Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhayden | Hacker News Reader

Is having a "high performance culture" a subtle way of saying they fire people very quickly for not producing enough results?

View on HN

I've already mentioned that the director of talent acquisition was part of my interview process. She gleefully told me stories of firing people. It was not "We monitor performance and those that do not meet our required level are fired" it was more like "I overheard an engineer say something and fired him on the spot." As well as "we had people doing job X because they were the best at X. Once that project was finished, we fired them."

The last story I mention is especially concerning since, at least in NY, if a company has a single project they need completed, they hire consultants. Consultants are paid very well (much more than even Netflix will pay) as compensation for the risk of being a consultant (i.e., no health insurance, no implicit or explicit agreement that the work will continue for more than a single project).

Yes. It is one of the few companies I've worked at where I saw substandard engineers get fired for being substandard. At most companies, they just shuffle substandard engineers around into a role where they won't cause too much damage.

I assume that also means you see engineers who are not substandard get fired for being substandard?

I don't think it's hard to imagine a great developer performing poorly because either the role or company is a poor fit.

In that situation, they are still "substandard". Ideally there would be some mentoring process that happens to try and get the employee on the right track. And a good recruiting process should minimize the number of employees who are a bad fit for whatever reason so this doesn't happen often. But at the end of the day, it really isn't good for the employee or employer to continue a relationship which isn't fruitful.

Indeed I would agree with this, I just thought the comment I replied to was disingenuous to only mention substandard engineers getting fired, when it really is engineers who are underperforming getting fired.

It just makes it seem as though getting fired implies you are a bad engineer, and not getting fired means you are somehow better than those who got fired.

Essentially it's a culture of elitism. Reminds me of Ivy League. It can work, but it's hard to scale and in my experience it's very hard to avoid a monoculture.

How diverse is the population of engineers at Netflix compared to other public tech companies at a similar stage?

A high-performing culture that emphasizes mentorship is better IMO.

It drives off a reasonable number of high-performing people as well, though obviously not all. One of the problems systems like stack ranking have encountered is that some proportion of people who are really good and not the intended target of the system end up very stressed out by it. Varying reasons: some people underestimate their own skills, some are worried about the system's false-positive rate, some are stressed out by worries about coworkers being fired even if not worried about their own job, etc.

My second hand experience says that they are very prone to firing people.

At first glance this seems good, because I've certainly worked places where dead weight was permitted and there seemed to be no getting rid of them.

The problem is: how do you know which people are good? I believe you can come to pretty accurate conclusions with the right people in place at each level of your hierarchy. However, one wrong person can completely skew your perception of who is doing good work.

I've also never seen a metrics-based review system that was actually designed for measuring humans. It must work really well on the robots that Google tests it on, but people don't map to 1-5 point scales or bell curves as well as you might think.

On a good team of engineers, I think a consensus generally builds when someone is not performing at the necessary level. Either you are constantly fixing their code, or they are slowing down the team because they cannot produce fast enough. Eventually this will bubble up to the manager, and they can then decide to shuffle them around, mentor them, put them on an improvement plan, or let them go.

Perhaps, if you work on a team of peers. I'm not speaking from personal experience in terms of managerial problems, but I have often been the only person doing my sort of work, which makes peer review challenging.

And I don't think that Netflix shuffles, mentors or warns people -- I think they just bounce you out of the company. It's been put to me as "they pay top of market, so they shouldn't have to deal with any personnel issues."

This is my issue with it as well. With perfect knowledge it sounds wonderful, but we all know how political situations can cloud people's judgment in an organizational context.

I mean think of it, have they literally never made a mistake here? Well, what if you're that mistake? Tough shit, here's 50 grand (made up number), go be unemployed now.

Are engineers constantly afraid of losing their jobs? How does this affect their willingness to accept risk?

I think you might be confusing "fires low performers" with "fires people who have occasional misses." There's a world of difference between the two.

I have a few friends who I worked with at a large company, the kind with a large bureaucratic, broken management system that shuffles around incompetence without ever purging it. They went on to work at Netflix and they tell me how much they love it. They no longer have to deal with terminally incompetent divisions. They're top performers; there's no fear. If Netflix were stupid enough to fire them they'd instantly be buried in new opportunity. Of course, Netflix isn't that stupid.

Consider the economic incentives: A strong will-fire policy is a great negative incentive to prevent incompetent hires in the first place. It's not so scary if you're competent and capable -- and that's precisely the kind of people a company will want to hire..

I could see having that perception if you were coming from a large company that never fires anyone.

I can say that for some people, it is absolutely scary, even if you are competent and capable. For example: - You suffer from imposter syndrome. Not that uncommon. - The companies you work for have fired people regularly (read: startups). You notice these people are not always incompetent, but more often bad at politics or unlucky. - You have others to support where the risk of being fired just isn't worth it.

Or, put it another way. Incoming netflix hires already have this expectation, so you'd expect the incompetent to self-select, as you've suggested. Yet netflix is reportably still firing often, which suggests one of the following is happening: 1) people who are so incompetent that they don't know they are incompetent are getting through netflix's hiring process 2) something else is happening and incoming netflix hires should absolutely be worried about being fired.

It's #1. Hiring is hard; everyone makes mistakes. Or sometimes people simply don't perform well in certain roles. Their deck goes into detail on this point IIRC. Try to fix it and if you fail, acknowledge the failure and move on.

Acknowledging that you will need to fire some portion of those you hire is an adult approach to the issue. Likewise from an employee's perspective. It's not a big deal to plan for things possibly not working out.

I searched for the phrase "high performance culture" in the article and couldn't find it. Was it edited after you read it? He does talk about "performance engineering", which basically means "make video streaming work really fast".

Can anyone comment on Netflix's backend architecture?

It is implied by the summary slides, but the phrase can be seen exactly as stated in the title of slide 38 (the last of the slides on this topic, starting on slide 18), "Our High Performance Culture Not Right for Everyone.

Okay thanks. I only read the article, not the slide deck.

Hopefully "high performance culture" isn't a synonym for "sweatshop".

So... what happens if an employee gets sick or has personal issues that lead to less than stellar performance? Termination?

Most people get a decent severance package though, so it's a win-win.

Yup. They're pretty open about that in some presentations I've seen.

See slides 23 and 25. http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/reed2001/culture-1798664

The slides have 10.4 million views! Are there even that many programmers in the US ?

Two problems with your logic: 1) A view is an action, not a person. 2) International viewers can view the URL even if there is much less of a chance it will be relevant to their job search

In addition to what thephyber said, the Netflix culture doc has been very widely read across many industries as exemplary of a high performance culture. Similarly, I'm not in the shoe sales business but I've read the Zappos Core Values[0] as well.

[0] http://about.zappos.com/our-unique-culture/zappos-core-value...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com