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All I'd say is; Netflix have a pretty extreme culture[1]. From the outside it looks pretty solid, but I understand the reality is that if you are not above aver

All I'd say is; Netflix have a pretty extreme culture[1]. From the outside it looks pretty solid, but I understand the reality is that if you are not above average for two performance cycles in a row they let you go. There is an expectation of drive, and constant commitment (no judgement; it works for them, though I'd never work there!) WFH naturally allows more flex into your real life. This will not vibe well with Netflix's culture IMO. 1. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture https://jobs.netflix.com/culture

pizza234 6y ago
> All I'd say is; Netflix have a pretty extreme culture[1] > 1. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture Scary. From some extracts, it seems more a cult than a company: > You question actions inconsistent with our values > You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group > You accomplish amazing amounts of important work They're taken out of context, but could be interpreted as hints to how the company really works.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- anoncareer0212 6y ago
  If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes. Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews: our first promotion case in 2 years is the colleague who performatively did no work for months while the manager was out, bullied me for continuing to schedule and work with our partner teams, and encouraged another co-worker to have a meltdown about it that cost them significantly.
  - verticalflight 6y ago
    FAANG = Netflix
    - anoncareer0212 6y ago
      Dropping the N seemed both potentially confusing and offensive - you can rest assured I'm not pining for Netflix from Netflix :p
  - pizza234 6y ago
    > If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes. I don't get it. What's the larger cause here? Netflix is not doing anything special for the society. If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies. I actually see it (but obviously, it's my opionion) as a very skilfull marketing targeted at outstanding but naive engineers (that is, people who sacrifice their work/life balance for the company). In a cynical way, it's like the nigerian scam, but oriented at intelligent people. > Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews A company like Alphabet is more than 10x the size of Netflix. Politics and inefficiency is pretty much inevitable at those magnitudes.
    - andreilys 6y ago
      “If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies.” If we took a random sample of Netflix engineers and compared them to a company with weak engineering cultures, like Blockbuster, I’m sure we could agree that Netflix engineers are more talented.
      - gaadd33 6y ago
        But we aren't comparing them to a random company, we are comparing them to the rest of FAANG. Do they have a much stronger engineering culture than Google/etc?
        jpgvm 6y ago
        Pound for pound I would probably say yes. Netflix is often where the best of the best aspire to be even if they have already done rotations at FB/Google. At least in my field (infrastructure, big data, etc) this mostly holds true.
    - biztos 6y ago
      > What's the larger cause here? Delivering high-quality entertainment people enjoy watching, and doing it in a way that "just works?" I don't know if that's the larger cause as they pitch it to engineers but as a Netflix subscriber, it sure seems like they care a lot about that cause; and as a cinephile I think it's definitely doing something special for society. Not unique, but special: these production-and-streaming companies are revolutionizing film art, and happen to also employ a lot of my friends. But... I probably wouldn't work there as a techie.
  - drewg123 6y ago
    I have worked for Netflix for over 5 years, and its the best place I've ever worked. It has the no-bullshit feel of a small company combined with the advantages (pay, benefits) of a big company. Almost everybody I've worked with is amazing. I admit that the culture was daunting, and even after going through an L5 -> L6 promo at Google, I was worried about not being able to cut it at Netflix. I was very nervous about this the first year, until the first performance cycle, after which time nobody I knew had been let go. There is honestly much less turn over around me than at Google, for example. To me, this means most people are pretty happy here. I'm not aware of any stack ranking. If there was, then 95% of my group must have been above average for the last 5 years since almost nobody has been let go. To be clear, yes, people in my group have been let go. However, I was seldom surprised when somebody was let go.
