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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

#231

Post by erikb »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #111

Netflix has tried to recruit me a couple of times, I interviewed on site both times (after having the recruiter send me the slide deck that they use to explain their culture so it wouldn't be a surprise). For one of the sessions I had the extraordinary opportunity to talk to the manager for the role, their manager, and two people who had previously been in the role (Netflix wasn't aware that I knew those people). Wha…

In all honesty, if you've seen Netflix software quality deteriorate over the last few months you probably know that they are not that excellent anymore. It's always like this. As long as there's real growth, there's real talent at work. But once that stops (and they now own the whole world, where should growth come from) the Machiavellian spirits set in. And the top doesn't really care about it, since the game of staying at the top is different from the game of getting to the top. The game of staying at the top is very Machiavellian in nature.

If it can be seen on the outside already, then that means it's growing on the inside for a few years. And your post shows that it's really like this. Sad.

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

#232

Post by erikb »

maxxxxx wrote: post #113
ChuckMcM wrote: post #111

Netflix has tried to recruit me a couple of times, I interviewed on site both times (after having the recruiter send me the slide deck that they use to explain their culture so it wouldn't be a surprise). For one of the sessions I had the extraordinary opportunity to talk to the manager for the role, their manager, and two people who had previously been in the role (Netflix wasn't aware that I knew those people). Wha…

That's what you get when you have fixed quotas for firing people, e.g. bottom 10%. After a few rounds you have some very good people left and either you fire good people that are hard to replace or you hire people to fire them. I don't understand how the top guys don't see that dynamic.

> That's what you get when you have fixed quotas for firing people, e.g. bottom 10%. After a few rounds you have some very good people left

That is not a general statement, bro. Not generally "very good people" are left, but people who are very good at achieving certain ratings. It can very well happen that for instance your top coders are actually in the bottom 10% because they don't know "how to human". People who only focus on social skills rarely end up in the bottom 10% tho. So this whole system depends on having very meritocratic rating systems or you end up actually increasing the speed of getting parasites in and normal people out.

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

#233

Post by tinus_hn »

hueving wrote: post #212
pavon wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's not like Olympic athletes are doing anything new and innovative. They are just the best at doing what millions of other people also do. That seems like a decent analogy for Netflix whose basic task isn't groundbreaking, but who has to manage doing it at a scale that rivals anyone else in the industry.

It's not a good analogy because it doesn't require individuals at the top of their field. The only reason Netflix is winning is because they have massive amounts of content and integration into many devices. Both of those are business arrangements and have no requirements for the best engineers in the world. Just competent ones.

That is not completely true, it would be very easy to start a company and acquire such a library and still fail.

It’s also about the quality of the service, the apps and the rest of the experience.

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

#234

Post by saiya-jin »

sgt101 wrote: post #214
alecbenzer wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think stack ranking can work well when it's understood that the quality bar doesn't sit at a fixed place in the stack. Google promo committees afaik stack rank a batch of employees and then decide where in the stack to promote, and (in theory) it can be anywhere from the whole stack gets promoted to no one gets promoted. Whether you explicitly stack rank or not, if you give some people promotions and not others, yo…

1. Don't promote based on ranking in current role. The new roles that you are promoting into aren't the current role. Being a good X doesn't mean that you will be a good Y. 2. Organise your company around rewarding excellent work. Ranking systems reward being good at the ranking system. They rapidly become the whole focus of the organisation, I have seen >10% of an organisations time burned on simply running the syst…

> Ranking systems reward being good at the ranking system.

This is how most of the banking works, anywhere (in fact I think most big oldish corporations). Most people go to the work just for the money, the mission is usually pretty pathetic and/or amoral (get rich guys richer, take as many fees from customers as possible, rob other players on the market etc).

Tons of semi-competent folks, usually various managers playing their games of perception - how do I look to the guy/lady who will be distributing bonuses/promotions.

I don't blame them, this is how whole system is set from C-level all the way to the bottom. That's how the top of the pyramid got there, why would they change the game they excel at. Just pure excellence at your work is possible, but a very ineffective way of getting rewards.

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

#235

Post by erikb »

flashgordon wrote: post #178
ChuckMcM wrote: post #111

Netflix has tried to recruit me a couple of times, I interviewed on site both times (after having the recruiter send me the slide deck that they use to explain their culture so it wouldn't be a surprise). For one of the sessions I had the extraordinary opportunity to talk to the manager for the role, their manager, and two people who had previously been in the role (Netflix wasn't aware that I knew those people). Wha…

Can share (without giving away names) what strategies you used to suss this out? One thing I am very terrible at is actually sussing out unhealthy behaviour and cultures in an interview setting and it would be great to see how you guage both the answers and the cues.

The learning loop is very simple here. Do interviews and look for clues. If you don't see clues join. If you see clues after joining, think about how they look from the outside. Then repeat.

AFter a few rounds (2-3) people usually have enough clues that they won't join a shitty team.

