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Did you use that 700K offer for increasing the salary at Netflix? I've heard about the culture of fear at Netflix - was this your experience as well? Who decid

by zerr 4y ago

Did you use that 700K offer for increasing the salary at Netflix? I've heard about the culture of fear at Netflix - was this your experience as well? Who decides whether you are a top performer or not - only the manager, or the peers as well? Do they use stack ranking? How is the performance deduced, e.g. by nbr of commits? Thanks!

jedberg 4y ago
I took the offer to them and got a nice raise, but not to $700k. :) In part because the offers weren't comparable. Finance is usually a modest base and a huge bonus, Netflix is straight cash. > I've heard about the culture of fear at Netflix - was this your experience as well? At first yes. But you quickly realize that in most cases only the underperformers were let go. In cases where good performers were let go, it was usually by a bad manager, and then that manager would get let go and they would sometimes even offer the other person their job back (but they usually already had another one). > Who decides whether you are a top performer or not - only the manager, or the peers as well? You manager has final and single say on both hiring and firing. But they always ask for input from others as a matter of course. > Do they use stack ranking? Absolutely not. Stack ranking is the opposite of what Netflix believes. They operate on the assumption that if everyone were stacked ranked, everyone would be in top rank. Stack ranking is evil and a terrible way to run a company if you use it for determining compensation or firing. > How is the performance deduced, e.g. by nbr of commits? Thanks! Haha no, no metrics like that. It's much more holistic. Are you getting good work done, are you making a positive difference. Managers are pretty in tune with the work getting done. Most come from engineering backgrounds and at least understand the work being done by those that report to them. They also can see all the feedback in the annual feedback session. It becomes pretty obvious who is not performing.
- zerr 4y ago
  > In cases where good performers were let go, it was usually by a bad manager, and then that manager would get let go I guess this is rare - the detection of such cases, since the bad manager's manager has to be aware. Also, the holistic evaluation makes things hard to argue - subjective opinions prevail.

by zerr 4y ago

jedberg 4y ago

I took the offer to them and got a nice raise, but not to $700k. :) In part because the offers weren't comparable. Finance is usually a modest base and a huge bonus, Netflix is straight cash. > I've heard about the culture of fear at Netflix - was this your experience as well? At first yes. But you quickly realize that in most cases only the underperformers were let go. In cases where good performers were let go, it was usually by a bad manager, and then that manager would get let go and they would sometimes even offer the other person their job back (but they usually already had another one). > Who decides whether you are a top performer or not - only the manager, or the peers as well? You manager has final and single say on both hiring and firing. But they always ask for input from others as a matter of course. > Do they use stack ranking? Absolutely not. Stack ranking is the opposite of what Netflix believes. They operate on the assumption that if everyone were stacked ranked, everyone would be in top rank. Stack ranking is evil and a terrible way to run a company if you use it for determining compensation or firing. > How is the performance deduced, e.g. by nbr of commits? Thanks! Haha no, no metrics like that. It's much more holistic. Are you getting good work done, are you making a positive difference. Managers are pretty in tune with the work getting done. Most come from engineering backgrounds and at least understand the work being done by those that report to them. They also can see all the feedback in the annual feedback session. It becomes pretty obvious who is not performing.

zerr 4y ago
> In cases where good performers were let go, it was usually by a bad manager, and then that manager would get let go I guess this is rare - the detection of such cases, since the bad manager's manager has to be aware. Also, the holistic evaluation makes things hard to argue - subjective opinions prevail.