The more correct analogy is a sports team. Everyone works well together to win the medal, but it's much more pragmatic in that sense.

Perhaps back in the age of B&W TV, when people could spend their entire life with a company, it was sort of more true. You had that one job, you had your pension. It was really like a second family, an getting let go was like death.

I am beginning to see that nowadays, even full time jobs are becoming essentially contract gigs with better benefits. You should treat it as such anyway. Be professional, be good at what you do, but also be detached and non-emotional about it. It can end at any second.

What you take from a job is not that you were "like a family". What you take from it is the experience, what you have learned from your own mistakes, and most importantly - friendships. The rest is ephemeral like a docker container. Be ready for it to go POOF.

My main takeaway was: fair enough, and when can I get into that interview pipeline.

I want to be on a meat-eating, high performing team with comp to match, and I don't want much more. I think most in the industry are the same.

Having been on [edit: sports] teams before, it can be a toxic situation or it can be absolutely amazing and life-affirming. It might sound cold in the language, but it can be so rewarding, so bonding. It's definitely a better analogy than family. Family is family. You can define it as you like, but nothing equates.

Shared hardship and superior performance that is greater than the sum of a team's individual talents are tremendous motivators and a dominant source of personal fulfillment.

There's a bit of a challenge to get people to seek this environment out, but setting the tone from the top, as Netflix does, is a Step 0 to achieving it.

My main takeaway is: they sound a bit bloody full of themselves.

Not for everyone though.

Ultimately, sports is different just like family is different and the way those things work relate to those differences. Sports is objective. Work isn't. Managers, players & spectators all know if they're playing in the A-league or the local league. In workplace culture, implying that you're not in the A-league is taboo. Remember that "elite" means very rare, and usually short lived.

People seek out, form, or join teams basically wherever they go, in whatever they do. While every team has an introvert, every team has a lead that works to pull the introvert into the fold. This is largely the "leaders/managers self identify themselves." Or, the introvert that strikes on on their own to do their own thing? Well if they're good..... they end up forming a team to support it.

It's not about knowing you're on the A-league or not, or implying it or not. That issue, while you're correct about the taboo nature of implying one's team is anything less-than, is very besides the point.

It's about how individuals time after time find fulfillment from performing at your (company, in this case) local optimum, with a hearty dose of feelings and actuality of personal autonomy, lack of micromanagement, clear standards that are just far enough of a stretch to be able to be met, etc. The nerdiest of nerds on a CTF team or hackathon will give each other a high five. In turn, to your point, the best players will seek out better teams.

It's a primordial behavior, we all do it. There's a wealth of organizational/leadership science out there. It's a fun read that unlike many social sciences, actually has a pretty well proven lemmas behind it, which control for personality types across the spectrum. The military is a one great source of this, flat orgs are another, and everything in between still displays the same behavior (for orgs that do "well"). The behavior and incentives of A->Z people in high performing, high satisfaction environments tend to be very similar, just the implementation is a little different depending on specific org charts.

I didn't mean to imply that we don't work in, join or even thrive in "teams." I meant the elite sports team analogy is a bad idea, usually. That's the analogy I netflix is going for, I believe. They meant it in that context, as you said:

There's no shame in getting cut, and you should be proud that you had the talent to perform at our level for the time you did.

All this has to be thought of as a management philosophy, because that's what it is. A Theory Of How We Do Things Here." Most os the time, work isn't sports-like. Objectivity is one fundamental difference, and actually running things like a sports team requires it. Hackathons are done to create sports-like scenarios on occasion. Trying to go past that, objectivity ends up biting you. ... you'll end up with productivity measures or some other low-autonomy management style.

This was my point about taboo. It's an example of reality leaking into the metaphor, making it unsustainable. Companies mostly don't operate in objective scenarios. Contribution is very difficult to ascertain, especially for the kind of work that requires elite performance.

Ultimately, a sports team is the way it is because of what it is. A team of artists shouldn't try to organise like a team of rowers or a software team like a sales team.

Incidentally, many sales teams run exactly like netflix aspires to... and without much effort. Their reality is objective. A 10X salesman can actually earn 10X, like an elite athlete does. There are elite teams and it is prestigious to have a stint there, even though most don't last.

Levels.fyi says the average compensation is...450k. But that's for the entire software engineer job ladder, so it's probably skewed upwards somewhat. Still, a median of 250-350k would still be a ton of money.

For all the talk of "talent" in this industry, it doesn't work like a talent industry. Where engineers do earn major salaries, it's usually on account of the managerial element and not the engineering one.

Lawyering is a talent industry, for example. Top lawyers in top firms do earn on a scale as disparate as pro athletes. The top lawyers may manage people, but their high salaries are for lawyering. The creative industries work that way, obviously.

Engineering is structurally more like accounting.

My last manager interviewed with them and said they gave him a 90+ frame PowerPoint on “the Netflix way“.

That said, culture shouldn't be forced. I think employees should be given multiple ways to participate to find a way that is most comfortable to them.

An additional challenge for me is that I don't like the taste of alcohol, and having even a little makes me do/say things that I later regret.

So even when I do show up at company social events, I feel even more like an outsider. It's hard to stay engaged at a job where all of these team-building events / milestone-celebrations make me feel lonely and excluded.

I actually had to push back on our in-office boozy happy hours because a few team members were getting too drunk and it was making other people uncomfortable. My boss didn't think it'd seem "cool" if we put together a policy for how these happy hours should be handled. I don't work there anymore. :)

I still distinctly feel different whenever a VP or higher level manager joins, but when it's just my team it's a lot more comfortable and has led to a lot of friendships that extend beyond our working relationship.

Or have a shitty family. A lot of “black sheep” out there are actually the relatively normal ones.

