7 ms·

Netflix wants managers to ask whether they would rehire their employees

32 points by mji 2y ago

Purge187 2y ago
I used to work for one of their biggest hubs and was one of their most senior employees. I saw a lot of highet-ups come and go. They wanted perfection, or something damn close to it. Good thing I was content being a QC inspector and driver, because I wouldn't have taken any kind of management position even if one had been offered to me.
BXlnt2EachOther 2y ago
Second half of the headline, possibly cut for length? "—and fire them if the answer is no" Which escalates things from how I initially read it! I know many companies have an eligible for re-hire bit and at least a couple of the FAANGs have an additional soft version of that bit [both set at separation]. edit: phrase for clarity
kevmoo1 2y ago
See also: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SRLtGOjEHkI https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SRLtGOjEHkI
outside1234 2y ago
Netflix is Disneyland for Psychopaths or This all makes sense to me as a survivor because I'm in the in-group (Disclosure: I worked at the company for three weeks and then fired it to go to a real FAANG, so I guess it works both ways.)
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  "This makes sense to me because I'm in the in-group" is basically how I feel about "unlimited vacation" policies. If you've a Type A person who's tight with your boss, it's great. If you're non-confrontational and you think maybe your boss doesn't like you, or if you really need to keep your job, it's a nightmare.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    It's also a nasty trap if your burned out. You need the time off but don't know if you have the political capital to safely take it. I struggle to find a charitable guess about the intent behind these policies.
    - crooked-v 2y ago
      The intent is "because there isn't a specifically accrued amount of time off, we don't have to pay it out when they quit or are fired".
    - mulmen 2y ago
      The charitable take is Hanlon’s Razor. Leadership at these companies is simply incompetent and honestly believes it’s a good policy. It’s an immediately disqualifying policy for me.
    - skywhopper 2y ago
      Less time spent dealing with the paperwork of tracking it and accounting for the termination liability of paying out vacation. Those are the two main reasons. I’ve always preferred it because the alternative is usually some too small fixed amount of vacation that I don’t have access to for the first year. It still takes just as much political capital to take time off as long as your boss has to approve, regardless of whether it’s “unlimited” or not.
    - CobrastanJorji 2y ago
      I imagine the charitable story goes "if we have a good way of measuring your contributions, we don't need to bother counting your hours and days because we'll know whether you're effective without doing that, and if we don't have a good way of measuring your performance, we have bigger problems that vacation policies won't fix." But that's kind of bullshit.
    - tbrownaw 2y ago
      > I struggle to find a charitable guess about the intent behind these policies. We're all friends here, who needs the overhead from all these silly rules about counting beans?
- quantified 2y ago
  Is "the company" Netflix? They are the N in FAANG.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Netflix has only been there because they needed to make the acronym non slur. Now they could use NVDA.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  I interviewed at Netflix in 2015. Unlike every other company I interviewed at, they earmarked you for a team before you interviewed. I didn't know what teams were available; the recruiter earmarked me for the logged out experience. I didn't get the job. The feedback? "You aced the technical stuff and everyone loved you, but we didn't sense your passion for the logged out experience."
  - acjohnson55 2y ago
    Wow. It's kind of hilarious to imagine that maybe they found someone who did.
  - cageface 2y ago
    Because if there's anything that excites deep, abiding passion it's certainly the logged out experience. Sounds like dialog from Silicon Valley.
  - carom 2y ago
    Former Googler. I did not make it past the Netflix recruiter phone screen because they had me read the culture memo before the first call and when asked what I thought about it I said "kind of culty but I can deal with it". Apparently that is not the correct answer.
    - neilv 2y ago
      While reading some longish culture thing on Netflix hiring pages, it started out OK, but by the end... I'm skeptical of places that are self-congratulatory about their own supposed superiority. I expect those places to probably have dim-wittedness, mediocrity, and game-playing.
29athrowaway 2y ago
1. Go to https://jobs.netflix.com/culture https://jobs.netflix.com/culture 2. Search for "keeper test" It says: >“if X wanted to leave, would I fight to keep them?” > Or “knowing everything I know today, would I hire X again?” > If the answer is no, we believe it’s fairer to everyone to part ways quickly. This is better than the "stacked ranking" methodology.
