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Comment by fallentimes | Hacker News Reader

Care to share any stories?

Sure. Here's some banal stuff. If you have anything in particular you'd like to know, ask.

Good - A few days after I joined I decided I wanted a much bigger monitor and several gigs more ram. After hemming and hawing for a day trying to figure out how to justify it to my manager, I just asked. My manager said there was no reason to ask him, just file a ticket. No approval needed. This is true for anything I need (hardware, software, cell phone...).

Bad - Within my first week, I noticed three "good bye" emails, none of which were voluntary.

Great - I have free access to one of the largest sets of voluntary enjoyment decision data and lots of big machines. ML paradise.

Great - All of my coworkers are amazing. It's really satisfying to not be the smartest guy in the room.

How long does it usually take to determine whether a person is only an "adequate" performer and given a generous severance package?

My guess would be a few months but I don't have any hard evidence on hand. Based on my limited experience, I wouldn't put the duration at more than a year.

No one I've worked with has ever been sent packing, but to the best of my understanding it's generally not a surprise and people are given chances.

"Bad - Within my first week, I noticed three "good bye" emails, none of which were voluntary.

Great - All of my coworkers are amazing. It's really satisfying to not be the smartest guy in the room."

You might want to reconsider the "bad" label on your first line item, because I suspect it's strongly correlated with the "great" label on your second one.

It's certainly not a bad (for me) now, but at the time I considered it a bad because I wasn't used to seeing three people get fired in two days.

Another opinion: the slide deck portrays a rather aggressive meritocracy, probably the most hardcore I've seen as a veteran of multiple startups. If you're planning a Mars mission, commercializing cold fusion, reinventing retailing, or trying to dethrone Microsoft, that's one thing, but jeezly crow, why burn yourself out in a company whose mission statement is, "Mail out whatever DVDs people ask for, without taking too long or screwing up too often"?

(This is a bit of a troll, because I do appreciate the drive to do the very best you can at whatever task you've set yourself. And the deck certainly reflects well on the company's ethics and overall cluefulness. It just strikes me as overkill -- competing with dumbass companies like Blockbuster shouldn't be that hard, should it?)

I think you're overlooking the online rentals market. Netflix's original business will die (or be killed) off at some point. They already have a strong presence in the online movie rentals market.

It should also be pointed out that they do value and tackle hard problems. The Netflix prize is the most public example of this. One million dollars for a 10% improvement in movie recommendations. The battle has been fought and won in the hundredths of percentages points. http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard

edit: added more context to what I meant by the "online market"

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