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Netflix: Non-'A' Players Unworthy of Jobs
- Robadob 13y agoThis appears to be a repost of yesterdays; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6959269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6959269
- wyclif 13y agoYes, I read the HBR post yesterday. But the reason I submitted this is (believe it or not) because of the rather cynical Slashdot commentary and links adding value, as well as the continued interest in employment and hiring trends on HN this week. In the case of the latter, I'm not really sure why that's so. I suspect it may have to do with the fact that it's the end of the year and that is when a lot of companies do layoffs and firings, and an upcoming new year means some people are thinking about transitioning to new jobs or roles.
- kiallmacinnes 13y agoIts amazing how different the Slashdot commentary is from yesterdays HN post...
- AmVess 13y agoThe quality of /. comments section has been in a tailspin for years. so it's no great shock that the opinions differ by a vast amount.
- adestefan 13y agoThere are many people who say the same thing about HN comments.
- bluekitten 13y agoPersonally, I feel the same way since a year and half or so ago.
- acjohnson55 13y agoEverything in degrees, I suppose!
- davidgerard 13y agoApproximate no-one reads it. I recently got Slashdotted, HNdotted and Redditdotted; Reddit melted the server (80k+), HN made it grind a bit (6k), Slashdot it barely noticed (<2000).
- polskibus 13y agoFiring once useful contributors is a failure of management. Managers should find a way to repurpose experienced employees and use their experience and knowledge of the company to greater mutual benefit.
- tomp 13y agoDid you even read the original article? Even the part quoted above says: > we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit If people's skills no longer fit, then by definition you cannot repurpose their skills. In the original article, the author explained Netflix's transition from DVD-over-mail to video-streaming-on-demand. I'm pretty sure there were quite a few people that were useful in the old business model and completely useless in the new one. The only fair thing in this case is to let them go, gracefully of course.
- perlpimp 13y agoHere is a case. you have a jar from pasta sauce. You can toss the jar out after making pasta sauce or you can fill it up with sugar/spices. And it can serve you for a long long time this way. High pressure environments usually burn people out leaving them useless and thats the underlying message in working for netflix - bust your ass, then most likely you will get fired. Great message, maybe it is a challenge to youngsters that want to see how not to build a company and rub shoulders with some great minds - before starting their own gig and pillaging the company for their top talent.
- mistercow 13y ago>You can toss the jar out after making pasta sauce or you can fill it up with sugar/spices. I'm not sure where I stand on what Netflix is saying here, but my immediate reaction to your analogy is this: I used to do this with jars too. Now I have more jars than I could ever use for storage, so now I recycle any new ones I get. It seems like it could work the same way with a company and its experienced employees. Once you've found use for a large number of employees whose original skills are no longer needed, it will get harder and harder to do.
- gopalv 13y agoThe best teams I've worked in has had A-players, B-players and C-players. Some of the C-players were wild kids with potential, who needed mentoring. Some of the B-players were people who were not motivated at all - some because they wanted money and the company didn't pay, some because they had been promoted upto their level of competence. The best bit the A-players did more than anything else was to make the B-players competent & motivate them. They added in their abilities and sure, wasted a lot of time sitting in other people's desks. But the team of five or so around an A-player grew and prospered to become incredibly effective. That was an awakening. That was when I stopped overworking myself to write tons of code and try to follow into the foot-steps of those A-players who became "force multipliers" in any team. Knowing the people I admired, I feel like it will take another decade, at least.
- logicallee 13y agoThere's a special kind of a-player who doesn't (or even can't) code, though understands the work of others. For example, Jobs early in his career and later on as well certainly seemed to fill your definition of an A-player force multiplier, with one exception: he did not code personally at all, according to Woz. It is very interesting that he still fit the rest of your description, as far as I understand.
- phaus 13y agoI wonder what he did at Atari if he didn't code? He wasn't a force multiplier there, he actually ended up on a shift by himself because everyone hated working with him. I always assumed that he could code at a very basic level, perhaps I was wrong.
