I'm an ex-Netflix engineer (voluntarily left in March to work on my own company, worked there just under 3 years).
I don't know what it's like from the executive or middle management side of things, but from the engineering side of things, I liked the fact that people were transparent about their mistakes and there were always detailed write-ups about any technical incidents.
Incident post-mortems were always incredibly good for that reason, and I never felt like my job was on the line if I admitted to messing up somewhere.
I liked it a lot there, good work/life balance and never really felt stressed. If anything, I didn't think there was enough interesting work to go around as the company was growing a lot bigger.
Stories I’ve hear from friends to my family who worked at Netflix made me cringe. Regular meetings where everyone at the meeting have to do presentations about their own recent work at the company and basically have to present why they should stay instead of the ”other guy” who will be fired. No rest with constant fear of being fired or the alternative if you ”make it” is constant preasure of performaning better than other teams. This breeds a backstabbing culture for sure.
I think that if you don't have regular discussion of the good and bad, as it sounds like they do at Netflix, then the void gets filled with something else. I think that void in most cases is quickly filled with people who hate to explain their practices, don't want to discuss their failures, and as a whole that inhibits new people from succeeding and creates an awful work environment. I'm sure there are bad sides to this approach at Netflix but having seen what happens when the culture doesn't insist on regular difficult communication, I'm not sure Netflix sounds that awful.
it's interesting to put this into the larger context of "the US needs more programmers and STEM grads." if that is true, how does Netflix find additional people to hire? how does it survive in a competitive labor market when it treats employees in this way?
"the US needs more programmers and STEM grads" can always mean "we wish we could hire programmers for $45,000 a year, but due to supply and demand we have to pay them more than that"
and, just as paying well attracts workers, supportive/interesting/personal-growth-oriented/comfortable working conditions attract workers. but I gather Netflix doesn't want to take advantage of that strategy.
OTOH, could it be that Netflix's management approach actually squeezes more performance out of the very same talent pool every other company has to draw from? is Netflix on to something?
Not true for every team. As in Microsoft. As in Apple. As in Google. Amazon has great teams and supersmart people. If you're unlucky you end up in a crappy team. Since there are lots and lots, it's a luck-driven process.
CEO Reed Hastings is described as a dedicated adherent to the culture and several former employees said he is “unencumbered by emotion”—in a good way.
Is this not the definition of a psychopath?
This really does sound like hell to me. Then again a lot of modern corporate culture especially in tech seems to be moving toward this type of hell. Basically a form of social Darwinism.
Life and more specifically happiness is not efficient. Maximizing profit and growth and performance might work better unencumbered by emotions, survival of only the fittest, but does that lead to happiness?
Perhaps one counter argument to this is that, at the end of the day, pretty much all profit-driven enterprises will do what is necessary to maximize profits (without regards to emotion).
So, if anything, I give it to Netflix that at least they're being honest about it, as opposed to lots of other "we're changing the world", cultish organizations that talk a lot about how "we're all a big family", but then when the going gets tough all that goes out the window in the interests of "maximizing shareholder value".
Stoic maybe if the same rules applied to him, but it is not the case, they apply to everyone except himself. Maybe it is just me, but I don't like when people apply harsh rules for everyone except themselves. Cult or dictatorship come to mind.
When you're the owner/manager of something, you get to decide how people use the things under your control. It's the same way if you let someone borrow your car or other valuable possession: you'll see rules for how that item can be used (e.g. don't take the Lamborghini off-roading).
If that behavior extends outside of things you _should_ control (e.g. you try to control your friends and acquaintances), then it can be considered psychopathic or sociopathic. If you're just trying to minimize harm to things you control, then I'd argue that it's normal.
The CEO of a company is very much interested in running things efficiently. Without more information, there's really nothing to suggest this CEO has a mental disorder.
Not everything that is lawful is also ethical. He can do it and I firmly believe it is unethical at the same time. Also, and I am not necessarily referring to the CEO, being a bad person – when the noun would actually start with the letter a – doesn't mean having a mental disorder.
It does for shareholders, the only people who matter in a capitalist economy. The only people at all, really, everyone else is just a resource to be maximally extracted from.
On one hand this seem crazy. On another, every place I worked at was full of free-loaders who did nothing and never got fired. I wonder if things are different at Netflix.
Are they firing "free-loaders" or people who are just worse at playing politics/self-promoting?
We have extremely quiet people at work, few know what they do, but they're actually extremely productive, rarely make waves (good or bad), and help keep longer term goals.
