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Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

nytimes.com

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Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#91

Post by zjaffee »

beamatronic wrote: post #79
quantumhobbit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Should you not expect to have a good work-life balance while at Netflix?

The type of person who will thrive at Netflix doesn't see an issue here. Either they have no issues whatsoever about having work always on their mind, or they are just simply so good at their jobs that they can still be one of the best engineers around only working 40 hours a week.

The problem with this whole thing is that people view working at a company of this caliber as some type of competition, they want to be the one working at the company with the best and brightest so others see them as the best and brightest.

The truth is that if you aren't really up there, you won't thrive in such an environment, and the vast majority of people will both advance the most, and be happiest working at a place where they are able to be the big fish.

Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#92

Post by enraged_camel »

outworlder wrote: post #82
enraged_camel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Lots and lots and lots of people get fired and don't flourish, in fact they drop like a brick and hit rock bottom. 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.

Usually, unless the company is really small, they won't drag it down. Unless they are CEOs, which are seldom fired. And get golden parachutes even when they do get fired.

I disagree. Low-performers can make mistakes and cause a lot of damage, which then has to be cleaned up by someone. They are also bad for morale all around, especially if you have a team of high-performers.

Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#93

Post by dragonwriter »

rpgmaker wrote: post #64
ergothus wrote: post #40

One of the best professional pieces of advice I've ever read said something like "Think you're indispensable? Do they know that?". It made me aware that often the people making the hiring/firing decisions aren't actually aware of my day-to-day. Rather, they know only the summary info. Those kudos to fellow employees and in-house "awards" that I'd been ignoring? Those are documentation that someone is worthwhile, and…

> While I'm sure Netflix would claim the same, I doubt McCord was expecting the axe to fall... Exactly. How likely is Hastings to adopt that standard if he knew that it would apply to him too?

> How likely is Hastings to adopt that standard if he knew that it would apply to him too?

He probably knows it applies to him whether or not he adopts it for people below him: CEOs usually have contracts that not only state that a "if you decide you don't want me, you write me a big check to go away" policy applies to them, but actually spell out in fairly precise terms how big of a check that is.

Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#94

Post by dismal2 »

kmonsen wrote: post #56
dismal2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me it seems like hacker news loves universal basic income, because they understand this might not be true today and even less likely to be true in the future.

I just think ubi is a panacea when we are really headed towards a cyberpunk dystopia were powerful corporations hold all the cards and the workers are reduced to a form of neo feudalism

Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#95

Post by sevensor »

ergothus wrote: post #40

One of the best professional pieces of advice I've ever read said something like "Think you're indispensable? Do they know that?". It made me aware that often the people making the hiring/firing decisions aren't actually aware of my day-to-day. Rather, they know only the summary info. Those kudos to fellow employees and in-house "awards" that I'd been ignoring? Those are documentation that someone is worthwhile, and…

> Think you're indispensable? Do they know that?

Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization -- if that person gets hit by a bus, or walks off the job, or is on vacation during a crisis, we're all in trouble. And if an employee becomes indispensable on purpose, that person is a problem and should be let go before the situation gets worse. Where I used to work, people who thought they were indispensable were the first to go when we had layoffs.

All this is to say that if you ever find yourself thinking, "this place would fall apart without me," you have a big problem.

Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#96

Post by ergothus »

sevensor wrote: post #95
ergothus wrote: post #40

One of the best professional pieces of advice I've ever read said something like "Think you're indispensable? Do they know that?". It made me aware that often the people making the hiring/firing decisions aren't actually aware of my day-to-day. Rather, they know only the summary info. Those kudos to fellow employees and in-house "awards" that I'd been ignoring? Those are documentation that someone is worthwhile, and…

> Think you're indispensable? Do they know that? Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization -- if that person gets hit by a bus, or walks off the job, or is on vacation during a crisis, we're all in trouble. And if an employee becomes indispensable on purpose, that person is a problem and should be let go before the situation gets worse. Where I used t…

1) I think you're underestimating the number of shops that ARE "in trouble". There's a lot more tech-need in the world than tech-capable people right now, and with the places that have resources and organization gobbling up people, a lot of smaller shops (small startups, govt shops, small non-startup businesses) DO have indispensable people. And often those people will want to stay there. As for becoming indispensable on purpose...I'm sure some people do this, but most don't. This leads me to #2 below.

