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Netflix: Non-'A' Players Unworthy of Jobs
theodp writes "Describing How Netflix Reinvented HR for the Harvard Business Review, ex-Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord describes 'the most basic element of Netflix's talent philosophy: The best thing you can do for employees — a perk better than foosball or free sushi — is hire only "A" players to work alongside them.' Continuing her Scrooge-worthy tale, McCord adds that firing a once-valuable employee instead of finding another way for her to contribute yielded another aha! moment for Netflix: 'If we wanted only "A" players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people — and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them — we learned to offer rich severance packages.' It's a sometimes-praised, sometimes-criticized strategy that's straight out of Steve Jobs' early '80s playbook. But, even if you assume your execs are capable of identifying 'A' players, how do you find enough employees if 90% of the country's population is deemed unworthy of jobs? Well, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings' support of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC suggests one possible answer — you get lobbyists to convince Congress you need to hire as many people as you want from outside the country. An article commenter points out that Netflix's 'Culture of Fear' has earned it a 3.2/5.0 rating on Glassdoor."
...so I guess there is now another reason to do it!
Netflix accepting only "A-Players" is exactly the corporate equivalent of some fat greasy obese anime-watching neckbeard putting up his dating profile and going SUPERMODELS ONLY PLEASE.
14 errors in font-awesome.css, over 50 errors in application.css, "Expected media feature name but found 'touch-enabled'" I don't even know what that means, but it came up a dozen times, downloadable font format unrecognized, another 50 errors in providers.css...
Leaving aside the obvious retort that Patty McCord sounds like she no longer fits, this sort of problem cannot be solved as long as people think they're all such special snowflakes that they don't need no stinkin' union. Work hard enough and you might just win the race to the bottom!
Anyway, they're just a streaming media company who got in there at the right time. It's not as if they do anything particularly remarkable, so when they talk about hiring "'A' players" they really just mean people who are mewly, pukey and subservient enough to fit the corporate culture. And, as summary notes, this is less about innovation in hiring+firing and more about starting the lobbying machine.
It's why Netflix has hands-down THE best offering around. Their streaming service would work in a foxhole on a 50kbps satellite connection.
Qwikster is not one of them.
But seriously, I don't think this policy is really all that outrageous. If 90% of the country is "unworthy of jobs" as the summary suggests Netflix is implying, there are still about 30 million left ... plenty for NFLX to hire. Even if you restrict that to computer science majors, I'm sure they'll find enough bodies. At companies with lax employment standards, you do sometimes end up with freeloaders that don't pull their weight, but identifying top-talent is not an exact science and people may leave if the environment becomes too toxic (see: IBM).
It does appear, though, that we are moving toward an economy where employment of people is not necessary. What do to about that, and how to feed those people, is a separate issue (but certainly not Netflix's problem).
on my list of too sleazy to deal with...
Maybe you could just ask people why they're no longer "A players" (which is a crap word in itself) or if they're going through a rough patch in the life?
Work is only 8h to keep you fed, it's not the center of your life. Everyone seeing it different will burn out - and maybe that's what's happening to their former best people. Or they're simply content with their work now because their fondest ideas have been implemented.
You can't force creativity which is the basis of excellent work and great ideas. You can only create a stable basis and trustful environment, so that ideas will flow and will be discussed in a proper manner.
Also perpetual competition within your teams and organization does NOT lead to the best results. It leads to fear, sucking up and everyone's self hidden agenda to keep their seat.
The company's statements are truly the core of what's wrong with the USA and what we in Europe have fought for ages. Still, it's creeping in...
Netflix isn't the first business to put all the weight on the players while ignoring the game. It doesn't matter how many A players you hire if your organization has deep structural problems. Microsoft would be a prime example.
In contrast, you can build extremely effective organizations out of ordinary people, if you allow them to organize freely around problems, compete honestly, delegate at will, and so on.
My blog
I was going to try out Netflix right after the post-Christmas AV rebuild. Not now, though. I was fine with the A-only, but the "we can't (be bothered to) to find (or pay) local talent" is more than enough to offset that.
"Continuing her Scrooge-worthy tale, McCord adds that firing a once-valuable employee instead of finding another way for her to contribute yielded another aha! moment for Netflix: 'If we wanted only "A" players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been.'"
Sounds like the epitome of short-term planning.
Congratulations, Netflix. Good (or not so) to know you. Really sorry to see you let it go to your head.
Ie does it also apply to the top level of management, or does it only apply to lower level, dispensible, minions ?
Netflix has sure made some foolish decisions for a company consisting of solely 'A' players. Why did they choose VC-1 for video compression, when H.264 is better in most measurable ways (including device compatibility, image quality at a given bitrate, etc.)? Why did they announce separate disc / streaming services (Quickster), and then immediately backtrack? And the reason Reed Hastings gave for the backtrack was, “It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.” How in the flying fuck did the A-Team manage to not figure that out in the first place?
I understand that even the best people aren't perfect, but it just doesn't add up. It seems like the mistakes they have made are simply too avoidable for them to be hiring only the "best of the best."
If 90% of a country's population is deemed unworthy of jobs, the country is doomed. A nation does not survive by allowing its talent to be wasted, and Netflix's philosophy is treasonous.
The best thing people can do to help America die is to sit idle and watch Netflix.
I bet the interview includes this test.
Sounds like a great place to work in, when, no matter how much blood you've spilled to get the latest and greatest out the door, you can get let go the very next minute you need to cut back a little to recuperate.
Remember kids: These kinds of people aren't interested in what you've learned or from your experience, not even from within the same company. Why? Because THEY are incompetent, and thus incapable of valuing experience, competence and knowledge. Also, they want to destroy your country for profit.
Psychopaths tend to view life as a game. And to be grossly incompetent. Thus the need to create scapegoats out of their own failings, instead of to ensuring ownership, bringing stakeholders together, make plans together and create organic and agile processes to ensure value.
Captcha: salesmen
Most or all of the people on /. would have to agree with this, at least on some level. I may not, myself, be an A-player but I know that working with them is an absolute pleasure. Worth far more than free lunches or pinball machines. I'm talking about the kind of people that you are constantly learning from - new ideas, new approaches, excitement and passion for what they are doing. I firmly believe that a good (A-player) techie is worth at least 3 average ones, and possibly worth an infinity of them.
What is an A-player though? How do you know one without working with them for a decent period? Do they have to have people skills or are they just a bonus? Do they have to have interests outside tech or are they just a bonus? I also think that the notion of an A-player is actually pretty nebulous, and overall company culture has a lot to do with whether someone will be an A-player or not in any given environment. I was offered the CTO position in a small company I worked in for several years but ended up not taking it for a variety of reasons, one of the main ones being that it would have been impossible to get rid of the D, E and even F players, due to both corporate culture and local employment laws. I am fairly certain the company will eventually die because of the lack of innovation coming out of it, and I think that is because most of the dead wood is taking salaries without contributing anything really valuable back. Then everyone will lose their job...