    - nomel 6y ago
      You might not be able to answer this, but what’s the QA culture there? How do project timelines work there? Are there project managers for all projects? I ask because I can’t remember the last bug, visual artifact, or non-intuitive UI design from anything Netflix related, even in my awful Roku TV. What I don’t understand is how it’s possible for management to exist that understands how much of an achievement that is, and how much man time that takes (assuming here).
    - stareatgoats 6y ago
      > seldom If only you had said "never" ...
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Not everyone's a good fit for their job, and dealing well with low performers is critical to building and maintaining a well-oiled organization. I've worked at a company that consistently failed to "deal well with poor performers" and man, it took a village to get poor or toxic folks walked. All the meanwhile they were crapping up the place.
      - drewg123 6y ago
        The only surprises I have had is for people that have run into socially, but are in other groups that I don't work with, and hence have no personal knowledge of their performance.
  - Google234 6y ago
    If you are Google, one bad peer review can probably end that promotion.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  These sound like things most companies claim to have. Most companies have a set of values. Some, like Amazon, actively encourage questioning things that go against those values. In my company, we haven't as deeply enshrined the notion of questioning things that go against the claimed company values. As a result, no one cares for the values, and people tend to ignore any org/department leader espousing any value (company or otherwise). The common refrain is "That's just talk, and few follow it." A company where you can actively question people's actions when they are inconsistent with the claimed values would be quite refreshing. > You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group First, to clarify different interpretations: They're likely saying to avoid decisions that will benefit you/your team/your department at the expense of the company as a whole. If that's the case, I understand the sentiment, and most companies claim the same. Mine definitely does. However, again, it's rarely practiced and the company is full of folks who do things to benefit themselves while hurting their team/department/company. If Netflix's culture solves this, then this is great! In any case, even if they fail at this, the statement is in line with most companies. > You accomplish amazing amounts of important work Well, a lot of companies want that. Probably few actually follow through like Netflix. I agree I probably wouldn't want to work there because of this, but I also don't think there is anything wrong with it. They're up front about it, pay a lot, and from what I hear they pay generous severance pay - the idea being that you're getting fired is not meant to be a statement about your abilities.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  What's the difference between culture and cult? Is it a cult to say that everyone is responsible for holding each other accountable to do the job they are paid to do?
  - krapp 6y ago
    A cult is built from the top down, culture is built from the bottom up. Cult is a hierarchy, culture exists among equals. If you have to conform to it, but can't contribute to it, question it or change it, it's a cult.
trhway 6y ago
>if you are not above average for two performance cycles in a row they let you go. that naturally results in what i anecdotally heard - anytime some corporate BS (which basically means anything not helping delivery as delivery is the most important thing at Netflix - again according to what i heard) is being pushed onto the employees there, the employees upon quickly mentally weighting "rejecting the BS vs. suffering performance hit and failing the delivery and loosing the half-million (or frequently even more) cash comp as the result" forcefully and successfully reject the BS most of the times :)
- ethbr0 6y ago
  It seems like an awesome way to run a business, with some pretty nasty caveats. And those caveats are that (a) you have a substantial and enforced amount of employee empowerment (ability to push back on poor tasking from above) & (b) you have an incredibly objective and ungameable performance evaluation system. If you're going to all in on measuring people by performance, then you'd better be really good at actually measuring performance (and preventing managers from influencing measurements).
