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 team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever. ...
> To strengthen our dream team, our managers use a “keeper test” for each of their people: if a team member was leaving for a similar role at another company, would the manager try to keep them? Those who do not pass the keeper test (i.e. their manager would not fight to keep them) are given a generous severance package so we can find someone even better for that position—making an even better dream team.
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.
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.
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.
Failed my keeper test with the subscription rate hike. Reminded me that I only watch one show every few months.
Somewhat relayed: for a company whose culture recently applauds itself for catering to all sorts of audiences, there’s a significant lack of skin when compared to HBO.
Netflix never willingly removes any popular show. What happens is that the original rights holder doesn't renew the license, because they want it on their own streaming platform.
Netflix is famous for cancelling all their original shows after a season or two instead of considering they might be able to improve them or market them better.
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.
Netflix actually cancelled my subscription last year. Their support insisted that I did it myself. A couple months later I started getting the-please-come-back emails.
I guess I wasn't a keeper.
(More seriously, I originally wondered if I was a bystander in some kind of social engineering attack. My best guess is that it was a fat finger error that occurred when another subscriber called in to cancel.)
Truth is, between HBO Max and Amazon Prime, I haven't missed it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
"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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Those who do not pass the keeper test [...] are given a generous severance package so we can find someone even better for that position—making an even better dream team."
What a load of wank. No one who has owned a company for more than five minutes would say that load of bollocks with a straight face. You do your best with what you have. You do your best with those you hire. You do your best with yourself. Well that's what I do anyway, most of the time (I'm human).
Any CEO of, a little firm in the UK (me) to a monster from the US has a simple question to answer for their staff: "Am I a wanker"? A wanker doesn't care and a CEO that starts wanking over a "dream team" is obviously a wanker. The "keeper test" as described is nonsense - you don't pay more to person A to entice person B to enhance your team - that's complete nonsense. Why would you "pay off" person A for being rubbish? You pay person A their dues and move on.
I try to avoid being a wanker. We generally offer to pay our staff what we think is reasonable and invite robust discussion in return.
I would never use the term "dream team" like that - what a wanker!
It is an embarrassing bit of corpspeak, to be sure, but can you please not fulminate on HN? It makes conversations less insightful and more predictable, which is why there's a site guideline against it.
You can make your substantive points without that; please do.
> you don't pay more to person A to entice person B to enhance your team
That has nothing to do with the "dream team" idea. It's a metaphor referring to the 1992 USA Olympics basketball team [1] that included:
Magic Johnson,
Michael Jordan,
Scottie Pippen,
Patrick Ewing,
David Robinson,
Charles Barkley
... and a few other of the most famous all-star basketball players. The coach was the famous Mike Krzyzewski of Duke. This was made possible by a rule change that allowed professional basketball players to play for the first time in the Olympics.
This team went to win the gold medal. The closest score in the eight olympic matches was 117-85. In other words, the "dream team" utterly dominated.
Netflix does not try to make do with what they have. They try to assemble a "dream team" for each thing they do. I saw Netflix be pretty successful at it while I was there.
This is just a cultural divide “dream team” to someone from the UK would be met with a harsh eye roll at best.
There’s some irony here though - UK software companies pay shit. Netflix engineers were routinely making 400-800k in cash with a similar amount of severance if it didn’t work out. Wanker talk aside, I’d rather be at Netflix with top compensation than a UK software company paying devs 60k/yr with heavy top down management.
Sure, use a top US tech company with a random UK company as your example, also prices are not in line with market rates. I earned twice as much in a £1M/yr revenue small company.
That said, the price comparison between US and Europe is always ignoring the myriad of economic difference between the two places, and in this case whether you're working for wankers that only care about their dream team or where you're treated like a decent human being and not a human resource.
There's a reason why many UK developers stay here and don't move to the Silicon Valley to work for Netflix for half a million dollars a year. Not because we're all idiots.
No, that's not the only factor. It may come as a surprise to some, but not everyone wants to live in the US, or live the US company life. I couldn't care less about getting a work visa and doubling my salary if it means I have to live in Silicon Valley. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying it's not for me, and for many others.
$250k/yr in Europe > $500k/yr in US, especially since in Europe that would put me somewhere in the 1% and I would live like a prince pretty much everywhere.
And more personally, $250k/yr at a company I enjoy > $1M/yr at a FAANG. I have no interest in getting filthy rich working for any of those companies, but YMMV.
