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."

Comments

Well, it is from the bring-your-D+-game dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Well, it is from the bring-your-D+-game dept.

[93 Escort Wagon]

Yeah, you'd think with all those "A" players they could design a mobile interface that actually worked well instead of sucking.

Re:'A' Players Make a Lot of Questionable Decision

[the_other_chewey]

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.

Re:'A' Players Make a Lot of Questionable Decision

[guises]

That didn't choose Silverlight based on "hype," they chose Silverlight because flash didn't offer DRM'd video streaming.

Re:this is like

[Desler]

Actually...Netflix does quite a lot of research. They are famous as being tireless in their quest to improve every aspect of their business...and while most of those changes are invisible to us there are still plenty that are quite apparent.

Yeah and so was Microsoft and it's decade+ of stack ranking was a complete disaster despite the arrogant HR managers thinking they were as great as these Netflix ones.