This the formula to became a European Country or a Venezuela.
For some reason, I think GE had a similar management philosophy tied to the process improvement system Six Sigma. I think the idea was that you fired the bottom 10%(?) of your work force every year, regardless of their absolute performance.
I can't see how this or any other similar system is sustainable, though. There are a lot of transaction costs with hiring new employees; at some point the overall cost of termination and hiring will exceed the differential value of a better employee.
You probably can't do this without statistics and it's not hard to see management and employees quickly learning to work towards statistics rather than results, as well as eliminating creative risk taking. Look at business as an example -- Wall Street is the ultimate version of this and corporations have devoted a lot of time and energy into managing to Wall Street numbers instead of other, longer-term goals that don't deliver the "numbers" in the expected timeline.
I would also think a culture like this would become quite ruthless and unpleasant, with "getting rid of people" becoming a goal and kill a lot of organizational enthusiasm if you spent a lot of time worrying about being gotten rid of.
On the other hand, they are probably trying to deal with real problems -- people who are just good enough to not get fired, and people who "rest on their laurels" after some accomplishment and stop contributing in a meaningful way, although management is often complicit in this by promoting people into mediocrity.
Here's the problem. Grade A people expect to do grade A work. In almost every organization there is a ton of work that doesn't fit into this category but still needs attention. Code gets old and has to be updated, and there's a ton of work that doesn't require the brightest and best but still has to be done.
Now the grade A people don't want to know that. They want to work on the sexy new stuff that makes them look like the superstars they are. They might put up with maintenance coding for a while, but they won't stay there. They will want to move to better things, and if they can't they will move to another company - and because they are grade A, they can do that with relative ease.
Google used to have the same issue with a grade A requirement, and they found that products stayed in beta for years as a result of engineers moving on when the interesting parts of the code was done. They even had to cancel some products because they couldn't get engineering resources that wanted to work on them. So they lowered their standards a little and things improved somewhat.
By the way, I'm not knocking maintenance programming - that's often difficult work. Maintenance guys have to come up to speed quickly on systems they never wrote and then make the code do things it was never designed to do, and finish it in an impossible short deadline, because it's "only" maintenance. But it's not sexy enough for most grade A folks.
What's there to be worried about? If you make wise decisions despite ambiguity, identify root causes, think strategically, smartly prioritize, perfectly understand others, speak and write in an articulate yet concise fashion, treat people with unfaltering respect no matter what, never lose your calm, accomplish amazing amounts of important work consistently, somehow focus on great results without thinking about how to do so, are fluent in meaningless buzzwords, learn rapidly and eagerly, know everything and can do everything, understand all about marketing, innovate, quickly find simple and cheap solutions to extremely hard and complex problems, take risks, make tough decisions, emit controversial opinions and criticize other people's bad behaviour without offending anyone or ever failing, inspire others, care deeply about your employer's success, [...], and you take time to help your colleagues and share information openly and proactively, then you'll have no problem.
Netflix have listed all of their criteria for being an A-player, you just have to follow that. What's so hard about that?
Let me ask this burning question: WTF IS AN A-PLAYER????
Maybe one who is part of the A-Team?
Maybe one who wears A-Style clothes?
I think the key is that being good at management is squishy and managers evaluating managers shoots for mediocre at best. Microsoft is full of politics because politics is all that managers can see in each other. They kill off an insane amount of decent to great projects and lose a ton of awesome people through politics. I was on an awesome startup team that was making traction and we got put under another manager that was trying desperately to have excuses why his team was 3 years late. If anyone with any authority would have spent more than a few hours looking at their branch the whole team would have been out the door, instead he got the go ahead to seek our teams 'help' and merge us under him. So my team was made to fit into where they wanted with a 'new design' that was made by the same team and we had no say, which meant we all had to find another team quick or leave Microsoft. Half the v- were chopped instantly too even though they were great.
I am pretty sure that Netflix is not taking this attitude to the top as Hastings has messed up plenty of times and their strategy is complete crap. So why didn't they fire him and everyone that messed up the Stars negotiation?
I think the choice of VC-1 came because it was supported by Silverlight while H.264 was limited if present at all. VC-1 is also the protocol of choice for Blu-Ray, and the time saved simply copying the files instead of moving them to H.264 may be significant.
They're the largest in their field and have little real competition, so they must be doing something right. They're also in the process of moving away from Silverlight, provide a primary source of more bandwidth across the Internet than perhaps any other single company (not counting CDNs like Akamai), and maintain a customer satisfaction rate that is the envy of most of the entertainment industry. The executives may need to be smacked around a little, but it's hard to argue that the company as a whole has many serious problems.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Had an "A player" right here. Cut corners everywhere so he'd finish quickly to look like a miracle worker, found other people to blame when the inevitable problems arose from that, then fucked off to a high paying contract in Saudi Arabia before it was obvious to everyone that he wasn't pulling his weight. People who present well and tick all the boxes can sometimes be too good to be true.
That's it, I'm cancelling my subscription. While I can understand the need to recruit talents, this so- called "HR-culture" is just awful. Where is the human in HR when you deal with your employees that way? Whatever the quality of the service, I will not help a company who think that employees are a commodity. The consequences of a culture of fear are depressions, suicides and broken families. And it is in no way improving the overall quality of the company. The best discoveries and improvements are generally made in enjoyable working environment.
From the article:
The second conversation took place in 2002, a few months after our IPO. Laura, our bookkeeper, was bright, hardworking, and creative. She’d been very important to our early growth, having devised a system for accurately tracking movie rentals so that we could pay the correct royalties. But now, as a public company, we needed CPAs and other fully credentialed, deeply experienced accounting professionals—and Laura had only an associate’s degree from a community college. Despite her work ethic, her track record, and the fact that we all really liked her, her skills were no longer adequate. Some of us talked about jury-rigging a new role for her, but we decided that wouldn’t be right.
So I sat down with Laura and explained the situation—and said that in light of her spectacular service, we would give her a spectacular severance package. I’d braced myself for tears or histrionics, but Laura reacted well
[...]
[Talking about another employee that no longer 'fit']
Give her a great severance package—which, when she signs the documents, will dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a lawsuit.”
Folks - remember the snippets above in your dealings with any company. This is the nature of the employer-employee contract these days.
