Adopting Microservices at Netflix

Christ on a bike, that sounds horrific.

All this approach can do is replace codified guidelines with unknown, arbitrary ones. Who defines what "NetFlix's best interest" is? In an organisation of that size, conflicts of interest must happen all the time.

Is this just a fancy way of saying "If we don't like you, you're out of the door?"

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 good, responsbile, knowledgable people, this is not so high.

Part of this is that you take the initiative to set expectations and clearly discuss what you are planning to do and what you'll be working on so there is no misunderstanding. It's all about setting expectations and communication.

I'm actually quite curious how life would be inside this culture. Since you have so much responsibility and control, life should be quite bussy, but manageable.

The ideal would be that you just have a bunch of adult, professional people who manage themselves just by talking to each other, agreeing on how they want to work with each other to get things done and they manage / steer this process themselves just with open communication. No (micro)managers needed.

The key is the people and their values / culture. Very simple things may make all the difference. Being on time. Being prepared for meetings (reading the short memo upfront, maybe lookup some things or make sure that you have done the tasks required of you). Starting the meeting on time. Respect each others time.

A willingness to to share and help people understand how tings are setup and why (reasoning), document the stuff that is important. And you know what is important or are capable of just asking what is important for other people to know so what you document is relevant.

I can only dream.

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-01-20/working-at-netfl...

> 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 sounds like this person never gets to take a vacation or be not on-call. Hopefully there's not just 1 person responsible for all of the configuration, it just takes 1 person to run it.

> Process prevents problems. At many companies, the standard response to something going wrong is to add a preventative step to the relevant procedure.

The linked section goes on to talk about HR process with the "Act in NetFlix's best interest". It totally avoids the concept of technical processes. I'm betting "best interest" is a bit more formal on the tech side. Bad process is process for process's sake. Good process serves a very important role for offloading what people have to remember, as well as knowledge transfer. From time to time, steps of a process become irrelevant because of other changes and it has to be pruned. Sometimes companies forget about this step.

If Netflix has ever seen a problem with their builds/deploys and added a test to check against that problem, guess what--they followed the standard response to update the procedure. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

Now, what you have to take into consideration is that it's written as a contrast to all kinds of other places that run a command structure where it's your boss' job to figure out what is good for the company.

I don't know about you, but I have worked in those environments before. They attract bad people, as doing what seems better for the company, as opposed to what is better for your boss, is discouraged. I think of one example in my past, where the team worked for two months on a feature we knew our in house customer did not want, and would refuse to use. However, it helped our boss' internal political status, so the team tolled, the feature was unused, and in the end, half the team quit. Our former manager, however, is still doing well, because what is good for the company was not what was good for his boss either.

I often get recruiting calls from that company. They have trouble retaining good talent. Imagine that.

So the Netflix approach brings in people that are more dedicated to the business than the chain of command. There's a lot of very good engineers there, and it's a pool that is often untapped outside of startups. It's not a bad strategic decision, IMHO.