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Aren't layoffs one of the hallmarks of Netflix's culture [1], made famous by Reid Hastings' slide deck [2]? > We model ourselves on being a professional sports

• drieddust 4y ago
  Professional players gets paid millions for a few years and then ends up into retirement. For analogy to work Netfix should pay that well. Seems they were bonkers from the start. Why they thought competition will not catch up with them? What is their business moat?
  • ericd 4y ago
    Doesn't Netflix pay very well relative to the field?
    • pc86 4y ago
      Yes, they pay top 1% and (according to them, but not disputed by anyone who actually works there that I've seen) they reassess every year and adjust according, to stay in the top 1%. Furthermore it's almost all cash, very minimal stock, so no huge unintentional pay cuts like basically every other large tech company that can only pay the way they do by giving out generous stock grants.
      • ericd 4y ago
        Yeah, that was exactly my impression. Sounds consistent with their sports star analogy.
  • chrisco255 4y ago
    Pretty sure the early employees did make millions from stock grants and Netflix was always known for high salaries. $250K - $500K a year not unheard of.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      Yes Netflix does pay top of market. But they pay in cash - not RSUs. Recently from what I heard, they give employees the option of cash and RSUs. BTW, $250K - $500K is about average for BigTech developers.
      • xvilka 4y ago
        Given the current state of the stock market, it's even better.
      • danachow 4y ago
        They pay with cash and options, not RSUs options that are fully vested and granted monthly at 40% value.
    • thundergolfer 4y ago
      > $250K - $500K a year not unheard of. More like $500k minimum. Netflix mostly hires senior engineers – until recently it was only seniors – and those seniors make over $500k.
      • drieddust 4y ago
        So they might be paying 2x-3x. Does that justify professional player analogy?
    • rodgerd 4y ago
      Professional footballers can make that in a week.
      • chrisco255 4y ago
        Which footballers are making $26M a year? Only the best of the best.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • rsanek 4y ago
    Median pay in the MLB is just over $1m. [0] Median pay for a Netflix senior software engineer is $500k. [1] Doesn't really seem that different to me. [0] https://en.as.com/en/2021/10/08/mlb/1633685987_178363.html https://en.as.com/en/2021/10/08/mlb/1633685987_178363.html [1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Netflix/salaries/Software-Engineer/Senior-Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Netflix/salaries/Software-Eng...
  • adrianN 4y ago
    Professional players lose the ability to play at that level after a few years. Programmers can usually find another job after staying a few years at Netflix.
• leakbang 4y ago
  I hate to say it, but I can see why they have chosen this route. I think ideally, the "sports team" idea should only apply to key people in the organization.
  • etse 4y ago
    Could you elaborate on what you meant about the sports team applying only to key people? Is it about a difference between operational work and strategic work?
    • leakbang 4y ago
      By key people I mean that there should be a small group of select employees, somewhere between 6-10 people and these people should be carefully selected so they would be compatible with each other. There would be a mix of Lead artists, engineers, etc. The benefit is that because the group is small, they can collaborate more effectively with each other and ultimately, this group would be the main force behind the innovations of the org. If the sports team idea applies to this small group, I think it would result in everyone bringing out the best of themselves but also other organization members could potentially get motivated by them. I've seen Valve (the company) do a similar thing with a lot of success. They call it the cabal process[1]. They don't treat it exactly like a "sports team" but there are lots of parallels. [1] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_in_the_press#Cabal_Process https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_in_the_press#...
• chrisseaton 4y ago
  Lol they're lucky I don't apply this test to my subscription.
  • illwrks 4y ago
    Seconded. I'm only keeping it for my daughter, she's engrossed with a series of unfortunate events.
    • davchana 4y ago
      Thirded. I am keeping the sub only for one reason, otherwise would never have gotten it.
      • Xcelerate 4y ago
        Sigh... CocoMelon for us
        • mattmillr 4y ago
          If I got rid of Ada Twist Scientist, I would fail my 5yo's keeper test.
