There's a benefit to making a ridiculous statement like that, though: it makes firing decisions a lot easier. Have you ever worked with that employee--the one that, sigh, they do an OK job, but wow, you have to explain everything to them 700 different ways until you get on the same page. The same mistakes keep popping up over and over. You sit them down and explain what's up. They say they're trying and they're overwhelmed. You believe them and understand that yes, our company has a lot of stuff going on and it can be tough to get your bearings.

Months pass, and the employee is skating slightly below to just above the point of causing you more work. You've corrected some of the recurring mistakes they made when they first started, but now new ones are coming up. You make notes of the employee's progress and give honest feedback. They continue to improve. Slowly. Improving just enough so that HR has strong reservations about starting the termination process. You're stuck with a dud employee that, yeah, they're not absolutely horrible, but you know that you'd be much better off with an employee that could at least get things right the second time instead of the 20th.

"You shouldn't have hired them," I hear you say. It's not always the case that you hire them. I've "inherited" bad employees from predecessors in the past and have even had my boss transfer employees into my department that were doing even worse in other departments.

So yeah, if our company had any kind of policy like the one at Netflix, this entire process wouldn't even be a conversation. I just send the mediocre employee off riding into the sunset and hire someone that's a better fit with none of the fuss and BS.