I was there for 10 years and I don't recall any mass layoffs. The article says this is about reducing expenses. Note that the article doesn't say if the layoffs were in Los Gatos or in the Hollywood office, or both.

The keeper test is mostly about helping managers be effective when they need to remove someone from their team. It eliminates the bureaucratic red tape that most companies have for firing someone. Managers at Netflix are still expected to give feedback to everyone about their performance and if there is a problem, give someone an opportunity to improve. No one should be surprised if they are let go for performance reasons.

The difference is that at Netflix someone who isn't keeping up will not be subjected to a 1+ year long process driven by HR before they are eventually fired. Instead they will be given specific time by their manager and if the problem isn't fixed fairly quickly, the manager can decide to let them go.

Most people have been on a team where there was somebody who was constantly slowing everything down or causing other problems. If you're a manager, you know that those people end up taking a huge portion of your time. At Netflix, managers are effective at removing those people.

So about the same or better than the non-tech world. I've been around the block for 20+ years in a variety of industries and, in most, you might get a warning or review. Given that in the US you can typically let go anyone for any reason, a year of reprieve is quite amazing.

Somewhat relayed: for a company whose culture recently applauds itself for catering to all sorts of audiences, there’s a significant lack of skin when compared to HBO.

That started my path down the NAS/PLEX rabbit hole, and 40TB later I don’t regret a thing.

I guess I wasn't a keeper.

(More seriously, I originally wondered if I was a bystander in some kind of social engineering attack. My best guess is that it was a fat finger error that occurred when another subscriber called in to cancel.)

Truth is, between HBO Max and Amazon Prime, I haven't missed it.

This type of high-pay contract-style work is extremely common in industrial construction. You’ll get paid $500k+ / year when you get attached to a project, and you are unemployed when that project ends until the company gets another project. It’s referred to as “breathe in, breathe out” and people genuinely enjoy it. High pay when there is work, and lots of free time between projects.

> These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance, which makes them especially tough as none of us want to say goodbye to such great colleagues.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/17/23103131/netflix-layoffs-...

I think ideally, the "sports team" idea should only apply to key people in the organization.

Is it about a difference between operational work and strategic work?

The benefit is that because the group is small, they can collaborate more effectively with each other and ultimately, this group would be the main force behind the innovations of the org.

If the sports team idea applies to this small group, I think it would result in everyone bringing out the best of themselves but also other organization members could potentially get motivated by them.

I've seen Valve (the company) do a similar thing with a lot of success. They call it the cabal process[1]. They don't treat it exactly like a "sports team" but there are lots of parallels.

[1] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_in_the_press#...

Dream team reasoning should ideally be applied semi-randomly -- if you need it to be enforced make the "reminder we are a dream team" messaging different and randomly chosen for different aspects of management and maybe even just introduce artificial delays to stagger firings so they are not clumped into groups ...

group firings are a wall street signal not a management strategy ...

"These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance, which makes them especially tough as none of us want to say goodbye to such great colleagues"

So no, these layoffs are different.

Is this person good enough, so you would try to prevent their growth when they feel like change is needed? Are they good enough so that you would fight for them to stay even after they expressed the wish to move to another team?

To be entirely honest, most (not all but most) of people that moved from one stable team to another within the same company were happy with that. Sometimes it is not so, but in most cases.

Heck, they'd need to layoff 500 of those engineers earning the vaunted 500k salary to reach what they're paying Benioff and Weiss, who have so far produced Metal Lords and The Chair.

Ok Reid, now where are those "dream team" replacements for them that you promised?

Reid?

Gross. Enormous red flag that is indicative of a toxic culture.

Seems they were bonkers from the start. Why they thought competition will not catch up with them? What is their business moat?

More like $500k minimum. Netflix mostly hires senior engineers – until recently it was only seniors – and those seniors make over $500k.

BTW, $250K - $500K is about average for BigTech developers.

[0] https://en.as.com/en/2021/10/08/mlb/1633685987_178363.html

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Netflix/salaries/Software-Eng...

Unfair dismissal cases are surprisingly common in AU, although not often talked about. They can get VERY expensive especially for higher-paying roles.

This is simplistic. Sometimes managers don't want a high-performing employee on their team just because the employee is a competitive threat to them.