    • benjaminwootton 4y ago
      We read the books after the series. Very enjoyable.
      • illwrks 4y ago
        My daughter loves the books, she's on book 10 now. The book was a recommendation from the staff in our local bookstore, it was a few weeks later that I discovered they had a tv series and it's been a real enjoyment for her to see the characters in her head appear on screen.
  • enumjorge 4y ago
    I wonder if Hastings himself would pass it for the CEO position.
• fartcannon 4y ago
  Sheesh, sure hope you don't look like your managers ex girlfriend, old mean boss, or high school bully. How do they control for bold, flagarant racism?
  • jedberg 4y ago
    They don't. Managers have ultimate discretion on hiring and firing. The control is that when a manager seems to be abusing that privilege, they get fired by their manager. It usually ends up being pretty obvious, and the rest of us would call it out. Especially when they were firing good people for no reason. In fact, sometimes those fired people would be invited back after the bad manager was fired.
    • fartcannon 4y ago
      What if they and their manager share the same prejudices? I guess at the end of the day it's no different than any other employer. Just novel to see it bragged about. Would be interesting to see some diversity stats. Cool that it can and apparently has been reversed, though. That shows character.
    • lupire 4y ago
      Would be, or have been?
      • jedberg 4y ago
        They were invited back after getting fired.
        • nowherebeen 4y ago
          Would they need to go through the entire interview process again? It would seem fair to just give them their old job back since they already did it.
          • jedberg 4y ago
• wly_cdgr 4y ago
  Like all CEO bullshit this is pretty cringe, but admittedly it's not quite as bad or creepy as One Big Family cultures
  • felipellrocha 4y ago
    I find it pretty honest. Very to your face, instead of that whole big family thing where everyone pretends to love each other, which you pointed out is worse.
  • infra_ 4y ago
    Netflix treats employment as a contract, they will pay you a lot and are very clear that the contract may end at any time. This is how adults should act. There’s minimal emotional manipulation which is almost never the case with corporate culture. Corporations generally try to get you to act against your best interest for the “sake of the company”. This type of high-pay contract-style work is extremely common in industrial construction. You’ll get paid $500k+ / year when you get attached to a project, and you are unemployed when that project ends until the company gets another project. It’s referred to as “breathe in, breathe out” and people genuinely enjoy it. High pay when there is work, and lots of free time between projects.
• faangiq 4y ago
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    To be fair, it was pretty future when they first built it. They had already built a successful DVD-by-mail business that toppled the Blockbuster monopoly, and decided to double down and bet the farm on video streaming when bandwidth was still crazy expensive, even before cloud services had really taken off, then aggressively navigated a ton of legal hurdles to aggressively expanded internationally. Clearly their business-as-a-sports-team mentality paid off in spades. But now that spinning up a competing streaming site is "dead simple" (as you put it), they have to compete on content alone, and they're kind of getting their lunch eaten. I do wonder if their sports mentality starts to break down when it comes to more artistic undertakings. Greenlighting the right projects means bringing the right people together takes a lot of experience and intuition to get right. I think they still have a lot to learn from HBO in terms of focus - it seems like Netflix is still throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and to constantly show their customers new movie posters, but for the past few years scrolling through their offerings feels like walking through the unorganized aisles of a giant discount store, when they probably want it to feel like walking into an upscale boutique. They optimized for a local maxima that's now rapidly eroding, and I think they could theoretically push themselves beyond it, but it seems more likely they'll just throw ads on the thing, or start squeezing and penalizing their users for using the product wrong like the Blockbuster of yore.
    • vkou 4y ago
      > they have to compete on content alone, and they're kind of getting their lunch eaten. More specifically, they have to compete with all of their prior suppliers, who gave streaming rights away for a song, but after Netflix proved the business model, are now charging two arms and a leg for it.