For instance if the team's management is full of parasites who have no technical skills at whatever they are supposed to do, then it will be very unclear from the outside what they are actually doing. If the recruiter can't explain it, it's likely that the team has not much skill.

Another example I faced is getting the same technical task in follow-up interviews (e.g. first phone call with one engineer, then a face-to-face with another engineer, both giving the same task). It shows that the organisation is not well since the engineers didn't know about each other's interview, otherwise engineers usually share their experiences and prepare each other.

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

#236

Post by erikb »

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…

> "Not being a team player" was often code for not trying hard enough to make your lead look good.

Replace often with always. That's coded language that exactly means this. It's really hard to avoid this though.

> massive tech debt accumulation

Do you know any company that doesn't have that? Honestly I've never seen it. I've worked in a 10 people company, I founded a company with a co-student, I worked in a 50 people company, I currently work in a 95,000 people company and there's always huge loads of technical debt. Also I now often work with Google APIs/tools/frameworks as well as AWS. Also loads of technical debt, right there.

> Implicit quotas for regularly letting people go is just an insane way to run a business.

That's for sure. It's great for getting investors though.

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

#237

Post by golergka »

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…

> just about every company has terrible hiring/HR/management practices

There are certainly companies out there with a lot of problems, and there are a lot of toxic people. But if it seems that every single manager and hiring person that you encounter is an asshole and a jerk, there is an alternative explanation. Just saying.

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

#238

Post by bartread »

sgt101 wrote: post #214
alecbenzer wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think stack ranking can work well when it's understood that the quality bar doesn't sit at a fixed place in the stack. Google promo committees afaik stack rank a batch of employees and then decide where in the stack to promote, and (in theory) it can be anywhere from the whole stack gets promoted to no one gets promoted. Whether you explicitly stack rank or not, if you give some people promotions and not others, yo…

1. Don't promote based on ranking in current role. The new roles that you are promoting into aren't the current role. Being a good X doesn't mean that you will be a good Y. 2. Organise your company around rewarding excellent work. Ranking systems reward being good at the ranking system. They rapidly become the whole focus of the organisation, I have seen >10% of an organisations time burned on simply running the syst…

> 1. Don't promote based on ranking in current role. The new roles that you are promoting into aren't the current role. Being a good X doesn't mean that you will be a good Y.

Definitely some truth in this but one needs to be careful. I think the way to view it might be that being good at X is necessary but not sufficient to being good at Y (assuming Y is a promotion, more responsibility, etc.).

If you're not performing well with the level of responsibility you have at X nobody should promote you to Y. For one thing, if you perform poorly at Y you're going to do a lot more damage than at X and the only real evidence anyone has for promoting you to Y is how you've done at X.

Possibly you can (or you might think you can) test for proficiency at Y but you may well be overestimating your ability to do this, and you open yourself up to all kinds of accusations about artificiality. Not only this but high performing employees can and should legitimately question why you as a manager are unable to accurately assess their suitability based on their performance.

Finally, skills are learned. Python is a learned skill; systems architecture is a learned skill; management is a learned skill. Even bad managers can learn to be good managers, and almost everybody starts out being bad at it. The key is engagement: do you want to get better at it? Are you going to invest the time in learning the skills you need to be better? If you do then, whilst it might take a while, you'll do just fine. The point with high performing employees, and why you promote them, is that they've already demonstrated the engagement and the willingness to learn that they're going to need in order to successfully take the next step.

Not to say there won't be any mess on the way, and success is obviously not to be taken for granted. Also worth pointing out that even great managers encounter serious difficulties - it's somewhat in the nature of dealing with people.

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

#239

Post by rladd »

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 appears he was fired for saying basically:

"We shouldn't have any shows that use the term 'retarded' because it can be as painful for a developmentally disabled person to hear as the word 'nigger' is for a black person to hear"

As reported he used the "n-word" as an example of something really hurtful that shouldn't be said. Is that really worth a firing? Is it really wrong at all? What am I missing?

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

#240

Post by setr »

maxxxxx wrote: post #113
ChuckMcM wrote: post #111

Netflix has tried to recruit me a couple of times, I interviewed on site both times (after having the recruiter send me the slide deck that they use to explain their culture so it wouldn't be a surprise). For one of the sessions I had the extraordinary opportunity to talk to the manager for the role, their manager, and two people who had previously been in the role (Netflix wasn't aware that I knew those people). Wha…

That's what you get when you have fixed quotas for firing people, e.g. bottom 10%. After a few rounds you have some very good people left and either you fire good people that are hard to replace or you hire people to fire them. I don't understand how the top guys don't see that dynamic.

That's only true if the population is static: if you fully replenish, and then discard the bottom 10%, on repeat, then your overall quality should be going up.

If you only make new bad hires, the 90% good population will stay the same, and the newly hired 10% will be fired.

If you make n good hires, such that that they're better than some peer in the previous 90% population, then the worst n peers will be shifted into the 10% firing population, and replaced with the better new hires in good 90% pop.

So, assuming your metric is solid, and replenishment occurs, the strategy should be successful.

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