  - trhway 6y ago
    to me it was told mostly in terms of delivery not "performance" per.se., ie. basically the only thing what matters is failing the delivery vs. successfully delivering . The employee empowerment comes naturally as they are going to lose that great job if they don't push back on anything what impacts delivery.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      > The employee empowerment comes naturally as they are going to lose that great job if they don't push back on anything what impacts delivery. That's not employee empowerment, that's an employee incentive. To the extent that the person doing the tasking remains a the company and the IC doesn't when this happens, that's not empowerment. Empowerment is an ICs ability to effect change, not whether they're sufficiently motivated to.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bcrosby95 6y ago
I have a friend that works there. He doesn't have "drive" in the sense that he works a lot, but he is good at what he does, likes software development, and thrives there. One week he might work 60 hours and the next he might work 20. But he is the best developer in my group of friends. And he makes in a year what I make in 10.
- 72mena 6y ago
  > And he makes in a year what I make in 10. Question about your last statement (I may need this clarification because English is not my first language). The statement might mean that he makes 10x more money than you, or that his output is 10x greater than yours (or both!). Based on the context of your reply, I think it means his output is 10x greater than yours. Is that correct?
  - jedberg 6y ago
    No, OP means that their friend at Netflix has a salary that is 10 times greater than their own. This is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but with the stock compensation, probably not much of an exaggeration.
    - gpapilion 6y ago
      Netflix’s comp model is weird, similar to google but all cash. The stock program was based on options you purchased with a strike price 2x the current price. You could direct between 0-100% of your salary to it. If you can wait it’s a great way to make a lot of money.
      - jedberg 6y ago
        > The stock program was based on options you purchased with a strike price 2x the current price. Unless they changed it, the option price was 40% of the strike and the strike was the current price on purchase day, which was monthly. Gave a nice dollar cost average. But you could only put in up to 50% of your salary, plus you got an automatic 5% of your salary put into the stock program. When I worked there the price was 20% of the strike and you could do 100% of your salary. I had friends who did 100% of their salary, which are now worth tens of millions.
jedberg 6y ago
> but I understand the reality is that if you are not above average for two performance cycles in a row they let you go. Not sure where you heard that, but it's not true. There is no such thing as a "performance cycle" at Netflix. Performance is evaluated continuously by your manager. There is a once a year process where anyone can give feedback to anyone else, and it's expected that your manager give you feedback, but nothing in that feedback should be a surprise.
- nomel 6y ago
  How does this work for risky, or longer term, projects?
  - yibg 6y ago
    I was tangentially a part of an experimental project that didn't produce any meaningful results for ~2 years. No one was fired.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Risky projects were fine, because your manager understood the risk. Long term was fine too, because presumably you had intermediate goals that could show progress towards the goal, or at least progress towards disproving the thesis.
- ErrantX 6y ago
  I heard it from them [1], slide 23/24. Caveats; that is an old deck and it is a passing reference. I did a lot more research last year as part of exploring other company cultures and found out more - my understanding was 2 adequates in a row = severance. Unfortunately I don't have the other references to hand (which is not great, sorry). 1. https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/23-Unlike_many_companieswe_practiceadequate_performance https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/23-Unlik...
  - jedberg 6y ago
    That deck is accurate, but I'm not sure where you're getting the "two in a row" part. There are no performance evaluations, therefore there is no "two in a row".
nytesky 6y ago
Remember Netflix slide deck and the baseball streaming team? This is all consistent with that. No surprise here.