- nswanberg 13y agoWire wrapping? In any case it probably isn't important what he did, and it is even possible that he was bad at it and should have been fired, and all of that having no bearing on his future success. Successful people don't excel at everything they do. What is nice about these hiring/firing posts is the perspective on how various companies sort out what works with employees. What isn't so great are the piles of insecure comments these posts bring. It's good to keep in perspective that lack of success in one place doesn't imply permanent lack of future success elsewhere.
- it_learnses 13y agoWhat I got out of it was that HR didn't want to micro-manage so they allowed employees and managers to think what was best for the company, rather than treating them like children. They gave them spending leeway and trusted them to spend it carefully. I think that was a good call. They did let go a few people who they thought wouldn't be able to adapt but with a good severance. I'm halfway split on this one. Is this a general policy? Or do they re-purpose people who they think are capable of being re-purposed and letting go the rest of them? It's sad that this happens, but I'm not sure I'd blame Netflix. Maybe if we had a guaranteed living wage, then this wouldn't even be an issue :)
- walshemj 13y agoUnfortunately I think a lot of the tail functions in organizations (accounts ,HR building services) get delusions of grandeur and start trying to run the company instead of just doing what they are paid to do - disastrous PRP and stack ranking systems being some very good examples As one "engineering" telecoms CEO told his building services director "world class telecoms companies dont have a head office in a F^%&*ing shed at Heathrow"
- fit2rule 13y agoWhat the heck is an "A-Player" or a "B-Player"? I think this is another American sporting term that has no place in the technology field, personally .. is it not discrimination wrapped up in a pop-cult package?
- AsymetricCom 13y agoHow else are we going to sell the next trendy bullshit to investors? Get your head in the game!
- thatthatis 13y agoIn American education an "A" grade is 90% or higher, a "B" grade is 80-90% and a "C" grade is 70-80% "A" player usually means someone in the top tier academically or professionally. As far as I know it isn't used in American sporting.
- caoilte 13y agoWow, your tests must be easy.
- forgottenpass 13y agoThat was the quick and easy answer. Testing that doesn't expect mastery of the material will, of course, work differently.
- phamilton 13y agoC means satisfactory. B means above average. A means exceptional. The expectation is a 70%. It is expected that the average student will get almost 1/3 wrong. However, recent grade inflation has skewed the original meaning of these definitions
- caw 13y agoOr there's a curve so you fit each letter to 10% of participants. Generally it's a bell curve though so most people end up in C, since that's "average" or "satisfactory". I had a few classes in college, where in a very 1984-esque fashion, failing (<60% correct) was passing. You just had to fail less than everyone else.
- NAFV_P 13y agoA, B && C players. First you categorise programming languages, next people. I thought this type of thinking died out in the late nineties, when people realised it was a load of shite.
- djillionsmix 13y agoAs long as there's an asshole looking for an excuse to be an asshole they'll keep reinventing the same stupid shit.
- ChristianMarks 13y agoLet the A-players clean their own toilets.
- spacecadet 13y agoIm a member of the A-Team. I have a certificate from 1985 to prove it...
- joezydeco 13y agoI pity you, fool.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- coldcode 13y agoSo if I put "A-Player" on my linked-in page I will get hired faster? Such an imbecilic way to divide up programmers. This definition is so open to multiple definitions it's totally useless. Everyone's idea of a good/bad programmer is radically different and likely a continuum. What matters in the end is the team you have doing what you need them to do. Calling people A, B or C is like trying to digitize an analog signal made up of multiple frequencies with 2 bits.
- CGamesPlay 13y agoUsing a bad definition of "A-level performance" obviously makes the idea of only keeping A players sound like a bad plan. Individual performance evaluations should create incentives that are aligned to company incentives. - Evaluating performance based on effort fails to incentivize output totally; a high performer who works 9-5 is foolishly ranked underneath a mediocre performer who stays overtime: the mediocre performer will be around forever--the high performer will find a better job. - Evaluating performance based on high quantity of output without regard to long-term viability (quality) of the output incentivizes reactionary behavior and leads to technical debt: over time, even your high performers won't be able to produce good output in a timely fashion because there is nothing sound to build upon. If the incentives are aligned, "performance" at an individual level means increasing performance of the team and company, and involves the quantity of high-quality output (ignoring low-quality output) and the degree to which an individual enables the rest of the team to produce high-quality output. I think the Slashdot comment totally misses the mark on how Netflix defines performance.