What a load of wank. No one who has owned a company for more than five minutes would say that load of bollocks with a straight face. You do your best with what you have. You do your best with those you hire. You do your best with yourself. Well that's what I do anyway, most of the time (I'm human).

Any CEO of, a little firm in the UK (me) to a monster from the US has a simple question to answer for their staff: "Am I a wanker"? A wanker doesn't care and a CEO that starts wanking over a "dream team" is obviously a wanker. The "keeper test" as described is nonsense - you don't pay more to person A to entice person B to enhance your team - that's complete nonsense. Why would you "pay off" person A for being rubbish? You pay person A their dues and move on.

I try to avoid being a wanker. We generally offer to pay our staff what we think is reasonable and invite robust discussion in return.

I would never use the term "dream team" like that - what a wanker!

You can make your substantive points without that; please do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> you don't pay more to person A to entice person B to enhance your team

That has nothing to do with the "dream team" idea. It's a metaphor referring to the 1992 USA Olympics basketball team [1] that included:

  Magic Johnson, 
  Michael Jordan, 
  Scottie Pippen, 
  Patrick Ewing, 
  David Robinson, 
  Charles Barkley

This team went to win the gold medal. The closest score in the eight olympic matches was 117-85. In other words, the "dream team" utterly dominated.

Netflix does not try to make do with what they have. They try to assemble a "dream team" for each thing they do. I saw Netflix be pretty successful at it while I was there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_men%27s_Oly...

There’s some irony here though - UK software companies pay shit. Netflix engineers were routinely making 400-800k in cash with a similar amount of severance if it didn’t work out. Wanker talk aside, I’d rather be at Netflix with top compensation than a UK software company paying devs 60k/yr with heavy top down management.

That said, the price comparison between US and Europe is always ignoring the myriad of economic difference between the two places, and in this case whether you're working for wankers that only care about their dream team or where you're treated like a decent human being and not a human resource.

There's a reason why many UK developers stay here and don't move to the Silicon Valley to work for Netflix for half a million dollars a year. Not because we're all idiots.

Because it's incredibly hard to get a work visa, and it comes with a lot of restrictions.

It's better for the US corporations to keep us as colonies of cheap labour for offshoring.

$250k/yr in Europe > $500k/yr in US, especially since in Europe that would put me somewhere in the 1% and I would live like a prince pretty much everywhere.

And more personally, $250k/yr at a company I enjoy > $1M/yr at a FAANG. I have no interest in getting filthy rich working for any of those companies, but YMMV.

That's the issue, it's more like earning $60k in EU vs. $160k in the US for most Tech workers. And the latter is much, much better.

In fact, how many US Netflix employees are actually earning $500k/yr like we were discussing upthread? I doubt that's the salary of a junior frontend employee. If it is, good for them. I don't think my quality of life and happiness would change dramatically between $250k and $1M/yr, but apparently this is so hard to convey to an American audience that thinks more money == more happiness.

I’d give up my $500k/year salary to move to Europe and feel more supported if anything went wrong, but I do wonder how much support someone on a work visa in the UK/EU gets if they lose their job.

I don't care if I get private insurance in the States. I get private insurance here too, and I even use it now and again. But I care about knowing that, no matter what happens to me, ever, I won't be saddled with a life-ruining debt that wipes out what I've gained. Not without my consenting to borrow such an amount.

I'm not interested in playing snakes and ladders. I'm not interested in the equivalent of someone selling me a mortgage without my knowledge in my sleep (and with no house at the end of it). And I know that insurers - unlike the UK govt - are in the business of avoiding making payouts[0].

(That's the main thing, at least, by far. Then the salary-erasing real estate costs, in all the places where those endlessly-quoted salary figures are from, make me not-particularly-sad that I ruled it out.)

[0] I'm not imputing dishonesty. I'm just saying their literal business model is maximise premiums, minimise claims.

I just moved to Canada

Health care is free and I am covered on my visa

Medication / dentist is not but my company has private health insurance so I am covered for that too

Education for kids is free too

Public transport sucks but that is because I am in a small city

Europe is better connected and I’ve heard their public health care is better, but I doubt it would be too different

I don’t know at what else the social safety net in Europe would be better

Unless people want to leave miserably, they need to pay rent and food everywhere (heck, you even have food stamp in the states)

Keep in mind things tend to be cheaper in the US than in Europe

Every time I've visited Europe I'm reminded of how money really doesn't buy happiness as cliche as thet sounds.

