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Adopting Microservices at Netflix

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Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#51

Post by matwood »

nkozyra wrote: post #46
matwood wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I would contend doing this tends to put you at a genetic disadvantage, and that some types of confrontation are essential for growth. Fully formed adults have confrontations all the time. The difference is that the result of the confrontation is not threats, backstabbing or whining later. We've all worked with the engineer who thinks they are the smartest thing around and acts like a 2 year old every time they ar…

> Fully formed adults have confrontations all the time. Sure. But without some HR codifications the line between "fully-formed" and "childish jerk nymph" becomes wholly subjective, and controlled by the majority. The end result is an organic uniformity. Nobody gets along all the time. But how you define "fully-formed adult" can vary from one person to the next. Essentially you're defining "good and bad" or "right or…

Even with codifications it is still subjective. The obvious things of no physical abuse, etc... are obvious. How do you codify don't be an asshole? In fact, simply saying act like a grown adult is probably the most clear I've ever seen an HR guideline.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#52

Post by xj9 »

louwrentius wrote: post #6
matthewmacleod wrote: post #2

Netflix doesn’t have an HR manual. There is a single guideline: “Act in NetFlix’s best interest.” The idea is that if an employee can’t figure out how to interpret the guideline in a given situation, he or she doesn’t have enough judgment to work there. If you don’t trust the judgment of the people on your team, you have to ask why you’re employing them. It’s true that you’ll have to fire people occasionally for viol…

I don't know how life is at Netflix. But I don't read it like that. I read it like I would want to work there in a heart beat. Because it seems that Netflix trust you and doesn't (micro)mange you on bullshit KPI's or something. It seems to me that at Netflix, you are trusted. You are trusted that your work improves the environment. Your work is evaluated afterwards. There is a risk of things going wrong, but with goo…

This is precisely what I was picturing.

If I can ever get my own business off of the ground, I hope to have it work similarly to what you described.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#53

Post by stonemetal »

brendangregg wrote: post #20
matthewmacleod wrote: post #2

Netflix doesn’t have an HR manual. There is a single guideline: “Act in NetFlix’s best interest.” The idea is that if an employee can’t figure out how to interpret the guideline in a given situation, he or she doesn’t have enough judgment to work there. If you don’t trust the judgment of the people on your team, you have to ask why you’re employing them. It’s true that you’ll have to fire people occasionally for viol…

G'Day, I work at Netflix, and we hire what's been called "fully formed adults". Here's a quote that can explain it better than I (also see the full article): Source https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1 : "Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get…

Sounds exactly like Github's policy that got them in trouble. Hopefully it works out better for you but somehow I doubt it.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#54

Post by derefr »

nkozyra wrote: post #46
matwood wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I would contend doing this tends to put you at a genetic disadvantage, and that some types of confrontation are essential for growth. Fully formed adults have confrontations all the time. The difference is that the result of the confrontation is not threats, backstabbing or whining later. We've all worked with the engineer who thinks they are the smartest thing around and acts like a 2 year old every time they ar…

> Fully formed adults have confrontations all the time. Sure. But without some HR codifications the line between "fully-formed" and "childish jerk nymph" becomes wholly subjective, and controlled by the majority. The end result is an organic uniformity. Nobody gets along all the time. But how you define "fully-formed adult" can vary from one person to the next. Essentially you're defining "good and bad" or "right or…

Presumably, if one person called another a "childish jerk nymph", then you have at least one person to fire (the person resorting to name-calling), if not two (the person maybe deserving the label) or more (the people taking sides rather than trying to dissolve the dispute.)

"Fully-formed adults" are people who I would expect to know how to mediate themselves. If people aren't able to successfully mediate their own disputes, then your failure in hiring came long before your latest addition.

Examples of people likely to be fully-formed adults: a mother with multiple children. A schoolteacher. A military sergeant. A nurse. A bartender. In general, people who have been exposed to enough pointless complaining and dispute that the object-level arguments don't matter to them any more, relative to the issue of figuring out what will allow everyone to continue working together optimally.

Note how most of those jobs are service jobs. People with natural talents rarely have to grow up in this way, and the people with the most natural talent are frequently the least grown-up (rock stars, career academics, startup founders). You only see this "fully-formed adult" trait re-emerge at the highest levels of accomplishment: astronauts are frequently fully-formed adults, for example.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#55

Post by mpdehaan2 »

caw wrote: post #8
matthewmacleod wrote: post #2

Netflix doesn’t have an HR manual. There is a single guideline: “Act in NetFlix’s best interest.” The idea is that if an employee can’t figure out how to interpret the guideline in a given situation, he or she doesn’t have enough judgment to work there. If you don’t trust the judgment of the people on your team, you have to ask why you’re employing them. It’s true that you’ll have to fire people occasionally for viol…

This other quote seem horrific as well. > A single specialist in Java distributed systems is managing the entire configuration without any commercial storage tools or help from engineers specializing in storage, SAN, or backup. So this person is either a genius who has specialized knowledge in these areas, or it's been abstracted by the platforms people to the point where it's only Java knowledge. Either way, it soun…

