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Are they still proud of high turn-over rate and the "culture of fear"?
by zerr 9y ago
Are they still proud of high turn-over rate and the "culture of fear"?
- drewg123 9y agoWhat makes you think the Netflix turnover rate is high? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that I have not personally experienced it. I've been at Netflix for a little less than 2 years. We've had zero turnover in my immediate group (the team that runs the OS used on the OpenConnect Appliance), and very little turnover in adjacent teams. I experienced far more turnover at Google.
- linkregister 9y agoThanks for replying. Those of us on the outside only have sensationalized news articles to go by, and journalists love to push the "Cutthroat Netflix Culture" narrative.
- jedberg 9y agoThose stories get clicks and sell ads, but they aren't really true. Yes, it is easier to fire someone at Netflix than elsewhere, but it doesn't happen all that more often than anywhere else, and it's also easier to hire, promote and give raises to them. So it all balances out.
- pfarnsworth 9y agoOur TPM worked at Netflix for 2 years and she said that she personally saw about 20 people let go during her time.
- zerr 9y agoI could understand this if interviews were broken (in a different way) at Netflix - is this the case? i.e. is it ridiculously easy to get a job there?
- hendzen 9y agoThere are plenty of highly capable people who are quite unproductive once settled in to a job.
- bmwe30is 9y agoI wouldn't say it's easy to get a job here. I've been working here for nearly 2 years now. The interview process is as challenging as it needs to be to find the right people for the job. This varies from team to team. We don't follow a corporate set of rules to hire engineers. This company is more adamant about letting folks go whom don't get the work done or aren't able to perform. They want good engineers to solve challenging problems. The teams are fairly lean so you can't really float by doing the bare minimum.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago> They want good engineers to solve challenging problems. Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left? Netflix is not SpaceX nor Tesla; its an online Blockbuster Video. Serving video in 2017 is not complicated.
- thoth 9y agoYou could say the same thing about chat apps (What's App) and picture sharing (Instagram)... >Is there much left? You might want to look at the Netflix tech blog - lots of interesting posts covering all kinds of topics.
- phamilton 9y agoSupplying sufficient video to be responsible for 25% of consumer internet bandwidth is a different story.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoCan you be more specific? Do you mean producing their original content? Or rendering renditions for each bitrate, and then pushing those renditions out to their custom CDN appliances? (OpenConnect) I can most definitely get behind original content production being hard. But pushing a couple hundred TB (or even low double digit PB) of data out to CDNs doesn't require a fleet of devs.
- svachalek 9y agoI think part of it depends on what you call "personally saw". I've been here 4 years, and I can name a lot of people that were let go. But it's a biggish company and there are just lots of people you know "of" without really working with that closely. In Silicon Valley 4 years is about how long it usually takes for complete turnover at a company, when you look around and there's nobody left that was there when you started. It's nothing like that for me, though, I'd say about half the people I interact with typically have been around about as long or longer than I have.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pmiller2 9y agoBy "culture of fear," do you mean the way they stated their willingness to let anyone go if doing so better meets the company's needs than retaining them? That's just what all large companies do; they're just making it explicit.
- dionidium 9y agoAs humans we do all sorts of things that it would be monstrous to state as explicit policy. Be careful with this justification.
- zimzam 9y agoNope: some companies, such as Chase, have programs to retain employees and find them other roles within the company when there are layoffs. Chase specifically gives their employees 6 months notice before eliminating the position to give people time to move around. Netflix's culture involved letting people go when they were away on short-term disability: that's not business as usual, that's a particularly harsh and unforgiving culture.
- tigershark 9y agothose programs are just a justification to fire people more easily most of the time. Have you got a different first hand experience in the company that you mentioned?
- brendangregg 9y agoA colleague already commented, but I too haven't personally experienced a high turn-over rate or a culture of fear. The culture is really great. On my team we're mostly the same as we were when I joined 3 years ago. We've added a few, and lost one. There is a turn-over rate, but what does one mean by high?