Netflix really has the best culture for at least senior engineers (I know only about engineer roles). If you are contemplating switching companies, you should seriously consider Netflix. Netflix tries very hard to set up coherent policies to properly incentivize its engineers, and it executes them consistently and beautifully. I can’t stress enough how important consistency is, but LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner put it best: "Trust equals consistency over time. There's no shortcut for either”. Let me elaborate: Netflix has the best policies to foster a collaborative environment. Really, you should read their culture stack, but here is the gist: - There is no forced curve or stack ranking, so teams do not stab each other for pathetic rankings. - There is no anual bonus, so people don’t fight every year. - The performance review is in May but salary negotiation is in Nov - There is no level. Every IC is a senior engineer, so people don’t fight for titles. - Netflix openly recognizes that some roles are more important than others, and therefore are paid more, so people have right expectations. If you’re not happy with your pay, change your role or make your role more important. - You’re only responsible for your team. You only need to work on one visibility: your team’s. In the meantime, you manager is responsible for the team’s success and failure. You get higher visibility if you team is more successful. You get higher visibility if your peers speak highly of your product, voluntarily. Therefore, no one even bothers to work on so-called “cross-team coordination” for the sake of getting higher visibility. You coordinate multiple teams only because you have great ideas to benefit the company. - Managers think really hard to make sure everyone has big chunk of work to do. I can not stress enough about this point. When the number of people overweighs the quantity of work, turf wars will break out and politics will ensue. Let me tell you unequivocally, it never happened to me or my team when I was in Netflix. Netflix is generous. Reed Hastings used to say that he didn’t want compensation to become an issue to retain people, and he meant every word of it. Again, it is not about what Netflix says, it’s about what Netflix does: - Netflix pays you top dollars in the market. You’re encouraged to have interviews outside of Netflix and report back your numbers. The HR in Netflix actively gather compensation numbers to stay informed. We all know there was a downturn between 2008 and 2013 or so, right? Even though IT industry was not really hurt that much, many companies did cut their total packages. Not Netflix. Every year, my salary increased by many tens of thousands of dollars, and for a couple of times even north of 100K. My salary stayed exteremly competitive every year. As I talked to my coworkers, they had exactly the same experience. - Netflix is generous in giving you options. Its option plan was the best in the world. It allows you to forfeit your salary for options. The options had 5X of discount, and later 2.5 times. The company also gave you for free options that is worth 5% of your total salary. Your options vest every month. And of course, the options will not expire until 10 years later. That is, Netflix does NOT even tries to use delayed vesting schedule to retain you. Remember Reed Hastings said that money should not be an issue? Netflix is wise. It says engineers stay for three things: good colleagues, meaningful projects, and handsome reward. Oh, boy, did Netflix deliver. The data pipeline that handles trillions of messages every day? Two people to start with and later fewer than 5. Its entire RPC ecosystem, one person to start with and later 3. The list can go on and on. There was always more rewarding work than number of people. As a result, I saw engaging debates on technical merits, and I rarely saw, if not at all, so called politics. I lost many debates to my great coworkers, but I had no bitterness but admiration of their intelligence and perspective. As a bonus, here is another example copied from a Quora thread: The telemetry system that Netflix built, code named Atlas, handles more than 20 billion unique data points every minute. It also has really sophisticated OLAP support. In fact, it is miles better compared to any open source solution. Seriously, popular solutions like Graphite/StatsD/Nagios are child's play compared to the sophistication of Atlas. Guess how many people worked on it and operated it? Only 4. One guy on backend. One guy on client. One guy on automating the operation of entire fleet of machines. And one lady on the monitoring service and all the UIs, part time. There are more things Netflix to praise about, but I’ll stop right here as the rant is already too long. Questions? :-)
Please feel free to share this anywhere too. I’d love it that more people know about Netflix and that more companies are like Netflix
What. Is. This.
What the fuck? I am bad at reading sarcasm so please help me. Is this post sarcastic?
This does not scale I suspect
That’s why they have so few people do so many things. Less is more.
Thanks for the write up. I wish they had an office closer to SF
No Seattle office :)
Man, when I build a company, I want to build a culture where every single person to be an active evangelist like this. Pretty inspiring.
So why are you at Uber? Netflix is an Indian shop just like any other tech company.
Go check your data. jobs.netflix.com/diversity
Uber has its challenges but also its benefits. I learned a lot in Uber and I met great people.
Ignoring the bizarreness of this coming from Uber, you’re missing out on the crappy part - they are in Los Gatos.
Oh, and Netflix DOES NOT LOW BALL you, at all. Let's say you make 120K a year in a small company, but the team members of a similar role in Netflix make around 400K. Then you will get 400K instead of a little bump on top of your 120K. As a result, people really don't have any reason to be bitter about their compensation.