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"
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.