Comment by brendangregg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brendangregg | Hacker News Reader

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G'Day, I work at Netflix, and we hire what's been called "fully formed adults". Here's a quote that can explain it better than I (also see the full article):

Source https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1:

"Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults

Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake."

I trust myself, and everyone on my team to act in Netflix's best interest. Throughout my career, I've worked with many professional engineers who could have been trusted to work in the company's best interest. But there have been many times when we've been prevented to do so, due to process. So I've been fascinated at how Netflix is operating, and it's been great working here.

It's important to know that a key role of management is to provide context to employees: what problems exist, what challenges we are facing, what opportunities might exist, what's important to Netflix right now. So that we know what to do, and how to exercise judgement.

I've written about working at Netflix earlier this year on my blog (someone else posted a link).

I think rather than "fully-formed adults," what's described here is mutual compatibility. Which is kind of unfortunate, as weird as that sounds.

We'd all like to work with people who operate with the same understanding, ethos, sense of humor, etc. It makes the day better, right? No office drama, no awkward meetings. But I would contend doing this tends to put you at a genetic disadvantage, and that some types of confrontation are essential for growth. Introducing only like-minded people will produce linear results.

What codified HR rules do is put some workplace guidelines around humanity - that allows a dissonant group of varied people to, you know, be themselves without necessarily worrying about conforming to avoid ruffling feathers.

Perhaps it's more nuanced than that, but it sounds more like "hire people you like" expressed somewhat condescendingly as it is.

Fully-formed adults does not mean like-minded people, which is a different topic (groupthink).

Expressing competing professional views is indeed healthy, and it's part of our culture deck: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

slide 13: "You challenge prevailing assumptions when warranted, and suggest better approaches"

slide 14: "You say what you think even if it is controversial"

I got something very different out of it - it reminds me of Auftragstaktik, or leading by mission. Instead of adding explicit restrictions on employees, give them freedom of action. It takes trust that they're the kind of person that would make the kind of decision you want. In other words, having a shared "adult" background.

My employer treats us as 'fully formed adults' also. It's fantastic, especially after the years I spent in government, where we were all treated like children who required policies on every damned thing to guide us.

An obvious example is about how you use your computer. In my old job, it was highly regulated. Want to install Firefox on your machine? Sorry, that's against IT policy, we only support IE. Your machine is locked down to prevent unauthorised installs, and even if it weren't, you'd be up for a warning for violating the policy.

In my current company, the sysops still limit what they support - for example, they're not willing to support OS X Yosemite users yet, and recommend users stay on Mavericks. But, if you want to upgrade to Yosemite, you can, just don't ask the sysops for help fixing it. And if your broken Yosemite install is impeding your work, well, we trust that you'll resolve it one way or another.

Or another - alcohol. In the government, alcohol at work was banned. A beer at lunch could get you fired. When we had Christmas parties, alcohol was provided, but on a token-per-drink basis. Everyone got two tokens. My current company, the beer fridge is a treasured perk. There are no rules about how much beer you can drink, or when you can drink it. So far, no raging alcoholism has impeded work.

What I really notice is that when you treat people like adults, they respond like adults, and when you treat them like children, they respond like children.

>In my current company, the sysops still limit what they support - for example, they're not willing to support OS X Yosemite users yet, and recommend users stay on Mavericks. But, if you want to upgrade to Yosemite, you can, just don't ask the sysops for help fixing it. And if your broken Yosemite install is impeding your work, well, we trust that you'll resolve it one way or another.

Sorry, but as someone who works in IT security, this sounds like an absolute nightmare. Even if you have a small company comprised only of intelligent developers, those developers do not necessarily understand the latest malware threats or what sorts of software can introduce risks. Wide-open FTP servers and Tomcat servers with default passwords are a major issue. I would actually say developers probably introduce more threats into our environment than any other demographic.

Whitelisting software installs from specific domains (google.com, mozilla.org) is okay, but a carte blanche policy is usually a very bad idea.

But I would contend doing this tends to put you at a genetic disadvantage, and that some types of confrontation are essential for growth.

Fully formed adults have confrontations all the time. The difference is that the result of the confrontation is not threats, backstabbing or whining later. We've all worked with the engineer who thinks they are the smartest thing around and acts like a 2 year old every time they are challenged. That's the person I assume Netflix says they will not tolerate, and I agree with them.

I have heated discussions with co-workers all the time and at the end of the day we are all still respectful of each other and our ability to get the job done.

> Fully formed adults have confrontations all the time.

Sure. But without some HR codifications the line between "fully-formed" and "childish jerk nymph" becomes wholly subjective, and controlled by the majority. The end result is an organic uniformity.

