251–260 of 335 posts
The first step is to seed doubt that your current situation is not as rosy as it seems.
Step 2 will be a outreach recruiter / manager offering u promises of greener pastures at one of the competing streaming services
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, "culture of fear" hasn't been my experience at all, and as far as I know it isn't the experience of the people I work with. I can't speak for other teams/orgs (I work in the ML org) but in the years I've been here I could count on one hand the number of folks (at least among those I knew) who were let go. I don't worry or think about my job security; I think about building better software (and from what I can t…
A few months ago, a good engineer who had left Netflix told someone I know that the reason was the work culture: specifically, she mentioned that there were team meetings where everyone was encouraged to say what they didn't like about others, in a public setting. More recently, this person I know brought it up when interviewing at Netflix (not wanting to work in such a culture), and was reassured by the hiring manag…
I have read that the Army Rangers have something like this, they call it the "beef circle". Everyone says a person who has annoyed them, then the two of you wrestle in the centre of the circle, then you shake hands and the matter is considered closed. But that's obv inappropriate for a corporate environment.
> 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…
The fundamental problem is a misalignment of incentives: what is good for any individual manager - getting a bigger budget and more staff reporting to them - it not necessarily what is good for the organisation as a whole, nor for any other individual within it, or even the shareholders or customers.
I would really not like to work there, but out of the FAANG companies, Netflix is definitely the most all-in on its quirks. My sense is that the culture at Google, Apple, MS, and FB are all in a cluster compared with the culture at Netflix, which is a real outlier. It's also an outlier in my unwillingness to go there. But I think they and I are both happier that way.
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…
stack ranking != ranking. Even at El Goog, 50% of the headcount is performing below average.
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.
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.
After a few rounds you the only people left will be those loyal and belong to the inner circles of the cartel boss.
Who ever believes these firings happen on work performance is deluding themselves.
At this point, is there a single FAANG company, or tech company of equivalent size or prestige, that doesn't have a toxic environment? I don't even mean contains pockets of toxicity because of the inherent size of the enterprise, but something rotten at the top or in the core, at the managerial level or in the culture.
Luckily they just fire people, not execute them.
I sooo don't get US…
I will work with you to create the narrative you need to showcase your true, natural leadership and management abilities. You know you've got what it takes; you just haven't had the opportunity to demonstrate it. My job will be to make sure that you come out of it shining, with the enhanced respect of your superiors, subordinates and peers. People will nod sagely when they look at you, clearly seeing your senior management potential. If you need any of your peer competitors to come out of it looking bad, that's part of the service; hey, the very fact that you're using my services makes it clear that you are smarter than them. You deserve this.
I won't name names (confidentiality of course is part of the service), but let me assure you that some of them are already doing this to you. There's no crime in levelling the playing field; making things even again is the right thing to do and the only way to ensure that your natural innate talents can be properly recognised to win you the promotions you deserve.
Obviously this is a premium service; we can work together to make sure that I appear to be worth every penny of the top flight salary you offer; part of the narrative will be how I appeared to be such a great applicant and a perfect hire but it was your leadership skills, your intuition, your deep insights that uncovered this employee's true inadequacies where everyone else had seen an illusion.