2) ...All of which is irrelevant since "indispensable" was mild hyperbole for "important/beneficial/worth keeping" in this discussion. I suppose I'll take the hit in the name of accuracy.

Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#97

Post by CamperBob2 »

sevensor wrote: post #95
ergothus wrote: post #40

One of the best professional pieces of advice I've ever read said something like "Think you're indispensable? Do they know that?". It made me aware that often the people making the hiring/firing decisions aren't actually aware of my day-to-day. Rather, they know only the summary info. Those kudos to fellow employees and in-house "awards" that I'd been ignoring? Those are documentation that someone is worthwhile, and…

> Think you're indispensable? Do they know that? Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization -- if that person gets hit by a bus, or walks off the job, or is on vacation during a crisis, we're all in trouble. And if an employee becomes indispensable on purpose, that person is a problem and should be let go before the situation gets worse. Where I used t…

Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization -- if that person gets hit by a bus, or walks off the job, or is on vacation during a crisis, we're all in trouble.

Easy to say in theory, but in reality, you can't build a great organization that's exclusively composed of average performers. There will always be people who contribute far more than the rest, whether management appreciates them or not. (And in my experience, management is usually very well aware of who those people are.)

Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#98

Post by coredog64 »

distances wrote: post #4
yarapavan wrote: post #2

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…

I was working in an office that had to follow French laws and norms, and I had a _contractor_* that refused to do her job. She wouldn't show up for work, when she did she'd play Farmville or be on Facebook. It was a data entry job with an objective way to measure performance, and she was accomplishing about 1/3rd of the other employees.

I couldn't just not renew her contract. I had to document her shortcomings, have her sign letters, take her to meetings with HR, etc. IIRC, it took two months to get rid of her after the end of her final contract (we had to keep her on a provisional contract until we finally satisfied all the requirements).

*We were paying salaries based on annual grants from other organizations, so all the positions were advertised (and accepted) as one year contracts.

Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#99

Post by hibikir »

zjaffee wrote: post #85
gaius wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perils of operational work: the mark of success is that no-one knows what you do, or that you are even there.

Ehh, at least in todays world where teams that focus on operations in a DevOps environment, there are a lot more metrics that operations teams can be measured by other than just uptime. For example, lets say a decision is made that you want to spin up a new environment, deploy a new service, scale up or scale down a piece of infrastructure. A good operations team in this more modern space will have automated the vast…

But how do we know what good automation is? It's easy to see terrible ops work, but it's hard to see amazing ops work. This leads many organizations to end up thinking that ops skill is about outage response. Guess what: The person that is best at fixing at outage is typically the one that caused it!

Imagine I have two people in an ops team: One writes a lot of new code, and ships a lot of buggy features, and quickly reacts to the problems. People get the impression that they are working on something hard, and they are grateful for all the hard work. Another one takes longer to ship, but the automation just works. Therefore, whatever he was doing was easy, and they are just slow at doing it.

So sadly, in most environments it pays off to actually have problems in your ops automation, for the visibility that you get by saving the day.

Re: Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?

#100

Post by dethstar »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #97
sevensor wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think you're indispensable? Do they know that? Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization -- if that person gets hit by a bus, or walks off the job, or is on vacation during a crisis, we're all in trouble. And if an employee becomes indispensable on purpose, that person is a problem and should be let go before the situation gets worse. Where I used t…

Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization -- if that person gets hit by a bus, or walks off the job, or is on vacation during a crisis, we're all in trouble. Easy to say in theory, but in reality, you can't build a great organization that's exclusively composed of average performers. There will always be people who contribute far more than the rest, w…

Indispensable != better at their job. Indispensable != Contributes more.

If someone you work with gets hit by a bus tomorrow, can you still ssh into the server? Can you continue working with the code they wrote?

Or is that all knowledge lost? If they're not indispensable that means that's all well documented.

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