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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

#91

Post by dunpeal »

halbritt wrote: post #82
dunpeal wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very true.

A pattern I've seen when relationship between employee and superior goes south is similar to disfavored step-child:

They get less praise for doing well, and more blame for any mistake.

This tends to escalate over time, and very often the employee's performance will degrade (since they won't get any credit anyway) which escalates the situation.

Often they "patch things up" a few times, but if they really aren't compatible, it's just a tenuous forced balance that will eventually break and plunge the relationship to even deeper depths.

Of course in this situation, all performance reviews for the employee are anywhere from slightly to heavily distorted in their disfavor.

This will always result in one of them eventually leaving the team, typically the employee.

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

#92

Post by jacobush »

stevenjohns wrote: post #6

> 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…

At Netflix you'd be fired not because your manager didn't like you. You'd be fired because he didn't like your performance. There's a lot of it, alas it's just not the quality we are looking for here...

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

#94

Post by abugheratwork »

stephengillie wrote: post #30
refurb wrote: post #4

“When life gives you lemons,” he said, taking a swig on stage, “you make lemonade.” Are you serious? What is it with the trite theatrics?

A problem with that old saying is it ignores the vast amount of sugar needed to make lemonade.

I was wondering if he just stood there and drank straight lemon juice while he talked about lemonade.

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

#95

Post by OJFord »

chimtim wrote: post #47

I am glad I cancelled my subscription early this year and never bought its stocks.

Well, you'd have made a packet on the stock, and could've watched a lot too.

Does the value of the subscription really vary according to the company's HR practices? I'm not even sure that of the stock will.

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

#96

Post by draw_down »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #10

I recently quit a job that had me burned out, and in the meantime I've decided to take a couple months off before my next job. My biggest fear in going back is that I feel like now that I have 0 tolerance for the corporate culture bullshit that permeates all large organizations. I don't really even fault Netflix for what they're doing (I've certainly seen much worse) but I've determined that to function that pretty m…

I guess so, but it’s not like you have to believe in the dance with your heart and soul in order to perform it.

I think this is a “pick your poison” situation. If you freelance you need to kiss clients’ asses, in a smaller org there are politics as well, just expressed differently.

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

#97

Post by rhizome »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #31
stevenjohns wrote: post #6

> 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 can't help but wonder why just about every company has terrible hiring/HR/management practices.

At least with startups, I think money is too cheap and is flowing to underqualified people, managementwise. The VCs see a business person and a tech person, call it a startup and try to eke out a real company. Meanwhile, employees learn the meaning of shit flowing downhill and how culture comes from the top. Anyway, these cheap-money bosses are more often than not predictably bad at org-charting. Just add "flat hierarchy" and 3rd party HR, and 90% of the time it'll be a shitshow that at best elicits a chuckle when you mention how you work. [exaggerated for effect]

Obligatory "sick systems" reference: https://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html

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

#98

Post by halbritt »

omegaham wrote: post #80
Sharlin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note that tech, and especially the tech examined on Hacker News, is an outlier in American business. If this were Civil Engineer News or Actuary News, you'd see a very different attitude toward hiring and firing. Startups are quick to hire and fire because hiring exactly the right person is important, and hiring the wrong person can cripple the company. Everyone who applies for a position at a startup knows how this…

Another characteristic of tech is that it is comprised of very, very many people that effectively have no idea how to accomplish the task they were hired to do.

For example, a civil engineer would need to have a degree in their field and then pass a series of stringent examinations to get an FE and finally a PE. Most will require a PE to practice their trade.

In tech an "engineer" may or may not have a degree and there may be certifications, but very few that I know of have ever provided any value. In my experience, there's also not as strong a correlation between a degree in CS for example and one's ability to produce software.

Lots of folks in tech come out of Enterprise IT where projects usually fail and the modus operandi is to purchase technology from vendors and blame them when it doesn't work out.

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

#99

Post by dsnuh »

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.

I don't think it works like that... The company doesn't ask you if you'd like to switch to the cloud, and then you give a yes/no answer.

In my experience, what happens is there is a technology shift -- the company leadership decides they want to use the cloud (or use containers, or start moving their codebase to ${LANG}, etc.) and there is a group of employees that will lead this effort by learning and working with the new technologies, and there is another group that will actively oppose taking responsibility to learn about the new technology, and may actively work to sabotage or slow down the process.

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

#100

Post by Balgair »

Careful now.

Taken at face value, this paints a pretty 'fun' portrait of Netflix. I'm NOT doubting the WSJ, especially after the Theranos articles, they do really good reporting and have the back-ups. The firewall between Mr. Murdoch and Ms. Ramachandran and Mr. Flint's reporting should be considered as good as it gets. At least, it was for Mr. Carryrou despite it costing Mr. Murdoch literally millions of dollars.

However, follow the money on this article. Disney just bought 21st Century Fox in late August. Disney is purported to be setting up it's own streaming services as soon as the contracts with Netflix run out [0]. News Corp. owns the WSJ. Though 21st Century Fox and News Corp. are different companies after the split in 2013, this article sure isn't something Disney is going to object to.

Look, again, I'm NOT doubting that any of this is true. In fact, as it's coming out of the WSJ, I'm pretty certain it is true. All I'm saying is that this article really helps out Disney. Especially as it's trying to ramp up streaming services.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWkDZ51yrUg

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