211–220 of 274 posts
Is better represented as "move fast and break important things" but what kind of management is going to sign up to that.
In essence it becomes "move fast", which becomes another way of saying, "get things done faster or you're not meeting company values and we can blame you for that." Yay for management doublespeak
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? They are getting double the average janitor salary. Why would they want to leave?
Because then you break the rule of 'everyone must be excellent'. In a room full of geniuses, do many people choose to mop the floor?
Also, I don't see anything wrong with choosing to mop the floor - especially if you're really good at it.
Back when I worked at EA there were obviously many horrible aspects to its culture. But one thing I always thought was cool was that they had a notion of a "razor". This was a principle or guideline that was worded specifically enough to clearly slice up a set of options into whether they fit it or not. When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make t…
> When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make trade-offs coming from countless hours of playing games and near zero hours making them, I'm curious why "this game is fun" doesn't help you make tradeoffs. I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), fre…
> I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), frequent non-skippable dialogue, etc.
These things are fun to many people. Just not you. Sometimes they are fun to me, usually not. I think "this game is fun" would lead to including more of this stuff, not less.
YouTubers in particular seem to like this kind of stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't be evil, is not an anti-value. It's negatively-stated-yet-positive value. The article says people should state values as a tradeoff. So for google it should have been something like: Favor not being evil over making more money.
"Don't be evil [at all costs]" A truly uncompromising value, if that was the intent of Google's motto, sits at the pinnacle of the hierarchy and the tradeoff is literally everything else.
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Toyota's "Respect for People" was a sort of joke to me when I worked there, then I worked at Amazon and saw the opposite. Toyota is a great company to work for, albeit super boring.
Being ethical is often aligned with being boring. I don't want the employees at my insurance company doing anything exciting with my personal information.
I didn't expect to read that ethical and boring are aligned during Black History Month (US).
Back when I worked at EA there were obviously many horrible aspects to its culture. But one thing I always thought was cool was that they had a notion of a "razor". This was a principle or guideline that was worded specifically enough to clearly slice up a set of options into whether they fit it or not. When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make t…
> When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make trade-offs coming from countless hours of playing games and near zero hours making them, I'm curious why "this game is fun" doesn't help you make tradeoffs. I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), fre…
I used to work with a great designer who used to say the goal was to take the un-fun out. That actually is a more actionable goal.
Back when I worked at EA there were obviously many horrible aspects to its culture. But one thing I always thought was cool was that they had a notion of a "razor". This was a principle or guideline that was worded specifically enough to clearly slice up a set of options into whether they fit it or not. When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make t…
> When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make trade-offs coming from countless hours of playing games and near zero hours making them, I'm curious why "this game is fun" doesn't help you make tradeoffs. I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), fre…
A game is a very carefully balanced hanging mobile of hundreds of parts and it's very hard to tweak one without risking throwing others off. Inventory management might be tedious, but it may be that simplifying that throws off other more critical game mechanics. Or it could be that the feature ended up being made worse in the process of fixing an even more important mechanic and now the team has simply run out of time to circle back and improve it.
> frequent non-skippable dialogue
Dialog usually is skippable, but if it's not, there could be reasons. For example, games pretty often rely on unskippable transitions to load content in the background and minimize time spent staring at a loading screen.
Saying "make the game fun" is about as actionable as telling a musician to "write a good song".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Don't be evil [at all costs]" A truly uncompromising value, if that was the intent of Google's motto, sits at the pinnacle of the hierarchy and the tradeoff is literally everything else.
You could add "at all costs" to any value. That would likely make it less true instead of more bold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a platitude, not toxic. Being a "pro sportsteam" on the other hand could be considered toxic. I know of no more cut throat legal business than sports. They are aggressivly signaling that they push KPI missers out.
This isn't exactly true. Other than NFL, American pro sports have pretty strong unions, and even if you get cut, you still get paid. You might even get paid more, even though you're not working. Netflix doesn't give out guaranteed contracts that continue to pay you even after you get fired.
Reading the whole slide back to back, I am a bit disgusted. It is so smug. It is trying to be brutally honest, but it feels more like a cult pep-talk. The place like doubled it workforce in four years -- there is not way to be elite after that, even if they were before ...
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I do agree that the honesty is refreshing. That said, I personally feel like the mentality of "We will fire you if you aren't doing an _exceptional_ job" reads as a serious red flag. The implication here is that you should expect to work overtime and prioritize your job over all else. Even then, we might still fire you. Of course I'd rather have a company being open and upfront about their unsustainable expectations,…
>The implication here is that you should expect to work overtime and prioritize your job over all else. I don't think that's right. The slide says: """ Hard Work — Not Relevant We don't measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office [...] Sustained B-level performance despite effort generates severance Sustained A-level performance despite minimal effort is rewarded """ The message seem…
There are a handful of people that are capable of producing "Sustained A-level performance" and for them this workplace probably seems ideal.
Even for the engineers that could reach this bar, it's a very high standard to apply constantly. There's another slide that gives a slight allowance for temporary performance issues, but that lack of security is hard for most people.
Slide 34 to be exact says this about Loyalty. "People who have been stars for us, and hit a bad patch, get a near term pass because we think they are likely to become stars for us again."
"A bad patch" is pretty loosely defined, if you burn out achieving something, or are assigned a problem that is particularly difficult, how much leeway do you have?
I don't think it would be an environment I would particularly enjoy, but I think to the original post's point this is a pretty great set of values because it really clearly articulates the trade-offs. If you are a 10x engineer and hate working at $current_company because they care about hard work and that's frustrating because you work smart not hard and you are comfortable with your career being contingent on consistent high performance, then Netflix is the place for you. If you work hard but think this would burn you out, look somewhere else. And that's what values should do, declare the trade-offs and take a firm stance on which things you value.