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I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actuall

I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event was often mentioned and expected in Netflix at that time. Case in point, active-active regions just happened in a few months. A really easy to use deployment tool, Asgard, just happened. The VP of CDN at that time said Netflix would build its own CDN and partner with ISPs. Well, it just happened in merely 6 months with 12 people or so. Netflix said it was going to support streaming and move away from its monolithic Tomcat app, and it just happened. And the engineers there? I can't speak for others but I myself had just one meeting a week -- our team meeting where we just casually chatted with each other, to the point that the team members still stayed close to each other and regularly meet nowadays. I also learned that the managers and directors had tons of meetings to set the right context for the team so engineers could just go wild and be productive. At that time, I thought it was natural, but it turned out it was a really high bar.

silentsea90 3y ago
Wow that's so cool but makes sense! Is it not like that there anymore? They still hire experienced engineers, so I wonder what changed? As an aside, is there any low hanging fruit / interesting work left to do at Netflix?
- g9yuayon 3y ago
  I left Netflix years ago, so I don't know their current culture. Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while making sure failures are manageable and success rate are maximized. That is, Netflix assumed that people would make mistakes and fail, but the trick was to ensure that failures do not hinder overall success of the teams and the company.
  - silentsea90 3y ago
    Sounds very cool. Were failures punished by low ratings, bonus? How did they incentivize taking risks? Did the focus on being a leader make you stronger? Were Netflix employees from then valued very highly?
    - g9yuayon 3y ago
      > Were failures punished by low ratings, bonus? Netflix's culture stack used to say that culture is all about who gets rewarded and who punished. So, yes, people did get punished for their failures. The key here is what behavior led to a failure? We have to analyze consider the failure and the associated human behavior together and see if there is a lesson or a punishable pattern - this is where strong leadership is needed for a just assessment and action. There is no rating. At that time, one either their job or not. There was no bonus either, as bonus contradicted to the no-rating system. > How did they incentivize taking risks? Taking calculated risk was also part of the culture. Good people actually wanted to take risks. So the incentive systems is to take road blocks away. > Were Netflix employees from then valued very highly? I think the success of the company and the quality of the employees make them marketable. Everything else is secondary.
    - lovich 3y ago
      Netflix was known for being very fast to fire if you stopped producing. Netflix didn't even value Netflix employees beyond what they could produce in the moment. They leaned into the zero loyalty to employees model that US corporations rely on. Read this article which is pushing this as a positive. Grep for "Tell the Truth About Performance" to see where they talk about changing what an employees job needed. An employee they recognize had done a good job for 5 years, but wasn't what they wanted going forward so they weren't even going to try and help get her the skills to do the new job, but just lay her off immediately.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        This is the other side of the coin for keeping processes and bureaucracy minimal.
- aaronblohowiak 3y ago
  It was a very very special place to work for a time. Everything changes, though, and I will leave it to say the Netflix I left early this year was a completely different place from the one I joined almost 8 years ago.
  - mochomocha 3y ago
    To expand a bit on what Aaron said, 2022 was a year where the company experienced drastic culture changes: introduction of levels, new VP&director-level leadership with more traditional / "big corp" management styles, push to hire junior engineers, decrease in transparency during decision-making, to name a few... These changes have alienated a lot of people who self-selected for the unique culture the company had, which was truly remarkable.
version_five 3y ago
Importantly, this requires mature engineers and managers. Nothing worse (from personal experience) than working at a place that hires experienced engineering talent and then has a bunch of junior "leadership" telling them what to do. That's how you end up inundated with meetings and frameworks and blablabla. Obviously you need experienced developers to get stuff done without handholding, but you need managers that can "manage" - I say coordinate, without handholding.
- g9yuayon 3y ago
  Absolutely. To start with, leaders must not be afraid of their teams making mistakes. Copying from another comment: "Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while making sure failures are manageable and success rate are maximized. That is, Netflix assumed that people would make mistakes and fail, but the trick was to ensure that failures do not hinder overall success of the teams and the company." I'll give an example of the leadership style of Netflix. Jordan Zimmerman, a great engineer who created Apache Curator, once asked then the director of cloud platform, Yury, if he could open source Curator. Yury just casually said: okay, do it. Jordan was puzzled and asked: "don't I have to talk to an attorney? ". Yury smiled and asked: does an attorney help you write code? Jordan said no, and Yury concluded the conversation: then you don't have to talk to an attorney.
  - esafak 3y ago
    > does an attorney help you write code? That does not sound like the right question. How about: have we vetted our dependencies' licenses?
    - progman32 3y ago
      I suppose that's a tangible benefit to hiring well- you don't have to ask your team basic questions like these. Presumably the engineer well knows to check licenses.
    - 3y ago
wavelander 3y ago
This makes a lot of sense at deep tech places that don't sell to enterprises where one can put their head down and just work on technical challenges. A similar place like Mongo DB or the hardware division of NVidia comes to mind. But if you're supposed to iterate with any input from more than 2 people that isn't highly objective (technical metrics that can correlate well with product satisfaction), communication and diffused collaboration is important and necessary. That doesn't mean it has to suck. But the Netflix model you described isn't applicable everywhere and shouldn't be blindly replicated.
- gervwyk 3y ago
  This. In our tiny company, Lowdefy, we try to distinguish when something is done as part of innovation, or as a deliverable or chore. The work that falls into the two categories are vastly different in nature, stakeholder expectations and outcomes. Being deliberate about what category of work you are busy with provides freedom to thrive when innovating required while introducing the structure needed when deadlines are on the table. Mixing the two results in frustration and reduces quality and output. I would be interested to know if this applies same to larger orgs?
slotrans 3y ago
I assume these storie-lets are true but the timeline is wrong, it was much more than 10 years ago. I went to an Adrian Cockroft talk in 2012: they had thousands of engineers and hundreds of services at that time, Asgard already existed and was in the process of being open-sourced, etc.
- g9yuayon 3y ago
  I joined in 2009 and left in 2014. So the timeline was anywhere in between.
aledalgrande 3y ago
> I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago where/when did Netflix go wrong? curious to hear from insiders
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- g9yuayon 3y ago
  I don't know if anything went wrong afterwards. I left in 2014, so I only spoke for what I saw when I was there.
  - yibg 3y ago
    Was fairly similar up until 2017 (when I left). Things just got done with minimal fuss.
- doktorhladnjak 3y ago
  Netflix's competition changed. They were one of the few players in streaming. Now, there are infinite streaming platforms, all angling for their cut of the pie. For Netflix to continue to be profitable, it decided it needed to spend more on original content. Then I suppose the cost cutting came for other expenses. Hiring a bunch of very experienced engineers does not come cheap. Netflix was known for having the highest cash comp in the valley. They've started hiring new grads again, because it's cheaper to hire one senior engineer to lead a bunch of junior engineers instead of a few seniors to do everything themselves.
  - ido 3y ago
    I’ve no clue about Netflix specifically, but at some point as an industry we have to hire some junior people in order to have new seniors a few years down the line…
ttymck 3y ago
Do you think this is thanks, at least in part, to the fact that Netflix is a rather narrowly defined product? It is a library of content and it streams to your screen. In the places I've worked, the product is poorly defined. Not because we've neglected to define it, but because it's novel and amorphous and nobody knows what it should be, let alone what it will be. Netflix on the other hand, in my view, has a clear goal: get video onto screens as efficiently as possible. It becomes much more of a pure technology problem solving situation. Of course, I won't assume there aren't ongoing product development tasks constantly. I'm sure there's a massive back office suite, along with ads, etc. But the overwhelming majority of the Netflix product "mandate" is pretty solid, so you don't need to spend a lot of time making sure folks are on the same page, or am I way off?
- g9yuayon 3y ago
  My own experience is that there was enough ambiguity in what we needed to build. Take building a CDN for instance, what tech stack would you use? How would you deploy them? What's your caching strategy? How would you partner with ISPs? What kind of hardware would you use? A large company may spend months approving every single such decision.