A spectacular severance supposedly balances out any disquiet at 'pump-and-dump' treatment of employees. Of course, "spectacular" may mean they pay $4,000 instead of $2,330.02 legally due - i.e. 200% of something which probably won't get you very far in the first place. And 'extra' documents they have you sign as a quid pro quo, also sign away review rights regarding unfair dismissal, etc.
Everyone working for someone - and I mean everyone - needs a backup plan to create wealth. Not an MLM - something where you get paid to create actual value. This could be selling cupcakes off your Facebook page, freelancing on guru.com, selling artwork on odesk.com, tutoring math classes, mowing lawns... Even if you make only $10/month, its a skill kept sharp for when you really need to depend on that next arrow in your quiver.
Before doing this, check your work contract - and speak with your attorney. Many jobs - specially IT roles - have a catchall 'all your efforts/patents/ideas/code belong to us' clause. Even for what you do on your own time and dime. Such clauses may or may not be lawful.
Choosing Silverlight based on hollow hype alone is a bit of a symptom IMHO.
Most companies which want "A" talent seem to offer "C" pay. If anyone offers "A" pay, they'll get "A" people applying.
s/A/H1B/
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It's all about da skillz. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. MOAR GRAPHS!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I think the choice of VC-1 came because it was supported by Silverlight while H.264 was limited if present at all. VC-1 is also the protocol of choice for Blu-Ray, and the time saved simply copying the files instead of moving them to H.264 may be significant.
While VC-1 is part of the mandatory codecs in the BluRay standard due to very heavy lobbying by
Microsoft at the time, I've yet to encounter a single actual disc using it. There are some of them out
there (it is used a lot by Warner Brothers), but "of choice" VC-1 certainly isn't.
And copying files from BDs to directly use as streaming sources? With their double-digit megabit
per second encoding bitrates (the maximum video bitrate alone is 40MBit/s)? Absolutely not.
#1 Regret is "Refusing to admit #2". Those 2 old rules (most common regrets of CEOs) take Netflix's Executive a 127 slide show to present. I think slide #21 and slide #25 say that, and are the only relevant slides out of the first 40.
Then she says some pretty interesting things in slides 45-50 about the way growing companies tend to favor more rules which compromise creative talent, which I find pretty insightful. The "vacation policy" (if you don't track "hourly" pay, why track "vacation days"?) is interesting. Professional sports analogies are good, but pretty common - nothing "Netflixy" about them. There are probably 25 good slides in there. Not bad, but nothing irreplaceable.
Is she fired?
Gently reply
Netflix moves bits - they're the UPS of bits. Other than putting hardware at ISP sites to cache bits, what's the big challenge? How many 'A' people do they need? It's not like they're doing pure research. Unless there's something I don't know, their problems seem to be network shaping and flow, which are already solved. They're basically managing what amounts to a big DDoS attack. I'm not impressed with their grandiose view of themselves, unless there is some secret to Netflix that I don't know about.
And I wonder, if they only hire 'A' people, who rips the DVDs they stream?
You can't do anything new and stay as an "A player". Solving problems or learning new skills means less output in the short term than just sticking to a standard operating procedure. In the long term if you have nothing but people good at doing the standard operating procedures then you have nobody that can devise the new ones. Either the place with this stupidity stagnates, you call in consultants or you poach from places with a better procedures and get them to parrot what is done in the other place.
This A-player shit sounds like it came from a 19 year old HR person on cocaine.
The example of the person they fired sounded like just the sort of flexible problem solver needed when changes need to be made. The message is clear - they don't want to change with circumstances but instead stay in their niche until it vanishes or they are displaced by another company prepared to change and be a better fit. Then they will wonder why it all went wrong.
Blu-Ray uses VC-1, H.264, and MPEG-2, depending on what studio released the disc. No clue which is most popular though. However, NetFlix most likely has to do video encoding anyway. The highest quality NetFlix stream is only around 8Mbps, which is far less than would be used on a Blu-Ray.
SilverLight did add H.264 support in version 3 (2009). It's never been clear to me why SilverLight was chosen. Flash offered the same features, but on more platforms and with a much larger existing install base and a larger variety of codecs supported.
That didn't choose Silverlight based on "hype," they chose Silverlight because flash didn't offer DRM'd video streaming.
They are like Yahoo used to be. Seemingly the best at what they do, but actually quite primitive and likely to be replaced by something better soon.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That sounds like a situation where an inhouse tool is called for. The inability to run on tablets/phones/etc should have been enough of a warning to stay away from a poorly supported emerging technology from a single vendor with a reputation for cutting the cord.
Maybe in Germany things are different, for now. Don't bet on it lasting long, the Harvard Business School approach is corrosive and deadly, and it gets short-term results, just like cancer cells getting a new blood supply.
"Don't be evil" fits on one powerpoint slide.
Code doesn't rot like organic matter.
OOOOoooohhhh yes it does! You are either not a developer, or are so green you haven't experienced it yet.
What happens is that the business changes AROUND the code, so the code doesn't reflect current business processes as well as it did when it was originally written. So, someone puts in a "minor fix" to correct something to make it more closely match current reality, and in the process they break two other small bits of functionality that no one knows about for a few months. Wash-rinse-repeat this process for a few years, and what do you have? Code rot.
Indeed. Check out Brave New World, the "Cyprus experiment" (or something, it has been a while).
Respect the beard.
It's an 80:20% rule. Most engineers only like to do the first 80% of a project, not the non-sexy last 20%. I don't think that's a problem about A-players, it's a generic problem. Personally I think an A-player who leaves something at 80% is not an A-player. The 20% of "details" is what makes the product shine on another quality level. If someone can't see that, he or she is not so smart, or lazy, and in any case not an A-player. An A-player delivers the whole thing.
The problem MS had with this HR policy what that people get very defensive, and you get a Windows island, an Office island, etc. where they fight for their own island but don't fight for the company or bigger lines.
The problem google has with this HR policy, on some levels (many mediocre people work for google) is that it is a lie and leads to a baffling mono-culture. If you go there to be interviewed for the day, if one person doesn't like you, you won't get in. I firmly believe that you need different people and different characters to make a great product, intellectual conflict is good.
The problem they both have is that they are shitty companies, I wouldn't want to work there. I don't want to work for an evil company which sells our privacy and where I'd become a glorified ad seller. We don't all sell our souls like Vint Cerf, who was someone sometime, and is now a trophy ad seller who argues against privacy. Not an A-player.
