How Netflix Reinvented HR

I was an engineer at Netflix from 2010-2012. There were a lot of things that I really liked about the Netflix culture. They really do live the &quot;Freedom and Responsibility&quot; culture. It was very empowering. There is a dark side to that culture though. At Netflix it was <i>too</i> easy to fire people.<p>This had two side affects.<p>1) People were afraid of being fired. You could come in one day and be sent home that afternoon without ever having any idea that you were under-performing. You&#x27;ll hear Netflix employees talk about the &quot;Culture of Fear&quot;.<p>2) In a meeting with my team Patty said &quot;We are your co-workers, not your friends.&quot; `The idea being, you don&#x27;t make friends at work because you might have to fire that person one day. It was really strange, people were very guarded and almost never talked about their lives outside of work.<p>PIPs protect employees from the constant fear of being fired. They require managers to give an employee negative feedback. Without them, managers can take the easy route and never have the uncomfortable conversations.<p>#2 made life really hard at Netflix. The majority of my friends come from my co-workers. You spend more time with them than most other people in your life. Some teams ignored the company culture and became close friends anyway. I think the correct thing to do here is to expect your managers to be adults and do the hard thing. Fire your friend.

Simple: <a href="http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Netflix-Reviews-E11891.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Netflix-Reviews-E11891.htm</a><p>You can filter for just engineers, if that&#x27;s who you want to pay attention to. Netflix rates very low compared to Facebook, Google, etc. Those companies demand hard work from their employees, but are great places to work. They do a good job with hiring.<p>Netflix does not, they just grind through people very rapidly .. like they&#x27;re cheap batteries. Thus the poor glassdoor reviews.<p>Fact is, Netflix culture is terrible for employees but effective for the Company.<p>I advise anyone before they apply for a job anywhere to study glassdoor carefully. Ignore ratings, read comments carefully. Reviews which balance positive with negatives are the ones to take as credible.

The big accounting firms in the US are an interesting case to look at. Accountants will join the firm and spend 8-10 years there. Eventually, they either become partners or they wash out (most don&#x27;t make partner). The culture has developed in such a way that &quot;washing out&quot; is not really seen as a negative thing. They&#x27;ve established a concept of alumni and maintain good relationships. The &quot;washed out&quot; alumni go on to become CFOs and CPAs and there is a steady stream of referrals to and from the big firms.<p>Maintaining relationships after letting an employee go is hard. If employees are only let go for incompetence, it may not even be worth the effort. But if an employee is let go because there&#x27;s a resource mismatch I think there is a lot of value in maintaining that relationship.<p>Netflix seems to say &quot;We just don&#x27;t need your exact skill set right now&quot; instead of &quot;You aren&#x27;t good enough for us&quot;. That seems like a prime situation to try and keep a good relationship.

Anecdote time:<p>My wife worked for Netflix customer service (CS) back about 9 years ago - in their formative years. She likens her time there as similar to any other large company. The individuals were great, but the management was your typical bureaucracy. Rankings were heavily based on seniority, not actual individual value.<p>As CS reps were considered to be fully interchangeable (and the first to be let go to maintain profit margins), it was a terrible department to try and gain seniority in.<p>Never seemed all that different, HR wise, from any other company. Perhaps they&#x27;ve changed; I can&#x27;t say.

Article mentions the shift to &quot;unlimited vacations&quot;. Sounds like it worked at Neflix, larger companies are starting to move toward unlimited vacation model, but it appears that it&#x27;s driven by not having carry accrued paid time off on the books and studies that show that people actually take less vacation under unlimited plans. How is it done at your company?

While the generous severance package and transparency about the process ease my concerns over whether it&#x27;s ethical or not to cut employees so frequently, all I really got out of this is that I will probably never apply to Netflix.

I think some of this is bizzare.<p>I mean, an employee is satisfactory, but only satisfactory, so they give him a generous severance package and go hiring somebody else. Really?<p>This sounds like &quot;stack ranking&quot; where they fire the bottom 60% every year.

So what problems are your typical Netflix Engineers solving? I really don&#x27;t mean to be insulting but given my interaction with Netflix as a consumer it&#x27;s hard to see the stellar part. Lots of bandwidth play and even some Web app challenges but what part about it requires only A players with 200K+ salaries? Genuinely curious.

After getting to this line - &quot;after I left Netflix and began consulting...&quot; - I couldn&#x27;t help wondering whether or not the author was fired and whether this means there are significant portions of her advice that the current management of Netflix would disagree with.

I am not sure its all positive though. I only heard bad things about Netflix and the atmosphere. I stay away from it and their recruiters proactively because of that. Just like the &quot;there is no limit on vacation&quot; scam that they pull over their employees got implemented in many startups, I am sure a lot of that &quot;culture&quot; spilled into the startup world as well.

I see some tension between values like &quot;go for the root cause rather than the symptoms&quot; vs &quot;bias towards action rather than analysis-paralysis&quot;, as well as &quot;speak up when we we aren&#x27;t practicing our values&quot; vs &quot;value action rather than process&quot;.<p>At the end of the day it&#x27;ll come down to the personality of your manager and the dynamics on your day-to-day team.

Makes me wonder how awesome their documentation and knowledge base must be to pull off that sort of churn.

I appreciate the philosophy of getting rid of HR rules in favor of treating people like adults with good judgement. However, good judgement is probably one of those things whose definition is open to disagreement. E.G. one person&#x27;s good judgement might mean taking risks and another&#x27;s might mean playing it safe. Is Netflix just forming a monoculture of people with the same definition of good judgement.<p>Also, it&#x27;s interesting that the writer validates Netflix&#x27;s efforts by saying the company&#x27;s stock went up, 3 Emmys were won, and the firm acquired a bunch of new customers. Are employees expected to optimizing these metrics, first and foremost, which seem very short sighted to me? What about fundamentals like profitability and customer retention?

Got few issues with the culture of Netflix.<p>So once someone is not needed, the person is just sent off? I understand a generous severance is given. But, you couldN&#x27;T use that money to try to retrain the worker with another technology&#x2F;task&#x2F;job?<p>What about mentoring? Someone has to start somewhere. So if Netflix ONLY hires someone who&#x27;s A grade, where do B and C grade people get their chance to learn and improve? Sounds like a very selfish way of hiring (granted every company is selfish).<p>I do agree with one thing in the article. The whole year-end or half-year end performance review is just a sham. No one in management cares until management decides to lay off someone. They start putting down C or D grade all of sudden when earlier it was mostly As and Bs. And next thing you know, you are let go.

Sorry, this sounds like a terrible place to work.

The author unabashedly claims credit for Neflix&#x27;s success, but provides no evidence that HR was the source of it.

Is it a coincidence that the main character in the TV Show &quot;Damages&quot; is called Patty, too?

Netflix sounds like an extremely well-managed company. Can anyone comment on the accuracy of what&#x27;s in the slide deck? I&#x27;d be curious to know how it all works out.