My brother got a job in London long ago, only thing he could do is rent a bedroom in a shared house

Compared to renting a house in Canada with similar wage

I always find it strange that on HN we all end up talking about London salaries and London cost of living. Believe it or not, other options exist…

Despite the reductiveness of your argument there are things people value more than just buying a big house.

The quality of life you get In Europe is superior in my opinion to the one in America. The way cities are laid out and the pervasiveness of public transit allows for a better social life.

I could go on and on but if you're going to be on this forum and engage with others you should adjust your attitude.

I’d gladly move to the US if I didn’t have to go through their hellish immigration system (and I may leave the UK if the Brexit madness keeps degenerating).

That's not a fault of the UK salaries, it's you being terrible with your money. The US won't save you from yourself.

Yet with that salary you can afford a very nice house outside of central London, you can travel, eat at a fancy restaurant whenever you want, get the latest iDevice every year and buy a new car with cash when the old one breaks, provided you're smart with your money. To my European tastes that's living like a prince (not a king)

In the UK £200k puts you solidly in the 1% bracket - that is, 99% of people earn less than you. If that's not princely, I don't know what is.

It does not do anything for me: if I have to live in an apartment instead of a house I am not going to feel happy about it because 99% of people live in even worse apartment.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_British_prince...

I personally had a manager refer to me as an athlete on a big-league sports team (I was a software developer), and it was incredibly off-putting. I don't like athletes, I don't like sports or athletics, and I don't like zero-sum bullshit at work. If I didn't like the guy otherwise he would have been one of the wankers GP is referring to.

Stock down 72% in 6 months.

People are leaving netflix because its value propersition is sh*t. Its dream-team algorithm is eating its profit and so full of wankers no one has noticed.

The amount of times ive herad an ex-netflixer tell me they never saw the content i saw is just the writing on the wall.

You had an early mover advantage and the dream team dropped the ball! The only reason your a house-hold name is because of account sharing your users will never pay what will make you profitable. People have left Network TV and the news. Creators no longer dream of Hollywood. Actors are moving to direct to fan engagements. Movies are just re-hashing classics.

The world has moved on.

s/can't/won't/ I believe they're gamifying their app to be the software equivalent of a discount retail outlet clothes bin. You get frustrated with the experience and just pick something. Now they're going to put ads in their app. The moment I start seeing ads is the goodbye netflix moment.

https://lebronwire.usatoday.com/lists/team-usa-basketball-ev...

So your analogy suggests Netflix will quickly return to its former glory days.

I think this is premature, at best, if not incredibly optimistic. I think this is the beginning of a long uphill battle for Netflix, and that if they ever return to their former glory days, it will be much further down the road than what is a typical recover from an upset.

I’m not convinced they ever will be the same. Not even close.

Turns out great players in a league are playing in a specific team configuration, and the context of the league in general is very different compared to a competition between national teams at the world cup level.

Yes it’s “profitable”. But until last year, it was having to borrow more money than if was making just to produce and acquire content and the acquired content was ripped away from them by their competitors.

I'm in NZ maybe our catalog is that different?

> The team has been described by journalists around the world as the greatest sports team ever assembled.

> The team defeated Cuba 136–57, prompting Cuban coach Miguel Calderón Gómez to say, "You can't cover the sun with your finger."[33] Marv Albert, who announced the game, recalled that "it was as if [the Americans] were playing a high school team, or grade school team. They were so overwhelming ... a blowout after blowout."[16] The Cubans were the first of many opponents who were more interested in taking photos with the Americans than playing them.

Mike K. was part of the coaching team, led by Chuck Daly.

The coach was Chuck Daly.

In any case, all of this is just the usual self-serving blah blah of top executives to rationalize to extract as much value as possible from the employees while minimizing the cost. I suppose that's the rational, cold thing to do, but I could be spared from the BS discourse.

Uhh yeah the Star Trek "dream team" is really something else ;)

I question if the strategy still makes sense as they seem to be getting eaten alive by spendthrifts like Disney.

As an aside, from an employees perspective, I think expecting much out of your employees and giving them high pay is fundamentally respecting them more than giving them “reasonable pay” and shrugging your shoulders and going “eh, I’ll make do with what I have”.