Replacement is possible though I don't know how likely it actually is. Netflix hasn't seemed to be as content to sit back and enjoy the limelight and instead has been pushing to change how they do things and the customer experience. I don't know who can seriously challenge them; there are at least a dozen competitors, but few if any have the range of content. Maybe Amazon (and I could see them trying to buy Netflix) has the architecture and the content, but I'm not at all happy with their non-rental selection. I don't see Redbox taking over any time soon, much less any of the other competitors.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Err...it kind of does. Libraries, third-party dependencies, frameworks, etc. all are versioned, fast become deprecated or unsupported in this day and age.
If you don't manage that and commit time and resources to abating it, perhaps the software doesn't die, but you do have a zombie.
I take it this does not apply to their media dept. Their collection is stale and unimpressive. Red box is going to eat these guys alive.
Nobody needs to be less than an A player - as long as they are in the right position. Not every position will be required at Netflix; some are at GE, GM, etc. But if every company had only the right people in the appropriate job, things would indeed work out better.
Then you are defining "grade A" wrong. You need "grade A" in more than one position. What you would talk about are designers that like to deal with big interesting problems and get some architecture up and going. You don't need the same person to finish the details they will be bad at, just hire someone who is "grade A" in the category of producing massive amounts of boring code. There are people out there that can turn out the stuff reliably and in large amounts as needed.
Well put. Some of us get bored with the mundane. Some of us love the mundane. It is best to fit the skills and desires with the job. That way we have all "A" levels in their spot.
Are you talking about Healthcare.gov? Or are you talking about the virtual-reality helmet for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter?
Most managers tend to identify A-players as those most like them. Old boys club?
Why did they announce separate disc / streaming services (Quickster), and then immediately backtrack?
I don't have a source for this handy, but I recall people suggesting that the Quickster split was deliberately set up to fail, as a way to shut up the investor and analyst types who had been demanding such a streaming/mailed-disc split.
And your first present is from Netflix and Slashdot... and what is it? Corporate Wank.
As others have noted, eventually you run out of A players (regardless of your price point, no matter how how, because there are intangibles for all jobs.. the best and highest paid job in the world in Ulan Bator isn't going to be interesting to someone who needs the stimulation of Manhattan)
The scalable organization plans for, hires, and uses average people, or more realistically, a mix of good, indifferent, and bad people (because bad workers are inevitable, and they have non-zero time in the organization before you discover their "badness").
Organizations that depend on any scarce resource, be it bodies, gold, regulatory help, or anything, cannot scale. It's like the difference between mining diamonds or gold and mining iron or coal. For the latter, there's a continuum of grades, you can always find some slightly worse stuff than you're getting now, so the cost to make that ingot goes up a bit. But it's continuous. gold and super star workers do not have a continuous distribution. There are concentrations, and once that concentration is mined out, it's a long way to the next.
It's often cheaper for a VOD over IP service to serve large countries than small countries because there's a fixed cost to negotiate a license for each country. Because of longstanding decades-long territorial distribution contracts that predate home broadband, especially when a film is an adaptation of a book or periodical or contains popular music, studios often are unable to grant a single worldwide license.
They are like Yahoo used to be. Seemingly the best at what they do, but actually quite primitive and likely to be replaced by something better soon.
The trouble is legal barriers to competition; required license arrangements to stream media.
Back in the stickshift era, Netflix directors drove the interstates/motorways at the proper speed. In first gear. Then parked by slamming directly into reverse. After all, you're supposed to burn things out, right?
Anyone checked the suicide rate of ex-Netflix employees? My guess is that it's above national average. Considerably above. Once an employee has been burned through and is no longer A lister because they're mentally shot, why would anyone else hire them? Their experience means they'll need to be paid more than the graduates who are more functional and more able. Not a good bargain. And the experience is worth nothing because web programmers are a dime a dozen and recommendation algorithms are common.
Work experience should always add value, but in this modern culture, who wants to help another company? The best short-term returns are from squeezing minds till they're dry, then throwing away the rinds. Why would companies worry about the long-term? Not on the balance sheet. As for helping others... that's..... Socialist thinking! Even when there's no competition. All for one and one for me.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They're the largest in their field and have little real competition, so they must be doing something right.
They were the first in the field, and no one has done it better - yet. FTFY
Remember myspace?
Silence is a state of mime.
I know I've brought this up before but I've had co-workers who were supposed to be tech savvy and couldn't successfully plug in a USB device and get it working. (Yes I was stupid enough to help them, I wanted them to go away.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
More than once in the article they discuss "generous severance". How generous? there's a lot of possibilities.. A year's pay? Use of their computer at work to fill out the forms for unemployment?
And, let us not forget that "severance" means you are "unemployed", which means that your resume will instantly be rejected at any other company in today's market.
How do I, as a "team member", know what the measure of an "A" versus anything else?
OH, I FORGOT, the North Dallas 40 rules apply here. DUH!
It's easy. If they keep this HR philosophy, they will never have long term viability. No one who is sane will want to hang around with a bunch of eccentric, hard to deal with egotistical "A" players.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
Windows Rot. The OS slows down over time due to the inefficiency of Windows. Incidentally for some, they dispose of their PC and buy a new one because of this. it could be intentional to sell new computers, you know, some deal with OEMs etc. Who knows for sure.
"A Players" in other words, people that they like,not people who can actually do the job correctly.
Sounds like a crappy place to work, unless you are best buds with the boss.
Be seeing you...
After a few years, once the code base gets creaky, you want to keep people who know why things were made that way to be around so you don't accidentally unplug something.
This also applies to other sectors. A salesman who is not making his numbers now may be back to making his numbers in a stellar way in a few quarters. Why? Some sales take a log time to bring home. On some products you only get a kick at the can every two or three years when a new vice-president is brought into a division and does the 'change shows I'm doing something' thing.
This strikes me as the babble of a guy in consumer products where the sales cycle is short and the emphasis is high volume. In enterprise products, or in products where you're building something that needs to hang around for a few years like aircraft, bridges, enterprise grade software deployments where if you fuck something up, it's not a tech support call that comes in it's a phone call saying 'I want someone from your team in my office to-morrow to explain the service disruption to my lawyers.'
He can talk this way because his products are not in any place where a long game needs to be played.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Are you kidding me?
Everything around your product changes. H264 is getting replaced by H265, and H266, et cetera. Various dependencies will be deprecated. New dependencies will be needed.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Flash didn't have video DRM at the time of launch. Silverlight did so it was chosen since DRM was judged as the most important feature to have.
Society doesnt consist of only 'A players'.
They don't care about society. They care about themselves and their own wallets.
I'm sympathetic to their philosophy. One of the biggest irritants at my job is having to work with people who don't know how to do theirs. If they were aware of their own limitations that would be one thing, but they're not. And, yes, my employer offers all the silly "perks" like an Xbox in the break room, free beer, etc. I'd trade that stuff for a team full of "A" players any day.
