Netflix to Its Techies: Shut Up | Hacker News Reader

Netflix to Its Techies: Shut Up

vulture.com

10 pointsatlgator7 comments

It isn't Netflix to techies, it's Netflix to a vocal minority of employees who feel their values on whats fit to air should trump all others, even public demand. As evidenced by the ton of people who watched Dave Chapelle's special.

The culture of openness was about feedback germane to the engineering process. Example:

"a software engineer, wrote a memo shortly after he started about improvements the engineering organization needed to make in how it tested the Netflix app. The engineer didn’t hold back, openly calling out dysfunction and identifying unnecessary obstacles to the process. “My manager was really happy,” he recalls. “She said, ‘This is the kind of context we are looking for people to bring up.’ ”"

Theres a big difference between engineers being encouraged to point out flaws in the engineering org and those who want to police content. If an engineer is qualified to decide what content airs, then so is everyone else, including every employee at Netflix, or Netflix's user base.

The gist of this article basically is:

"Activist-minded employees were unable to stop a show from being aired on the platform of their employer and now they cry murder."

Meh. The cancel culture cannot last and this was becoming increasingly obvious lately -- partly due to companies waking up to the obvious fact that a loud minority doesn't represent any majority out there, and partly because some start to understand that being loud and obnoxious about your beliefs only makes the common folk hate you.

There's time and place for activism and its advocates have long ago crossed many acceptable boundaries. Trying to invent a sensational story out of executives saying (once) "sorry but this time we disagree" is only making the activists look bad -- especially if we try and not forget the fact that they are employees and the employers are the power wielders.

If I were them, I'd take my 80-90% success ratio and be happy with it and not cry that it's not 100%.

And finally, the cancel culture is just censorship with a colorful paint job. Whatever happened to USA's love for free speech?

I think people in the US do not value the first amendment enough. In my country, I can go to jail for sharing the wrong post on whatsapp or liking the wrong image on facebook. Freedom of speech is a great leveler of society tilting the balance away from authority. The downside is you need to put up with some chirping. But it's an extremely cheap price to pay for what you get in return.

It also takes a mature society to understand the need for freedom of speech. A society that understands that beliefs are not definitive and learning is a continuous journey. It's only with the free flow of ideas do you allow this to happen. Otherwise you are saying there is nothing left to learn.

Freedom of speech is a right of the people against the government. Not between employees and employers. The level of frank discourse a corporation will tolerate is based on its individual culture and subject to change. This is an oversimplification as there may be other labor laws at play based on the circumstances, but as far as a Constitutional right to free speech, it does not extend to the workplace.

The article is about employees pressuring Netflix into taking down content that is deemed offensive. I was speaking about that.

Seems like they're really just telling their ACTIVIST techies to shut up. Which I have no problem with. I hope someday that modern activists realize that their strategy of cancelling, banning, and harassing anything and anyone they disagree with is counterproductive and makes people support the opposite of their aims.

I'm glad to see this. I don't want to live in the mental straight jacket that these "activists" want to create.

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