The "Rockstar" types join, get all excitable, make a handful of rapid (often good) changes, burn out, and leave. Likely to start again at their next workplace.
> The "Rockstar" types join, get all excitable, make a handful of rapid (often good) changes, burn out, and leave. Likely to start again at their next workplace.
The most helpful advice I've ever been given by my manager is to come to terms with my, so to say, "rockstarness". There are people who come in to work everyday and deliver a constant stream of output. Others (like me) have huge bursts of productivity at seemingly random times. And that's fine when you know that this is what's going on. When I'm in a phase of low productivity, I don't panic anymore about not getting anything done. I'm deliberately spending the time mentoring juniors, learning new things, or working on getting tickets unblocked so that when the next productivity streak hits me, I'm ready to make the most of it.
I'm extremely quiet at work and don't really have any work friends at least in my department (helps stifle drama), yet am consistent with my productivity, have clear ticket queues every day or they're in a status where I'm waiting for a response from another engineer. I've had my manager tell me in 1:1's that people report me for doing nothing all day except listening to music. I've been here 3 years.
I'm content with just sitting here and doing this job for now and get paid enough to live at my means, so I make no attempts to get a promotion where I'll have much more work and stress, and make little attempts to go above and beyond. I just stay consistent and I'm seen as a free loader by some. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They were taken away from us around a year ago. They were very beneficial, but leadership said they 'were a waste of time'. Our team has suffered with communication and staying on track with problem issues since. Oh well though. I just keep doing the same work.
Well, we have to come to terms with the realization that society has a percentage of freeloaders. They also need to make a living; somehow. So the better option is to assume a certain percentage of freeloaders and design work with them in mind. Instead of firing them, reassign them to places they will prove more useful. Something like where in Japan they relegate these people to the periphery of the company but don’t fire them.
A friend had a co-worker who would just walk around the company all day holding a coffee mug, schmooze with people, pop in on meetings, etc. They ended up making him the liaison (point person) for the company's charity projects. He apparently ended up doing a great job in this position.
I always feel that freeloaders are not hurting me personally, so why harm them? And it's not like they bring nothing to the table, it's just less than an ambitious/motivated person would. Last but not least, and why I think most people take on freeloaders and keep them: If they switch to another company and are motivated there, it's better for them personally, but might also mean more competition on the market. Therefore better have all people slack off in your offices than give the competition the edge. Not sure if I would agree with that strategy but it has some logic at least.
>I always feel that freeloaders are not hurting me personally, so why harm them?
In my experience, over time, freeloaders tend to become vocal and lobby for policy changes (within the team, not corporatewise) that helps keep them there. I've seen them oppose technically sound decisions because they're not sure they can handle the complexity, or (and more commonly) because it involves skills they don't want to learn. Skills well within their reach if they just tried - some of them had those skills in school and they merely need to get a book and review what they once knew.
Generally, if you're a motivated person, but in a team with a significant number of "freeloaders", your ability to raise the bar of the team will be limited. I left my last team because of it.
Ah I see, there's certainly a clear difference between our evaluation. If I see a whole team of freeloaders I blame the management team above them. At least in engineering teams it's super easy to have motivated teams because the people choose this career out of desire for working as engineers. Loads of freeloaders means there is no fruitful ground for motivated people to grow on. So they leave or turn into slackers, and some even might become toxic themselves. I don't blame the potatoes if they don't grow though, but either the weather or the farmer.
>At least in engineering teams it's super easy to have motivated teams because the people choose this career out of desire for working as engineers.
Where do you work and how do I get a job there?
I've only worked in big corporations - and I rarely see this attitude. Many people became engineers because it was seen as a way to make a decent living. The number among them who actually enjoy technical stuff (say, well enough that they would do it in their spare time if they had all the money in the world) is negligible. And then even amongst those, big corporations with mediocre management can do a great job of demotivating you. I've certainly been there - where I decide "Screw all this. At this point I'm doing it only for a paycheck (i.e. no job satisfaction). I'll just put in the minimum to keep my employer happy and use my extra time to do fun technical stuff at home".
In my experience, the "median" management helps you go down that path. You really need them to actively foster technical interest.
Western Europe country. I wouldn't suggest my company though. Where I currently work is Slack-off Fest 9000, but it's also a big corp.
Maybe you should check out meetups, hack fests, hackathons, coworking spaces, hacker spaces, maker spaces around you. There you can meet the real engineers. They earn maybe even just 50-75% of your colleagues. But they always give 120%.
