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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

This review doesn't jive with the apparent performance of the company in the market. They're the front-runner in an extremely tough space with hostile partners, and even more amazingly, they did this while starting as a company that ships physical goods around the country. There aren't too many things that are harder than moving away from a successful business model, but they've done it really well.

They don't appear to be afraid to innovate at all. Hell, they even started making their own hardware (Roku).

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Many tech companies perform well despite the (poor) treatment they give their employees. Amazon is not particularly well rated on Glassdoor, and I've heard plenty of horror stories about EA (and other game companies) from people I trust.

Good observation, particularly using Amazon as an example. As a former employee, I just nodded my head.

You're right, but I wasn't saying they don't treat people badly, just that it doesn't seem likely that his characterization of the company's attitude towards innovation was accurate.

Didn't they have some public contest to see who could come up with the best movie recommendation algorithm? That seemed pretty bold and innovative.

That's also a potentially cheap way to solve a vexing problem when you have a limited resource pool (ie your employees).

So maybe the upper management can innovate and the employees can't?

Not at all. Think of it this way, you're a small company with a limited budget. You have a very difficult problem and your existing engineers haven't been able to figure it out. Hiring another engineer could help but it's no guarantee and you can't keep hiring indefinitely until it's solved. Why not have a contest with a known payout (ie the prize). That way you're not paying for all the work that is a non-winning idea. You get the solution, for a fixed amount and are able to spread the time and effort across a vastly greater resource pool without having to pay for it.

How is that a "not at all"?

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