At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks

Post by 2sk21 » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 11:46 AM UTC

EliRivers wrote: post #260

If anyone from Netflix is reading this and needs to hire someone for the purposes of firing them a year later, I'm your man. I am no ordinary sacrificial hire. 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 o…

Post by tomrod » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 11:48 AM UTC

lazerwalker wrote: post #263

sgt101 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The tricky bit for #4 is if you're, say, a high-performing engineer on a team that's being poorly mis-managed so as to create little business value, getting a disappointing performance review is far more likely to cause you to leave the organization entirely than to switch to a different team. Creating a company culture that engenders that sort of trust and loyalty is not impossible, but still non-trivial.

Post by asien » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 11:50 AM UTC

faizshah wrote: post #140

I feel like tech needs to experiment with worker owned cooperatives and flat management more. I know, I know, the politics in flat structures can be worse. But I think tech should be innovative in management structure and eventually a standard for decision making, perhaps based on quaker principles, and management structure, maybe based on mondragon, can emerge.

Post by hnzix » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 12:09 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #255

hnzix wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by ck425 » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 12:12 PM UTC

omegaham wrote: post #80

Sharlin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand US-style at will employment. It just seems so barbaric and arbitrary. Where I'm from the current conservative government just proposed legislation that would make it slightly easier to fire people in small companies (at most dozen employees or so). This caused the left-leaning part of the country to throw a collective hissy-fit, including several political strikes organized by major unions.

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…