Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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Which shows the perfect meaninglessness of the netflix slide, the cognitive dissonance of it. "We fire all B performers regardless of effort".

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.

There's a benefit to making a ridiculous statement like that, though: it makes firing decisions a lot easier. Have you ever worked with that employee--the one that, sigh, they do an OK job, but wow, you have to explain everything to them 700 different ways until you get on the same page. The same mistakes keep popping up over and over. You sit them down and explain what's up. They say they're trying and they're overwhelmed. You believe them and understand that yes, our company has a lot of stuff going on and it can be tough to get your bearings.

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.

I believe there could some some grade inflation going on. That sounds like a "D-" or "F+" situation. You're talking about the far extreme left corner of the population bell curve, whereas the stated policy is all about the far right corner.

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"

Yes, been there done that. Especially - I think - in coding, there are people who put in negative performance by messing up the things theyre assigned to do so others have to come in later and clean up their bugs. Terrible decision to let somebody go but best to cut your losses early.

Couldn't agree more. Every little startup and bigcorp think they need the Ninja Rockstar Astronaut Millionaire Cowboy 1% Hacker, while in fact they're just looking for someone to crank out some standard js or ruby for some social networking web app.

Oh, they might need a minority of "A" level players for a couple of the really tough jobs. Whoever runs netflix routing and NAS gets a total tip of my hat to them and at least some of them must be "A" level. I bet they've got some guys who know a few things about video codecs too. On the other hand, the dude who files expense reports in the correct filing cabinet most of the time, well, lets be polite and claim its hard to say. Describing the entire corporate culture as "A" level is just laughable.

Well to be fair, you have to compare the guy filing expense reports to his peers. He may be the best damn expense report filer in North America.

True as an example its unfair to pick on one dude. BUT... if he's a "A" level hero 1% astronaut then statistics indicate at least 10 of his coworkers are just joe average, maybe 100.

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?

I want to work in [some forms of] a society with 99% unemployment rate, owing to advances in automation.

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 think HR would have a huge headache separating the self-satisfaction people who coincidentally have huge talent from pathological control freaks, and fame seekers, and pathological types who just want to see the world burn, and probably other weirdos. If HR fails then the nuts might wreak havoc on the normal workers and the rest of the world.

I don't think NFLX will make it to that historical era. And appearing somewhat delusional doesn't help their odds.

It is worth noting that that presentation was from a few years ago. According to someone I knew that worked there at the time but doesn't now, the culture went downhill after.

"Welp, I guess that means everybody who currently works here is an A-player, great going everybody! Let's go get some beers for the next couple of years."

>Describing the entire corporate culture as "A" level is just laughable.

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.

Yep its like making all the bug fixes priority 1

<wince> You speak as if we worked together in a previous life.

"Hey, you guys never fix the P2 or P3 bugs!" Remember him?

There's an easy solution to this behavior: If all the bugs are P1, you the developer get to choose what order they go in.

Every startup that plans on being successful must have at least one person on the team that is smart and driven far beyond the median. It's usually at least one of the founders. Then you can hire B people and maybe still succeed (but of course your chances are diminished).

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.)

They then want you to spend your time teaching them to be A-players.

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.

Think about it this way: no matter how low you put the dividing line between A-level and B-level performers, you will always have people that fall below the line.

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".

I think you might be reading a little much into the slide. I think it's obvious that the point is you get no credit for effort expended: you either deliver what is expected of you or you don't.

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.

The things you see as obvious are equally "read into" the slide, just from a different perspective.

It's interesting to hear that "A" means "competent" in the USA. I'm assuming that you aren't just making an off the cuff statement of course, and if you aren't I'd like to share some Australian context.

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

A does not mean "competent" in the US. Grades are curved so that only a few students get A's. It has nothing at all to do with what the student knows either. Hell, I remember some university classes explicitly assigning grades this way: a a measure of you relative to your peers. People generally don't get 4.0's either.

depends on the university. Many universitys do not use a curve for grading. Almost every class i went to on the very first day you get a syllabus that states the total number of available 'points' that you can get for the various parts of the class, and then states how many points you need to acquire the various grades of A B or C.

I had a professional development class in college where A, B and C players were defined. "A player" meant you would shoot-for-the-moon, process be damned. You would be a constant source of disruption. That can work in the short term, but a sustainable business is not build with only "A players". Building products and services, and especially supporting them, takes work that "A players" don't want to do. You need "B players" for day-to-day work. They can range from excellent at their work to just competent. "C players" are the ones who nobody wants, incompetent and/or interpersonal disasters.

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.

Aren't you attacking the wrong thing here? The expectation is performance, not necessarily brilliance. I'm personally tired of the perception that performance is even correlated with hours worked, let alone causative.

The thing is you need I be an A performer for your role. This could also be summarized as avoid the Peter principle.

That's where you run into the bell curve problem where you demand 5% of the area under the curve be hired, yet claim that magically they all came from the 1% right edge. In an industry where everyone claims to do the same thing. That's not going to work mathematically.

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.

Is the distribution of ability levels really a bell curve? I would expect it to be roughly trimodal, with a large group at "generally competent", a small but sizable group at "incompetent and painful to work with", and another small group at "creative innovator that raises the productivity of everyone around them".

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.

And I could go into any company in the world and make an A performer a B just by using their procedures.

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