockstar" types join, get all excitable, make a handful of rapid (often good) changes, burn out, and leave. Likely to start again at their next workplace.
Yes.
I'm content with just sitting here and doing this job for now and get paid enough to live at my means, so I make no attempts to get a promotion where I'll have much more work and stress, and make little attempts to go above and beyond. I just stay consistent and I'm seen as a free loader by some. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The most helpful advice I've ever been given by my manager is to come to terms with my, so to say, "rockstarness". There are people who come in to work everyday and deliver a constant stream of output. Others (like me) have huge bursts of productivity at seemingly random times. And that's fine when you know that this is what's going on. When I'm in a phase of low productivity, I don't panic anymore about not getting anything done. I'm deliberately spending the time mentoring juniors, learning new things, or working on getting tickets unblocked so that when the next productivity streak hits me, I'm ready to make the most of it.
The salary was eye-popping...$400k. That's just to be a senior developer. There were RSUs on top of this so total comp was probably $500k. That's crazy!
I knew if I joined I would be terminated but that didn't bother me...the salary was crazy and apparently the goodbye package is also generous. I suppose it's sort of nuts to know you will be fired from day one though.
In fairness they make sure you understand what you are getting in to. My future manager even phoned me on a Saturday to make sure I understood. So I have respect for them
When the next recession hits, working in tech will get worse and even the monster salaries will go away. Almost no one here has had to experience a real drop in demand for developers
1. How did you know you would be terminated?
2. How long do you estimate you would have lasted before this expected termination?
3. If the expected termination did not bother you, why did you refuse the job?
2. Hopefully long enough to get a good severance package
3. Had another competing offer that had some useful benefits and seemed like a better fit for my skills
The severance package is 4 months of salary.
I doubt you got an offer from there, because it is all very clear, or you did not pay any attention.
In my management classes at business school, it's taught as a cautionary tale of unintended consequences and bad management. So this policy is a well-explored bad idea from decades ago, and it seems typical of Silicon Valley to arrogant reinvent a wheel without looking at cautionary tales from the past.
Most people cannot even tell you how to measure a programmer's performance. But we're comfortable with firing the "lowest performing" developers? Lowest performing by what metric?
Honestly these "get rid of poor performance" policies are just abused to remove people who others have a personal dislike for, or similarly those who don't make enough friends to game the system.
Plus whose to say that even if we could measure performance, that it wouldn't be down to externalities outside of the individual's control (e.g. poor manager, poor team culture, bad project requirements, poorly written/documented legacy system they need to integrate with, etc).
The only thing they need to do to survive is maintain rights to enough shows people are willing to pay for.
I don't see how that's true at all. They were originally an American DVD mail order service that rented other people's movies.
They're now a global streaming service with a strong content production division.
They've change both the product, the business model, the customer base and the tech.
They could be looking at another pivot, but that's yet to be seen.
But even regarding tech, they've been making new things; for example, they moved from physical data centers to their OpenConnect appliances.
I bet you think iPhones make themselves or that Google search barely requires maintenance?
It's not like they've not added countries, content and features since inception.
The UI is slick. It’s also simply geared towards making you zombie watch Netfkix branded shows.
Using Netflix feels like giving up control, over both the viewing experience and the recommendation system. The recommendation system that Netflix poured millions into developing, with hyperoptimizations down to the thumbnails you see? I can't get it to stop recommending me shows I don't want to see. I can't pick the genres I want to show up on the homepage. The automated genre generation/clustering algorithm occasionally generates hilariously poor results. I can't leave my mouse over any thumbnail for a few seconds to read the synopsis because the trailer will automatically start playing.
Another example: No control over stream quality. I'm fine with waiting 30 seconds for the higher quality version to buffer, but Netflix forces me to watch the first 30 seconds in glorious 360p with sharp edges and features on actor's faces smudged out of existence. There's no way to change this setting, which exists on every video player I've seen since before YouTube existed.
The UI and findability sucks if you're on a PC but is fine if you're on a big screen tv (which is the direction I assume it's been aimed in, as well as big buttons for touch screen or visibility). When I was subscribed, I would use a third party website like instantwatcher to easily sort and search what so I could browse quickly.
Recommendations and the whatever algorithms they're using now aren't very useful (maybe coming full circle on the limited content leading to limited choice).
Also seems like the Hollywood office is becoming more "Hollywood", which might prove problematic for avoiding all of the dumb mistakes Hollywood people make.
