Ho ho ho! Santa is here, albeit a little late. Someone on our internal forms claimed Patty as a legend for creating the culture. I guess it really needs a critical analysis. Disclaimer: Opinions are purely mine and not of my employer. Thesis: Companies making $$$ are unfortunately being confused with great culture. When people make $$$ they also conflate that with company having a great culture. Unfortunately, new generation techies have become conditioned to the kool-aid. Observations: What I have experienced here is complete set of inconsistencies which are rationalized by employees who cannot make the same $$$ elsewhere. I will give you a few examples of these: 1) transparency: CEO paid CPO money to buy a house. No one knew about it until it was exposed in the WSJ article. People got mad, so they did the obligatory "how do you feel" by the talking heads to make everyone rationalize that. 2) 360 feedback: it is basically one way hierarchical feedback but by using 360 as a keyword, they psychologically trick folks into believing feedback is all way. For instance, you can give Reed feedback but no one else can read that feedback. Folks giving management critical feedback always get fired under some pretext. 3) when asked in the interview about the negative Glassdoor reviews, their standard strategy is to deflect it on angry customer support employees, but the data will show thoughtful reviews written by Swes. Implicitly, they are happy to admit that they treat their CS employees poorly, so, why wouldnt that treatment be extended to others? The company borrows tons of $$$ and uses that for public branding and portraying the culture as the best. I was asked by a VP whether they should pay money to remove Glassdoor reviews. HR regularly hunts down interviewees posting negative (true) reviews and pays them hush money to remove their post. After the WSJ article, they even put out a video on YouTube "Netflix culture is not cut throat". Should remind everyone of office space "I'm a people person" scene. Every part of the culture is weaponized to give an hierarchical advantage in power. Any thoughtful discussion brought up in the internal channels are met with "you should leave the company". For fun and tech culture improvement, I will answer questions and give you a Machiavellian version of how to interpret the culture deck. Everything will be only public info or my personal events. p.s Of course, you will see a lot of naysayers here, the thought of losing $$$ thrown at people removes any critical thinking.
TC OR GTFO
Do they really put a pip’d person in a room and people tell them why they are being fired?
That was a rare case in the WSJ. But usually they call a town hall meeting and shame the shit out of ICs. Leaders however get special treatment. They cover up the true reason and give them a gentle exit (unless they are internally hated).
Wow. Incompetent people should be let go, but throwing tomatoes at them in the town square seems counterproductive. I feel like that drives people to throw others under the bus. Appreciate you answering tho. Thanks!
Interesting write up, thanks for sharing. I read Patty's Netflix culture book and my impressions were that they seemed to be very practical ("we're not going to promote someone to manager unless we really need one"). But at the same time I could see how this could also be less than ideal as an employee, as a higher up can always use the "it doesn't make sense for the company" card. Tbh if this is true, im pretty disappointed that the book doesn't reflect reality. I also heard they fire if they deem that you're not useful anymore, and that you join Netflix with those expectations (something along those lines)?
Check out David Ronca's LinkedIn post about IC levelling. Management likes to maintain control here. They promote each other but give some $$$ every year to ICs to keep them around. As Frank Underwood would say, a person needs to understand the difference between money and power. There are plenty of non useful or questionable folks hanging around as long as you are subservient and conformant to leaderships personal benefits. It works just like any other culture you have seen.
The culture deck idealistic and is hard to implement in practice. The concept of no rules basically made Netflix into a chaotic environment. Concrete example: one engineer is arguing for having some safety checks in production rollouts and not giving root access to all the employees. The person got a lot of pushback with “freedom and responsibility” culture. I see that happening frequently and you can’t have engineering quality without having strict standards. Hiring is broken as it’s heavily culture talk driven. This lets a lot of bad engineers in and all they do is defend their high comp. good engineers either leave or get fired by the gang.
1) Have been part of hiring decisions? What are the other stuff other than tech skills (and soft skills) that get assessed during the interview? 2) It's well know at this point that NFLX has a fear driven culture. How worse can it get. Quote an anecdote without revealing identify 3) What are a few trivial things that IC SWE have been fired for? 4) Are there sane managers at all?
The culture is all about freedom which essentially is equivalent of "arbitrary". Power decides everything. Folks will agree with all decisions because they would be fired for some arbitrary culture reason otherwise. Powerful folks (long yoe and connections) will threaten you often with termination subtly if you don't play by their rules. To be fair, there are plenty of good teams and good folks, but you don't have have any control over your existence there. It is highly arbitrary because there is no performance trail or any paper records. Someone brought up the issue of poor code quality on our internal channel and that person was told "if you like your paycheck, don't bother about it. Otherwise, you will be sent home by the old timers soon." Several folks have gotten fired for harping on such issues.
You forgot to mention that old timer was an exception. All other old timers disagreed with him in that thread.
Hey do you want to come over for a little while tomorrow? We can meet up for lunch or dinner tomorrow and then take a walk
Hired to do a hit job on me? I wouldn't put that past them.
lol
What's the cool off period for interviewing another team after failing an on-site?
No real rules. If they feel like you are a good fit, they will call you. Off-topic though!
No rules, you can interview with a new team the very next day.
360 feedback is not one way street. Every 360 cycle someone high up was let go. Multiple VPs were let go due to feedback. I believe the chief communication officer too. I think one negative feedback won't trigger changes. Multiple similar feedbacks can.
I can easily tell you were not around at Netflix when the CCO incident happened.
I sure did.
Can someone post the WSJ link?
Not 100% sure but I think its this? https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency-and-blunt-firings-unsettle-the-ranks-1540497174
One more thing. We don't hire customer service representatives directly. We use a vendor company and they are basically contractors. Let's be honest, they are commodity similar to Amazon warehouse workers. We pay slightly better than market rate but we don't employ them directly or apply the same culture.
Given the way he’s bringing the JF incident as an example of how great the 360s work, (for the record, JF incident had nothing to do with 360s, nor feedback culture working - it was a pure power play just as you described - He was fired for not using the N word - which he did the first time, but rather trying to explain to the mobs on what he said, SMH) I’ve to agree. Either that or he’s super-naive (unlikely as I actually love his posts and point of view on some other topics such as code quality) or himself a political player.
Just sounds like part of the game one has to play for the $$$