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  If you want managers to fire marginal employees you have to make it so doing so doesn’t screw them over. That means always backfilling (quickly) and meanwhile adjusting output expectations.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    "Jane, we're trying to backfill that position. Look, we even have it posted!" the posting: https://qz.com/companies-posting-fake-job-listings-resume-builder-1851556777 https://qz.com/companies-posting-fake-job-listings-resume-bu... I've never been the negative type, but things feel really really broken.
- foundart 2y ago
  I've never worked at Netflix but the above reflects my understanding of the culture there, with this addition: Unlike the approach of being required to stack rank and fire the bottom x%, managers aren't required to fire anyone but are supported if they decide someone is no longer adding value. I think the fact I know this means they are pretty transparent about it. Obviously, that could be applied unfairly. Given the transparency, you need to decide: 1. Does the hiring manager seem like a reasonable person? 2. What is the hiring manager's / company's definition of reasonable expectations? 3. Am I willing and able to sustain the kind of efforts that those expectations entail? 4. Am I willing and able to deal with the ego, financial, and hassle ramifications of being wrong about any of the previous questions? I think it's a reasonable way to run a business. It's not a way I want to participate in, so I hope it doesn't become the only way. (edited for formatting)
rightbyte 2y ago
Managers got way to much power over their subordinates. The looming one-sided threat of being instant-fired cultivates such a psychotic inducing culture of ass-kissing it is not healthy for a company. I guess Netflix could make the rule bilateral? "Should we hire your boss right now?" being asked each quarter.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  But your manager operates in a jurisdiction where defamation law exists. Defame someone verbally and it is slander, defame someone in writing and it is libel. A defamatory statement must be false. When psychopaths ascend, they will abuse their position and assassinate the character of people that cannot be used as pawns. When I say psychopaths, note that only a subset of managers are psychopaths, but psychopathic traits are favored by organizations and they are more likely to become managers, and that subset is highly toxic. Freedom of expression has limits, defamation is one of them. You cannot just say whatever you want and cause financial losses to others. The fiction created by a psychopathic manager through manipulation can cross legal lines. And it is time to put an end to this practice that plagues engineering organizations. It is time to let the justice system do its work. We have enough technology to automatically detect problematic behaviors like sycophancy and other types of manipulation with AI and take that as a factor in evaluations, or take administrative action. In this way, we can finally let people focus on doing their job without the distractions of office politics. i.e.: analyze the sentiment of words used with peers vs managers and if sentiment diverges too much then fire the sycophant, and if a manager only has sycophants as reports, fire the manager too. And while we are at it, completely destroy the culture of lying through idioms such as "maybe later", "I will think about it" instead of simply saying "no" as they are predictors for dishonesty which ultimately it is a waste of time. Being a manager should require a license and manipulative behavior past certain limits should get it permanently revoked. We need to make a piñata out of the concept of being a professional liar in an engineering organization as a source of income, we are better than this.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    I’d love to try and detect sycophancy with ai
38 2y ago
Title edit results in nonsense, here is original Netflix wants managers to ask themselves whether they would rehire their current employees
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Netflix should stop trying to be a tech company or some amazing new management culture company and focus on quality content. So much waste Netflix produces.
- downrightmike 2y ago
  If they don't make good content, their "meritocratic" circle jerk can't go on
- toast0 2y ago
  Netflix has to be a tech company because a significant part of their product is the usually pretty seemless streaming experience. Of course, a technically good streaming experience and mediocre content isn't great. But using apps on Roku and Samsung TVs (and some older platforms, like the Wii player and some blu-ray players), Netflix is consistently better tecnically than Amazon, Hulu/Espn/Disney, Apple+ (maybe it's good on AppleTvs, but it was garbage on Roku); and then all the free ones are way worse.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    Oh please. Pornhub has better tech than them but they are not walking around talking about their micro services and management principles because they don't believe in virtue signalling.
