Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
At my last job, I participated heavily in the interviewing process. We had a certain perspective and requirements, and would often sift through 50+ resumes to interview perhaps 10 people to pick one person. That suggests that we were looking for the top 10% or top 2%, depending on your perspective. The only difference with Netflix is that they keep that evaluation going. I kind of wish we'd done that where I was and cut some people when it was clear they weren't pulling their weight.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
Most companies which want "A" talent seem to offer "C" pay. If anyone offers "A" pay, they'll get "A" people applying.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's not a matter of training. Let me give an actual example. Meet Joe.
Joe's official title is "enterprise architect" of a 25 person start-up with a mobile offering. He designed and wrote the back-end system that supports the company's apps. He also designed the database that sits behind that back-end system. Since the earliest days of the company he's manged equipment purchasing.
Joe, despite his title, is not a very good developer. He has a CS background but is admittedly not good at the "theory stuff". He is a self-taught ruby programmer. The server code is an utter mess. Absolutely no awareness of object-oriented design, even in situations that cry out for o.o.p. No use of or even knowledge of exceptions. I did some work for the server team I wrote some code that used exceptions and he didn't even know they were part of the language. Twice Joe has deleted important data "by accident" on production systems ("rm -rf"). Moreover, Joe likes to insert himself into situations outside his official responsibility. For instance, he one asked the app team to slip an unplanned feature into a release because it would be a big deal to one of "his customers". He's not a product guy. He's not an account manager. He shouldn't have "special customers" for whom he's doing special favors. Joe is also the choke point for all hardware purchases. The app team has a requirement (and verbal permission from the CTO) to upgrade its antiquated build environment. There is a hard deadline for this imposed by Apple. App team's plan is to construct a parallel build environment on new hardware then use it as a drop-in replacement for the legacy system. However, this requires Joe to actually buy the hardware. It's not a priority for him, though, so he's not doing anything. At one point he wanted to buy one of the new Mac Pro's and use it as the build machine. App team member pointed out that the Mac Pro's won't even be available until after our deadline has passed. This was news to Joe. The most likely outcome is for the deadline to come and go and the build machine to not be updated, creating a scenario in which the company is unable to produce new app store builds. Joe is also in danger of driving a couple of female employes to quit because of some borderline-inappropriate comments Joe made and the subtly patronizing way in which he interacts with women.
We have a defect tracking system. The process is supposed to be that new tickets get assigned to a team lead who triages them and metes them out to someone on his or her team. Joe is the lead for the server team. Tickets assigned to Joe, however, are often not looked at for weeks. Even if they are, and are resolved, Joe never updates the ticket in the defect-tracking system so the creator has no idea it's been resolved. If you want Joe to do something you have to go to his office and sit in his lap because there's always something more urgent he's working on.
In my opinion, the things Joe does that negatively impact the company's bottom line are not going to be fixed by "training".
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+
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 !