Disney+ is also hosted on AWS.

Netflix effectively pays the “max pay” for all positions. Naturally, they do not have difficulty hiring with this philosophy - but it comes with the trade off that they either need a rediculous interview gauntlet or performance management process. They do a bit of both from what I understand.

This is a common conception. Netflix's option plan is extremely generous. Per this link (https://www.teamblind.com/post/Netflix-is-a-truly-great-comp...), a Netflix employ would lose monly only if its stock price always goes down: "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. "

But that's not really the point. Your job safety is ultimately about whether other companies would hire you. And if you're good enough to get a role at Netflix, then you can get another job extremely quickly here in the valley. Most top recruiters know that Netflix is very selective. I have yet to see anyone who was let go at Netflix struggle to get another job. They usually get multiple offers, in fact.

And yet, you often hear of Google's rest and vest culture and how bored people are in that environment. Some people might prefer an all-around high achiever culture, at certain points in their careers.

> And with Netflix stock down 72% in 6 months

Given Netflix's compensation structure (all cash) this is irrelevant unless you believe the market valuation indicates the company is doomed in the short term.

Netflix's market valuation is extremely relevant. The only reason we are discussing Netflix on this thread is that layoffs there have begun.

The effect is much more subtle and it has more of an impact on companies where equity is a big part of employee compensation.

Netflix's market value falling 72% means the market has a negative view of Netflix's foreseeable ability to sustain or grow revenues and profits.

You are right in that it is possible that Netflix has the market fooled and in reality is growing its revenues and profits and cash flows at an even greater rate than expected and it is all just one big misunderstanding.

If that is the case, Netflix can always choose to 'go private', where it no longer sees a need for public market funding and believes that savvy private investors combined with its revenues and cash flows can fund its operations and growth.

But as a public company, its stock price and market value also signify access to capital. The less capital Netflix has access to, the less it can invest in its existing and growth operations, like the 100s of shows it creates every year.

With access to less capital, Netflix will keep on fewer of its 'dream team athlete' workers, even with their all cash and no stock compensation, which is why we are starting to see layoffs.

If their stock price keeps tanking, layoffs are inevitable. This is sadly true for much of the economy if it goes into recession.

So really it's not a question of quality--as though such a thing existed among employers--it's a question of elitism, and Netflix pays the price of being elitist. Which many places don't, they say they only hire the best bla bla well first off they don't hire the best because they didn't hire me, so second best in the most favorable view, and second off they want to...uh...pay the median for the best. Paying 50 percentile salaries--not even 51 percentile, just 50 percentile--for 99 percentile people according to their unpaid homework. Which is not worth a fuck, you can put original research and break impossibility limits on the unpaid homework, it won't matter if they smell excess dignity. DNANexus and JITX got crazy results and they didn't bite why? Don't know. Yeah I'm a fucking arrogant guy[1] I can read what I write but still, that's consistent with being the best (at the particular thing I do best, which isn't everything by any means, but programming interviews I always, always, always nail without prep), but they don't want spine. No spine. Except Elon Musk, weirdly enough. A few other places. Netflix too it appears, well like those sport teams, there's fucking arrogant guys there too, most athletes. Elitism means flowing with that, and most companies just don't.

And in general, most places saying they're hiring? Are actually firing. Not hiring, so much as firing. They're not growing, they're trying to diminish those W-2 line items with cheaper replacements, so there's a built-in cap to what you can ask of them, and then you hit a wall. And you're competing back and forth with a guy you can't talk to. They rip the job description of his resume.

So at least Netflix is consistent.

[1] To the point I consider myself a slave of GOD, knowing the last shall be the first (Matthew KJV).

EDIT: So in fact those are the two mainstream ways of ending up sick, drug use like Wolf of Wall Street ("it's your own fault, you were warned") and it being congenital like in American Psycho ("ew stay away from me don't get near me it's a deformity").

But there's a third way, malpractice. And you can't look down on that the same way. It's in now way my fault, you can't look at me like I'm inferior like for the other two cases. It's very, very different. It could happen to you through no fault of your own, or any reader, it's the shrink's fault, Doctor Jorge Barros Beck. The disease comes from him, he has both the drugs and the deformity.

If you so much as talk to him, you could have your eyes open and yet open your eyes. Reading this comment one instant, the next instant in a torture ward a month in the future unable to communicate in your own thoughts, halfway through this...did you make it to the end of this sentence?