>you get lobbyists to convince Congress you need to hire as many people as you want from outside the country.
Translation: We want to exploit overseas, cheap labor and we will buy off as many people in Washing to get it.
We made up that A-player story so we won't sound like the greedy pigs we are to the techie people we will be firing.
It's a VOD service. It's not rocket science. This CEO is a a$$h0l@ who only looks at paper and not the actual person. Lets also face it, Netflix is the only mainstream VOD and By Mail service around, now that blockbuster is gone. So either pirate everything, buy everything, or subscribe to Nitpixs.
When corporations run things and the only thing that matters is the bottom line.
I wish we could crowd source corporate control, in this case getting as many people as possible to cancel their Netflix accounts with the explanation "We don't like the way you do business".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'm a bleeding-heart liberal from Scandinavia, but I'm in full agreement with the HR manager. Or, more to the point, I believe businesses should be run as profit-making machines and shouldn't have any ulterior motives. If society only needs the top 10% to contribute, so be it.
The problem comes in when we couple a person's worth with their job. America, especially, should understand that unemployed people are not lazy, up-to-no.good misfits. Wage labor may not be the cornerstone of a person's livelihood in the future, but we need to be prepared for a society where the majority of the people don't have anything useful to contribute. Yes, that may necessitate a shift to a much more socialistic system with steeply progressive including negative taxation (call it citizen dividend, if you will). If "advanced tax planning" makes steep enough progression impossible to implement, a move to a wholesale communism might be called for.
It's lovely to see the sociopaths in charge of society have finally taken off their masks to show them for the torturers they really are.
I think most of the comments about A players are defining them incorrectly. An A player is one that:
- is competent in their skills and is continually upgrading their skillset
- works well with others, viewing criticism not personally. The A player uses criticism to get better
- will go the extra mile(s) so their projects and the company will be a success. No task is too menial. When they walk down the hall they will pick up any trash they find to throw away.
- is humble
- is not afraid of failure
In education, you see A players all the time. These are the ones you want to work with and work for. They make you better.
What, me worry?
People with an employee mindset naturally want job security, and consider the provision of such to be a moral obligation of employers. The reasons are obvious.
Employers, on the other hand, face the possibility of paying high salaries to a staff full of under performers, and ultimately harming (or losing) their business because of this. Neither they nor *any* of their employees will be very well off if the business goes under. So, from their perspective, it is morally obligatory that they hire the best and get rid of people who are becoming dead weight.
So, the two perspectives directly contradict. Each sees the other as a moral blight. On the one hand, employers are seen as sociopathic assholes that demand everything you have to give and make no promises in return. On the other hand, employees are seen as lazy assholes that demand high salaries in perpetuity with no guarantee of productive output at all.
Each has good reason to find the other to be morally flawed, and to try to manipulate the legal system to force the other to play by one's own rules. This will never change. Articles like this one, and counter-articles, will be written in perpetuity, because neither side is objectively correct. Or rather, both sides are correct even though they are in direct disagreement.
I agree with Netflix's approach, to an extent. I used to work at the International 8-bar company. Because of constant outsourcing and layoffs, morale was low. The general feeling among many of the engineers was "don't ask me to work, and I won't ask you for a raise". People who took advantage of the "excellent work-life balance" were naturally inclined to stick around, but without contributing much to product or company. The general joke was that it was a great company for people with other priorities!
If your lot fell with such colleagues, your career was doomed, since product releases would never go anywhere. I jumped ship when I realized their mind-set wasn't going to change.
So, I think that Netflix starting out with hiring an A-team is a good thing, provided:
- It rewards and recognizes their contributions
- It makes them feel safe in their job to make mistakes
- It doesn't lay off people to meet quarterly numbers (especially since it says it hires only A-players)
- It doesn't outsource/offshore work, chasing after stock price.
or Blackberry ?
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
The reason you have companies like Netflix, Facebook and Microsoft (and to a lesser degree Google) determining immigration policy is that they enjoy a network effect subsidy and there are cultures out there that have been so long without any kind of a frontier that they have evolved very sophisticated parasites.
If you want an efficient market, distribute network effect profits as citizen's dividends. Network effect profits can be extracted from the economy by shifting the tax base away from economic activity and toward liquidation value of assets.
Once the citizens realize that every immigrant is a dilution of the value of citizenship, immigration reform will be more rational.
Seastead this.
Not to insult REAL Klingons, but any job where you have to attack, belittle and demean your co-workers and downplay their accomplishments while building up your own, must be ... the Govt.
Soon everyone will know your a dis loyal company to your employees and no one will work for you if there is more than one opportunity. Then your only choices will be b people.
THIS NEW DESIGN IS DOG SHIT
If their videos are VC-1 then how do they play back on iOS devices without killing the battery?
If they're already H.264 for iOS devices, then why is transitioning needed?
Several possible answers, none of which I've been able to verify.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Why did they announce separate disc / streaming services (Quickster), and then immediately backtrack?
I believe they considered splitting the company, expecting (allowing?) the disc company (or business unit) to die off w/o impacting shares of the streaming company/unit. This would have also allowed people to tailor their investments. Perhaps not a good technical idea, but I can see the business merits, especially if you expect disc subscriptions to die off in favor of streaming.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is a classic case of not learning from history. When companies start routinely ignoring the needs of the employees as human beings, the employees for unions to protect their interests and then, we'll, we've seems what happens. It is worse for the companies than simply acknowledging that the employees are people with needs and that the company cannot simply trust them as disposable monetary units. If the companies fail to acknowledge the needs of their employees to have a stable source of income that provides for a reasonable life style then the employees are left with no choice than to unionize and everything gets worse then for everyone.
So learn from history and take care of the people who are making the ceo's rich, or face the inevitable consequences, which you as a rich CEO will like even less.
This is pretty true about A workers.
But on the other hand, if you then, go and assign the necessary B and C tasks to B and C workers, many A workers get a bit "territorial". (and often, critical).
If this is the case - it's because those "A" workers really are not A workers. They lack team-skills. This is the flaw underlying all employee ranking systems. Evaluating performance, and selecting a subset of important criteria.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I'm seeing a lot of posts spouting the idea that 'A' players come with a lot of trade-offs. That's incorrect. Those posters are thinking of prima donnas.
Think about it like this: Are you an 'A' student if you got a perfect score on your math test and a zero on your history test? No. You're just good at math.
True 'A' players are hard to find. But they aren't unicorns. A true 'A' player has the following qualities:
-technical competence
-creative
-detail oriented: your creative solution isn't finished until the detail work is complete.
-cross-functional diplomatic skills, and at least a superficial understanding of the work that people around him do.