And these also exist in big corps, but true, it's rarer there. The highest motivated engineers I see in big corps are people who don't care about engineering that much, but are certainly working their ass off to ship whatever stupid idea their manager had latest. The thing will not work in a customer environment, but it's good for a demo, and more does their manager not need.
I also led teams of engineers in the start-up world. Usually all you need to do is keep the political bullshit away from them, show them the sufferings of the customer, and provide them with enough money that they don't starve to death (and can afford 1-2 raspberry pis, and/or a nerf gun).
I had a Netflix offer this year I declined (yes, people decline Netflix now and then)
The salary was eye-popping...$400k. That's just to be a senior developer. There were RSUs on top of this so total comp was probably $500k. That's crazy!
I knew if I joined I would be terminated but that didn't bother me...the salary was crazy and apparently the goodbye package is also generous. I suppose it's sort of nuts to know you will be fired from day one though.
In fairness they make sure you understand what you are getting in to. My future manager even phoned me on a Saturday to make sure I understood. So I have respect for them
When the next recession hits, working in tech will get worse and even the monster salaries will go away. Almost no one here has had to experience a real drop in demand for developers
There are no RSUs at Netflix, just for everyone 5% each year of annual salary in free stock options at 40% of current value, vesting every month. You can also use up to 100% of your salary for buying stock options at 40% of current value. The policy made rich many people who invested heavily in the stock options program years back.
The severance package is 4 months of salary.
I doubt you got an offer from there, because it is all very clear, or you did not pay any attention.
Dude I don't even know how the stocks work at my current employer. Can't force you to believe I got an offer there and I'm not forwarding you my offer letter...so choose to believe me or not.
Putting aside the very rude "dude", it is not a matter of how RSUs work or do not work, more simply they never talk about RSUs because they do not give RSUs.
As I said, you never got an offer or you did not pay any attention. It is fine either way, of course. No need for any letter.
Not even remotely similar. RSU for a public company given at $100 per share can be sold at $100 per share (or more or less depending on the value of the share when it is sold). For public companies, that is basically cash. If you buy an option at 40% of current $100 value means you pay now $40 dollars for the option of buying the share at $100 in the future (Netflix has a 10 years horizon). That means that you start making money ($1, pre-tax!) when the stock reaches $141. If it does not happen, you have lost your $40.
400k??? This seems insanely high. Are you one of a kind specialist of sort? I find it hard to believe that regular engineer, even in the prime of his career can expect such high salary.
Their location is brutal and basically transit-inaccessible. You'd have to pay me seven figures to live near Los Gatos or do the crazy commute from some place interesting.
That’s more than double average salary. Seems like worth going for it, even knowing that they will fire you eventually. Hold on for 6 months, make a yearly salary, take 6 months off :)
Most of the time they do not hire average people – in the sense that they are not considered average, then some of them are actually pretty bad, but it is part of the business of false positives.
hmm, from what I have seen, $400k is usually their de-facto salary that gets junior folks (L4/E4) from F/G to make their top of market and move to NFLX. Beyond that, do you know how the comp progression is?
Yes, or is there a version of this policy -- say remove very poor performers from time to time -- that is effective without having to fetishize being "tough"
The idea of removing the lowest performers, regardless of their ability, is a business idea from I believe the Jack Welch era at GE.
In my management classes at business school, it's taught as a cautionary tale of unintended consequences and bad management. So this policy is a well-explored bad idea from decades ago, and it seems typical of Silicon Valley to arrogant reinvent a wheel without looking at cautionary tales from the past.
Most people cannot even tell you how to measure a programmer's performance. But we're comfortable with firing the "lowest performing" developers? Lowest performing by what metric?
Honestly these "get rid of poor performance" policies are just abused to remove people who others have a personal dislike for, or similarly those who don't make enough friends to game the system.
Plus whose to say that even if we could measure performance, that it wouldn't be down to externalities outside of the individual's control (e.g. poor manager, poor team culture, bad project requirements, poorly written/documented legacy system they need to integrate with, etc).
To put this idea another way: good managers are humans, and exceptional humans aren't scalable. To solve that problem, companies try to deploy algorithms (via spreadsheets or software) that do scale, but end up being terrible managers.
They’ve been pushing the same product since inception; they could do nothing except maintain current tech and catalogue, which is what they’ve more or less been doing. So it’s in spite of. They could have any culture, hire a herd of thousands of cats and pay them half a million each, and they wouldn’t lose much.
The only thing they need to do to survive is maintain rights to enough shows people are willing to pay for.