Not to speak for Netflix on the storage part, but Cassandra can run against ephemeral disks in AWS, and is designed for it. As such, I think what they are saying they don't have to think about storage as much.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#56

Post by makeitsuckless »

brendangregg wrote: post #20
matthewmacleod wrote: post #2

Netflix doesn’t have an HR manual. There is a single guideline: “Act in NetFlix’s best interest.” The idea is that if an employee can’t figure out how to interpret the guideline in a given situation, he or she doesn’t have enough judgment to work there. If you don’t trust the judgment of the people on your team, you have to ask why you’re employing them. It’s true that you’ll have to fire people occasionally for viol…

G'Day, I work at Netflix, and we hire what's been called "fully formed adults". Here's a quote that can explain it better than I (also see the full article): Source https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1 : "Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get…

You realize your company has an HR policy that is illegal in most civilized countries, because it is considered unethical for an employer to treat employees that way?

The issue here is that some (many) people need more guidance, because it's not their company, and they have no idea what it considers "the right thing". Should you hire such people, you can't just dump them like thrash because you can't be bothered to manage them properly.

Netflix is going to get into a truckload of legal issues if it tries to scale this practice internationally in countries with decent employee protection laws, which is most of the Western world outside the US.

Netflix sounds to me like a Randian cult.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#57

Post by brown9-2 »

makeitsuckless wrote: post #56
brendangregg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

G'Day, I work at Netflix, and we hire what's been called "fully formed adults". Here's a quote that can explain it better than I (also see the full article): Source https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1 : "Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get…

You realize your company has an HR policy that is illegal in most civilized countries, because it is considered unethical for an employer to treat employees that way? The issue here is that some (many) people need more guidance, because it's not their company, and they have no idea what it considers "the right thing". Should you hire such people, you can't just dump them like thrash because you can't be bothered to m…

I'd be curious where this is illegal in.

I don't think they are saying "we have zero policies whatsoever", but exaggerating the level of trust. For instance I am sure that new parents are given a fixed amount of paid leave.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#58

Post by makeitsuckless »

ryandvm wrote: post #9
harrylove wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would seem to echo Hastings' Netflix culture slide deck published in 2009[1]. It's worth reading even if you disagree. The deck was the first time I had heard of a major company having a "no vacation tracking" policy. It was presented in the same context as the HR manual. The policy of having no policies is built on employee trust. Employee trust is built on the standard of only hiring top quality employees. I'v…

Kind of a tangent, but having worked at two companies that have a "unlimited" vacation policies, I can say that I detest the concept. It's basically an anti-policy. There are two major ramifications of unlimited vacation policies: 1) It changes how you feel about taking time off. Rather than paid time off being something that you have "earned", you evaluate your PTO in comparison to your teammates - specifically most…

The so-called "unlimited vacation" is manipulative to the extreme. It would be illegal in most countries outside the US, because it's effectively taking worker's rights away.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#59

Post by pnathan »

brendangregg wrote: post #20
matthewmacleod wrote: post #2

Netflix doesn’t have an HR manual. There is a single guideline: “Act in NetFlix’s best interest.” The idea is that if an employee can’t figure out how to interpret the guideline in a given situation, he or she doesn’t have enough judgment to work there. If you don’t trust the judgment of the people on your team, you have to ask why you’re employing them. It’s true that you’ll have to fire people occasionally for viol…

G'Day, I work at Netflix, and we hire what's been called "fully formed adults". Here's a quote that can explain it better than I (also see the full article): Source https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1 : "Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get…

Having worked in similar environments with similar polities before, those sorts of policies tend to mean, "whoever has the most shininess in an argument" is the person who is considered to take the best policy, and frankly? innovation becomes stifled as the most political adult wins or stalls out the innovator who thinks further than others. Because in general, the members of the team are all adults, and we all understand the company, and we are all competent - so it comes down to who has the most appeal in the rhetorical wars. I find it appalling - extroverts and manipulation tends to win.

IOW, I'd rather work for a structured hierarchical firm, where politicians brown nose managers and the managers firewall these people from the rest of the team.

edit: Hum, your name seemed familiar. I attended your LISA talk. You're brilliant and well known (witty to boot, as I recall. :) ). You, sir, will be listened to by default, so you will tend not to encounter the failure modes I described above. But do think about them, okay? Tyranny of Structurelessness really is a great read.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#60

Post by pnathan »

mc32 wrote: post #33
matthewmacleod wrote: post #2

Netflix doesn’t have an HR manual. There is a single guideline: “Act in NetFlix’s best interest.” The idea is that if an employee can’t figure out how to interpret the guideline in a given situation, he or she doesn’t have enough judgment to work there. If you don’t trust the judgment of the people on your team, you have to ask why you’re employing them. It’s true that you’ll have to fire people occasionally for viol…

I agree this sounds on the surface like it's very liberal but in effect it's stifling. Since there are no concrete outlines the onus is on you to figure things out. That sounds great but then like you said, who decides "best interest"? It's an ideological wet dream. It's like saying, you can make any choice, you have the freedom, just make sure you make the "right choice". Not to mention what happens when netflix's b…

This is exactly what happens in the situations I've been in. It's miserable when you don't turn your attention to greasing the political game daily.
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