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Adopting Microservices at Netflix

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Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#61

Post by EdwardDiego »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #42
nkozyra wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think rather than "fully-formed adults," what's described here is mutual compatibility. Which is kind of unfortunate, as weird as that sounds. We'd all like to work with people who operate with the same understanding, ethos, sense of humor, etc. It makes the day better, right? No office drama, no awkward meetings. But I would contend doing this tends to put you at a genetic disadvantage, and that some types of conf…

I got something very different out of it - it reminds me of Auftragstaktik, or leading by mission. Instead of adding explicit restrictions on employees, give them freedom of action. It takes trust that they're the kind of person that would make the kind of decision you want. In other words, having a shared "adult" background.

My employer treats us as 'fully formed adults' also. It's fantastic, especially after the years I spent in government, where we were all treated like children who required policies on every damned thing to guide us.

An obvious example is about how you use your computer. In my old job, it was highly regulated. Want to install Firefox on your machine? Sorry, that's against IT policy, we only support IE. Your machine is locked down to prevent unauthorised installs, and even if it weren't, you'd be up for a warning for violating the policy.

In my current company, the sysops still limit what they support - for example, they're not willing to support OS X Yosemite users yet, and recommend users stay on Mavericks. But, if you want to upgrade to Yosemite, you can, just don't ask the sysops for help fixing it. And if your broken Yosemite install is impeding your work, well, we trust that you'll resolve it one way or another.

Or another - alcohol. In the government, alcohol at work was banned. A beer at lunch could get you fired. When we had Christmas parties, alcohol was provided, but on a token-per-drink basis. Everyone got two tokens. My current company, the beer fridge is a treasured perk. There are no rules about how much beer you can drink, or when you can drink it. So far, no raging alcoholism has impeded work.

What I really notice is that when you treat people like adults, they respond like adults, and when you treat them like children, they respond like children.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#62

Post by wonnage »

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…

The logical conclusion of your codify-everything approach is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

Every functioning organization requires faith in the people you work with.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#63

Post by ernestipark »

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 think so. This is similar to HubSpot's policy (and probably influenced) of "Use Good Judgement". You can read more about it in the culture deck[1], but it's incredibly liberating and means there is a culture of trust rather than rules and regulations. And in most places, employment is at-will anyways so outside of illegal reasons, you can get fired for any old reason anyways.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-hubspot-culture-code-c...

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#64

Post by e12e »

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 don't think it is illegal anywhere. It might be illegal for Netflix to fire people over "violations" of such a "policy" -- but I don't really think that'll be an issue either. It's not a policy that lends itself to firing people because some manager didn't like them (which, incidentally is illegal many places anyway). But if someone were to actually "work against the company's best interested" repeatedly, that'd typically be a firing offence anyway. That'd be stuff like not actually doing work, stealing, sabotaging and/or leaking company secrets etc.

I think it sounds great to not have a lot of pretend-policy that does no good other than pretend to cover the ass of inept management.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#65

Post by q2 »

chc wrote: post #30
AngusMcQuarrie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how we're happy to talk about companies in a Positive light that do good things, but don't want to name names when it comes to the shit-holes we've ejected ourselves from.

Is that really interesting? I would be surprised if people were more eager to make enemies and potentially make themselves look petty than to make friends.

We expect freedom and transparency in all aspects across the world irrespective of personal/social costs associated with it. Isn't it? So why exception in this case? Just because it is unwritten and some sort of convention inducing hypothetical fear? Won't it help future employees from joining such toxic work places? Just a view point.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#66

Post by betaclass »

stonemetal wrote: post #53
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…

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

I'm not sure what Github's stated policy was, but it's clear from Julie Ann Horvath's description of how things operated there that quite a few of her co-workers were far from being fully-formed adults.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#67

Post by meowface »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #61
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got something very different out of it - it reminds me of Auftragstaktik, or leading by mission. Instead of adding explicit restrictions on employees, give them freedom of action. It takes trust that they're the kind of person that would make the kind of decision you want. In other words, having a shared "adult" background.

My employer treats us as 'fully formed adults' also. It's fantastic, especially after the years I spent in government, where we were all treated like children who required policies on every damned thing to guide us. An obvious example is about how you use your computer. In my old job, it was highly regulated. Want to install Firefox on your machine? Sorry, that's against IT policy, we only support IE. Your machine is…

>In my current company, the sysops still limit what they support - for example, they're not willing to support OS X Yosemite users yet, and recommend users stay on Mavericks. But, if you want to upgrade to Yosemite, you can, just don't ask the sysops for help fixing it. And if your broken Yosemite install is impeding your work, well, we trust that you'll resolve it one way or another.

Sorry, but as someone who works in IT security, this sounds like an absolute nightmare. Even if you have a small company comprised only of intelligent developers, those developers do not necessarily understand the latest malware threats or what sorts of software can introduce risks. Wide-open FTP servers and Tomcat servers with default passwords are a major issue. I would actually say developers probably introduce more threats into our environment than any other demographic.

Whitelisting software installs from specific domains (google.com, mozilla.org) is okay, but a carte blanche policy is usually a very bad idea.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#68

Post by sgentle »

rodgerd wrote: post #48
ryandvm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's still unlimited, for whatever that's worth, but employees will be required to take a minimum amount of vacation every year. It's worth noting that in some sectors (including the one I work in), minimum chunks of leave are considered an anti-fraud measure. A non-trivial amount of internal fraud is uncovered when someone is required to take 1-2 weeks off in a block, which is enough to require someone else to sta…

There's an important related point there: regular vacations are the business process equivalent of the Chaos Monkey. Repeatedly having to do without employees for a short amount of time forces you to make your processes robust.

I've previously asked co-workers and even bosses who work too hard to take time off for exactly this reason.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#69

Post by acaloiar »

kitbrennan wrote: post #40
acaloiar wrote: post #17

"If you ask any developer whether a slower development process is better, no one ever says yes. Nor do management or customers ever complain that your development cycle is too fast for them." I've never known a developer not to speak up when the development cycle is too fast or a user who is not averse to the resultant buggy software.

You're confusing 'development cycle' and 'pushing code'. Pushing code too fast is clearly a problem that causes bugs, and neither developers or users are a fan of. The 'development cycle' includes the total time to implement something, including time taken to fix resultant bugs. Where you can speed up the development cycle without introducing more bugs (eg. by implementing comprehensive testing and QA practices), the…

I think you draw an important distinction, but I don't believe that either of our comments are incorrect. I was explicitly referring to a development cycle that is too fast. After all, developers are humans and not machines. Perpetually fast development cycles lead to mental exhaustion, missed vacations--bugs. Unless, of course, you exist on a team that is staffed over-capacity such that the absence of any single developer has an immaterial effect on development cycles. I suspect that is not the case for most of us.

Re: Adopting Microservices at Netflix

#70

Post by brendangregg »

pnathan wrote: post #59
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…

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 under…

Yes, in prior jobs I've seen the extraverts and manipulators win, by use of their charisma over technical facts. Most engineers aren't like that, but a few are, and we try not to hire them.

It helps to have technical management, who are able to understand all sides of a technical argument, regardless of how those sides were presented. It also helps to have staff who all can communicate effectively, at least at some basic level.

Tyranny of Structurelessness is great. But I'd like to see a more focused analysis of tech culture and its failings.

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