It's still a better culture than anywhere else I've worked.
At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
61–70 of 335 posts
Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
#62> Richard Siklos, a Netflix spokesman, said the company only fires employees for performance reasons, not because managers don’t like them That's not true at all. The company fires people all the time because their skills just aren't necessary. I mean I guess technically it's a layoff, but a layoff and getting fired are functionally the same at Netflix as they both come with the same severance. When we moved to AWS,…
" and they had no desire to learn about the cloud."
Is that true? I have seen it quite a bit that people in similar situations were never asked if they would like to switch.
Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
#63I think the headline misconstrues the issue. There's nothing wrong with transparency, but there are plenty of issues with airing dirty laundry and having, quite apparently, sociopathic upper management.
Transparent lies are still lies.
See my response to tareqak. I mostly disagree with the way the headline is written as it implies that transparency is bad. Obviously the article dives much further into the issue but since when have people bothered reading such things? :)
Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
#64“Being part of Netflix is like being part of an Olympic team,” the company said in a written statement
Oh please. Get over yourselves.
Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
#65Wow. I can literally feel my neck and shoulders bunching up just _reading_ this. If I wanted to live in a fear-based culture every day, I'd join the armed forces--at least that way I could shoot back.
Also, the military has pretty great job security, with the only genuine cutoff happening between E5 and E6.
I worried about a lot of things during my time in, but getting fired was not one of them.
Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
#66Wow. I can literally feel my neck and shoulders bunching up just _reading_ this. If I wanted to live in a fear-based culture every day, I'd join the armed forces--at least that way I could shoot back.
If it was a fear based culture I would agree with you - I’ve worked in those & left as fast as I could.
Netflix is not even close to that in my experience, nor have I seen any evidence of that in the engineering teams around me.
Of course some teams may be different-and it certainly is different to how many companies operate-but the article seems to be unfairly characterizing the culture based on grumbling from a few disgruntled ex employees.
Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never seen an employee getting fired "because their manager didn't like them". I've seen plenty of employees getting fired because their manager, who didn't like them, gave them a bad review. In fact, across companies and even industries, being disliked by your manager is the single most reliable way to get fired. Anyone claiming you can be disliked by your superior yet reliably keep your job - is BSing you. Sin…
OTOH your feelings for your reports correlates highly with the quality of work they're putting out
Sure, correlates highly, but not perfectly.
Some people just don't get along. It's a fact of life. Managers are humans, and they detest working every day with people who rub them the wrong way.
Couple that with upper management at Netflix pressuring managers to hit firing quotas, and you can be sure who is chosen to be sacrificed on the altar of that particular metric...
Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
#68I'd be shocked if there weren't at least a few assault arrests a year at Netflix HQ reading this. While on one hand having it be known that your time at a company is tenuous and can change quickly is helpful, because thats true at all companies, going the opposite direction to directly play into both imposter syndrome and general workplace anxiety sounds like they're selecting for only the most self-assured people.
In my experience, extremely self-assured people are wrong at probably the same rate as those who are unsure if they can cut it (but are still there). Having seen Netflix employees give tech talks at conferences, the thing I tended to take away is that every single thing they do must be marketed to be the end all be all and because they made it everybody else is wrong. In general, I've even agreed with much of the talks, but the rate at which they close off any/all ambiguity or side-considerations is bordering on an air of desperation.
Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
#69Sure, they fire for performance reasons by setting up one of those kangaroos courts where your voice is nowhere to be heard. The build-up to the inevitable firing is something akin to an Ionesco play, one absurdity after the other. The higher-up gets some sidekicks onboard, people who would sell their grandmother for a half-chewed piece of chocolate, and the smearing campaign begins. The apologist has the words ready…
I remember reading about this a while ago and I thought that it could work for a while but eventually you will attract and accumulate a bunch of cutthroat sociopaths. How do you even assess performance objectively without smart people gaming the system?
Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
#70> Richard Siklos, a Netflix spokesman, said the company only fires employees for performance reasons, not because managers don’t like them Oh how I wish I could have had that. I've had an experience in the past where I was dismissed because my manager decided he just didn't like me anymore. Although I was the best performing, most senior developer on the team and was doing all the hiring and mentoring of others, it d…
I can't help but wonder why just about every company has terrible hiring/HR/management practices. You would think that someone out there would fix those problems at their companies and reap the rewards: an effective, highly motivated workforce. The fact that we haven't seen that means either that it's a hard problem to solve, that nobody pays attention to it, or that there is no economic value in working to have "goo…
I think the reason is that HR is similar to IT and QA - if they do their job right, it's like they're doing nothing at all.
My guess is that "Thank God HR was on top of that problem" is not a common phrase in meetings. Neither is "Wow, HR did a fantastic job creating that job posting, and every single candidate that they've brought in has been at least plausible." If they aren't braindead, you just take them for granted.
Systems like that tend to get neglected.