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Yeah, Netflix appears to do it in a reasonable way. I would be perfectly fine taking an offer to work there. But I've more frequently heard stories of others w

Yeah, Netflix appears to do it in a reasonable way. I would be perfectly fine taking an offer to work there. But I've more frequently heard stories of others who see "fire fast" solely as a way to save money and also avoid having to ever train or mentor. That's bad for the employee, and not a place I'd work, if I knew it in advance. If you're looking to structure your employees' comp with a heavy equity component that takes a while to vest, "fire fast" becomes especially dangerous for the employee.

WalterBright 5y ago
People are fired who cost more than the value they provide. To not get fired: 1. provide more value than you cost the company 2. make sure the boss knows (1) for you
- majormajor 5y ago
  "People are fired when they underperform their peers [over some time window]" is much more common, since most organizations have a very fuzzy grasp exactly on value returned per employee. Candidates should try to be aware of companies that won't give new hires much of a time window to prove their performance level or value creation. Especially if large amounts of their compensation depend on going at least 12 months without getting fired.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Companies indeed often have a fuzzy grasp. But you can do things like point out how your work got the product to market X days sooner, and point out the profit per day of sales times X. Or point out how you fixed Major Customer Y's problem, ensuring a steady revenue stream from that happy customer. Or point out how you sped up the code in the datacenter by 1%, meaning 1% less needs to be spent on the datacenter. At Boeing, the accountants managed to pin down the cost of one pound of airplane weight. At the time, it was $250,000 per pound. This made it easy to point out to the boss how much money you'd saved the company by doing weight reductions. I.e. if you saved a pound, that was the equivalent of 6 years salary. Time to bring up that raise you deserve!
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      I pretty strongly disagree this is actually possible (and not just be an exercise of made-up statistics) at any sizable company. Look at Google for example. I'm quite sure that a very large percentage, if not majority, of the employees at Google produce net negative value. The problem, of course, is that it's impossible to know which ones. I know a bunch of people (brilliant people, mind you) that worked years on products at Google that never shipped, or worked on products that shipped but were discontinued long before they were ever profitable. But Google is willing to make these investments because they believe that, one day, one or two of them will pay off spectacularly. I mean, Waymo has certainly never been profitable (heck they've barely had any revenue) - what do their employees argue?
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        > Waymo has certainly never been profitable The employee needs to be profitable, not the aggregate of all the employees. As for speculative research projects, nothing succeeds like success (making money). Researchers who produce loser after loser projects I expect would be much more likely to be fired than researchers who had a win big enough to cover their losing projects. > possible The whole field of cost accounting is devoted to figuring this out. Back in the 70s, I attended Caltech when Feynman was on the staff. It came up in conversation that Feynman was making a salary of something like $55,000 (a lot of money in those days). I said what could anyone do to justify paying him such a salary. A grad student laughed and said "you don't understand. Feynman doesn't need to do anything to be worth that salary. He just has to be on the staff, which attracts donor money and draws top talent to Caltech." Of course, he was right. But also, Feynman being Feynman, did do an awful lot as well. In many universities and companies, you'll find such "prestige" staff.

WalterBright 5y ago

People are fired who cost more than the value they provide. To not get fired: 1. provide more value than you cost the company 2. make sure the boss knows (1) for you

majormajor 5y ago
"People are fired when they underperform their peers [over some time window]" is much more common, since most organizations have a very fuzzy grasp exactly on value returned per employee. Candidates should try to be aware of companies that won't give new hires much of a time window to prove their performance level or value creation. Especially if large amounts of their compensation depend on going at least 12 months without getting fired.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Companies indeed often have a fuzzy grasp. But you can do things like point out how your work got the product to market X days sooner, and point out the profit per day of sales times X. Or point out how you fixed Major Customer Y's problem, ensuring a steady revenue stream from that happy customer. Or point out how you sped up the code in the datacenter by 1%, meaning 1% less needs to be spent on the datacenter. At Boeing, the accountants managed to pin down the cost of one pound of airplane weight. At the time, it was $250,000 per pound. This made it easy to point out to the boss how much money you'd saved the company by doing weight reductions. I.e. if you saved a pound, that was the equivalent of 6 years salary. Time to bring up that raise you deserve!
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I pretty strongly disagree this is actually possible (and not just be an exercise of made-up statistics) at any sizable company. Look at Google for example. I'm quite sure that a very large percentage, if not majority, of the employees at Google produce net negative value. The problem, of course, is that it's impossible to know which ones. I know a bunch of people (brilliant people, mind you) that worked years on products at Google that never shipped, or worked on products that shipped but were discontinued long before they were ever profitable. But Google is willing to make these investments because they believe that, one day, one or two of them will pay off spectacularly. I mean, Waymo has certainly never been profitable (heck they've barely had any revenue) - what do their employees argue?
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > Waymo has certainly never been profitable The employee needs to be profitable, not the aggregate of all the employees. As for speculative research projects, nothing succeeds like success (making money). Researchers who produce loser after loser projects I expect would be much more likely to be fired than researchers who had a win big enough to cover their losing projects. > possible The whole field of cost accounting is devoted to figuring this out. Back in the 70s, I attended Caltech when Feynman was on the staff. It came up in conversation that Feynman was making a salary of something like $55,000 (a lot of money in those days). I said what could anyone do to justify paying him such a salary. A grad student laughed and said "you don't understand. Feynman doesn't need to do anything to be worth that salary. He just has to be on the staff, which attracts donor money and draws top talent to Caltech." Of course, he was right. But also, Feynman being Feynman, did do an awful lot as well. In many universities and companies, you'll find such "prestige" staff.