OTOH... our gut-definition of teams is a pretty tight group working very cooperatively. It definitely doesn't feel right to describe Microsoft as a "team," family or whatever.

Anyway, I disagree... kinda. I agree that "We are a family" is bullshit, but I don't think "detached and non-emotional" is a viable strategy. We humans can't be detached and unemotional about such a major thing in our life. That road leads to misery.... which is where a lot of us are in our work lives.

You say that like having a business degree is almost something to be ashamed of, or a lesser degree relative to perhaps "computer engineers" and "computer scientists"

Research in industrial psychology consistently demonstrates that managers are extremely hesitant to fire workers, particularly when the human welfare costs are high.[1] They'll consistently keep workers employed well past the point where it's economically justified.

So, I'd say for most people co-workers are not "family". But it's certainly a closer human social bond than an arms length economic transaction in most circumstances.

[1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/06/firing_aversion_2.h...

With that being said, I've made some of my best friends in boring coding jobs that only promised me money in exchange for work. It's funny now that people I'm friends from other jobs have met and mixed, that I don't even remember who I worked with where or what the hell we even did.

I was working with awesome people and had tons of fun as a particular tourist resort exploded in popularity (and revenue) while us workers only saw union minimum wage increases along a massive work stress with the increased work. We all justified still working there because we had fun with our work buddies, which was promptly exploited by upper management that had us work more for less money.

The moral of this story is: Don’t get blinded by good work culture. We still have our rights and demands as workers.

Most of the people I work with are highly ambitious and globally mobile. Our average tenure is something like a year. People who have been at the company for two years are veterans. Forming friendships in that situation is difficult because at this point many of those people have moved away for greener pastures.

Most of my friends are people I met trough my extracurricular social circles. Personally I like that almost all of my friends have different jobs in different fields. There's never work talk in social settings and I get a more diverse perspective on the world.

That sounds like a highly irregular company. My last company, which wasn't very big (<100), had half a dozen people who had been there 15+ years. The majority had been there 3+. A bunch of us would go out for a group lunch nearly every Friday (not organized by management). We'd do group Halloween costumes and wear them to the office. People would have game nights at their houses and invite people over.

I realize that my anecdote is probably also outside of the norm, but I just wanted to illustrate how wide the range is.

I used to work at a <100 person company and most of those people had been there for years and a decade was common. I had a few friends there but those relationships stagnated immediately after I left.

I've worked at a lot of companies over the years and there are two people I consider friends today that I met at work. Everyone else I consider a friend is a person I met through social circles.

I'm not sure if I'm in total agreement or in total opposition.

Family is an analogy... At the scale of many of our workplaces "tribe" might be more fitting. I'm also note convinced people quite believe it... It's more that they're learning the language of their new social structure, whether that's "team," or "family" or whatnot.

In any case, it's suspicious that we're using analogies here at all. Workplaces, usually a company, are the main social institutions of our society. Only the family rivals it. Why do we need analogies to describe workplace the relationship?

I agree that it's not a family. What is it though? A purely transactional definition doesn't work in this context. Your workplace is not your bank. You don't have to be emotionally vested in your bank. You can't avoid being emotionally vested in your workplace in a psychologically sound way.

So... going to the OP's point somewhat... Something is very broken, socially, in the thing we call companies. It's often unpleasant and for many people this lockdown is a reprieve.

I think work from home, as a norm, is a move towards a more transactional relationship with work. This may be better than whatever sucks about your workplace, but it's also got problems. We spend so much of our lives working. A minimalist relationship may not be enough.

I think I disagree though. I don't think it's replaceable, unless we're replacing work. With remote work we'll be replacing office culture with online office culture, not hobbies. I suspect they'll inherit some of the problems.

Where we spend huge amounts of time interacting with others that we never choose is what most of our major social structures are. Family, tribe, village, parish.

Work happens to be our most important social structure besides family. It the one that grants you your privileges and titles, so to speak. You can't just replace it with a hobby. Hobby's take much less of your time and have much lower stakes. To be more engaged with what's going in a minor part of your life than a major one.... it's not healthy, IMO.

I'm not crying over office culture getting lost. We can't get rid of it, that's the problem.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66966-they-fuck-you-up-your...

I can tell off-color jokes around my real family. I censor the ever-loving hell out of myself when I'm with my "work" family. I talk about work, and nothing else.

So for younger folks out there. Don't drink the cool-aid and don't buy into all these family/social bs. Always think about your interests first. And be ready to move on when your work is no longer beneficial for you.

I dunno, mine certainly does. My family extends only to where they're no longer toxic in my life. When they intrude and become a negative influence, I cut them out.

My gripe with the antagonistic "work is not your family" approach is it sends the signal that the people I meet at work will never be my family. That kind of sucks. Sure, corporations cutting people out aren't very familial, but there are other humans at the core and some of those coworkers do care if I get fired or am having personal issues. Unilaterally casting them out as a machine to further my personal interests is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

This seems like a safe assumption? I guess you can marry a couple coworkers in the course of a career but how else are they going to become family?

I don't see that as antagonistic. Work isn't your family. The purpose and circumstances are entirely different. It doesn't mean throw all your coworkers under a bus but the relationship is fundamentally different.

Still, I don’t think “work is not your family” is antagonistic and I don’t think it implies you can’t form meaningful relationships with your coworkers. I interpret it from the other direction more like “don’t expect your coworkers to be your family”.

On one level there's my "real", immediate family (my spouse, my children). On another level there's my "real" extended family (parents, other blood relatives). On yet another level there's my "adopted" family (close friends, their children, etc.)

It's pretty easy to see certain coworkers moving into the adopted family category.