    - toast0 2y ago
      Does pornhub have clients on a bazillion platforms? Pretty sure they never released one for my blu-ray players. I haven't looked to see if they have a client for Roku or Samsung or LG tvs...
jiveturkey 2y ago
this is in response to the just-updated "culture deck". but netflix has for ages (always?) had their so-called keeper test.
sudohackthenews 2y ago
https://archive.ph/ap80H https://archive.ph/ap80H
romanhn 2y ago
The keeper test has been at Netflix forever. This is very much a non-story.
- gaws 2y ago
  The "keeper test" was known inside the organization, but it wasn't disclosed publically until recently.
  - romanhn 2y ago
    That's not true at all. I've never worked there and have heard of the keeper test for years, ever since the culture memo leaked in 2009. Here's an article from 2010 about it: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/tough-love-netflix https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/tough-lov.... The company's culture page has mentioned it ever since its first iteration in 2017 (per Wayback Machine).
Mathnerd314 2y ago
I think it's an interesting question to turn around - for the current "good" employees, would Netflix's current hiring process allow them to be hired, or would the hiring team look at their resume and pass? Seems eminently testable too, just ask for resumes and anonymize them. You could even bring in current employees for interviews if they were willing to "red team". :-)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fbdab103 2y ago
  I am failing to find an original source, on what could be internet legend, but supposedly this happened at Google. Someone submitted the interview panel's hiring-date resumes to the panel (presumably with some minor names/dates swapped). Panel fully rejected themselves. Edit: found a Linkedin post, which seems like little more than a FWD:FWD:FWD kind of deal, but whatever: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hiring-committee-google-fails-hire-themselves-lucas-bean https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hiring-committee-google-fails...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - neilv 2y ago
    I think this is the original source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0&t=8m50s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0&t=8m50s
LouisSayers 2y ago
I really hate how a lot of people treat a manager as a "mini-boss". A manager should really just be another role on the team, with the possibility of firing a team member being a decision for the team, not a single managerial role. Everyone should get a vote in who stays, otherwise you just end up with a bunch of sociopaths running the show.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I've never worked at a company where your manager was not also your "boss." You do what your manager tells you to do, make them look good, defer to them when necessary, because they utterly control whether you continue to work there or not. I'd love to learn about a company where this is not true. Not doubting it, but genuinely curious because it is counter to all of my 25 years of career experience.
  - fbdab103 2y ago
    Valve? From insider reports, there are power structures, they are just not officially recognized by HR.
  - LeChuck 2y ago
    I work in a country with strict laws around firing and while I suspect our laws are generally too strict, this is one of the big upsides in my view. It just makes for a healthier dynamic. People feel (reasonably) free to speak their mind, disagree, or stand up for themselves. Management is based more on merits and consensus than power and hierarchy. Disclaimer: I've never worked in the US. The difference is probably not as pronounced as I imagine it to be!
ryandrake 2y ago
Looking back at every job I've ever had, I would not pass the current hiring bar two years after being hired. Companies are just getting pickier and pickier, more and more conservative and risk adverse, and shrinking rather than growing the pool of candidates they are considering. Sometimes it seems they are acting as though a single bad hire will torpedo the business. It's ironic that while they keep raising the bar, they also keep complaining that they just can't find talent anymore...
ergonaught 2y ago
Reminds me of a quote possibly from Warren Buffett, "If you wouldn’t buy it today, you shouldn’t hold onto it."
keernan 2y ago
I was a department manager at a Fortune 500 Company that required every department head to rank all the department employees from 1 - (n) based upon performance and importance to the department. Senior VPs had to do the same for the department managers who reported to them. We were instructed to fire the bottom 10% every year.