So you know what, be happy you know anything, be happy you can remember anything, be happy to be. Live in the moment between the lacunae. And if you wake up there, know when you reread this years later there was no advice I can have given you that you will have been allowed to recall.

Read up on my comments, I talk at length about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen

It also explains quite well why I don't hire people like your character. They think they aren't hired because of their arrogance, like it's a downside that only merely vitiates their tremendous intelligence. In reality an attitude like that is a nearly-perfectly-reliable signal of someone who's totally deluded about their own intelligence. Truly super-intelligent people of course are not chippy, insecure, oppositional, constantly expatiating upon their great intelligence, etc - it's just a given, a neutral fact, much like the way Bill Gates doesn't go on about how much money he has, whereas a recruitment consultant earning 50k a year will go on about such.

Anyway, I enjoyed the skit. Thank you for sharing it. The technique of your not using quotation marks and suchlike really imbues it with a sense of great immediacy and realism. Marvelous stuff.

I have stuck with subpar pay because I liked my bosses, and didn't hate comming into work.

I have quit high paying jobs, with union representation.

(And yes--those bastards will eventually drag us all back. I thought Jamie Diamond's demand that if you want to work here show up to the office. Even Diamond retreated. Might be the only war he ever lost? Then again Diamond might be feeling less immortal? He had his aorta replaced a year ago, and is a survivor of throat cancer. I don't know why I'm writing so much about Diamond. Maybe--because if I had a do-over, I would have gone into finance, and hopefully retire early?)

He was fired from Citigroup in 1998 by Sandy Weil, who he had worked with for 15 years. So there's that.

Less of a nit: You apparently care about liking your workplace. Sample size of 1, but I know of (a) no-one who went into finance who enjoyed their tenure; and (b) plenty of folks that retired early from their tech careers and none from their finance careers. (Most have moved from i-banking to PE or VC, but they’re still slogging away.)

With respect to the “generous severance”, if you’re engineer who’s being recruited by Netflix and know of their “Dream team” culture where they hire slow and fire fast, you’d have to have some concern about joining that team and fearing that you won’t fit in regardless of skill set. The “generous severance” is there to ease that concern and exists as a hiring tool, not a firing one.

This philosophy strikes me as cruel. Not everything is your fault, sometimes life is just hard and work, especially for anonymous giga-corp, is not all there is.

A professional sports person (like a soccer or basketball star) would not be able to give this same excuse, so why would it not be the same in an engineering setting? Netflix wants their workplace to be like pro-sports, where elites complete for the best outcome and be rewarded like so.

If you choose to apply for employment at netflix, this is what you're signing up for. There are other positions in other companies, if such an environment is not conducive to your own lifestyle - noone is forcing this onto you.

The natural condition of humanity is cruel, and society and civilization hasn't proceeded to the stage where such cruelty don't exist. But right now, there's still at least choice and options for those who don't want to compete this way (with the associated decrease in salary).

I'm not saying these contracts are "for life", but there are plenty of athletes who either a) get injured and are unable to play or b) take a significant period of time to deliver on their initial promise. Nature might be cruel, but sports teams are often quite fair & accommodating...

In tech orgs, a system (potentially composed of dozens of service) can often outgrow their team, especially when there's high attrition and turnover (perhaps because you view each individual software engineer as a highly expendable/fungible "pro sports player").

Seems like a breeding ground for entropy, and compositions of systems built on lost history, chaos, and confusion.

This situation is pretty common professional sports, actually. For example, Russell Westbrook's salary is higher than either Lebron James or Antonio Davis, and the highest-paid player on the Dallas Mavericks has been out for two months (including all of the playoffs). They have a strong union with guaranteed contracts, though.

But of course it is not comparable. While Netflix pays very well (have many friends there), it's still nothing compared to a pro-sport star who is making double digit millions per year.

It's the concept, and culture that are analogous. And netflix do pay above average of the FAANG amounts.

So we're supposed to just accept the "dream team athlete" analogy even though it falls massively short when it comes to a crucial factor: compensation?

In other words, Netflix gets to expect "star athlete" performance, and quickly fire those who fail to meet it, but doesn't have to pay anywhere near "star athlete" compensation.