-quick learner
-able to prioritize tasks
-positive attitude
-executes quickly & effectively (aka "works smart, not hard")
-can handle the bureaucracy of your work environment (startup/megacorp/whatever)
That probably sounds like a lot to ask of one person, but people with this list of skills exist. They just take a bit longer to find and its admittedly tough to identify them all in an interview.
Maybe you don't have all those skills yourself. That's ok. But it means that if I hire you, I have to hire other people to get those skills. Netflix has decided that its worth their time to look for the whole package.
"how do you find enough employees if 90% of the country's population is deemed unworthy of jobs? Well, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings' support of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC suggests one possible answer â" you get lobbyists to convince Congress you need to hire as many people as you want from outside the country."
Wrong, greedy and short sighted. Far better is to breed your own talent and train them from birth to the jobs, as well as teaching them the flexibility necessary to adapt as the job changes. Eventually this evolves better workers. Netflix has it all wrong.
What a load of rot.
a severance package for Patty would be in her best interest.
what would nextflix need A players for? they mostly carry B and C material.
Why would an A player (whatever that means) work for a place that doesn't value their accomplishments and contributions?
What you need to ask yourself: what makes the "A" player an "A" player? How did that player get there? A very intelligent go-the-extra-mile person with excellent social skills is always welcome. Don't forget, this would affect anyone that has been an "A" player in one role, and (after a similar transitional period a new hire would get) is an "A" player in another role. Because if you are made redundant in the manner McCord champions, what would be the chances that you would ever return to the same company, other than for a substantial wage increase and -in a fool me once... manner- demand a substantial severance package.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
The "A player" argument is just an excuse to hire lower wage slaves from other countries while playing the political correctness game.
e.g. We're not off-shoring or bringing in low cost talent to minimize expenses and maximize profit -- we're importing A-grade talent! Yea, that's it!!!
In some areas. If you take the package it is income to the local unemployment office. It also counts as prior notice in some areas where prior notice is required before a layoff.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'm not really in a position to know, but I thought A-players had a tendency to job hop fairly often which it would seem to me would be problematic in a different way than B-player dead weight or whatever. If your A-players are constantly moving on to greener pastures this must have a deleterious effect on any long term projects.
https://defectivebydesign.org/netflix
An even worse kind of rot is when you have a code base that's old, and has suffered any number of shortcut hacks and other deviations from good engineering practice. Then on top of it all, anyone that knew anything about what was done and why it was done is no longer with the organization, and because it's "maintenance work", the greenest guys get stuck on it without the knowledge or willingness to do things right, making a bad code base even worse.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Based on this I'd say that the worst under-performers at Netflix are their HR department. I bet nobody is firing them. Who in their right mind would work for those clowns now? In fact, I'm going to cancel my Netflix subscription over this. Those assholes deserve to crash and burn.
The cucumber gets more pickled than the brine gets cucumber. Obviously H1 is the silver bullet.
Or, the "not in the commodity level" but not quite "super" model winds up dating outside the model world, and for instance, dates superior software developers or people with other talents.
What this means is they will hire young engineers, work them till they burn out then fire them.
It is very unlikely that management can consistently identify highly talented individuals, they will select their favorite lackey.
Having seen all "A" player teams inaction, they are unmanageable and distrutive, engage in endless disputes about nits andnobody and wants to do the dirty work.
I worked for a company that had similar ideas. Everyone figured out that the most important job requirements were kissing management asses and stabbing colleagues backs. This obviously makes any organization a winner in any market.
I turned down a software job at Netflix that would have paid twice my current salary.
Reasons:
The hire and fire culture seemed to be a crutch for poor management skills.
The boss is well-known to be abrasive and needs to get his way.
The work was completely undefined. I was to show up and "be awesome", and it was up to me to determine what that meant. There was no project list.
In the end it didn't matter how many people I already knew there, I simply could not rely on it being a steady job. I'm comfortable enough in my ability to "be awesome" from time to time, but who can possibly maintain that level of creativity and/or output on a steady basis? Consider also the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The only thing Netflix has going for it is that they pay well. Outside of that, it seemed like a pretty crappy and almost sociopathic place to work.
What you would talk about are designers that like to deal with big interesting problems and get some architecture up and going. You don't need the same person to finish the details they will be bad at, just hire someone who is "grade A" in the category of producing massive amounts of boring code.
Whether you call them an architect or a designer, "big interesting problem" people who never "finish the details" will never be Grade A because they never had to deal with the devils that were hiding behind those design details. I've spent years cleaning up the crap caused by architects who perpetually run off to the next project proposal/start before the flaws in their designs appear; my experience means that my architecture designs have never had the last 20% of the task require 80% of the work.
"Vision" refers both to the ability to see the big picture AND the ability to see the long term.
I just finished a project for a company who hires only 'Bar Raisers'. Their internal ecosystem is a mess of partially documented custom tooling. Many projects named New*, Fast*, Simple*; began a few months ago, and now being replaced by yet another design addressing a scenario that could have been teased out during one or two design discussions. Lots of yes men and cowboys: Everything was estimated to take 'a few hours', and that pattern became evident after deadlines repeatedly slipped.
That begs the question: What makes an A Player? Somebody donning a pager who is okay toiling away excess hours? Someone who volunteers to fix everything one day, then shows up sleep deprived and burned out the next (leaving everybody else blocked on WIP to boot)? A yes man/cowboy? As other commenters have pointed out; Sometimes organizational issues can stifle the potential of any sized horde of Jesus developers. In the case of my last gig: the Bar Raisers were trying to apply half effective bandages as quickly as possible to a behemoth transplant candidate, and all teams were experiencing atrophy/turnover.
Netflix has made some fine contributions to the open source community (http://netflix.github.io/#repo). They deserve credit for sharing out well-documented, quality libraries. That said: Proclaiming your company hires only 'A Players' is run of the mill corporate executive doublespeak.
I agree wholeheartedly that an underperformer can drag down everybody around them, and that it's crucial to remove worst practitioners as early as possible as they will pollute the codebase. However, the lack of fundamentals and consistency I witnessed at the last world-renowned technology company has left me wondering if the vectors used to differentiate the A Player have the Cowboy could use some tuning. I've experienced greater success in highly cohesive teams where greener members were grown internally (as opposed to recruited at a certain level then cast into the jungle alone).
Perhaps instead of worrying about "A" players, Netflix could put their resources to better use acquiring "A" content.
A European Country like Germany? With unemployment at 5.2 pct and a great social safety net I think we need to start doing this right now....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I work in the UI development space at Netflix, and I certainly wouldn't describe it as anything remotely close to a culture of fear. Only two people on my team in the past 3+ years have gotten let go, any they were both gross under-performers with poor attitudes.