32 points by mji 2y ago

I used to work for one of their biggest hubs and was one of their most senior employees. I saw a lot of highet-ups come and go. They wanted perfection, or something damn close to it. Good thing I was content being a QC inspector and driver, because I wouldn't have taken any kind of management position even if one had been offered to me.

BXlnt2EachOther 2y ago

Second half of the headline, possibly cut for length? "—and fire them if the answer is no" Which escalates things from how I initially read it! I know many companies have an eligible for re-hire bit and at least a couple of the FAANGs have an additional soft version of that bit [both set at separation]. edit: phrase for clarity

kevmoo1 2y ago

See also: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SRLtGOjEHkI https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SRLtGOjEHkI

outside1234 2y ago

Netflix is Disneyland for Psychopaths or This all makes sense to me as a survivor because I'm in the in-group (Disclosure: I worked at the company for three weeks and then fired it to go to a real FAANG, so I guess it works both ways.)

CobrastanJorji 2y ago
"This makes sense to me because I'm in the in-group" is basically how I feel about "unlimited vacation" policies. If you've a Type A person who's tight with your boss, it's great. If you're non-confrontational and you think maybe your boss doesn't like you, or if you really need to keep your job, it's a nightmare.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  It's also a nasty trap if your burned out. You need the time off but don't know if you have the political capital to safely take it. I struggle to find a charitable guess about the intent behind these policies.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    The intent is "because there isn't a specifically accrued amount of time off, we don't have to pay it out when they quit or are fired".
  - mulmen 2y ago
    The charitable take is Hanlon’s Razor. Leadership at these companies is simply incompetent and honestly believes it’s a good policy. It’s an immediately disqualifying policy for me.
  - skywhopper 2y ago
    Less time spent dealing with the paperwork of tracking it and accounting for the termination liability of paying out vacation. Those are the two main reasons. I’ve always preferred it because the alternative is usually some too small fixed amount of vacation that I don’t have access to for the first year. It still takes just as much political capital to take time off as long as your boss has to approve, regardless of whether it’s “unlimited” or not.
  - CobrastanJorji 2y ago
    I imagine the charitable story goes "if we have a good way of measuring your contributions, we don't need to bother counting your hours and days because we'll know whether you're effective without doing that, and if we don't have a good way of measuring your performance, we have bigger problems that vacation policies won't fix." But that's kind of bullshit.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    > I struggle to find a charitable guess about the intent behind these policies. We're all friends here, who needs the overhead from all these silly rules about counting beans?
quantified 2y ago
Is "the company" Netflix? They are the N in FAANG.
- bombcar 2y ago
  Netflix has only been there because they needed to make the acronym non slur. Now they could use NVDA.
bsimpson 2y ago
I interviewed at Netflix in 2015. Unlike every other company I interviewed at, they earmarked you for a team before you interviewed. I didn't know what teams were available; the recruiter earmarked me for the logged out experience. I didn't get the job. The feedback? "You aced the technical stuff and everyone loved you, but we didn't sense your passion for the logged out experience."
- acjohnson55 2y ago
  Wow. It's kind of hilarious to imagine that maybe they found someone who did.
- cageface 2y ago
  Because if there's anything that excites deep, abiding passion it's certainly the logged out experience. Sounds like dialog from Silicon Valley.
- carom 2y ago
  Former Googler. I did not make it past the Netflix recruiter phone screen because they had me read the culture memo before the first call and when asked what I thought about it I said "kind of culty but I can deal with it". Apparently that is not the correct answer.
  - neilv 2y ago
    While reading some longish culture thing on Netflix hiring pages, it started out OK, but by the end... I'm skeptical of places that are self-congratulatory about their own supposed superiority. I expect those places to probably have dim-wittedness, mediocrity, and game-playing.

