31–40 of 158 posts
> “If it is a flop, we will have overpaid for one series,” he told Hastings. “But if it succeeds, we will have changed the brand.” Traditional big companies are structurally unable to think this way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instinctively and ideologically I mostly oppose the idea of this lack of loyalty toward employees. At the same time, for some reason it bothers me less the way it is presented to work within Netflix. I'm not sure why, though. Maybe it's to do with the fact that there are plenty of jobs in tech right now and Netflix apparently pays very well, enough for a future employee to accept that disadvantage. Partly it's also b…
"I often thought they and the team would be much better off if they found work somewhere else where either they'd feel challenged to develop themselves further, or where their current skills were good enough." This echoes one of the chapters in Fire Someone Today, a book with a seemingly heartless title, written by the CEO of a Bible software company. They had an underperforming employee that everyone liked & no-one…
I'm generally in favor of firing underperforming employees, but this punchline feels uncomfortably close to ex post facto justification.
Lots and lots and lots of people get fired and don't flourish, in fact they drop like a brick and hit rock bottom. While everything turned out for the best this time, I worry about the lesson being imparted here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instinctively and ideologically I mostly oppose the idea of this lack of loyalty toward employees. At the same time, for some reason it bothers me less the way it is presented to work within Netflix. I'm not sure why, though. Maybe it's to do with the fact that there are plenty of jobs in tech right now and Netflix apparently pays very well, enough for a future employee to accept that disadvantage. Partly it's also b…
The idea that there is an ideal place for everyone in capitalism and be able to pay for all the costs of day to day life is some kind of libertarian hacker news delusion.
Netflix has several concerns up ahead which might make it difficult to survive operating at a constant loss. One is that Hulu and Amazon are encroaching on its markets, and competition tends to drive down profits. Another is that they don't own the vast majority of their content, which puts them at the mercy of the pricing of their suppliers -- and being downstream from a monopoly can also drive down profits. Even worse, their suppliers still have a revenue model based on this old advertising-and-cable-packages system, which Netflix is destroying by transforming the landscape: which is a disincentive to working with them; a channel which can broadcast a breakout-popular new TV show might keep that in-house to try to keep the channel alive, rather than licensing the show to Netflix for an alternative revenue stream. At the very least this will probably keep Netflix content about a season behind whatever's on TV.
Finally, Netflix is finding itself raising its own prices, which may lead to a flurry of cancellations from people who maintain inactive subscriptions precisely because they're pretty cheap. On the flip-side, it's not clear that they can sustain continued growth in their subscriber base; maybe at this point almost everybody who wants Netflix's service is already signed up. If those numbers don't keep up, then problems arise that are not too different from the problems with "borrowing from the future" in Ponzi schemes (albeit with a solid net positive revenue, which makes it morally very different -- in Ponzi schemes this is 0 and it is being advertised as a huge number, which is a huge lie -- no similar problem here). A similar "collapse" could happen, where the growth tapers, thereby skepticism spikes, thereby costs to borrow go high, and everything rapidly turns around from apparent success to apparent failure.
There may also be problems with the corporate culture, but while most of the article is devoted to the corporate culture, no clear message is given; it is apparently a somewhat ruthless place which is probably somewhat sad but is also sold as really exciting, because the ruthlessness only keeps the people who really care about what they're doing, which apparently creates good morale. There's a lot of other details like that which don't really amount to anything significant regarding what this "new world" is that Netflix has created, or whether it will survive the above growth pains.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I often thought they and the team would be much better off if they found work somewhere else where either they'd feel challenged to develop themselves further, or where their current skills were good enough." This echoes one of the chapters in Fire Someone Today, a book with a seemingly heartless title, written by the CEO of a Bible software company. They had an underperforming employee that everyone liked & no-one…
> "The punch line: the employee flourished as soon as he was fired - his dream had been to join the ministry, but he'd worried about quitting a stable job to do so." I'm generally in favor of firing underperforming employees, but this punchline feels uncomfortably close to ex post facto justification. Lots and lots and lots of people get fired and don't flourish, in fact they drop like a brick and hit rock bottom. Wh…
Sure, but speaking from the perspective of the company and everyone else in it, it's better if those low-performers hit rock bottom outside the company, rather than hit rock bottom while employed and bring the rest of the company down.
Spoiler: It's a long read! > Does this still holds? Is there any other organization in dissimilar industry where this works? McCord also convinced Hastings that he should ask himself a few times a year whether he would hire the same person in the same job if it opened up that day. If the answer was no, Netflix would write a larger check and let the employee go. “If you are going to insist on high performance,” McCord…
Netflix gets a lot of flack for their approach here, but at least they are honest about it and try to compensate by paying employees very well. The truth is there are many companies that are just as ruthless about firing employees they view as underperforming but try to hide it with layoffs and don't compensate employees nearly as well. If you take a job with Netflix at least you know what you are getting into.
Spoiler: It's a long read! > Does this still holds? Is there any other organization in dissimilar industry where this works? McCord also convinced Hastings that he should ask himself a few times a year whether he would hire the same person in the same job if it opened up that day. If the answer was no, Netflix would write a larger check and let the employee go. “If you are going to insist on high performance,” McCord…
> You’ll have to fire some really nice, hard-working people. But you have to do it with dignity. I wonder if this is part of the reason why there are not too many Netflix-like high achieving companies in Europe -- firing people is not possible. Even totally sucking at your job isn't acceptable reason for employment contract termination, that'd be just a reason for further training. You'll have to go through different…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they can't, they have a requirement to be at work and to perform their assigned duties. If they suck at their duties, well, employer should provide training I suppose. But they have to work of course, no question about that -- this was just about firing not being possible "at will" as it is often the case in the US. Also, stuff like coming to work drunk is a valid reason for immediate firing.
Is it legal to negotiate terms for them to leave voluntarily?
Now, when I learned that advice I was working for virginia state govt, where I didn't have technically competent and aware management like I do now in Seattle tech companies, but there is still an important kernel in the message: We tend to judge our performance relative to the difficulty of the tasks in front of us. Often, our performance will be judged my management using different criteria. It's a good idea to be aware of how you look from the outside.
...which is why I'd not want to work in the Netflix system. It's not whether I'm a good performer, it's whether THEY THINK I'm a good performer. Ideally these are related, and outside of a Netflix-like environment I might have confidence that my manager would let me know in advance of action if there was a discrepancy. While I'm sure Netflix would claim the same, I doubt McCord was expecting the axe to fall...