As far as "A players", it's not just a matter of hiring people who are good at their jobs, but also A-players from a team and interpersonal perspective. I like everyone I work with because very few people have strong or confrontational personalities. At the same time I know the people I work with are honest with me, and I feel free to be honest with them. If I mess up, I don't feel like it would be in my best interest to try and hide it or make excuses; I own up to it, and am still around after so many years. I've also never witnessed any sort of team-v-team competition.
The visa issue is not something I've encountered, either. Not to say there aren't a number of H-1 workers -- and those tend to be exceptional talents -- but my team for example has hired around 15 people devs and testers in the past 6 months, and all of them are local talent.
I realize this reads rosy, and some teams in the company may have different experiences, but I honestly would never leave here willingly. Keep in mind the glassdoor rating includes a lot of complains from customer service workers who were let go, and as with most internet ratings, the people who post reviews are most likely the people who are pissed off.
Why is this a strategy? Why are they doing this? Because they want the best code? Or because they want the best design? Is the result only dependant on the coders?
nosig today
If Netflix is so hot, so A-list, firing anyone mediocre, hiring only the best, how do they keep making such dumb mistakes? Sure, they're #1, but their instant streaming *blows* now. Their recommendation engine *blows*. It worked several years ago. I remember when they changed it over and it stopped making any sense and being of any use to me. So they're doing some things right, for sure, but now their performance makes more sense to me in light of the fact that they don't keep their talent around. I remember calling them up once and making a suggestion, which they implemented for everyone. I don't know if I was the only one or the last straw or what, but that was very impressive. But the whole qwikster thing and the total lack of anything good for their streaming service... I don't understand why they think they're such hot stuff. In my opinion, they're on their way down. Give it another couple years. Their self-produced stuff is pretty amazing, but I'm only going to activate my instant account for a month at a time to watch that stuff. I feel like a whole lot of their instant watching userbase is just there because they don't know how to get better instant streaming or because there is no better alternative for them at the moment. If they could turn around their streaming movie selection, that would be something, but I keep checking in and it just keeps getting worse.
We should pigeonhole all new hires and discard them when they are no longer needed. Keeps rates low, and we can lower their self esteem by calling them non-"A" players.
not tracking vacation pay is a scam to not pay vacation when someone is fired.
I've heard the A-player bullshit before. And from what I've seen A-players they:
And remember the A-team never actually managed to hit shit.
It's an 80:20% rule. Most engineers only like to do the first 80% of a project, not the non-sexy last 20%. I don't think that's a problem about A-players, it's a generic problem. Personally I think an A-player who leaves something at 80% is not an A-player. The 20% of "details" is what makes the product shine on another quality level. If someone can't see that, he or she is not so smart, or lazy, and in any case not an A-player. An A-player delivers the whole thing.
I'm actually one of those developers that like the 20% part. I enjoy those last minute details and actually releasing a product and the companies I work for seem to understand the importance in that endeavor.
When Jack Welch was CEO of General Electric he fired 10% of of his managers every year, and told the survivors do the same to their subordinates. Constantly purge the bottom and try to back fill with better. I also note that Patty McCord is the ex-Chief Talent Officer; no reason given for her departure...
This is the same as the statement by companies, "We only hire from the top 20% of universities."
For illumination on this topic, read
"The Ropes to Skip and the Ropes to Know," by Ritti & Levy
http://goo.gl/KOBO1i
Every word is true.
I see I have to work on my SO to drop Netflix now. She likes it but I think the're really not that many good things on it at all, just sort of a lot of crappy teenage movies with a few decent series . You can't even search their database of movies in a decent way. But if you're going to take my money, abuse your employees and warp the system to hurt ME, well, I think it's time for us to come to a partings of the ways.
I take it as a project; it's just a matter of time now for Netflix at my house.
Considering what a clusterfuck the upper management of Netflix is (remember that brain-dead plan to split the company in two?), it's time to apply that "A" standard to them as well.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
How do you find enough employees if 90% of the country's population is deemed unworthy of jobs?
Pay all of them really well, at least top 10% wages, some of them more.
Oh, you don't want to actually pay people like A players, you just want them to work like A players. Then it's much harder.
Funny, when I was living in Germany a little over a decade ago the unemployment was around 9% and actually dismantled some of that great social net. Guess that worked out for them...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
They're the largest in their field and have little real competition, so they must be doing something right.
Actually, it is more probable that they get away with fucking up because they're the only game in town.
The movies get reencoded anyway.. They certainly don't just rip the blu-ray streams from disc and stream them as-is as the bandwidth required for those files is huge (20-50Mbit).. VC-1 is basically the 'pro' variant of windows media video, which silverlight probably has the best support for. It's also possible that the studios give netflix the elementary streams for each title which are then wrapped in DRM and containers by netflix's stream servers.
flash does offer drm video streaming..
Here's the problem. Grade A people expect to do grade A work. In almost every organization there is a ton of work that doesn't fit into this category but still needs attention. Code gets old and has to be updated, and there's a ton of work that doesn't require the brightest and best but still has to be done.
"Doesn't require" isn't the same as "can't benefit from". You just need some grade A software maintainers, guys who, rather than just plodding through updating all that old code, will build tools to automate the updates, and will do it intelligently so the same tool can easily be applied to the next dozen maintenance problems as well. Code is also data.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Code doesn't rot like organic matter.
Yes, it does. Well, the mechanisms and the details of the process are different, but the effect is the same.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Sort of: they use torrenting stats to work out what's popular and acquire licences to stream it.
Netflix, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and many others, are actively looking for fresh talents in the same pool as me.
Yes, I am constantly looking for talents.
But unlike them, I do not look for "A Players".
No matter if the "A" is of the academic or of "Type A personality", people do change, with time.
What I look for are the self-starters - and I have found plenty of self-starters, both from America and from elsewhere in the world.
What is ridiculous in this "talent race" is that those who are doing the hiring do not even have any idea what they are looking for.
It's so very easy to say "I look for 'A'" but often they end up with people who may have a pretty resume but ain't those who will do things ON THEIR OWN without being told to.
Even the startups that I invest in I look for self-starters.
People may have really cool ideas but if they are NOT of the self-start type, ideas will forever stay IDEAS, and will never become a reality.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Would you like to work at "Survivor" all the time?
So every week we "vote" someone out of the company?
What Netflix is missing is that employee loyalty comes with an implicit "employer" loyalty as well. People should feel that they have a future where they work and that they can invest in the place.
A nice severance is fine if you're 20 years old.. but if you're 50 and you get fired it may be your last job (don't think age isn't a factor).
