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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."
Ie does it also apply to the top level of management, or does it only apply to lower level, dispensible, minions ?
This has been my experience as well. The best teams and companies are those who have a good mix of people, and who know how to utilize talent. For example, I've worked with an old geezer who was rather over the hill as a designer / analyst. A "D" player at best in his assigned role. However he had a ton of knowledge about the company, projects and people, and in some ways he was the department's "memory". He also had good ideas about how to organise teams and company processes, and he was a brilliant coach. He wasn't good at actual management jobs, so... they left him where he was, and where he was perfectly happy. Adding a ton of value to the company on a daily basis. Freely organizing around problems is exactly what he did.
That's not to say you don't need the right mix of people and skill levels to be successful. A-teams are probably as likely to contain the right mix, and in my experience about as likely to recognize it. Unless of course you stack the deck by saying that your A-team also has an A team lead who knows everything about this, but I've never seen this in practise.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
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.
Sort of: they use torrenting stats to work out what's popular and acquire licences to stream it.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Oddly enough, many actually are caught in a dating quagmire. There are certain tiers in the modeling world, if you are above a certain level (too exotic for non-elites) but below the level where you are integrated with the elite culture, they kinda end up in a bit of a dateless limbo that only really ends if their career picks up or fails.
My gig is hardware crypto, but it wouldn't be worth anything if I didn't make it work [...]
Nothing personal.
Way too often I have seen the following. A cool high-paid consultants comes in, swarmed with managers, lots of buzzwords flying around, and he "makes it work". The "it" being what he/she was hired to do. Shortly after they're gone, the people who work on the system long term find that the "it" works - but the rest of the project is broken, sometimes irreversibly.
Like a quite recent example. There were (perceived) performance problems with the transaction logic: people wanted more TPS, but the software simply couldn't deliver. Managers have invited cool specialist who "fixed" it in record time of one week. Only later, when customers started complaining about inconsistencies in the DB, people took closer look at what he did. His solution turned out to be to simply bypass the transactions completely (AKA rather run multiple actions in parallel in different transactions). And guess what: the consultant still has a perfect record with the managers. Proper solution was to give the full-time developers time/money to comb the software for performance problems and optimize what's possible to. But that can't be done in a week time. Neither would earn any "glory" since that is a mundane work, not a silver bullet solution where in a week you magically double performance.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
. "However he had a ton of knowledge about the company, projects and people, and in some ways he was the department's "memory". He also had good ideas about how to organise teams and company processes, and he was a brilliant coach. If that guy is a "D" player you need a new fucking report card.
This has been my experience as well. The best teams and companies are those who have a good mix of people, and who know how to utilize talent. For example, I've worked with an old geezer who was rather over the hill as a designer / analyst. A "D" player at best in his assigned role. However he had a ton of knowledge about the company, projects and people, and in some ways he was the department's "memory". He also had good ideas about how to organise teams and company processes, and he was a brilliant coach. He wasn't good at actual management jobs, so... they left him where he was, and where he was perfectly happy. Adding a ton of value to the company on a daily basis. Freely organizing around problems is exactly what he did.
My experience from the military is an A leader can make use of anyone, focusing and multiplying the efforts of those under him/her. In the USMC anyway, leadership is something we all wanted to be good at, and examples to learn from were all around us. There was no such thing as a D player, that is a body with a leader not trying hard enough.
I'm entirely convinced that in the civilian world when a team's hiring practice is 100% "self-motivated rock stars" they are compensating for the lack of ONE good leader. Things are directionless and people look out for themselves. Act shocked and amazed as "Is it resume worthy" becomes the top criteria for project prioritization.
I get it too, once you have a taste for that, you stop wanting a good leader above you and even make things hard for the one you have, pretty much cementing the status quo. The only coming back from that is finding an excellent leader to snap the reigns. I've heard this called "herding cats", and that never made sense to me until I left the military. Now I see... no shit, when you ASK everyone to look out for themselves, they DO.
Netflix is like any large enough companies. There are some groups/dept that are innovative and carry the entire company, the rest are there to benefit from the other group/dept's work.
I've worked at Netflix, and most of the company is highly political. Because of their hire/fire policy, the people who have been there long enough learned to form political connections to keep their job. It's no longer how well you contribute, but who you know that can CYA while you CTA. These people watch out for each other and protect each other's job. Sad, but understandable.
I watched an entire group of supposedly experienced sysadmins/devops/whatever who can not make the open sourced OpenStack work, so they hired an external consulting firm to set it up for them.
There is/are a few groups/dept, mostly on the cloud engineering side who are doing most of the innovative work. But even there, some of the political culture seeped through and infected them. Mostly the ones who have been there long enough. So maybe it is good for them to hire and fire so much, to keep things fresh. Keep churning and not letting their employees get infected by the political culture.