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At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

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Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

#81

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

maxxxxx wrote: post #62
jedberg wrote: post #7

> 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.

That would interfere with onboarding more H1-Bs. Look, we can't find anyone to do these jobs...

Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

#82

Post by halbritt »

dunpeal wrote: post #67
darkerside wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Further, to that point, any manager that dislikes a report is likely going to have a very difficult time getting quality work out of that report regardless of how talented they may be.

Ergo, the report's performance may be suffering, but entirely because they're being poorly managed.

Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

#84

Post by AareyBaba »

stephengillie wrote: post #23
strict9 wrote: post #8

>Many employees say they see the keeper test as a guise for ordinary workplace politics while some managers say they feel pressure to fire people or risk looking soft. I worked for a place like this. Regular firings, sometimes every month. The CEO (who also self-funded the company) believed that regularly letting people go was a way of eliminating bad apples and forcing people to work harder and smarter. Similar to N…

> The CEO ... believed that regularly letting people go was a way of eliminating bad apples and forcing people to work harder and smarter. Microsoft called it Stack Ranking.

Also known as "Management by Bestseller".

Some CEO of a successful company writes a book claiming his management wisdom led to his company success and then a bunch of CEOs read the book and try to replicate the same success because they don't have any original ideas themselves. In this instance the CEO was GE's Jack Welch and his policy was 'rank and yank'

Similarly, some CEO will write that you must have a mission statement and distill your management philosophy into 3 or 4 words preferably starting with the same alphabet. Next thing every CEO has their own tag lines: 'Agility, Accountabilty, Ambition' or 'Passion, Persistance, Performance' or . My previous company CEO spent thousands of dollars on polished metal tangram squares with her three words embossed on them given to every-single-employee at the company.

Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

#85

Post by k_sh »

booleandilemma wrote: post #34

Mr. Hast­ings had re­cently fired his chief com­mu­ni­ca­tions of­fi­cer for say­ing the “N-word” in full form. The ex­ec­u­tive, who is white... The race of the speaker shouldn’t matter. Either make the word forbidden (a silly concept to begin with) or don’t.

It's a reclaimed slur - it's meant to be used exclusively by the targeted group. Not respecting that requires you to ignore the painful cultural background of the term.

> In sociology and cultural studies, reappropriation (or reclamation) is the cultural process by which a group reclaims terms [...] previously used in a way disparaging of that group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

#86

Post by halbritt »

omegaham wrote: post #70
ahmedalsudani wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gran…

The role of HR is to shield the company from liability.

Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

#87

Post by walshemj »

jedberg wrote: post #7

> 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,…

Err no they are not, being fired is not the same as redundancy.

Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

#88

Post by throwaway359087 »

dunpeal wrote: post #58
throwaway359087 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Netflix pays 360k a year plus benefits. It’s a shit place to work if you don’t fit the exact culture though, which is pretty brash and confrontational

You can get similar comp at Google and Facebook, to name just two examples. Why should I choose Netflix if I can get the same pay there, minus the BS? Also, I won't have to live in Los Gatos.

Don’t choose them. It sucks I just said that. But working at Google or Facebook is totally different. Netflix has a couple hundred engineers. They aren’t involved in selling ad funded content. I wouldn’t want to work at google or facebook

Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

#89

Post by ghaff »

Sharlin wrote: post #56
throwaway4195 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the exact same experience with a well known startup in SF. I got a glowing "Outstanding" review in the previous quarter. My manager left and the new manager who came in took just 15 days (with a single one on one meeting) to decide she din't like me and fired me without offering much of a reason.

I'll never understand US-style at will employment. It just seems so barbaric and arbitrary. Where I'm from the current conservative government just proposed legislation that would make it slightly easier to fire people in small companies (at most dozen employees or so). This caused the left-leaning part of the country to throw a collective hissy-fit, including several political strikes organized by major unions.

It also means that US employees are able to leave the next day if they want and that company hiring decisions don't have to factor in that it's going to be really really hard to get rid of someone if they don't work out or circumstances change. It allows a lot for flexibility for everyone, with some costs.

Re: At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

#90

Post by walshemj »

booleandilemma wrote: post #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.

Netflix is a fracking online video store for F^%k's sake - not Bell labs
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