silentsea90 3y ago

Wow that's so cool but makes sense! Is it not like that there anymore? They still hire experienced engineers, so I wonder what changed? As an aside, is there any low hanging fruit / interesting work left to do at Netflix?

g9yuayon 3y ago
I left Netflix years ago, so I don't know their current culture. Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while making sure failures are manageable and success rate are maximized. That is, Netflix assumed that people would make mistakes and fail, but the trick was to ensure that failures do not hinder overall success of the teams and the company.
- silentsea90 3y ago
  Sounds very cool. Were failures punished by low ratings, bonus? How did they incentivize taking risks? Did the focus on being a leader make you stronger? Were Netflix employees from then valued very highly?
  - g9yuayon 3y ago
    > Were failures punished by low ratings, bonus? Netflix's culture stack used to say that culture is all about who gets rewarded and who punished. So, yes, people did get punished for their failures. The key here is what behavior led to a failure? We have to analyze consider the failure and the associated human behavior together and see if there is a lesson or a punishable pattern - this is where strong leadership is needed for a just assessment and action. There is no rating. At that time, one either their job or not. There was no bonus either, as bonus contradicted to the no-rating system. > How did they incentivize taking risks? Taking calculated risk was also part of the culture. Good people actually wanted to take risks. So the incentive systems is to take road blocks away. > Were Netflix employees from then valued very highly? I think the success of the company and the quality of the employees make them marketable. Everything else is secondary.
  - lovich 3y ago
    Netflix was known for being very fast to fire if you stopped producing. Netflix didn't even value Netflix employees beyond what they could produce in the moment. They leaned into the zero loyalty to employees model that US corporations rely on. Read this article which is pushing this as a positive. Grep for "Tell the Truth About Performance" to see where they talk about changing what an employees job needed. An employee they recognize had done a good job for 5 years, but wasn't what they wanted going forward so they weren't even going to try and help get her the skills to do the new job, but just lay her off immediately.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      This is the other side of the coin for keeping processes and bureaucracy minimal.
aaronblohowiak 3y ago
It was a very very special place to work for a time. Everything changes, though, and I will leave it to say the Netflix I left early this year was a completely different place from the one I joined almost 8 years ago.
- mochomocha 3y ago
  To expand a bit on what Aaron said, 2022 was a year where the company experienced drastic culture changes: introduction of levels, new VP&director-level leadership with more traditional / "big corp" management styles, push to hire junior engineers, decrease in transparency during decision-making, to name a few... These changes have alienated a lot of people who self-selected for the unique culture the company had, which was truly remarkable.