60k anywhere in EU gives you pretty comfy life with two to three proper holidays a year and regular short weekend trips. And there's something left on the table for savings and hobbies as well. You will probably never be rich rich but you will have no money worries.
I'm closer to the second figure working in the UK, actually. You won't certainly get $60k/yr working for one of the FAANG offices in London.
In fact, how many US Netflix employees are actually earning $500k/yr like we were discussing upthread? I doubt that's the salary of a junior frontend employee. If it is, good for them. I don't think my quality of life and happiness would change dramatically between $250k and $1M/yr, but apparently this is so hard to convey to an American audience that thinks more money == more happiness.
I think for Americans (I am one), more money == less fear. We don’t have any real social safety nets, so making $500k/year let’s you pay off your house and save for retirement faster.
I’d give up my $500k/year salary to move to Europe and feel more supported if anything went wrong, but I do wonder how much support someone on a work visa in the UK/EU gets if they lose their job.
Yeah, this is the obverse of why I don't go to the US. I know the guy upthread was smarmily pushing the "oh, it's just because you CAN'T get a visa / get a job / figure out how the fuck you're meant to apply for an ESTA / etc" line, but it's not really that. I'm at the not-literally-top-percentile-but-very-very-close mark in London, and I'm confident I'd be paid commensurately in the US. But the healthcare situation is an absolute, hard no.
I don't care if I get private insurance in the States. I get private insurance here too, and I even use it now and again. But I care about knowing that, no matter what happens to me, ever, I won't be saddled with a life-ruining debt that wipes out what I've gained. Not without my consenting to borrow such an amount.
I'm not interested in playing snakes and ladders. I'm not interested in the equivalent of someone selling me a mortgage without my knowledge in my sleep (and with no house at the end of it). And I know that insurers - unlike the UK govt - are in the business of avoiding making payouts[0].
(That's the main thing, at least, by far. Then the salary-erasing real estate costs, in all the places where those endlessly-quoted salary figures are from, make me not-particularly-sad that I ruled it out.)
[0] I'm not imputing dishonesty. I'm just saying their literal business model is maximise premiums, minimise claims.
There are places in Europe other than London. In fact, put up with a 90-minute commute a couple of days a week, and you can be living in places with half the housing costs.
I always find it strange that on HN we all end up talking about London salaries and London cost of living. Believe it or not, other options exist…
Despite the reductiveness of your argument there are things people value more than just buying a big house.
The quality of life you get In Europe is superior in my opinion to the one in America. The way cities are laid out and the pervasiveness of public transit allows for a better social life.
I could go on and on but if you're going to be on this forum and engage with others you should adjust your attitude.
I earn in excess of 200K£ (So 300K$) in London and in no way I live like a prince. I managed to buy an average flat (at least for continental European standards) in a semi-decent area (Battersea) and that took 10 years of savings plus 3K£pm in mortgage (which is roughly one third of my net income) for the next 25+ years. I pay 2K per month for a random nursery and another 500-600£ for a baby sitter, because the nursery doesn't keep the baby after 1630. I spend in excess of 1K pm in food and bills. That’s a total of almost 7K£ per month just to put a (continental European quality) roof over my head and it’s 70-80% of my aftertax income. If I lose my job, I’m homeless in 3 months.
I’d gladly move to the US if I didn’t have to go through their hellish immigration system (and I may leave the UK if the Brexit madness keeps degenerating).
London is insanely expensive and you need a household income of ~140-150K£ to live like a normal person in continental Europe (80sqm flat with 2.6mt ceilings and insulated windows and working kitchen, I'm not asking for a toilet with a window because that would be super-upper class). If you don't go on holidays and are parsimonious with take-aways, the additional 50K to get to 200K are taxed at ~50%, so you get to keep 25K. If you lose your job, one year of savings earns you 3-4 months of survival.
You won't get a four bedroom in Mayfair with that salary, but living in Mayfair is not my idea of fun either.
Yet with that salary you can afford a very nice house outside of central London, you can travel, eat at a fancy restaurant whenever you want, get the latest iDevice every year and buy a new car with cash when the old one breaks, provided you're smart with your money. To my European tastes that's living like a prince (not a king)
In the UK £200k puts you solidly in the 1% bracket - that is, 99% of people earn less than you. If that's not princely, I don't know what is.