- greenyoda 13y agoI'd have more confidence in a company that retained only "A-players" if the policy was applied to everyone up to the CEO. But I doubt we'll ever live to see the CEO of Netflix resign because the company isn't performing well enough. (If he ever gets fired by the board, it will only be after the company under-performs for a very long time.)
- macspoofing 13y agoHeh. The attempted spinning of the DVD business plus the fee increases were a PR fiasco and cost Netflix huge amount of subscribers. Surely the CEO was off his "A game" and was fired accordingly.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoI don't know if aggressively firing low performers is a good strategy, but it has zero bearing on the economy as a whole, or H-1Bs. All tech companies would gain if they were allowed access to cheaper labor, regardless of their HR strategy. And all companies would prefer better employees over worse, regardless of whether they prefer to achieve this in the hiring stage or by firing people later.
- lukejduncan 13y agoEveryone claims to hire "only A players." Alice interviews at TechCo, enters the interview anti-loop, and doesn't get an offer. Alice leaves while TechCo tells it's new hires "we only hire A players, you're the best of the best, welcome to the team." Alice avoids the anti-loop at MicroCo, gets an offer, and is told "we only hire A players, you're the best of the best, welcome to the team." And the myth of only hiring A players perpetuates itself. edit: grammar
- zmjjmz 13y agoI think the point of the article is that whether or not someone is an A-player is context dependent. Alice might not be an A-player at TechCo (for some reason e.g. the way they dole out projects) but is an excellent fit at MicroCo, where she is considered an A-player because she can work well in their context. Whether or not this works in practice is obviously a bit iffy, since finding someone who fits exactly your context is incredibly difficult.
- auggierose 13y agoI think this is totally OK. Pay me 10 dollars a minute, and I will surely understand when I will be let go because I am not fully adequate for your current purpose anymore.
- stefan_kendall 13y agoI no longer believe in A/B/C players. It's an excuse, as many have mentioned, of poorly managing a dysfunctional team. Are there people at companies that shouldn't have been hired, or should be fired? Sure, but that doesn't mean you can't take a team of differing skill-set individuals and make great products. When your product is iterating rapidly, you may suddenly find that your crack team of javascript developers suddenly needs to analyze an sql execution plan. The best guy on the team for the job probably isn't the smartest guy, it's the one whose dealt with these sorts of issues before. A team learns from each other.
- yalogin 13y agoSlashdot says it like it is. This made me remember why I liked it in the first place. Unlike HN where its mostly people who look to implement or have implemented such policies and so have no incentive to be harsh on Netflix.
- lazyjones 13y agoClaiming to hire only 'A' players is probably much more important for successful hiring than actually doing it. It seems to be en vogue suddenly to claim to have only the best people. Is that really such a sought-after attribute of companies for people who are looking into new tech jobs?
- avifreedman 13y agoA friend of mine is a director at Netflix. He was explaining to me that compensation vs retention are different conversations there. They want to pay people market+ for A players, but if you're not at the level expected, you'll be let go if you don't get (back) to that level. So a conversation shouldn't (but sometimes does) go from "we shouldn't give her a $25k raise, {s}he hasn't been doing well enough" to firing her for not improving. On the other hand, no one is supposed to be confused about where {s}he stands with respect to performance and improvement.
- protomyth 13y agoHow does new, disruptive technology enter the company if the consequence of such technology is hiring new A players and firing the existing A players?
- macspoofing 13y agoI'm interested to read about the rating system they use to differentiate A players from others.
- macspoofing 13y agoI'm interested to read about the rating system they use to differentiate A players from others.
- djillionsmix 13y agoYou know who talked a lot about being A players who only hire A players? The Bush administration.