Not to mention that in reality, "star athletes" are given plenty of time to grow to their potential, and recover when their performance drops, while Netflix made it into an ideology to immediately fire the employee in that exact situation.

It's a rotten deal for the engineers, sugarcoated with inappropriate and wildly inaccurate "dream team" glamor rhetoric.

> And netflix do pay above average of the FAANG amounts.

They pay about as well or a bit better for the same level of talent. "FAANG average" is meaningless, because you're averaging FAANGs who pay poorly (Amazon) to FAANGs who pay very well (Meta).

Obviously not the case this year.

It has in Europe.

A professional sport star, certainly at "dream team" level, would be compensated far better than any alternative employment they may have. After just a few years at that level, they would have earned such vast amounts that financially they can retire, and any further employment in their role is optional. It's not a big deal if they lose it.

Netflix doesn't pay engineers much above their alternatives. They compete for the best talent with the other top employers, and pay about on par or slightly better, which doesn't compensate the engineer for the very transitory nature of their employment.

Netflix model is inferior for full-time employees, and they're not paying anywhere near enough to make it worthwhile. They're relying on hype rhetoric to convince naive engineers that they are "star athletes", just like all the startups that used to scam engineers into believing they are "rock stars" and will definitely earn millions upon exit, while in reality underpaying and overworking them.

But the "dream team" doesn't last forever. The metaphor is meant to reinforce that. If you could play for a season with Michael Jordan, Barkley, Ewing, and the other amazing players from the actual 1992 Dream Team -- wouldn't you do it? And if you got cut the next season because there was someone even better than you -- would you regret being on that team? It would probably be a great experience, even if it only lasted a while. This is what the "dream team" idea is about.

It's clearly not for everybody, not for every company, and not for every situation. Netflix's culture is all about excellence, and the "dream team" and "keeper test" ideas work well there. I saw it play out first hand.

I know for a fact from a first-person connection that this is not true. Get sick and you're out.

Jordan is famous but bloody lonely. His essentially a degen gambler. The biggest tool you could imagine.

But hey, he plays BBall well!

To all us on the outside, all i see is wasted talent, locked up, for the money and the prestiege. Who are so smart, they cant even build a profitable product!

It is extremely cruel. I have a friend who, while working at Netflix, had a major health problem and was coldly fired for not performing. As if anyone could perform at 110% (required at Netflix) from a hospital bed.

"even if your performance declines, you'll get a nice check before being let go" sounds a lot better to a candidate/employee than "not good enough? just leave. now."

it's nonsense to you because you just don't have the budget.

For a huge tech company, how much you pay people seems to matters a lot less than who's building the product. It's better to have a few amazing people that you pay way above market, than a bunch of crappy employees that you pay at market level or below.(for their level of "experience")

What you cannot do is compete in the highest level at any field while caring about things like "will people think I'm a wanker?". If you are succeeding spectacularly at anything, there are guaranteed to be thousands, if not millions, of people who think you're a wanker. Look at people at the top of anything and look at what people say about them.

Can you point out why succeeding spectacularly needs someone to be an asshole? Is it a US specific thing?

Sure, after you’re dead people will look back and think you were great, but while you’re in the process in any competitive endeavor you necessarily are not going to be liked by the people you’re competing against, especially if you’re winning.

Take the late president of India. Did every single person in India vote for him? Did everyone agree with everything he proposed? He had no opposition? I know absolutely nothing about Indian politics, but I bet there were people who didn’t like him while he was in office.

“I better be nice and not do anything that anyone might object to” is not an attitude that leads to success.

And MLK, really???? You think nobody thought he was an asshole? You know they murdered him right? Do you think the people who killed him said he was a great guy?

To incentivize people to apply and work for you company, given the known higher risk of getting fired?

Hiring is really hard. I think when this Netflix thing was written it was a different era.

Why? The founder of LinkedIn also says in his book Alliance that employees and their companies are not families. Instead, they form alliance. They work toward the same goal if they can be aligned, or they part ways. Netflix said a company is like a sports team. Similar idea, and Netflix is upfront about it. This is much better than the family utopia that companies like to promise but can never deliver.

Good luck to Netflix with their constant recycling of staff, they'll need it.

A lot of American MBAs are, in fact, wankers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Overview

I don't understand your thinking - why do your best with what you have rather than trying to find better?

