I'm all for this mentality.

It's extremely rare, but there's nothing that makes my job satisfaction drop more than having someone incompetent (in no way related to experience) on the team, or being lead by someone incompetent.

I come to work to get cool stuff done, and sometimes people just don't fit with that goal.

These thoughts are in no way related to the topic.

It’s not only about incompetence, it’s about letting someone go who did their job very well, but are no longer needed and keeping them around anyway.

The story is legendary about all of the infrastructure guys that were let go at Netflix whose job was to migrate them to AWS.

Is that a bad thing? Can you imagine the opportunities you could have if you said that you were instrumental in the largest cloud migration in history?

I can’t remember her name but there was a top ranking official at Netflix hired by Hastings personally. She was instrumental in helping Netflix in the DVD era. But she knew she was going to be laid off when they started focusing on streaming because that wasn’t her area of expertise. She went in and got “quit fired”. She said there were no hard feelings.

I first heard about this with an interview she did on the Internet History Podcast.

My brother-in-law works with various Netflix managers. One of them got a negative mark on her performance review for not firing enough of her team members over the previous 12 months. Netflix pays about 20% over market value, but it's like Lord of the Flies over there.

20% over the top of the market value.

"People who have been stars for us, and hit a bad patch, get a near term pass because we think they are likely to become stars for us again".

Source: your link.

The difference is the timescale. Netflix won’t let you cruise doing nothing for 3 months while you troll an internal job board begging people to take you.

That came from Jim Barksdale: "This isn't a family and I'm not your Daddy".