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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.
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?
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
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.
Can we please have a "+100 Sarcasm" mod choice? This needs it.
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.
Other than putting hardware at ISP sites to cache bits, what's the big challenge?
Knowing which hardware. Negotiating with the ISP to let you. Getting the ISP to pay for it, as it reduces their peering costs. Negotiating the peering arrangements to get the data to those servers. Designing the cache mechanism to balance data flow vs storage cost. Designing the security mechanisms to stop the ISP sys admin from copying the entire Netflicks library to his local NAS.
How many 'A' people do they need?
Going for hard minimums, I'd look for around a dozen in each major area of the business. So somewhere between 200 and 500, more if you want to break it down by product area.
Finance, HR, Marketing, Customer Service, Procurement, Collections, Sales, Corporate Comms, Product Development, Change Management, IT, Compliance, Fraud, InfoSecurity.. companies are kind of complex at that scale.
Unless there's something I don't know, their problems seem to be network shaping and flow, which are already solved
There's an awful lot you don't know. Even if the theory behind network shaping is known, you need somebody capable of applying it. Netflix as "the UPS of bits" probably encounter a bunch of edge cases that present genuinely difficult problems to solve even to the guys that developed the theory and solved all the easy problems.
I'm not impressed with their grandiose view of themselves, unless there is some secret to Netflix that I don't know about.
Well, a lot of people aren't impressed by their grandiose view of themselves. You do however seem to have a simplistic view of the technical challenges they face, and the complexities of running a large business. Shit, the article mentions explicitly someone designing a payment collection mechanism. You any good at that?
And I wonder, if they only hire 'A' people, who rips the DVDs they stream?
Without researching, I'd guess they either outsource to cheap offshore labour and/or they negotiate with the studios and get the digital content sent straight to them. The Internet, it works both ways!
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.
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.
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).
It will be when that portion of the populace has no money to pay for their service.
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.
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"
"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.
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.
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."
Or stop sitting on your ass watching TV waiting to be "entertained" and do something meaningful.
"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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
Actually some companies intentionally hire cheap D-players, H1B's and other offshored "design center" labor, and put the burden on management to corral this nonsense into a successful company. It's TBD whether this is cheaper than the A-player only team (who will demand top salaries, fancy coffee machines, and 4 weeks of vacation).
Given that both types of companies are examples of MBA driven cultures, I personally think they both fail equally. Their best hope is to "hang in there" for years at a time.
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.
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.
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
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
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...
Most large businesses don't recruit A players. They look to recruit B and C players, as they're a lot cheaper and generally good enough.
The top companies do recruit the top people, and they benefit as a result. It doesn't matter how mundane your business is, good people will do it better.
Running a business and providing a service is not a solved problem. It's a constantly evolving challenge and you need great problem solvers that know how to work effectively together.
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/
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..
I totally agree. People that complain about this brilliant tactic think the offensive line on a football team make it possible for the real players to shine. I mean why do they even bother hiring linemen. The center does something every once in a while, snap the ball, but the rest are just useless.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
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.
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 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.
For the senior web developers out there, browse to netflix.com, view source, and have a fun time critiquing. Netflix consists of average developers.
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.
"Give me an A-player architect who doesn't actually write code"
About as useful as a mechanic who doesn't drive.
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.