29athrowaway 2y ago

1. Go to https://jobs.netflix.com/culture https://jobs.netflix.com/culture 2. Search for "keeper test" It says: >“if X wanted to leave, would I fight to keep them?” > Or “knowing everything I know today, would I hire X again?” > If the answer is no, we believe it’s fairer to everyone to part ways quickly. This is better than the "stacked ranking" methodology.

bradleyjg 2y ago
If you want managers to fire marginal employees you have to make it so doing so doesn’t screw them over. That means always backfilling (quickly) and meanwhile adjusting output expectations.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  "Jane, we're trying to backfill that position. Look, we even have it posted!" the posting: https://qz.com/companies-posting-fake-job-listings-resume-builder-1851556777 https://qz.com/companies-posting-fake-job-listings-resume-bu... I've never been the negative type, but things feel really really broken.
foundart 2y ago
I've never worked at Netflix but the above reflects my understanding of the culture there, with this addition: Unlike the approach of being required to stack rank and fire the bottom x%, managers aren't required to fire anyone but are supported if they decide someone is no longer adding value. I think the fact I know this means they are pretty transparent about it. Obviously, that could be applied unfairly. Given the transparency, you need to decide: 1. Does the hiring manager seem like a reasonable person? 2. What is the hiring manager's / company's definition of reasonable expectations? 3. Am I willing and able to sustain the kind of efforts that those expectations entail? 4. Am I willing and able to deal with the ego, financial, and hassle ramifications of being wrong about any of the previous questions? I think it's a reasonable way to run a business. It's not a way I want to participate in, so I hope it doesn't become the only way. (edited for formatting)

rightbyte 2y ago

Managers got way to much power over their subordinates. The looming one-sided threat of being instant-fired cultivates such a psychotic inducing culture of ass-kissing it is not healthy for a company. I guess Netflix could make the rule bilateral? "Should we hire your boss right now?" being asked each quarter.

29athrowaway 2y ago
But your manager operates in a jurisdiction where defamation law exists. Defame someone verbally and it is slander, defame someone in writing and it is libel. A defamatory statement must be false. When psychopaths ascend, they will abuse their position and assassinate the character of people that cannot be used as pawns. When I say psychopaths, note that only a subset of managers are psychopaths, but psychopathic traits are favored by organizations and they are more likely to become managers, and that subset is highly toxic. Freedom of expression has limits, defamation is one of them. You cannot just say whatever you want and cause financial losses to others. The fiction created by a psychopathic manager through manipulation can cross legal lines. And it is time to put an end to this practice that plagues engineering organizations. It is time to let the justice system do its work. We have enough technology to automatically detect problematic behaviors like sycophancy and other types of manipulation with AI and take that as a factor in evaluations, or take administrative action. In this way, we can finally let people focus on doing their job without the distractions of office politics. i.e.: analyze the sentiment of words used with peers vs managers and if sentiment diverges too much then fire the sycophant, and if a manager only has sycophants as reports, fire the manager too. And while we are at it, completely destroy the culture of lying through idioms such as "maybe later", "I will think about it" instead of simply saying "no" as they are predictors for dishonesty which ultimately it is a waste of time. Being a manager should require a license and manipulative behavior past certain limits should get it permanently revoked. We need to make a piñata out of the concept of being a professional liar in an engineering organization as a source of income, we are better than this.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  I’d love to try and detect sycophancy with ai

38 2y ago

Title edit results in nonsense, here is original Netflix wants managers to ask themselves whether they would rehire their current employees

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

Netflix should stop trying to be a tech company or some amazing new management culture company and focus on quality content. So much waste Netflix produces.