I wasn't speaking only regarding tech, since the previous poster talked about the catalogue, which has definitively changed with the Originals (the first is just five years old).
But even regarding tech, they've been making new things; for example, they moved from physical data centers to their OpenConnect appliances.
Netflix is following FB tracks it seems, 1st degrade the user experience, then poor company ethics surface. Soon we'll need food like "humane" labels in tech..
[edit : user not customer]
What did the user experience used to be like, if the current version is 'degraded'? We only just got Netflix but it seems pretty slick and well-thought-out.
I don't know what it was like before, but when I signed up for it after Netflix went international in 2016, and my first reaction is: this is it?
Using Netflix feels like giving up control, over both the viewing experience and the recommendation system. The recommendation system that Netflix poured millions into developing, with hyperoptimizations down to the thumbnails you see? I can't get it to stop recommending me shows I don't want to see. I can't pick the genres I want to show up on the homepage. The automated genre generation/clustering algorithm occasionally generates hilariously poor results. I can't leave my mouse over any thumbnail for a few seconds to read the synopsis because the trailer will automatically start playing.
Another example: No control over stream quality. I'm fine with waiting 30 seconds for the higher quality version to buffer, but Netflix forces me to watch the first 30 seconds in glorious 360p with sharp edges and features on actor's faces smudged out of existence. There's no way to change this setting, which exists on every video player I've seen since before YouTube existed.
Auto play video trailers.
Star ratings are almost invisible. The currrnt Betflix percentage ratings have almost no association with reality and once again seem to exist to promote Netflix shows.
It’s harder to find an episode that I stopped watching midway the previous night, because Netflix is promoting its own shows.
Non Netflix catalog is buried deep. I’m not sure if this is because they simply don’t have much Non Netfkix content anymore.
Movies are hard to find. Again, this could be a content issue.
The UI is slick. It’s also simply geared towards making you zombie watch Netfkix branded shows.
Those who have been subscribed for a long time know that the content selection is abysmal compared to what it was in the past. A long time ago, I remember feeling surprised when they didn't have something specific I wanted to see; now I am surprised when they DO have something specific I want to see.
That and there were things that, yes, might've taken a little time to maintain, but at least gave it a 'face' outside of normal corporate BS such as being able to share stuff with friends on there. Also, star ratings going away, I think reviews are gone now too, as well as the ability to dismiss things you aren't interested in the past (I think that disappeared a few years ago).
The UI and findability sucks if you're on a PC but is fine if you're on a big screen tv (which is the direction I assume it's been aimed in, as well as big buttons for touch screen or visibility). When I was subscribed, I would use a third party website like instantwatcher to easily sort and search what so I could browse quickly.
Recommendations and the whatever algorithms they're using now aren't very useful (maybe coming full circle on the limited content leading to limited choice).
FB has been accused of poor ethics since the start. They were barely three years old when they launched Beacon[1], to much criticism and even lawsuits.
I really liked working at Netflix, but yeah... puhrty intense culture.
Also seems like the Hollywood office is becoming more "Hollywood", which might prove problematic for avoiding all of the dumb mistakes Hollywood people make.
With so much attention going to the content side of the biz, I also wonder if top engineers would feel more celebrated at Google, Facebook, or start-ups where their contributions are seen as the primary innovation driver of the business.
Also, what engineering/technical challenges do you think Netflix still has to resolve? It seems like things are stable and right now the focus is on content growth / ownership, especially in the face of other companies catching up and trying to compete in the streaming space.
> Sounds like being on a sports team at a high level.
In the sports that doesn't pay too much (for most people working at Netflix) even though you are in the top of the world. With the high level sports you get some kind of satisfaction that you got further than anyone (or some other reason beyond money) and not for the money; most people at Netflix probably work there for the money.
>In the sports that doesn't pay too much (for most people working at Netflix)
Can most people who work at Netflix join another company for comparable pay? From what I've heard: No. Netflix often justifies their culture by pointing out they pay the highest. If you look at a thread below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316176) you'll see that $400K guaranteed as a senior developer is normal.
They also used to have a generous severance pay - well above industry average. That again was used to justify their policy: Hire the best, and give them a generous token of appreciation when we replace them. The claim was they don't want people to be worried about being fired, because whether they stay or leave, they'll get good money.
(Not sure if the severance package is good these days - my information is quite dated).
The question of course is how much staff works on video tech. Even at a company like Google, most people are not working on Google search. There are teams that do all kinds of work behind the scenes to make this happen. Like Build teams, SRE, QR DevOps etc.
