61–70 of 107 posts
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-Leading-Companies-Coaching-...
The part about "fear", or the high pay and low benefits, shouldn't be surprising if you are familiar with Netflix's values. They place employee performance above all else and strive to create a place where high performers want to work - which means getting rid of anyone who isn't one. Their values are to give employees huge amounts of freedom and responsibility and to let the individual's decide what to do with that,…
This review doesn't jive with the apparent performance of the company in the market. They're the front-runner in an extremely tough space with hostile partners, and even more amazingly, they did this while starting as a company that ships physical goods around the country. There aren't too many things that are harder than moving away from a successful business model, but they've done it really well. They don't appear…
Many tech companies perform well despite the (poor) treatment they give their employees. Amazon is not particularly well rated on Glassdoor, and I've heard plenty of horror stories about EA (and other game companies) from people I trust.
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> than Radford 50th percentile for the Bay Area Can you give us the value rather than the symbol name, please?
Well - I'm not sure if it means anything to say that I've spoken with network engineers from Netflix who make from $130K - $185K, but there you go. Those numbers, by themselves, don't actually mean anything. $185K is undervalued for a Sr. Network Architect. $130K might be good, bad, great, or average - depending on what your responsibilities are. A better way of looking at it, is if you have two job opportunities, on…
NetFlix should be compared to the contractor scale if they offer low job security.
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It feels like you didn't critically read the review, and are just trying to impose your own interpretation on top of it. Processes and lack of agility come into place in a mature company as risk-aversion. If the company is scared to fuck up, they introduce processes to prevent fuckups, even though those processes also dampen remarkable innovations. Judging from the Glassdoor review, Netflix's firing strategy has the…
Except that everything I've read about Netflix indicates that they're not risk-averse. They seem to be innovating in just the right areas. And yeah, I may be reading into it, since I have some frustration with large, process ridden organizations right now. I'm just saying, this is only one guy's take.
Of course, for Netflix's business model, they don't actually need risk-taking and innovation at the lower levels, just the ability to fill a defined role as well as possible. Netflix mails and streams video content to people, and if they want to do something else, it'll only be because the executives decide to do it. They seem to hire specialists rather than generalists, fire people when their specialties aren't needed anymore, and so forth. It's categorically different from something like Microsoft or Google, where they hire generalists and have ways (although, to be fair, often politicized ones) to generate multiple product lines in parallel and where creative initiative and risk-taking at the lower levels is a part of that process. Netflix is way more top-down than that.
This review doesn't jive with the apparent performance of the company in the market. They're the front-runner in an extremely tough space with hostile partners, and even more amazingly, they did this while starting as a company that ships physical goods around the country. There aren't too many things that are harder than moving away from a successful business model, but they've done it really well. They don't appear…
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I think some people have different "career goals" than other people. Some people want to show up and keep their chair warm from 9-5 every day for 4 years, to get their small pay increase and title bump. Others want to come into the company with the title "Awesome Excellent Programmer", work on something cool, and leave the company after they've done something interesting with the title "Awesome Excellent Programmer".…
I realized this is how it is at my current employer too. They have very strict processes around this to manage seniority. For example, I am currently at a lower title (level 2) than another developer on my team (level 3) who I spend at least half an hour a day managing and coaching. We have to be very diligent with code reviews for this person because there is a lot of stuff they miss. I feel like they would be a goo…
It's OK, though, because I can write solid software faster than other people can write shitty software :)
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Well - I'm not sure if it means anything to say that I've spoken with network engineers from Netflix who make from $130K - $185K, but there you go. Those numbers, by themselves, don't actually mean anything. $185K is undervalued for a Sr. Network Architect. $130K might be good, bad, great, or average - depending on what your responsibilities are. A better way of looking at it, is if you have two job opportunities, on…
Are you comparing to full time or contractor roles? Contractor roles frequently pay more, but have less job security. NetFlix should be compared to the contractor scale if they offer low job security.
This review doesn't jive with the apparent performance of the company in the market. They're the front-runner in an extremely tough space with hostile partners, and even more amazingly, they did this while starting as a company that ships physical goods around the country. There aren't too many things that are harder than moving away from a successful business model, but they've done it really well. They don't appear…
Didn't they have some public contest to see who could come up with the best movie recommendation algorithm? That seemed pretty bold and innovative.