pizza234 6y ago

> All I'd say is; Netflix have a pretty extreme culture[1] > 1. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture Scary. From some extracts, it seems more a cult than a company: > You question actions inconsistent with our values > You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group > You accomplish amazing amounts of important work They're taken out of context, but could be interpreted as hints to how the company really works.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
anoncareer0212 6y ago
If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes. Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews: our first promotion case in 2 years is the colleague who performatively did no work for months while the manager was out, bullied me for continuing to schedule and work with our partner teams, and encouraged another co-worker to have a meltdown about it that cost them significantly.
- verticalflight 6y ago
  FAANG = Netflix
  - anoncareer0212 6y ago
    Dropping the N seemed both potentially confusing and offensive - you can rest assured I'm not pining for Netflix from Netflix :p
- pizza234 6y ago
  > If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes. I don't get it. What's the larger cause here? Netflix is not doing anything special for the society. If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies. I actually see it (but obviously, it's my opionion) as a very skilfull marketing targeted at outstanding but naive engineers (that is, people who sacrifice their work/life balance for the company). In a cynical way, it's like the nigerian scam, but oriented at intelligent people. > Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews A company like Alphabet is more than 10x the size of Netflix. Politics and inefficiency is pretty much inevitable at those magnitudes.
  - andreilys 6y ago
    “If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies.” If we took a random sample of Netflix engineers and compared them to a company with weak engineering cultures, like Blockbuster, I’m sure we could agree that Netflix engineers are more talented.
    - gaadd33 6y ago
      But we aren't comparing them to a random company, we are comparing them to the rest of FAANG. Do they have a much stronger engineering culture than Google/etc?
      - jpgvm 6y ago
        Pound for pound I would probably say yes. Netflix is often where the best of the best aspire to be even if they have already done rotations at FB/Google. At least in my field (infrastructure, big data, etc) this mostly holds true.
  - biztos 6y ago
    > What's the larger cause here? Delivering high-quality entertainment people enjoy watching, and doing it in a way that "just works?" I don't know if that's the larger cause as they pitch it to engineers but as a Netflix subscriber, it sure seems like they care a lot about that cause; and as a cinephile I think it's definitely doing something special for society. Not unique, but special: these production-and-streaming companies are revolutionizing film art, and happen to also employ a lot of my friends. But... I probably wouldn't work there as a techie.
- drewg123 6y ago
  I have worked for Netflix for over 5 years, and its the best place I've ever worked. It has the no-bullshit feel of a small company combined with the advantages (pay, benefits) of a big company. Almost everybody I've worked with is amazing. I admit that the culture was daunting, and even after going through an L5 -> L6 promo at Google, I was worried about not being able to cut it at Netflix. I was very nervous about this the first year, until the first performance cycle, after which time nobody I knew had been let go. There is honestly much less turn over around me than at Google, for example. To me, this means most people are pretty happy here. I'm not aware of any stack ranking. If there was, then 95% of my group must have been above average for the last 5 years since almost nobody has been let go. To be clear, yes, people in my group have been let go. However, I was seldom surprised when somebody was let go.
  - nomel 6y ago
    You might not be able to answer this, but what’s the QA culture there? How do project timelines work there? Are there project managers for all projects? I ask because I can’t remember the last bug, visual artifact, or non-intuitive UI design from anything Netflix related, even in my awful Roku TV. What I don’t understand is how it’s possible for management to exist that understands how much of an achievement that is, and how much man time that takes (assuming here).
  - stareatgoats 6y ago
    > seldom If only you had said "never" ...
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Not everyone's a good fit for their job, and dealing well with low performers is critical to building and maintaining a well-oiled organization. I've worked at a company that consistently failed to "deal well with poor performers" and man, it took a village to get poor or toxic folks walked. All the meanwhile they were crapping up the place.
    - drewg123 6y ago
      The only surprises I have had is for people that have run into socially, but are in other groups that I don't work with, and hence have no personal knowledge of their performance.
- Google234 6y ago
  If you are Google, one bad peer review can probably end that promotion.
BeetleB 6y ago
These sound like things most companies claim to have. Most companies have a set of values. Some, like Amazon, actively encourage questioning things that go against those values. In my company, we haven't as deeply enshrined the notion of questioning things that go against the claimed company values. As a result, no one cares for the values, and people tend to ignore any org/department leader espousing any value (company or otherwise). The common refrain is "That's just talk, and few follow it." A company where you can actively question people's actions when they are inconsistent with the claimed values would be quite refreshing. > You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group First, to clarify different interpretations: They're likely saying to avoid decisions that will benefit you/your team/your department at the expense of the company as a whole. If that's the case, I understand the sentiment, and most companies claim the same. Mine definitely does. However, again, it's rarely practiced and the company is full of folks who do things to benefit themselves while hurting their team/department/company. If Netflix's culture solves this, then this is great! In any case, even if they fail at this, the statement is in line with most companies. > You accomplish amazing amounts of important work Well, a lot of companies want that. Probably few actually follow through like Netflix. I agree I probably wouldn't want to work there because of this, but I also don't think there is anything wrong with it. They're up front about it, pay a lot, and from what I hear they pay generous severance pay - the idea being that you're getting fired is not meant to be a statement about your abilities.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
What's the difference between culture and cult? Is it a cult to say that everyone is responsible for holding each other accountable to do the job they are paid to do?
- krapp 6y ago
  A cult is built from the top down, culture is built from the bottom up. Cult is a hierarchy, culture exists among equals. If you have to conform to it, but can't contribute to it, question it or change it, it's a cult.