As others have pointed out Microsoft tried out a similar strategy.. that didn't pan out so well for them.
A company needs to have a certain level of humanity and morality. Not everything is about money and performance metrics. There are people and families involved as well. As a company owner myself I firmly believe that I need to care about "my people" or otherwise why should they care about me?
Another factor here is that hiring is VERY EXPENSIVE.. and training as well. Also corporate know-how is in its people.
Netfilix may be ok.. but their UI is certainly not an A-game.. (I have quite a bit of trouble finding and browsing with it)
So their magic results are not a given in my opinion.
People are not pieces of machinery to play with and then discard. These people have forgotten their moral/human obligations toward their people. They think only stock holders matter. That is what is wrong with a lot of corporations these days.
I can't believe anyone is taking this seriously. Every valley company claims to hire only the best. It's marketing bs that upper management sells to themselves, and to gullible new hires. They've been doing this for decades.
Doesn't matter if you're an A player for most of your career. When you hit 50, you're automatically demoted.
Hey! Why do you bother posting well thought out replies to idiots that clearly have no idea what they're talking about?
Give me an A-player architect who doesn't actually write code and bunch of lazy B-player Senior Software engineers any day.
You'll have a rock solid system that's more efficient and cheaper to maintain, than the overly abstracted systems where half the system is being constantly refactored for something better created by the A-Players.
I double dare the HR people in this place to consider the actual and extensive implications of "The Peter Principle revisted" becuase if they can't then they aren't able to understand what an "A" player is, especially in the presence of stack-ranking.
It provides a set of very valuable frameworks including:
- how often should you measure to provide informative evaluations of performance
- how does age-out and selection interact with organization structure. Here is a hint: most structures are built so that it is meaningless to hire above the 90th percentile - you could fill it with 99%-ers and it can only output less than them. Structure and talent interact.
- how does the enduring good or bad impact of a leader in branch impact tomorrows performance?
They aren't qualified to wrap their heads around the basic math, or ask what it means, but they are arrogant to assume they already understand it. This sounds like a good recipe for non-exceptionalism.
Someone should do a study of an HR department to test the following hypothesis: HR's evaluation methods are better than random chance. Is there any evidence to support this hypothesis?
I didn't give netflix any of my money.
funny, I thought it was because Reed was on Microsoft's BoD...
You're right. It decays like radioactive waste.
I say fuck companies who think this crap! Who are they to deem Americans unworthy of their jobs? Who does she think is going to buy her products and services? Yeah those same unworthy lazy Americans! I'm happy to say that I don't own any Apple products because of this attitude and I have never purchased Netflix content.
As far as I'm concerned it's time to boycott companies who feel we are the dirt on the floor for them to walk on. Let me add this also; A&E can kiss my ass too! I don't watch the channel because I don't have cable TV! I don't have cable TV because the cables companies treat it's customers like shit also! Stop supporting these bastards and they will get the message one customer at a time! Time to stand up to these corporate wannabe gods!
Too bad the quality of the product does not hold up to the quality you expect from an 'A-player only' culture.
I believe it may be because they use Apple's native player for iOS when the Netflix app detects an iOS device so it bypasses the normal Silverlight/Windows Media Player requirement for VC-1 (VC-1 is also supported under Apple's native media player on iOS due to cross-licensing from MS).
I know the player itself seems to work a bit differently between my Nook (Android) and my PC or laptop for instance (and the load/seek times are vastly different as well).
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Lots of angry Slashdot "geniuses" around here explaining why a successful company can't possibly be successful at what they do. Lots of angry B-listers who can't hack it competitively and want mommy gov't to step in and guarantee jobs for their lazy asses.
You're predictable, Slashtards. Way too predictable for a self-appointed intellectual elite.
Your disconnect is conflating central planning with corporate-controlled government. Personally I don't think that having a charter has anything to do with the subject of business entities controlling the government. Whether it is an incorporated entity or not, it is in no sense responsible to the People.
If you have some idea that there is any movement towards actual laissez-faire capitalism, I believe that you would be quite mistaken. Despite the hordes of would-be anarcho-capitalists, the "socialist" notion that making a buck is not the raison d'etre of humanity seems to have remarkable staying power. Laws and restraints on trade proliferate, thank God, and those misanthropes who are willing to undo the progress of 100 years of workers' rights and social support have neither the political will they imagine nor the courage to live outside the bounds of the society they deride.
So the great minds behind Qwikster know what an "A" player is?
For the senior web developers out there, browse to netflix.com, view source, and have a fun time critiquing. Netflix consists of average developers.
Complicit? Heck, management is often the finest example of this.
And yet, Netflix sucks more and more every year -- I am always discovering new titles which they no longer carry... So this strategy must really be working for them, huh? And what kind of "innovation" do they really need from their employees anyway? Guys, you just deliver streaming video. How could that be rocket science?
This explains a LOT about why Netflix is such a pathetic, stagnant piece of shit. "A players..." - who hires someone who even talks like that?
Every rule has more than one consequence.
eventually dumb pigs take over and shit up every good thing
Nobody's figured out yet to tell the user to put their barcode facing the window in the mailer. I mean I figured it out when I noticed the window.. but there's nothing on the envelope, no email I remember getting, nothing on the website that's telling me obviously hey, turn it this way. Seems to me like they might just be propagating a certain culture that appears to be A-list but is really missing a whole segment of people who would think of obvious things like this... or not continue such a stupid recommendation engine (unless it changed recently, haven't paid attention, but it used to be just stupid inaccurate, a change from being pretty useful in the early days). I guess I can understand their lack of streaming titles if it's just due to the Hollywood companies not selling rights, but I have to wonder if they're just clueless about how much their streaming sucks content-wise for anybody who's actually watched a few movies.
But for all I know, they send out emails to people who fail to turn the barcode in the right direction. I dunno. I just started doing it years ago and actually got confirmation that it's the right thing to do by some post up top. :) I mean yeah, it seemed like the right thing to do. There's just no text on the mailer that says "this direction please."
So, I'm not following you on Slashdot, but this is the second time I've seen your link to Sue's page.
I have to say, I love the way you continue to tell the world what a special woman she was.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
If we doubt the competency of colleagues and managers to objectivity evaluate one another, especially in the hiring and firing decisions, that negates the result that such as system is a meritocracy, since evaluation of merit would not be reliable. In fact it becomes the same old political system with the social interactions having a far greater weight, even in technical work, and just like non-technical working conditions.
The argument for "Meritocracy" is then just a ruse. It is another way for people with the power to make such decisions to retain the right to decide who gets hired and who gets fired in the way they have always done.
Judging by the buggy interface on my television, Netflix is NOT actually staffing A-players.