Nobody gets along all the time. But how you define "fully-formed adult" can vary from one person to the next. Essentially you're defining "good and bad" or "right or wrong" by a feeling. I can understand the appeal of that, but it would worry me quite a bit as even a loose policy for behavior and interaction.

Presumably, if one person called another a "childish jerk nymph", then you have at least one person to fire (the person resorting to name-calling), if not two (the person maybe deserving the label) or more (the people taking sides rather than trying to dissolve the dispute.)

"Fully-formed adults" are people who I would expect to know how to mediate themselves. If people aren't able to successfully mediate their own disputes, then your failure in hiring came long before your latest addition.

Examples of people likely to be fully-formed adults: a mother with multiple children. A schoolteacher. A military sergeant. A nurse. A bartender. In general, people who have been exposed to enough pointless complaining and dispute that the object-level arguments don't matter to them any more, relative to the issue of figuring out what will allow everyone to continue working together optimally.

Note how most of those jobs are service jobs. People with natural talents rarely have to grow up in this way, and the people with the most natural talent are frequently the least grown-up (rock stars, career academics, startup founders). You only see this "fully-formed adult" trait re-emerge at the highest levels of accomplishment: astronauts are frequently fully-formed adults, for example.

Even with codifications it is still subjective. The obvious things of no physical abuse, etc... are obvious. How do you codify don't be an asshole? In fact, simply saying act like a grown adult is probably the most clear I've ever seen an HR guideline.

> What codified HR rules do is put some workplace guidelines around humanity - that allows a dissonant group of varied people to, you know, be themselves without necessarily worrying about conforming to avoid ruffling feathers.

I hate to be the one who says this, but that's not what those guidelines do. They don't allow varied people to be themselves. They make everyone be a self-similar group of other people. Other people who are not themselves.

Codified rules also mean that we can figure out who is responsible, rather than this where the management can't be held accountable, as there is nothing to hold them accountable to. It's all on you.

Even when we account for HR being an organ doing the bidding for the parent org.

While this isn't nearly as bad as companies like Valve which go around claiming not even to have any managers, let alone any policies, it still means you're going to run into this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessnes...

Having worked in similar environments with similar polities before, those sorts of policies tend to mean, "whoever has the most shininess in an argument" is the person who is considered to take the best policy, and frankly? innovation becomes stifled as the most political adult wins or stalls out the innovator who thinks further than others. Because in general, the members of the team are all adults, and we all understand the company, and we are all competent - so it comes down to who has the most appeal in the rhetorical wars. I find it appalling - extroverts and manipulation tends to win.

IOW, I'd rather work for a structured hierarchical firm, where politicians brown nose managers and the managers firewall these people from the rest of the team.

edit: Hum, your name seemed familiar. I attended your LISA talk. You're brilliant and well known (witty to boot, as I recall. :) ). You, sir, will be listened to by default, so you will tend not to encounter the failure modes I described above. But do think about them, okay? Tyranny of Structurelessness really is a great read.

Yes, in prior jobs I've seen the extraverts and manipulators win, by use of their charisma over technical facts. Most engineers aren't like that, but a few are, and we try not to hire them.

It helps to have technical management, who are able to understand all sides of a technical argument, regardless of how those sides were presented. It also helps to have staff who all can communicate effectively, at least at some basic level.

Tyranny of Structurelessness is great. But I'd like to see a more focused analysis of tech culture and its failings.

You realize your company has an HR policy that is illegal in most civilized countries, because it is considered unethical for an employer to treat employees that way?

The issue here is that some (many) people need more guidance, because it's not their company, and they have no idea what it considers "the right thing". Should you hire such people, you can't just dump them like thrash because you can't be bothered to manage them properly.

Netflix is going to get into a truckload of legal issues if it tries to scale this practice internationally in countries with decent employee protection laws, which is most of the Western world outside the US.

Netflix sounds to me like a Randian cult.

I'd be curious where this is illegal in.

I don't think they are saying "we have zero policies whatsoever", but exaggerating the level of trust. For instance I am sure that new parents are given a fixed amount of paid leave.

I don't think it is illegal anywhere. It might be illegal for Netflix to fire people over "violations" of such a "policy" -- but I don't really think that'll be an issue either. It's not a policy that lends itself to firing people because some manager didn't like them (which, incidentally is illegal many places anyway). But if someone were to actually "work against the company's best interested" repeatedly, that'd typically be a firing offence anyway. That'd be stuff like not actually doing work, stealing, sabotaging and/or leaking company secrets etc.

I think it sounds great to not have a lot of pretend-policy that does no good other than pretend to cover the ass of inept management.

Sounds exactly like Github's policy that got them in trouble. Hopefully it works out better for you but somehow I doubt it.

I'm not sure what Github's stated policy was, but it's clear from Julie Ann Horvath's description of how things operated there that quite a few of her co-workers were far from being fully-formed adults.

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