Think about that. Pretend you don't know what netflix does. I hope nuclear reactors are run by people like that. Oh that sounds like a good slogan for an open heart surgeon. Secret service agents? No, you say? Hmm how about space shuttle tile installation specialist? I've got it, sounds like people who guide tin cans full of thousands of gallons of flammable fuel and hundreds of vulnerable human beings, miles above the earth at just under the speed of sound in incredibly crowded skies and they almost never make a mistake. Umm are they the people we trust our youth to, to mold and train their minds, or at the other end, the people we trust to care for our elders? Nope none of the above... dude, they rent videos. No.... you're kidding me! Really? Thats all?
Every corporate mythology has some kind of self congratulatory mythos about being the elite of the elite, perfection on earth. Lots of kool-aid get drunk at these proclamations. It sounds absolutely hilarious to realistic outsiders not drunk on the kool-aid.
I know this is HN where only binary thinking is allowed therefore making fun of them for not being the 1% elite means I'm implying they must be the bottom 1%. Nope. Not at all. They're probably good average people doing good average things, just like every other average company out there. Key word being average. Dude... they rent videos... I hope to god for the survival of our species that the intellectual elite of our civilization are doing something slightly more important. And I think they are.
See, here's the problem. You can get one, maybe two geniuses to found a company. Maybe even a couple peppering the whole company... But wikipedia claims they have over 2000 employees.
Can you have an organization full of geniuses? Sure, although its rare. Think of the institute for advanced studies in its glory days. Or Bell Labs in the good old days. If you twist definitions and turn the Manhattan Project into one org and only count the top physicists and not the rank and file, sure. A two thousand person video rental company, um, no, I don't think so.
Now the Kool-Aid drinkers could proclaim that they only hire personnel with Nobel Prizes in Physics. But 2000+ prizes have not been issued yet, and quite a few of those people are dead or otherwise unavailable, most (all?) of the early 20th century winners for example. Even worse the whole industry also claims in public they also only hire Nobel Laureates.
I guarantee that NFLX does not fire all B and below performers because there is not enough talent to pull it off industry wide especially with everyone else having the same ridiculous demand.
Frankly that's good. Who wants to work in an industry where 99% of the graduates are permanently unemployed and only 1% ever get to work? Or even worse, a society with 99% unemployment rate?
It may be realistic in such a society to expect that the 1% still 'working' are going to be very good at their jobs, and doing it primarily for self-satisfaction.... such as Nobel Laureates. I suspect that people who aren't really good at their job don't want to do the job at all. They want the income, but probably not the job itself.
"Work if you want to eat" produces organizations rife with mediocrity.
With a sustainable population, mincome and a (continued) increase in automation, its not hard to imagine a world where everyone working wants to be there, and thus most of the people working are indeed A-players.
99% unemployment rate could be pretty good for both workers and non-workers.
I don't think NFLX will make it to that historical era. And appearing somewhat delusional doesn't help their odds.
And it is an excellent means to cover up bad management. When expectations are unrealistic, then everyone is probably failing. It just boils down to office politics about who avoids blame.
It is a nice idea to always be A-level or work towards there -- that requires a significant investment in recruiting and training that few companies are actually interested in. But a company that cannot make good use of B-level work in most places surely has incompetent management.
"Hey, you guys never fix the P2 or P3 bugs!" Remember him?
Most frequently, I startups seeking out these one-percenters due to their own massive organizational ignorance - which, incidentally, makes getting one or more people with extreme clue onto the team a requisite for any success whatsoever, if only insofar as they will keep the ship from hitting an obvious iceberg.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that when dumb startups say they need this, they are frequently so dumb as to be right. (That person (often me) will be miserable there, though.)
10-15 years ago the "smart and driven" person was called a "visionary" in the dotcom world. Check Wired backissues, they probably bought out the entire late-90s inventory of the word.
So, set your line appropriately, but fire people below the line, no matter how "hard" they work / how much time they spend "ass-in-chair".
Other ways to handle it other than massive underemployment are grade inflation and redefining an "A" into a participation trophy or redefine "A" performance as brown nosing the boss or whatever. Or redefine earning a "A" as we don't plan to fire you this year... at least at this time.
There is a lesson to this situation for ALL startups. A genius can found a company. Maybe a couple geniuses can found a company. Maybe the first hire, or some of the first hires can be genius level. HOWEVER... Somewhere on the path to being a real, scaled, grown up company, you're going to start to hire from the general population. It doesn't matter if you admit it or not. As a management issue it probably helps to be aware of it rather than delusional about it, aside from the obvious "people laughing at you" thing. You can push against reality for awhile if you're the richest search company that ever existed, or if you can get the .gov to pay any sum you ask for, or the most prestigious .edu or thinktank in the world. But almost all startups are not like that, and that's another "better to understand reality than live in a delusion" scenario.
I'd also expect that everybody wants to think of themselves as being in the last group, and so the companies all advertise for that. But realistically, very few people actually want to hire creative innovators and even fewer still will listen to them once they do, so companies are really gunning for that middle group. It's quite possible to parcel out that middle group into 5% chunks.
Months pass, and the employee is skating slightly below to just above the point of causing you more work. You've corrected some of the recurring mistakes they made when they first started, but now new ones are coming up. You make notes of the employee's progress and give honest feedback. They continue to improve. Slowly. Improving just enough so that HR has strong reservations about starting the termination process. You're stuck with a dud employee that, yeah, they're not absolutely horrible, but you know that you'd be much better off with an employee that could at least get things right the second time instead of the 20th.
"You shouldn't have hired them," I hear you say. It's not always the case that you hire them. I've "inherited" bad employees from predecessors in the past and have even had my boss transfer employees into my department that were doing even worse in other departments.
So yeah, if our company had any kind of policy like the one at Netflix, this entire process wouldn't even be a conversation. I just send the mediocre employee off riding into the sunset and hire someone that's a better fit with none of the fuss and BS.
The B guy getting fired scenario would sound a lot like "he came in late once last quarter, he was responsible for one software bug (the A level guys are perfect of course), he didn't get awarded any honorary doctorates in CS last year unlike some of the A level guys (hey, Linus has a few), he claims to be publishing a textbook on the language we use but he's behind schedule, and he only taught his coworkers one new programming paradigm last year"
Also, I'm not sure what hellish grading system you're used to where "A" means "1% elite". In most contexts, it means "competent": A student at most educational institutions in the US can expect an A if they grasped the class material and didn't flub the tests and assignments.
There are places where consistent, well intentioned sub-competence is sufficient, a high-availability, technically complicated, ultra high volume paid service running on retail margins is not one of them.
Most people get a "C" or passing grade only in Secondary and Tertiary education. As an Aussie trying to impress American employers (in the past) with my credentials, this goes some way to explaining why they list "GPA 4.0" as required. I know practically nobody with a 4.0 GPA in Sydney.
Here is some more reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_Australia
The Netflix stance of only hiring "A" people is obviously does not work with this definition. If you get 2000 "A players" together for more than a short time, your organization will fall apart. Everyone would try to get to the top and make the company follow their vision. If they can't, they will move on sooner than later.
Your "A-game" is your best, not the best in the world. Your "B-game", by extension, is something less. The way I read it, is that as long as you're doing the best work you can, it doesn't matter when you work. If you're doing less than your best work, well, you should stop.
Hmm, that doesn't jibe with the idea of not rewarding mere effort, which is how I read it as well; we reward results, and "punish" lack of results. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; applicants know what they are getting into and can self select out if they don't feel up to it.