downrightmike 2y ago
If they don't make good content, their "meritocratic" circle jerk can't go on
toast0 2y ago
Netflix has to be a tech company because a significant part of their product is the usually pretty seemless streaming experience. Of course, a technically good streaming experience and mediocre content isn't great. But using apps on Roku and Samsung TVs (and some older platforms, like the Wii player and some blu-ray players), Netflix is consistently better tecnically than Amazon, Hulu/Espn/Disney, Apple+ (maybe it's good on AppleTvs, but it was garbage on Roku); and then all the free ones are way worse.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Oh please. Pornhub has better tech than them but they are not walking around talking about their micro services and management principles because they don't believe in virtue signalling.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Does pornhub have clients on a bazillion platforms? Pretty sure they never released one for my blu-ray players. I haven't looked to see if they have a client for Roku or Samsung or LG tvs...

jiveturkey 2y ago

this is in response to the just-updated "culture deck". but netflix has for ages (always?) had their so-called keeper test.

sudohackthenews 2y ago

https://archive.ph/ap80H https://archive.ph/ap80H

romanhn 2y ago

The keeper test has been at Netflix forever. This is very much a non-story.

gaws 2y ago
The "keeper test" was known inside the organization, but it wasn't disclosed publically until recently.
- romanhn 2y ago
  That's not true at all. I've never worked there and have heard of the keeper test for years, ever since the culture memo leaked in 2009. Here's an article from 2010 about it: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/tough-love-netflix https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/tough-lov.... The company's culture page has mentioned it ever since its first iteration in 2017 (per Wayback Machine).

Mathnerd314 2y ago

I think it's an interesting question to turn around - for the current "good" employees, would Netflix's current hiring process allow them to be hired, or would the hiring team look at their resume and pass? Seems eminently testable too, just ask for resumes and anonymize them. You could even bring in current employees for interviews if they were willing to "red team". :-)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fbdab103 2y ago
I am failing to find an original source, on what could be internet legend, but supposedly this happened at Google. Someone submitted the interview panel's hiring-date resumes to the panel (presumably with some minor names/dates swapped). Panel fully rejected themselves. Edit: found a Linkedin post, which seems like little more than a FWD:FWD:FWD kind of deal, but whatever: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hiring-committee-google-fails-hire-themselves-lucas-bean https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hiring-committee-google-fails...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- neilv 2y ago
  I think this is the original source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0&t=8m50s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0&t=8m50s

LouisSayers 2y ago

I really hate how a lot of people treat a manager as a "mini-boss". A manager should really just be another role on the team, with the possibility of firing a team member being a decision for the team, not a single managerial role. Everyone should get a vote in who stays, otherwise you just end up with a bunch of sociopaths running the show.

ryandrake 2y ago
I've never worked at a company where your manager was not also your "boss." You do what your manager tells you to do, make them look good, defer to them when necessary, because they utterly control whether you continue to work there or not. I'd love to learn about a company where this is not true. Not doubting it, but genuinely curious because it is counter to all of my 25 years of career experience.
- fbdab103 2y ago
  Valve? From insider reports, there are power structures, they are just not officially recognized by HR.
- LeChuck 2y ago
  I work in a country with strict laws around firing and while I suspect our laws are generally too strict, this is one of the big upsides in my view. It just makes for a healthier dynamic. People feel (reasonably) free to speak their mind, disagree, or stand up for themselves. Management is based more on merits and consensus than power and hierarchy. Disclaimer: I've never worked in the US. The difference is probably not as pronounced as I imagine it to be!

ryandrake 2y ago

Looking back at every job I've ever had, I would not pass the current hiring bar two years after being hired. Companies are just getting pickier and pickier, more and more conservative and risk adverse, and shrinking rather than growing the pool of candidates they are considering. Sometimes it seems they are acting as though a single bad hire will torpedo the business. It's ironic that while they keep raising the bar, they also keep complaining that they just can't find talent anymore...

ergonaught 2y ago

Reminds me of a quote possibly from Warren Buffett, "If you wouldn’t buy it today, you shouldn’t hold onto it."

keernan 2y ago

I was a department manager at a Fortune 500 Company that required every department head to rank all the department employees from 1 - (n) based upon performance and importance to the department. Senior VPs had to do the same for the department managers who reported to them. We were instructed to fire the bottom 10% every year.