Netflix's Culture Document (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Netflix's Culture Document (2009)

slideshare.net

79 pointsbcardarella33 comments

Its always interesting to read these broad visionary executive statements in contrast to the 'boots on the ground' nitty gritty such as the reviews of Netflix on Glassdoor:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Netflix-Reviews-E11891.htm

Incongruences are notable.

I tend to agree. This document sounds really great but does not match up with the reality, at least based on the few samples that I am aware of.

Big companies constantly try to portray themselves as the enlightened place to work in order to attract great people.

This is ironic, considering at the start of the presentation they pointed out this exact point.

Worst job I ever had was at Starbucks [1] in the early 1990s. I had my liver cut out and fed to me every single day.

I could not reconcile the positivity put forth by CEO Howard Schultz (and conferred thru HR's training regime) with the miserable treatment we received. A fish is rotten from the head down and all that.

Years later I was in middle management. I couldn't believe how hard it was to change things, get people to behave better, etc. I was all about learning organization, empowerment, democratic decision making. Stuff that really pulled people out of their comfort zones. Any successes I had, mostly thru will power, came at a very high cost.

I then became a lot more forgiving of the Howard Schultzes of the world. He was doing pretty much the most any CEO/President can do: Stay on message, nudge the needle, hope for the best.

I will note that friends in other departments had very different experiences. Some are still there and loving every minute of it.

So I also learned you can have a good job at a bad company, a bad job at a good company, and if you're very lucky, a good job at a good company.

[1] I was the CAD guru for the Store Planning dept, which did all the retail architecture. Performance was measured in "sales weeks", meaning how many weeks all the stores are open per year. As a publicly traded company, the pressure to hit the projected sales weeks was intense.

After reading a couple of reviews on glassdoor I don't see much that contradicts their culture as stated in the slides. They actually seem to be applying their culture better than most company. Can you back your statement with specifics?

They updated this in 2011, by the way:

http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

We talked about this back in 2009: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740524

Yeah the document is a few years old, but it is relevant considering this recent TC article: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/read-what-facebooks-sandber...

I'm very curious how (or if at all) this thinking has been applied to Netflix's hourly employees. Basic customer service, distribution center folks, etc who have more structured jobs to do. The distinction is briefly touched on at the beginning, but I'd love to hear more.

I too am very interested in this. Netflix and Amazon both seem to be amazing companies to work for - if you're in the right class/caste/level of employment. If you're a developer or similar working for corporate, it sounds great. If you're working in the factory-like fulfillment warehouses, it sounds less great. There are few stories I've heard of the companies applying equal policies to both. I've heard of even fewer stories of people moving between the two classes of employees- or of the companies creating opportunities for them to do so.

But moreso, instead of demonizing the companies for any practices on their hourly employees- I'm curious to know if its possible to apply these forward-thinking policies to 'unskilled labor' or hourly workers from an organizational perspective. Or are these types of policies only workable for certain types of jobs? Have there been any large (and recent) experiments done with applying this type of management to hourly employees?

Hourly fulfillment employees do work at marginal cost (linear relationship between revenue and labor) that doesn't have the multiplier effect that corporate office work has. Thus there is a hard ceiling on sustainable wage level. For a lawyer it is high. For packaging $5 books it is not.

I worked at the call center in Oregon. The vibe at the beginning was positive for the most part, but deteriorated into typical call center anarchy. Chronic turnover at all levels(usually a new call center head everyone 3 - 6 months), poor communication(surprise!, new product or marketing launch today!), fear used as primary tactic to motivate(we'll fire you if you don't hit your numbers), benefit and perks stripped away(here's some cake, btw no more discounted bus passes), no upward mobility(become a manager and get fired in a few months), and other stuff.

The document is a joke when compared with the experience of hourly employees.

I read this, and I had a ridiculous number of "Aha!" moments. A few for me:

-Context vs. control: In any place where your expecting creative contribution, it makes literally zero sense to define the contribution by the input. You hire people for their output, not their input.

-Vacation tracking: If you're not tracking how many hours the employees do work, you're already not tracking how many they don't work -- by definition.

-Generous severance: This way your managers don't feel bad firing people that aren't a good fit.

One thing that stands out here is the work-life balance for employees will not be there and Netflix does not think they should care about it. Given that they measure the effectiveness of the employee, one can always be more effective if he/she works longer hours every single day. Same goes with the no vacation tracking policy. That only means there are no vacation. You are getting paid so deal with it :)

Of course startups in the valley are in general not big on work-life balance anyway.

I really like slide #7, in how it discusses that most "corporate values" are just these ambiguous ethereal ideals that don't necessarily mean anything.