Clearly their business-as-a-sports-team mentality paid off in spades. But now that spinning up a competing streaming site is "dead simple" (as you put it), they have to compete on content alone, and they're kind of getting their lunch eaten.

I do wonder if their sports mentality starts to break down when it comes to more artistic undertakings. Greenlighting the right projects means bringing the right people together takes a lot of experience and intuition to get right. I think they still have a lot to learn from HBO in terms of focus - it seems like Netflix is still throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and to constantly show their customers new movie posters, but for the past few years scrolling through their offerings feels like walking through the unorganized aisles of a giant discount store, when they probably want it to feel like walking into an upscale boutique.

They optimized for a local maxima that's now rapidly eroding, and I think they could theoretically push themselves beyond it, but it seems more likely they'll just throw ads on the thing, or start squeezing and penalizing their users for using the product wrong like the Blockbuster of yore.

More specifically, they have to compete with all of their prior suppliers, who gave streaming rights away for a song, but after Netflix proved the business model, are now charging two arms and a leg for it.

Blockbuster was never a monopoly. Hollywood Video had a comparable number of locations, and there were many smaller competitors. The business model had no real moat.

The details are important, and running a good CDN isn't easy but....it's a CDN serving files. People really did build a completely free version on their own time [1]. That also costs less to run (kind of a requirement if you're building a BitTorrent streaming client).

It's important to think really carefully about what Netflix actually does, as opposed to what they like to pretend they do: because all the important stuff isn't really tech, it's business, bureaucracy and manual labor - subtitling, license management, ISP negotiations for server placement, someone going through every episode of a show to set the "skip credits" titling.

[1] https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop

Streaming sites are “good enough” now and will live:die on content.

I honestly have no idea what all that engineering talent is doing such that HBO Max is able to replicate 95% of the technology experience.

In fact, sometimes those fired people would be invited back after the bad manager was fired.

Harsh performance cultures favor the perception game over time.

Cool that it can and apparently has been reversed, though. That shows character.

Maybe you like your employer, but let me tell you: that's sociopathic. It's deeply disrespectful to long-term individual contributors to treat them that way, and if this is in any way representative of the company's leadership's philosophy, then they are bad people who should not be hiring.

Oh wait, they're firing. Not hiring.

- It was extremely rare. In my four years I only saw it happen once, and only heard about it happening one or two other times in the history of the company.

- The general philosophy was to make it easy to both hire and fire people, to allow for nimbleness. But they were open about this and let people know this wasn't for everyone.

- I think it shows great leadership -- the company admitted it made a mistake and tried to rectify it by inviting them back. Seems better to me than just trying to sweep it under the rug.

The sports team mentality wasn't for everyone, but for a lot of us, we loved it. We loved having coworkers who lifted us up and who we could trust to get things done and do them well, and knowing that if they didn't they wouldn't be around for long.

If I was the employee affected and received that invite, I'd ask to speak to the SVP in charge of my division and ask them a few questions about how a good employee got fired. ANd I'd also let them know that as a human, it was a devaluing experience.

Having worked at a number of enterprises and been a manager, I can't say I'd ever want to work in your environment. Hiring and firing quickly isn't a recipe for nimbleness, it's a recipe for a weak foundation. Note: I have vendors and contractors for me, and I can easily hire or fire them. That's entirely different from FTEs.

To your point, in general if you leave a place due to a bad manager (or get fired) and some kind of reform happens and you get invited back, usually the best move is not to come back. The organization already showed it was willing to toss you away at least once. That being said Netflix is probably a bit of an exception because it’s explicitly where you go to work if you want to work with people who are all insanely competent and hardworking and where performance is actually a core focus.

Also I still don’t quite understand the sociopathy element. It doesn’t seem sociopathic to say “hey we got rid of the toxic manager, want your old job back?” although like I said it’s still generally a bad idea to actually take the job back

The reason it's sociopathic is because companies shouldn't devalue their employees by treating them so callously as allowing a single bad manager to fire them. It speaks volumes about the nature of the company- one that is willing to bring in people and kick them back out without ever considering things like growth potential, job training, life circumstances, and any number of other things that affect employees.

I guess that's the sort of difference between companies that hire people and invest in them, and companies that just sort of churn through employees.

> not that they were wearing a clan hat to work

If so, I'd go with "refer them to Uber or Coinbase" perhaps..