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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."
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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."
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...
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.
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?
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.
And that basically outlines the problems with the "A" players: they are poor team players and they do not like routine mundane work.
Developing a skeleton of the application might be the task suitable for the "A" players. But the rest of it, making it really working for everybody, is very often "too easy" and "boring" for them.
Corollary. From the start on, the "A" players deem many design solutions as not feasible, because they entail lots of routine mundane work which they are unwilling to accept.
But then, Netflix doesn't do anything particularly sophisticated, so the strategy might seem to work. But in a nutshell, they are simply throwing money around.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Most companies which want "A" talent seem to offer "C" pay. If anyone offers "A" pay, they'll get "A" people applying.
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely. In the old days, employees could rely on employers to give them stability. So long as they were competent in their jobs, they could make a consistent and long term life plan around their job and their community. This had enormous economic benefits in that entire families could stay in one place and purchase nice houses, nice cars, go on vacations, etc. With the onset of lasseiz faire capitalism and the "corporation as top tier person", actual human beings have become easily (and often) replaced widgets with the resulting predictable fall in infrastructure and economic benefit for anyone but the most wealthy. This country is no longer about doing what is best for the *people*, but instead doing what is best for "corporate persons" in the futile hope that they will grant the rest of us the privilege of having a temporary job for a few months before being shuffled off for the next batch of desperate suckers.
Thank you Ayn Rand, we're so much better off now than we were back when we had stable jobs and a strong country!
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.
The A players that succeed are the ones that can make their 'A' ideas useful.
No, the players that succeed are the ones that can convince their superiors that they are "A players". Most of time it's just knowing how to play office politics rather than actual merit.
You do realize that nobody validates CSS any more, right? Because working CSS is almost never valid, and vice versa (aside from the very simplest and most rudimentary). I doubt many developers validate HTML or XHTML any more either.
With the onset of lasseiz faire capitalism and the "corporation as top tier person"
What country are you talking about? The U.S. has been going steadily away from laissez faire capitalism for at least 100 years now... to the point where it might actually start turning back in the other direction as more and more centrally-planned fiascoes are revealed and the old socialist hippies start dying off.
Your other disconnect seems to be thinking that "corporation as top tier person" is laissez faire, as opposed to a government rent-seeking benefit largely found in countries with more government control of the economy. Pro-economic freedom doesn't necessarily mean pro-government organized corporation.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.