    • echelon 4y ago
      > toppled the Blockbuster monopoly Blockbuster was never a monopoly. Hollywood Video had a comparable number of locations, and there were many smaller competitors. The business model had no real moat.
• gerdesj 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • anonu 4y ago
    Upvoted because I partly agree with you. And also for the liberal use of wanker throughout. Hiring is really hard. I think when this Netflix thing was written it was a different era.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure Yankee comes from the British trying to insult Americans by calling them wankers. It didn't work out too well :-)
  • smohare 4y ago
    Sounds like you’ve worked for some pretty subpar companies?
  • lumost 4y ago
    Personally, I like your take - however “reasonable pay” generally defaults to “median pay”. A great employee who sticks it out for “median” pay, might be selling themselves short, but this can be made up for with a reasonable boss and team you like working with. Netflix effectively pays the “max pay” for all positions. Naturally, they do not have difficulty hiring with this philosophy - but it comes with the trade off that they either need a rediculous interview gauntlet or performance management process. They do a bit of both from what I understand.
    • donthellbanme 4y ago
      Liking the place you spend more time in than your own living room matters. I have stuck with subpar pay because I liked my bosses, and didn't hate comming into work. I have quit high paying jobs, with union representation. (And yes--those bastards will eventually drag us all back. I thought Jamie Diamond's demand that if you want to work here show up to the office. Even Diamond retreated. Might be the only war he ever lost? Then again Diamond might be feeling less immortal? He had his aorta replaced a year ago, and is a survivor of throat cancer. I don't know why I'm writing so much about Diamond. Maybe--because if I had a do-over, I would have gone into finance, and hopefully retire early?)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• synicalx 4y ago
  WOW, I'm pretty sure this would be 100% illegal in Australia and quite a few other countries. At least they're up front about it so people know to avoid them.
  • jay_kyburz 4y ago
    I think you would just have to provide 3 written warnings that they are not performing at super star level.
    • synicalx 4y ago
      They also have to go on a "performance management plan" where the employer has to make an effort to help them address any performance issues. There also needs to be very clear documentation of said issues, and how everyone is addressing them. The performance expectations also need to be documented AND reasonable in comparison to the industry, the company, the pay scale, and other similar roles elsewhere. Unfair dismissal cases are surprisingly common in AU, although not often talked about. They can get VERY expensive especially for higher-paying roles.
• trunnell 4y ago
  No, not at all. I was there for 10 years and I don't recall any mass layoffs. The article says this is about reducing expenses. Note that the article doesn't say if the layoffs were in Los Gatos or in the Hollywood office, or both. The keeper test is mostly about helping managers be effective when they need to remove someone from their team. It eliminates the bureaucratic red tape that most companies have for firing someone. Managers at Netflix are still expected to give feedback to everyone about their performance and if there is a problem, give someone an opportunity to improve. No one should be surprised if they are let go for performance reasons. The difference is that at Netflix someone who isn't keeping up will not be subjected to a 1+ year long process driven by HR before they are eventually fired. Instead they will be given specific time by their manager and if the problem isn't fixed fairly quickly, the manager can decide to let them go. Most people have been on a team where there was somebody who was constantly slowing everything down or causing other problems. If you're a manager, you know that those people end up taking a huge portion of your time. At Netflix, managers are effective at removing those people.
  • shostack 4y ago
    They don't just consume the time of the manager. The drag coefficient or blast radius of such individuals (depending on the nature of the issue) can be considerable. Just as there are force multipliers, so to are there force dividers.
  • JBlue42 4y ago
    The difference is that at Netflix someone who isn't keeping up will not be subjected to a 1+ year long process driven by HR before they are eventually fired. Instead they will be given specific time by their manager and if the problem isn't fixed fairly quickly, the manager can decide to let them go. So about the same or better than the non-tech world. I've been around the block for 20+ years in a variety of industries and, in most, you might get a warning or review. Given that in the US you can typically let go anyone for any reason, a year of reprieve is quite amazing.
