261–270 of 335 posts
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I think your stats are off. When I left Netflix in 2015, we already had 1000+ engineers. By 2017 it was probably closer to 2000.
So if 2000 eng, they are paying 300k on avg on the low end. That is like 600 mil/ year???? Omg
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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…
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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 int…
A "bottom 10%" employee can thrive in the right environment. A formerly-star employee might completely tank when placed in the wrong environment.
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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 the…
Or something like that anyway.
The other big group of fail that I’d point to is bootcamp developers.
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" 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 t…
Another perspective is that that group of employees was doing the unglamorous work of maintaining the legacy systems that kept the lights on and paid the bills while the lucky few got to play with new toys, and they were rewarded for their diligence with getting shafted. Been there, done that, lessons learned.
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stack ranking != ranking. Even at El Goog, 50% of the headcount is performing below average.
> 50% Only if the average equals the median. There is a low probability that they are equal if you randomly pick a distribution from the set of all possible distributions (and round the percentages to the nearest integer). Edit: I am not a statistician so maybe the above is totally incorrect. The myth half of a sample is below the average triggers me every time!! Sorry.
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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 int…
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Is that total cash compensation (salary + stock + bonuses, or whatever), or just salary? I can never tell with these sorts of statements.
Just cash. Plus another 5% in free options. It’s a ton of money. No bonus, no RSUs or stock, just straight cash salary. And I didn’t write books on the language I used or anything, in my opinion I’m just a regular developer.
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> The pay for Senior & Principal level positions at Netflix are $350k-$500k+ base compensation. The same shape of thing at Apple, Facebook, etc. would be about half that in many cases. A Principal Engineer at FB would make "half" of $350-500k in compensation? Pure nonsense. Moreover, it seems like Netflix pays more cash and less equity, so some folks on this thread love to talk about "base compensation", "salary", et…
They definitely pay more at Netflix for equal IC positions and very likely for Director roles. It is very rare to find ICs making 600-700 k total comp at Facebook or Google, not rare at all at Netflix.