The tech part is hard, but is largely solved. AWS has today made it easy to play the scale game. The unsolved riddle there is affordability not tech. That's the whole point behind Amazon Prime anyway. If Netflix was using their infrastructure to be successful, they might as well have done it themselves and they have.
Another big part about these companies is they oversell the role of technology, and the role of tech people in their success. Content is way important a thing for these companies than tech will ever be. Interesting content to consume is what keeps these people in the game.
There is a reason why some thing like New York Times is still around. And they are not even a tech company.
"The study of 261 senior professionals in the United States found that 21 per cent had clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. The rate of psychopathy in the general population is about one in a hundred."
And I personally think if you examine ceos of highly successful companies, the ratio will be higher than 1 in 5.
Sure it's ONE study. But it actually makes sense. You don't get to the top in modern corporate world (especially hyper competitive one like the tech) without being slightly crazy.
I wonder if this model would work better with a little bit of gamification.
Let me explain: You get fired for not performing. And the gamification part is you can get hired again in that same company, even same position, let's say, three or six months after you were fired.
You get your old salary, benefits everything. And the mental relief that being laid of is not permanent.
Then you work different this time, with the experience of having done this job before and the experience of being without a job too.
It would benefit Netflix a lot more than firing people in a permanent basis, IMO. And with these ultra high salaries, people would go back there.
This isn't all that surprising. Almost 10 years ago Reed literally published all these tenants in a culture presentation that made the rounds in SV. It very much mentions keeper test.
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/reed2001
Now what is interesting are the anecdotes about how it impacts people. People often feel motivated by fear, and sometimes feel shamed, etc.
"""One employee expressed the feeling that they live in fear of being fired every day at an executive meeting. A vice president named Karen Barragan was said to have responded: “Good, because fear drives you.” """
isn't this normal (for contractors?)
i mean it is terrible (armies whose job is to kill people put a pot of effort into avoiding just such feelings)
I do wonder why businesses so easily follow this route.
maybe it's interesting here that, in the last couple of days on HN, we've seen several stories to the effect that long-term chronic stress is literally damaging people's brains.
given that, i wonder how a Netflix competitor might exploit the defects in this hiring/firing strategy.
Exactly my thoughts. In fact, from what I've seen companies where people lead "from the front", ie. by example, have much higher productivity and better retention of top performers than companies where the management goes around threatening people if they don't perform.
Usually in the early stage (when stock has no value) people get more stock. Then in the growth times people get more cash. And then when the growth slows down and one succeeded at becoming another boring behemoth people get stock again because it increases market activity for an otherwise boring stock. So I would assume that most Netflix people currently report a higher amount of cash bonuses, while the internal policy slowly shifts to more stock.
No, I actually read an article saied that, you can choose how much do you want to stick your profit to the company, AKA, you can choose how many proportion do you want to get paied by cach or stock.
It is wrong and it is very unlikely that you read it in an article, since it is not a secret. There are no stocks, it is all cash for everybody, at least below the C-suite. You can use up to 100% of your salary to buy stock options at 40% of current value. The options are delivered each month and vest immediately.
There is a huge difference between shares and stock options.
>>CEO Reed Hastings is described as a dedicated adherent to the culture
It really isn't culture unless it applies to yourself. Does Mr Hastings hold himself to the same standards himself as does to everybody else?
>>Kill or be killed seems to be accepted as a mode of operation.
A pathetic excuse for a toxic work environment than anything else. This will lead to non-existent to negligible co-operation inside and across teams. Stealth political projects and alliances to sabotage internal projects. Cartel style power structures, purges and internal power dynamics. You usual ala carte toxic political power play.
Of course this happens in all companies. But the speed is low. Here it feels like the CEO derives please pouring a catalyst into a run away chemical reaction.
>>It’s also led to culture shock as the company rapidly expands, takes on bigger loads of debt, and faces stiff competition.
Based on everything I've read so far. I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff Bezos eats these people for lunch in a few years.
Bezos isn't known to be employee friendly either, but he is also not a fool.
There is a always a fine line between working hard towards a purpose, and pointless busyness just for the heck of it.
>>One executive said he was fired because he did not inform others about another employee’s medical condition out of respect for their privacy. Netflix saw this as not being “forthright with us around a major employee issue.” But Jonathan Friedland, former chief communications officer was a little too forthright and open when transparently talking out issues. He was fired this summer
Damned if you do, damned if you don't situations happen in processes where people want to screw you regardless, and not exactly because of the merit of your case.
Here the cartel boss seems to maintain early communism-esque purge lists.
