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Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

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Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#21

Post by PhantomGremlin »

biffa wrote: post #6

The slideshow referred to in the podcast: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

Definitely worth flipping thru. I found stuff I agreed with, stuff I disagreed with. Much to think about. One of my favorites:

   Great workplace is not espresso, lush benefits,
   sushi lunches, grand parties, or nice offices
And the not-so-subtle dig against stack ranking:

   We avoid "top 30%" and "bottom 10%"
   rankings amongst employees

   We want employees to help each other,
   and they do

Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#22

Post by brianmcconnell »

Oooh, how I love it when out of shape tech industry people use professional sports metaphors without understanding the difference between 1) a professional sports tournament system and 2) employment in a growing industry.

In 1) there is an artificially limited number of slots (and money) in the "big leagues" that little leaguers are clamoring for. In 2) there is generally a shortage of people relative to the available jobs.

Applying the professional sports metaphor to category 2 merely demonstrates that as a manager you are a f---t--d, which is probably why they have ridiculously bad turnover (a HQ location that might as well be in Siberia being another).

Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#23

Post by zo1 »

cbd1984 wrote: post #20
rifung wrote: post #11

I actually found this.. disturbing. I get that sometimes you have to fire people because you are running out of money. What I can't agree with is that you can just fire people and it's fine because people's careers are long and this is just another spot in their "journey". Sure, maybe a person will work at many companies over their life. On the other hand, people work to make a living, sometimes for an entire family,…

This is why I think improved social safety nets (not necessarily any specific scheme such as mincome or negative income tax or similar, just guarantees that nobody lives worse than some minimum) will actually save capitalism: It will free businesses from the moral quandaries expressed in your post, and enable them to make pure business decisions without having to consider the well-being of anyone involved. The altern…

The instability you mention resolves itself in a purely "capitalist" system. For example, I currently pay X amount of money every month, privately to an insurance company.

They, in turn, insure me against the risk of losing my job, becoming disabled and unable to work and a bunch of other things. They calculate the amount required based on how much I earn, and probably my age/risk profile. No need for a social safety net to protect me from losing my job there.

Sure, a safety net is all nice and dandy. And you could possibly argue that it'll benefit those that can't pay for it like I can, but I'd respond to that in saying that their insurance amount would be a whole lot less. Classic sliding scale. But to be fair, if I was that poor, I'd put more value into having such a fall-back as I'd probably be unskilled labor at that point.

On a side note, when I hear a lot of arguments against an "emergent behavior" system like relatively pure capitalism, I am reminded of the whole "evolution vs intelligent-design" debate. I guess, for me, emergent and self-correcting systems are inherently elegant just by themselves. There is no need for a "creator" (government in this case) to guide the lowly agents to do whats best for themselves within their local constraints.

Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#24

Post by enraged_camel »

codeonfire wrote: post #15

One thing where the Netflix system breaks down is for some reason managers are never found to be useless or relevant. It becomes a small number of individual contributors trying to support a larger and larger management base. The real reason is political. The people at the top fear people rising through the ranks so they execute people like a dictatorship. At my previous job everyone with more than 15 years of experi…

>>The real reason is political. The people at the top fear people rising through the ranks so they execute people like a dictatorship. At my previous job everyone with more than 15 years of experience was pushed out and people with no experience at all were brought in.

Actually, the real reason is usually financial. People with 15 years of experience tend to cost a lot more than new hires fresh out of college.

Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#25

Post by lmm »

timr wrote: post #16
psykotic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree if we weren't talking about a company renowned for having among the highest base salaries in the business. Engineers who go to Netflix have a lot of other options and should know what culture they're joining.

I knew that Netflix paid well, but I didn't know that they operated like this. After hearing the story about laying off the tech team to move to AWS...well, let's just say that the salaries I've heard wouldn't be enough. They recruit engineers like crazy, but they still couldn't find a use for their existing, high-performing team? That seems insane. The whole time I was listening to this, I was thinking: if a company…

Absolutely, ask for the rate you'd demand as a contractor. Netflix might actually be willing to pay it.

Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#26

Post by enraged_camel »

UK-AL wrote: post #19
jeo1234 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you work for a company with an HR attitude like Netflix, you don't go in expecting to stay there for the next 15 years. It gives you as an employee the chance to make a pretty good living and more importantly sharpen your skills so that when you're finished there it's easy to move on. And if then you want to have a nice stable job which you can expect to stay in for the next decade, you can. Investment banking a…

Having worked with a lot of consultants from the big consultantancy companies I would not say they're good at they're job. It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better than in house people.

