141–150 of 335 posts
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.
Managers should understand that they are not the center of the universe.
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.
> 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. Postmortem emails and meetings explaining why people got fired are viewed by some employees as awkward and theatrical when the audiences can be dozens or even hundreds of people. So every employee gets to be badmouthed in front of as many as hundreds…
Let me take a stab at this: money is good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm sure they do, they just assume that the benefits of ensuring low performers don't accumulate outweigh the costs of letting go some good talent. That said, I think quota policies are bullshit.
I've been in teams where firing a few bad actors was definitely a good idea.
I've also been in teams that were well-oiled machines where everyone was doing their part. You want to tell me I need to find 2-3 people every year to fire because of some quota dictated by some celebrity CEO with an agenda?
Great way to disrupt a well-functioning team.
> 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. Postmortem emails and meetings explaining why people got fired are viewed by some employees as awkward and theatrical when the audiences can be dozens or even hundreds of people. So every employee gets to be badmouthed in front of as many as hundreds…
> (Netflix employees, why do you accept this?) Let me take a stab at this: money is good.
> Let me take a stab at this: money is good.
Better than everywhere else, including other FAANGs, where you don't have to tolerate such policies?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very common. Senior Software Engineers are commonly at 400+ up to 7-800. Director level for Software, Data Eng, Data Science are very rarely under 600+. VP in the same areas rarely (never?) under 800+.
That looks very high for senior devs and very low for directors/VPs.
> 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. Postmortem emails and meetings explaining why people got fired are viewed by some employees as awkward and theatrical when the audiences can be dozens or even hundreds of people. So every employee gets to be badmouthed in front of as many as hundreds…
> So every employee gets to be badmouthed in front of as many as hundreds of former co-workers, as Netflix's special parting gift? Well no. It’s usually very positive about them and generally sad that things couldn’t be made to work. The point is not that they were bad - the idea is Netflix wouldn’t have hired them if that were so! It’s that it just wasn’t a good fit due to misalignment of goals. Perhaps someone does…
That's not what Netflix's own spokesman say:
> Richard Siklos, a Netflix spokesman, said the company only fires employees for performance reasons
Only "performance reasons", not "misalignment of goals".
> Perhaps someone doesn’t want to change or just keeps behaving in a way that they’ve been asked not to.
Saying someone "just keeps behaving in a way that they’ve been asked not to" is a very negative thing to say. As a hiring managing, hearing that about a candidate would cause me not to hire them.
> It’s usually very positive about them
Something is very distorted if you think saying about someone that he "just keeps behaving in a way that they’ve been asked not to" and similar stuff that make a person unemployable is "very positive about them".
And once more, this contradicts everything else in the article. You can't have your cake and eat it, too: if Netflix is saying (through it's spokesman and multiple other execs in the article) that firing is always due to performance reason, then that's not a "very positive" statement about the person being fired. It's actually a very negative statement.