For one, I'd think actual princes and princesses[1] in UK live a bit better than what you described. But I can see your point: you take comfort in knowing that you are wealthy relative to the masses. I get this a lot from the recruiters from UK/Europe.
It does not do anything for me: if I have to live in an apartment instead of a house I am not going to feel happy about it because 99% of people live in even worse apartment.
I think GP is referring to the obnoxious type-A personalities that dominate management where everything has to be the best (or at least be presented as such) and virtuous (hah!) competition weeds out the weak. They like to see themselves as moneymaking stablemasters cultivating fine workhorses for their shareholders.
I personally had a manager refer to me as an athlete on a big-league sports team (I was a software developer), and it was incredibly off-putting. I don't like athletes, I don't like sports or athletics, and I don't like zero-sum bullshit at work. If I didn't like the guy otherwise he would have been one of the wankers GP is referring to.
So is it time for Hastings and Sarandos to get cut from the team? They’re clearly not achieving dream team results lately, and it has nothing to do with the worker bees.
I cant beleive they say with a straight face they have a dream when when they cant even implement a search catalogue correctly!
People are leaving netflix because its value propersition is sh*t. Its dream-team algorithm is eating its profit and so full of wankers no one has noticed.
The amount of times ive herad an ex-netflixer tell me they never saw the content i saw is just the writing on the wall.
You had an early mover advantage and the dream team dropped the ball! The only reason your a house-hold name is because of account sharing your users will never pay what will make you profitable. People have left Network TV and the news. Creators no longer dream of Hollywood. Actors are moving to direct to fan engagements. Movies are just re-hashing classics.
> I cant beleive they say with a straight face they have a dream when when they cant even implement a search catalogue correctly!
s/can't/won't/ I believe they're gamifying their app to be the software equivalent of a discount retail outlet clothes bin. You get frustrated with the experience and just pick something. Now they're going to put ads in their app. The moment I start seeing ads is the goodbye netflix moment.
You know it's kind of funny, because many former Olympic dream teams have famously fallen short from time to time. The most noteworthy is the American basketball team losing early rounds to smaller countries, but also Canadian Hockey "dream teams" being knocked out of early rounds too. Every so often there are upsets, even if you do have a "dream team".
“Upset” is usually used to refer to a one-off, when a team expected to win has been defeated by an underdog, but then the team often returns to their former level of dominance.
So your analogy suggests Netflix will quickly return to its former glory days.
I think this is premature, at best, if not incredibly optimistic. I think this is the beginning of a long uphill battle for Netflix, and that if they ever return to their former glory days, it will be much further down the road than what is a typical recover from an upset.
I’m not convinced they ever will be the same. Not even close.
This reminds me of my friends who are generally disappointed when the English team with their favorite 'premier league' players loses to other teams in the world cup.
Turns out great players in a league are playing in a specific team configuration, and the context of the league in general is very different compared to a competition between national teams at the world cup level.
Netflix isn’t “successful” as a business. It thought of itself as a technology company instead of a content company. It’s content is second rate compared to its competitors were able to throw money at companies like BamTech (now owned by Disney) to have “good enough” technology.
Yes it’s “profitable”. But until last year, it was having to borrow more money than if was making just to produce and acquire content and the acquired content was ripped away from them by their competitors.
That was a cool read. I knew there were some American basketball legends in the 90s but I had no idea the sheer level of dominance they had over the rest of the world.
> The team has been described by journalists around the world as the greatest sports team ever assembled.
> The team defeated Cuba 136–57, prompting Cuban coach Miguel Calderón Gómez to say, "You can't cover the sun with your finger."[33] Marv Albert, who announced the game, recalled that "it was as if [the Americans] were playing a high school team, or grade school team. They were so overwhelming ... a blowout after blowout."[16] The Cubans were the first of many opponents who were more interested in taking photos with the Americans than playing them.
> The coach was the famous Mike Krzyzewski of Duke.
The coach was Chuck Daly.
In any case, all of this is just the usual self-serving blah blah of top executives to rationalize to extract as much value as possible from the employees while minimizing the cost. I suppose that's the rational, cold thing to do, but I could be spared from the BS discourse.
Netflix genuinely did break with orthodoxy on this point and paid more than “reasonable pay” (meaning median pay) and the approach seemed to work with their engineering so competent that a major AWS outage that seemingly took out a quarter of the internet didn’t take down Netflix despite its disproportionately higher needs for cloud infrastructure. I think it certainly made sense for them to do in hindsight as a high growth company, high standards and high pay likely fuelled their growth and expanded their moat.