• dsizzle 4y ago
  This deck describes people being let go for performance reasons, whereas Netflix clarified this was different: > These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance, which makes them especially tough as none of us want to say goodbye to such great colleagues. Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/17/23103131/netflix-layoffs-tudum-streaming-subscriber-loss-email https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/17/23103131/netflix-layoffs-...
• bushbaba 4y ago
  This works early on, but during later stages of the company there's those who start to empire build. These empires are happy to label all their employees as "Keepers" and encourage headcount growth as a top priority.
• petilon 4y ago
  > if a team member was leaving for a similar role at another company, would the manager try to keep them? This is simplistic. Sometimes managers don't want a high-performing employee on their team just because the employee is a competitive threat to them.
• paxys 4y ago
  Manager reads this and fires everyone on their team who are not "keepers". Ok Reid, now where are those "dream team" replacements for them that you promised? Reid?
• breatheoften 4y ago
  There's no reason for layoffs to be time-correlated if that is the reason. Unless you think the sports analogy is strong enough to support ideas like "seasons"? Dream team reasoning should ideally be applied semi-randomly -- if you need it to be enforced make the "reminder we are a dream team" messaging different and randomly chosen for different aspects of management and maybe even just introduce artificial delays to stagger firings so they are not clumped into groups ... group firings are a wall street signal not a management strategy ...
• bmitc 4y ago
  Imagine working for a place that is constantly evaluating whether they should keep you or not rather than trying to grow you.
  • imgabe 4y ago
    Those aren't mutually exclusive. You can encourage employees to grow and get rid of people who aren't taking advantage of the resources to grow that you're making available.
  • t-3 4y ago
    That actually sounds like the normal experience pretty much everywhere outside highly in-demand fields. A poor performer will be sacked in a second, unless the demand greatly outstrips supply. Money-seekers are in the process of oversaturating the tech-talent market, so I wouldn't expect the favorable conditions to last for long.
• jti107 4y ago
  interesting...sounds like the stack and rank at microsoft. at microsoft it didnt matter much bc they were a monopoly, they missed out on the smartphone market. the idea is that they were so busy trying not to get axed and worrying about internal politics they didnt innovate quickly and respond to apple and google. they ended up reversing this policy and pivoting to enterprise/cloud.
• moistoreos 4y ago
  > managers use a “keeper test” for each of their people Gross. Enormous red flag that is indicative of a toxic culture.
• sanjosethrow7f2 4y ago
  My current company literally uses the same slide deck - stolen directly from Netflix - and failed to mention that the professional sports team they're run like is the Sacramento Kings or the Detroit Lions. More realistically, given the lack of cuts to the bottom rung of talent (and those with a complete lack thereof) and the lack of promotion to those with talent in spades: they're running it like a JV soccer team. Not saying Netflix isn't cutthroat, but it's entirely possible to call this out and then also have layoffs be big news.
• watwut 4y ago
  > if a team member was leaving for a similar role at another company, would the manager try to keep them? Is this person good enough, so you would try to prevent their growth when they feel like change is needed? Are they good enough so that you would fight for them to stay even after they expressed the wish to move to another team? To be entirely honest, most (not all but most) of people that moved from one stable team to another within the same company were happy with that. Sometimes it is not so, but in most cases.
• achow 4y ago
  Right at the top, the article says.. "These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance, which makes them especially tough as none of us want to say goodbye to such great colleagues" So no, these layoffs are different.
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  Seemingly engineering is only a small part of what matters. Netflix is a content company, after all. Being fast and available means nothing if the content isn't there. HBO Max seems to be doing quite well in spite of the app being technically terrible. Heck, they'd need to layoff 500 of those engineers earning the vaunted 500k salary to reach what they're paying Benioff and Weiss, who have so far produced Metal Lords and The Chair.