trhway 6y ago

>if you are not above average for two performance cycles in a row they let you go. that naturally results in what i anecdotally heard - anytime some corporate BS (which basically means anything not helping delivery as delivery is the most important thing at Netflix - again according to what i heard) is being pushed onto the employees there, the employees upon quickly mentally weighting "rejecting the BS vs. suffering performance hit and failing the delivery and loosing the half-million (or frequently even more) cash comp as the result" forcefully and successfully reject the BS most of the times :)

ethbr0 6y ago
It seems like an awesome way to run a business, with some pretty nasty caveats. And those caveats are that (a) you have a substantial and enforced amount of employee empowerment (ability to push back on poor tasking from above) & (b) you have an incredibly objective and ungameable performance evaluation system. If you're going to all in on measuring people by performance, then you'd better be really good at actually measuring performance (and preventing managers from influencing measurements).
- trhway 6y ago
  to me it was told mostly in terms of delivery not "performance" per.se., ie. basically the only thing what matters is failing the delivery vs. successfully delivering . The employee empowerment comes naturally as they are going to lose that great job if they don't push back on anything what impacts delivery.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > The employee empowerment comes naturally as they are going to lose that great job if they don't push back on anything what impacts delivery. That's not employee empowerment, that's an employee incentive. To the extent that the person doing the tasking remains a the company and the IC doesn't when this happens, that's not empowerment. Empowerment is an ICs ability to effect change, not whether they're sufficiently motivated to.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bcrosby95 6y ago

I have a friend that works there. He doesn't have "drive" in the sense that he works a lot, but he is good at what he does, likes software development, and thrives there. One week he might work 60 hours and the next he might work 20. But he is the best developer in my group of friends. And he makes in a year what I make in 10.

72mena 6y ago
> And he makes in a year what I make in 10. Question about your last statement (I may need this clarification because English is not my first language). The statement might mean that he makes 10x more money than you, or that his output is 10x greater than yours (or both!). Based on the context of your reply, I think it means his output is 10x greater than yours. Is that correct?
- jedberg 6y ago
  No, OP means that their friend at Netflix has a salary that is 10 times greater than their own. This is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but with the stock compensation, probably not much of an exaggeration.
  - gpapilion 6y ago
    Netflix’s comp model is weird, similar to google but all cash. The stock program was based on options you purchased with a strike price 2x the current price. You could direct between 0-100% of your salary to it. If you can wait it’s a great way to make a lot of money.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      > The stock program was based on options you purchased with a strike price 2x the current price. Unless they changed it, the option price was 40% of the strike and the strike was the current price on purchase day, which was monthly. Gave a nice dollar cost average. But you could only put in up to 50% of your salary, plus you got an automatic 5% of your salary put into the stock program. When I worked there the price was 20% of the strike and you could do 100% of your salary. I had friends who did 100% of their salary, which are now worth tens of millions.

jedberg 6y ago

> but I understand the reality is that if you are not above average for two performance cycles in a row they let you go. Not sure where you heard that, but it's not true. There is no such thing as a "performance cycle" at Netflix. Performance is evaluated continuously by your manager. There is a once a year process where anyone can give feedback to anyone else, and it's expected that your manager give you feedback, but nothing in that feedback should be a surprise.

nomel 6y ago
How does this work for risky, or longer term, projects?
- yibg 6y ago
  I was tangentially a part of an experimental project that didn't produce any meaningful results for ~2 years. No one was fired.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Risky projects were fine, because your manager understood the risk. Long term was fine too, because presumably you had intermediate goals that could show progress towards the goal, or at least progress towards disproving the thesis.
ErrantX 6y ago
I heard it from them [1], slide 23/24. Caveats; that is an old deck and it is a passing reference. I did a lot more research last year as part of exploring other company cultures and found out more - my understanding was 2 adequates in a row = severance. Unfortunately I don't have the other references to hand (which is not great, sorry). 1. https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/23-Unlike_many_companieswe_practiceadequate_performance https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/23-Unlik...
- jedberg 6y ago
  That deck is accurate, but I'm not sure where you're getting the "two in a row" part. There are no performance evaluations, therefore there is no "two in a row".

nytesky 6y ago

Remember Netflix slide deck and the baseball streaming team? This is all consistent with that. No surprise here.