version_five 3y ago

Importantly, this requires mature engineers and managers. Nothing worse (from personal experience) than working at a place that hires experienced engineering talent and then has a bunch of junior "leadership" telling them what to do. That's how you end up inundated with meetings and frameworks and blablabla. Obviously you need experienced developers to get stuff done without handholding, but you need managers that can "manage" - I say coordinate, without handholding.

g9yuayon 3y ago
Absolutely. To start with, leaders must not be afraid of their teams making mistakes. Copying from another comment: "Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while making sure failures are manageable and success rate are maximized. That is, Netflix assumed that people would make mistakes and fail, but the trick was to ensure that failures do not hinder overall success of the teams and the company." I'll give an example of the leadership style of Netflix. Jordan Zimmerman, a great engineer who created Apache Curator, once asked then the director of cloud platform, Yury, if he could open source Curator. Yury just casually said: okay, do it. Jordan was puzzled and asked: "don't I have to talk to an attorney? ". Yury smiled and asked: does an attorney help you write code? Jordan said no, and Yury concluded the conversation: then you don't have to talk to an attorney.
- esafak 3y ago
  > does an attorney help you write code? That does not sound like the right question. How about: have we vetted our dependencies' licenses?
  - progman32 3y ago
    I suppose that's a tangible benefit to hiring well- you don't have to ask your team basic questions like these. Presumably the engineer well knows to check licenses.
  - 3y ago

wavelander 3y ago

This makes a lot of sense at deep tech places that don't sell to enterprises where one can put their head down and just work on technical challenges. A similar place like Mongo DB or the hardware division of NVidia comes to mind. But if you're supposed to iterate with any input from more than 2 people that isn't highly objective (technical metrics that can correlate well with product satisfaction), communication and diffused collaboration is important and necessary. That doesn't mean it has to suck. But the Netflix model you described isn't applicable everywhere and shouldn't be blindly replicated.

gervwyk 3y ago
This. In our tiny company, Lowdefy, we try to distinguish when something is done as part of innovation, or as a deliverable or chore. The work that falls into the two categories are vastly different in nature, stakeholder expectations and outcomes. Being deliberate about what category of work you are busy with provides freedom to thrive when innovating required while introducing the structure needed when deadlines are on the table. Mixing the two results in frustration and reduces quality and output. I would be interested to know if this applies same to larger orgs?

slotrans 3y ago

I assume these storie-lets are true but the timeline is wrong, it was much more than 10 years ago. I went to an Adrian Cockroft talk in 2012: they had thousands of engineers and hundreds of services at that time, Asgard already existed and was in the process of being open-sourced, etc.

g9yuayon 3y ago
I joined in 2009 and left in 2014. So the timeline was anywhere in between.

aledalgrande 3y ago

> I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago where/when did Netflix go wrong? curious to hear from insiders

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
g9yuayon 3y ago
I don't know if anything went wrong afterwards. I left in 2014, so I only spoke for what I saw when I was there.
- yibg 3y ago
  Was fairly similar up until 2017 (when I left). Things just got done with minimal fuss.
doktorhladnjak 3y ago
Netflix's competition changed. They were one of the few players in streaming. Now, there are infinite streaming platforms, all angling for their cut of the pie. For Netflix to continue to be profitable, it decided it needed to spend more on original content. Then I suppose the cost cutting came for other expenses. Hiring a bunch of very experienced engineers does not come cheap. Netflix was known for having the highest cash comp in the valley. They've started hiring new grads again, because it's cheaper to hire one senior engineer to lead a bunch of junior engineers instead of a few seniors to do everything themselves.
- ido 3y ago
  I’ve no clue about Netflix specifically, but at some point as an industry we have to hire some junior people in order to have new seniors a few years down the line…

ttymck 3y ago

Do you think this is thanks, at least in part, to the fact that Netflix is a rather narrowly defined product? It is a library of content and it streams to your screen. In the places I've worked, the product is poorly defined. Not because we've neglected to define it, but because it's novel and amorphous and nobody knows what it should be, let alone what it will be. Netflix on the other hand, in my view, has a clear goal: get video onto screens as efficiently as possible. It becomes much more of a pure technology problem solving situation. Of course, I won't assume there aren't ongoing product development tasks constantly. I'm sure there's a massive back office suite, along with ads, etc. But the overwhelming majority of the Netflix product "mandate" is pretty solid, so you don't need to spend a lot of time making sure folks are on the same page, or am I way off?

g9yuayon 3y ago
My own experience is that there was enough ambiguity in what we needed to build. Take building a CDN for instance, what tech stack would you use? How would you deploy them? What's your caching strategy? How would you partner with ISPs? What kind of hardware would you use? A large company may spend months approving every single such decision.