> "[Enron's values] were chiseled in marble in the main lobby, but had little to do with the real values of the organization."

I wish other major employers would see this and realize how self-parodying they can be.

>I wish other major employers would see this and realize how self-parodying they can be.

It would be nice if Netflix itself actually realized this.

I've always wondered how these slides applied to their CEO as their stock went from 300 to 66 and, in particular, the comparison to sports teams--although per their slides it's not a perfect comparison.

So when would it ever be time to trade the CEO?

Is every employee given a year or two to turn things around?

Most points in this document are great, except for the argument about high salary in lieu of high bonuses and great benefits.

High bonuses have worked well for Wall St traders, as well as for exec-level employees in all industries. And great benefits clearly work well, as proven by Google.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

High enough salary + great benefits to the point where needs are met are ideal. "Rockstars" may be able to negotiate with companies who want to hire those kinds of people, but if you are hiring only the best people and not the best people for your company then your culture will suffer. I like the way Valve does things. No rockstar culture like WallSt or Hollywood has. Everyone gets even footing and credit. You can earn more if your peers agree that you deserve it - people there are not chasing rewards - they are doing what they love well and being rewarded for it. It seems to work very well for them and other co-op like companies.

This document is a fantastic read, highly recommend everybody to check it out

If you need 129 slides to explain your culture, there is definitely something wrong with it.

It's interesting that while Netflix is quite successful overall it has made some hugely bad decisions (silverlight, qwikster, house of cards release). You wonder if Netflix culture is a contributor.

What about the House of Cards release was a hugely bad decision?

I'll give you qwikster and possibly silverlight (would probably say that one is only correct in hindsight), but I'm curious why you'd place "house of cards" on there as it seems to be getting lots of attention and is looking like one of Netflix's best decisions recently.

The show itself is terrific.

Releasing all the episodes at once, 2 days before the superbowl no less, so far appears to have been a very poor way to spend $100 million.

I think that's yet to be determined. They're taking a non-standard strategy with releasing media, and there's potential that it could just work for them.

Sure, normally TV spreads by people talking about it across a season, but normally there's also the problem of "oh I have to now 'catch up' and the resistance that comes with that. This is a no-pressure situation where you can tell your friends about how awesome a show is, and they can go watch the whole show with no constraints or time pressure or schedule. It embodies the goal of the Netflix service.

Sure they're not getting the standard 'talk about a show for 6 months as episodes come out', but instead they might get a viral chain effect where the season isn't constrained to that time period either. Ultimately their goal is to grow subscribers by hooking them with valuable content they can't get anywhere else.

There are a _lot_ of options between 13 episodes at once and 13 episodes over 13 weeks.

Nobody will know whether spending all that dough on House of Cards will have been a good move or not for many months at the earliest.

I'm going to echo the other commenters here and ask why House of Cards was a hugely bad decision. It's funny because just today I reactivated my Netflix account so I could watch the show.

There is a problem here though. Because I'm sure I'll devour the season in less than a month, I'll be tempted to cancel my account (until Arrested Development is released). If they had spaced the release out like a normal TV show, they could get about 3 months of subscription fees from me.

As to the problem... Let's assume that they're not going to make major policy decisions based on just this one show and instead that it's a ramp up of what started with Lillehammer. We'll see them putting out content more and more frequently.

As they put out more and more 'original' content, it becomes more likely that even if there is a month you're not interested in something new you'll stick around for the next new thing. I've been a subscriber (and cable cord-cutter) for years and even without the original content it's been worth the small fee.

I don't think we'll know for awhile whether the strategy is successful, but I certainly think it's more promising then qwikster (:

They've said already that they plan on putting out at least 5 new Netflix original series a year.

Building an audience takes time. When you have an asset this good, you should try to build an audience. It's simple to come into contact with spoilers which is hugely annoying. There's no social media activity. No water cooler talk. Little anticipation. Etc, etc.

I'd be surprised if House of Cards goes down as a failure.

It's an HBO-quality show that didn't cost Netflix nearly as much as some HBO series.

Netflix bought 2 seasons for HoC for $100M. As HBO shows goes, a single season of Rome ran $100M+, Game of Thrones $50M+, the Boardwalk Empire Pilot $18M.

It's unknown how much of the subscriber fee HBO takes home, but the Internet seems to think it's somewhere in the $8-10 range, not too far off from what Netflix charges.

Yes, someone could sign up for a single month of Netflix, watch the series then cancel, but I'd expect the truly cheap/broke to simply download whatever they want to watch for free anyway.

The show has wide appeal, plenty of hype, reviews are largely positive and if torrent interest is indicative of popularity, the peer counts for HoC are right on par with with other recent premium cable series.

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