Every company has no loyalty to its employees, they just pretend they do and thus expect loyalty from their employees. At least Netflix is honest about the lack of loyalty being a two-way street.

I think it is more enjoyable to work with people who are competent and performing well, so keeping poor performers around hurts the morale of other employees. Plus, the caliber of people Netflix hires can easily find another job where they'll be a better fit, so showing them "loyalty" by keeping them around probably hurts them as well.

How does loyalty even work? Let's you'r a valuable developer, but your performance dropped significantly for 6-12 months because you got a baby. The company should stick with you not because of loyalty, but because it's good business - they know you will bounce back once you start getting enough sleep.

Another example - you were a valuable developer, but got a crippling, chronic disease which makes it harder to concentrate. There is no hope of your productivity ever going back to "reasonable" levels. What is loyalty in this case? Should they still pay you for the years even though you can't contribute?

Your first example relies on the tired employee have specialized skills. Instead, if the tired employee were easily replaceable, then loyalty would be sticking with that person despite the fact that they could be easily replaced.

For your second example, loyalty would be working with the employee to find a more suitable position in the company (or outside of the company) and helping with medical bills and any rehabilitation.

I've read that that's how it pretty much works in a lot of Japanese companies (i.e. even when you're pretty much of no use because of bad luck (illness, accident), they give you for example a janitorial job where it's understood that little is expected of you).

That's completely at odds with Western individualistic culture though hence it's rare here. Netflix is not really an exception - if you are the "weakest link", they will just fire you after your yearly review instead of waiting for a panic fire of bottom 10-20% of staff when stock price plummets (like most other corps do).

I understand that the actual culture might be different, but their culture deck[1] seems refreshingly honest to me.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/40-The_Ra...