With so much attention going to the content side of the biz, I also wonder if top engineers would feel more celebrated at Google, Facebook, or start-ups where their contributions are seen as the primary innovation driver of the business.
Also, what engineering/technical challenges do you think Netflix still has to resolve? It seems like things are stable and right now the focus is on content growth / ownership, especially in the face of other companies catching up and trying to compete in the streaming space.
It's business, not personal.
In the sports that doesn't pay too much (for most people working at Netflix) even though you are in the top of the world. With the high level sports you get some kind of satisfaction that you got further than anyone (or some other reason beyond money) and not for the money; most people at Netflix probably work there for the money.
Can most people who work at Netflix join another company for comparable pay? From what I've heard: No. Netflix often justifies their culture by pointing out they pay the highest. If you look at a thread below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316176) you'll see that $400K guaranteed as a senior developer is normal.
They also used to have a generous severance pay - well above industry average. That again was used to justify their policy: Hire the best, and give them a generous token of appreciation when we replace them. The claim was they don't want people to be worried about being fired, because whether they stay or leave, they'll get good money.
(Not sure if the severance package is good these days - my information is quite dated).
Working with video at large scale is tough man.
The question of course is how much staff works on video tech. Even at a company like Google, most people are not working on Google search. There are teams that do all kinds of work behind the scenes to make this happen. Like Build teams, SRE, QR DevOps etc.
The tech part is hard, but is largely solved. AWS has today made it easy to play the scale game. The unsolved riddle there is affordability not tech. That's the whole point behind Amazon Prime anyway. If Netflix was using their infrastructure to be successful, they might as well have done it themselves and they have.
Another big part about these companies is they oversell the role of technology, and the role of tech people in their success. Content is way important a thing for these companies than tech will ever be. Interesting content to consume is what keeps these people in the game.
There is a reason why some thing like New York Times is still around. And they are not even a tech company.
"The study of 261 senior professionals in the United States found that 21 per cent had clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. The rate of psychopathy in the general population is about one in a hundred."
And I personally think if you examine ceos of highly successful companies, the ratio will be higher than 1 in 5.
Sure it's ONE study. But it actually makes sense. You don't get to the top in modern corporate world (especially hyper competitive one like the tech) without being slightly crazy.
Let me explain: You get fired for not performing. And the gamification part is you can get hired again in that same company, even same position, let's say, three or six months after you were fired.
You get your old salary, benefits everything. And the mental relief that being laid of is not permanent.
Then you work different this time, with the experience of having done this job before and the experience of being without a job too.
It would benefit Netflix a lot more than firing people in a permanent basis, IMO. And with these ultra high salaries, people would go back there.
Now what is interesting are the anecdotes about how it impacts people. People often feel motivated by fear, and sometimes feel shamed, etc.
isn't this normal (for contractors?)
i mean it is terrible (armies whose job is to kill people put a pot of effort into avoiding just such feelings)
I do wonder why businesses so easily follow this route.
maybe it's interesting here that, in the last couple of days on HN, we've seen several stories to the effect that long-term chronic stress is literally damaging people's brains.
given that, i wonder how a Netflix competitor might exploit the defects in this hiring/firing strategy.
There is a huge difference between shares and stock options.
It really isn't culture unless it applies to yourself. Does Mr Hastings hold himself to the same standards himself as does to everybody else?
>>Kill or be killed seems to be accepted as a mode of operation.
A pathetic excuse for a toxic work environment than anything else. This will lead to non-existent to negligible co-operation inside and across teams. Stealth political projects and alliances to sabotage internal projects. Cartel style power structures, purges and internal power dynamics. You usual ala carte toxic political power play.
Of course this happens in all companies. But the speed is low. Here it feels like the CEO derives please pouring a catalyst into a run away chemical reaction.
>>It’s also led to culture shock as the company rapidly expands, takes on bigger loads of debt, and faces stiff competition.
Based on everything I've read so far. I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff Bezos eats these people for lunch in a few years.
Bezos isn't known to be employee friendly either, but he is also not a fool.
There is a always a fine line between working hard towards a purpose, and pointless busyness just for the heck of it.
>>One executive said he was fired because he did not inform others about another employee’s medical condition out of respect for their privacy. Netflix saw this as not being “forthright with us around a major employee issue.” But Jonathan Friedland, former chief communications officer was a little too forthright and open when transparently talking out issues. He was fired this summer
Damned if you do, damned if you don't situations happen in processes where people want to screw you regardless, and not exactly because of the merit of your case.
Here the cartel boss seems to maintain early communism-esque purge lists.