>>It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better than in house people.

Sorry, but this is a very ignorant thing to say. The fact of the matter is that there's different types of consulting at different points along the problem-complexity spectrum.

At the low end, a consultant is no different than a contractor, and the point is not to hire those who are better than in-house people, but more efficient. For example, your in-house IT guy may have the skills to configure Kerberos, but maybe you'd rather have him work on a more important project (or maybe he is busy fighting fires, as helpdesk people usually are, and doesn't have the time), so you hire an outside contractor to do it, and he or she can get it done a lot faster (and with fewer errors) because they have done it many times before.

At the high end (which you don't sound like you have experience with), consultants are highly specialized and they are hired to solve very difficult technical problems that are of great importance to the firm. These problems tend to be well outside the competency of in-house people. For example, imagine a scenario where the firm is the target of a lawsuit and they need to perform e-discovery to gather each and every business record pertaining to the subject matter from a large variety of sources and office locations across the country. There are consulting companies that specialize in this type of complex service, and they charge very high fees for that reason.

So yeah, it's not "essentially salesman and confidence skills". It may look like that from the outside, but it just isn't.

Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#27

Post by UK-AL »

enraged_camel wrote: post #26
UK-AL wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked with a lot of consultants from the big consultantancy companies I would not say they're good at they're job. It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better than in house people.

>>It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better than in house people. Sorry, but this is a very ignorant thing to say. The fact of the matter is that there's different types of consulting at different points along the problem-complexity spectrum. At the low end, a consultant is no different than a contractor, and the point is not to hire those who are better than in-house people, but mo…

I know people who work with e-discorvery, digital forensics from the consultancy departments of big 4 accountants(PWC, kpmg etc) etc

They essentially run dedicated tools against computers and report and summarize?

The real technical skills are the people who wrote those tools.

I was thinking of applying but the recruitment process says they look for social skills, and not hard core techies. That put me off.

I.e they rather get history graduates , with social skills and teach them how to use the tools than say super skilled computer science graduate without salesmanship skills.

That says to me that technical skills arnt that important, its the sales part that is is important.

I know people that did apply, and after talking to them, its mostly writing SQL scripts, bash/powershell scripts, running dedicated forensics tools I.e not 'really' hard technical skills

Most of the value added for them comes from proposals, reports(templates) and presenting it.

Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#28

Post by 6d0debc071 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #24
codeonfire wrote: post #15

One thing where the Netflix system breaks down is for some reason managers are never found to be useless or relevant. It becomes a small number of individual contributors trying to support a larger and larger management base. The real reason is political. The people at the top fear people rising through the ranks so they execute people like a dictatorship. At my previous job everyone with more than 15 years of experi…

>>The real reason is political. The people at the top fear people rising through the ranks so they execute people like a dictatorship. At my previous job everyone with more than 15 years of experience was pushed out and people with no experience at all were brought in. Actually, the real reason is usually financial. People with 15 years of experience tend to cost a lot more than new hires fresh out of college.

Assuming that both groups are competent for their level of experience: If you can't make more profit out of someone with 15 years experience than you can out of someone who is fresh out of college, then I really question how good you are at running a team. Sure, they're more expensive, but they can get a lot more done a lot faster.

Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#29

Post by seanmcdirmid »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #28
enraged_camel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The real reason is political. The people at the top fear people rising through the ranks so they execute people like a dictatorship. At my previous job everyone with more than 15 years of experience was pushed out and people with no experience at all were brought in. Actually, the real reason is usually financial. People with 15 years of experience tend to cost a lot more than new hires fresh out of college.

Assuming that both groups are competent for their level of experience: If you can't make more profit out of someone with 15 years experience than you can out of someone who is fresh out of college, then I really question how good you are at running a team. Sure, they're more expensive, but they can get a lot more done a lot faster.

Many companies are inefficient at evaluating people right. Someone could be very experienced, but in very wrong ways (e.g. playing politics); not all, or maybe even most, ICs aspire to get better and better at their craft over time. There is plenty of dead weight.

So in a sense you are right; it's just management is not very sure which experienced persons are worth it or not. Whereas that new grad is all potential: it's an opportunity to start over again and do it right this time (but they never do of course....).

Re: Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]

#30

Post by SixSigma »

coldtea wrote: post #14
greggman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

she was cut from the company herself by the very same rules

Sounds like this karma thing.

Karma would also mean everyone she cut previously had also had it coming.

Karma is a "blame the victim for their own problems" system of oppression.

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