I question if the strategy still makes sense as they seem to be getting eaten alive by spendthrifts like Disney.
As an aside, from an employees perspective, I think expecting much out of your employees and giving them high pay is fundamentally respecting them more than giving them “reasonable pay” and shrugging your shoulders and going “eh, I’ll make do with what I have”.
They are getting eaten alive by a content company with better content that had the money to buy their way into technology that was just as good when they acquired BamTech.
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.
> Naturally, they do not have difficulty hiring with this philosophy -
This is a common conception. Netflix's option plan is extremely generous. Per this link (https://www.teamblind.com/post/Netflix-is-a-truly-great-comp...), a Netflix employ would lose monly only if its stock price always goes down: "Netflix is generous in giving you options. Its option plan was the best in the world. It allows you to forfeit your salary for options. The options had 5X of discount, and later 2.5 times. The company also gave you for free options that is worth 5% of your total salary. Your options vest every month. And of course, the options will not expire until 10 years later. That is, Netflix does NOT even tries to use delayed vesting schedule to retain you. "
Netflix doesn’t pay max pay though, they pay «5-6 year of experience at a FAANG » in cash according to levels.fyi. This does not compensate for the layoff risk in any meaningful way.
Former Netflix manager here. Netflix frequently competes for L6/L7 talent against Google, Apple, and FB -- and wins. Look at the detail view on levels.fyi and sort by compensation. They pay extremely well for the best talent.
But that's not really the point. Your job safety is ultimately about whether other companies would hire you. And if you're good enough to get a role at Netflix, then you can get another job extremely quickly here in the valley. Most top recruiters know that Netflix is very selective. I have yet to see anyone who was let go at Netflix struggle to get another job. They usually get multiple offers, in fact.
But to have an axe constantly dangling over your head is no way to live. If you are competent, better to choose a more dignified existence along with high pay. And with Netflix stock down 72% in 6 months, the choice becomes even easier.
> But to have an axe constantly dangling over your head is no way to live. If you are competent, better to choose a more dignified existence
And yet, you often hear of Google's rest and vest culture and how bored people are in that environment. Some people might prefer an all-around high achiever culture, at certain points in their careers.
> And with Netflix stock down 72% in 6 months
Given Netflix's compensation structure (all cash) this is irrelevant unless you believe the market valuation indicates the company is doomed in the short term.
Market value fluctuations aren't the same thing as profit or even revenue. A company doesn't suddenly lose money and have to lay people off due to others trading its stock for less money. And they don't get rich when the stock price goes up, either. Unless they sell more shares in a secondary public offering or similar, their cash flows stay the same.
The effect is much more subtle and it has more of an impact on companies where equity is a big part of employee compensation.
Market value and revenue/profit are not the same thing but they are very related.
Netflix's market value falling 72% means the market has a negative view of Netflix's foreseeable ability to sustain or grow revenues and profits.
You are right in that it is possible that Netflix has the market fooled and in reality is growing its revenues and profits and cash flows at an even greater rate than expected and it is all just one big misunderstanding.
If that is the case, Netflix can always choose to 'go private', where it no longer sees a need for public market funding and believes that savvy private investors combined with its revenues and cash flows can fund its operations and growth.
But as a public company, its stock price and market value also signify access to capital. The less capital Netflix has access to, the less it can invest in its existing and growth operations, like the 100s of shows it creates every year.
With access to less capital, Netflix will keep on fewer of its 'dream team athlete' workers, even with their all cash and no stock compensation, which is why we are starting to see layoffs.
Variable stock compensation for engineers does have the benefit that it fluctuates with investor perceptions of company performance. In theory investors may not care about compensation in a flat/growth stock, but seeing a 10% decline in personnel expenses on a stock down 25% is definitely appealing to investors.
If you’re “living in a position of f%%% you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI) which you should be in a couple of years making a Netflix salary, a layoff is just an inconvenience. Heck how many software engineers at any of the top tech companies have trouble finding a job quickly?
Agreed. Being laid off after a couple of years at 500k/yr is better than grinding it out for a decade at 100k/yr. And you can always choose the grind after the layoff.
OK this sounds like a disagreement, after you spoke the air was full of disagreement-sounding words, but this is an agreement with the parent posters. So yeah that's what you want, pony up the cash, pay the best demand the best fire everyone else, that's not for you--that's, that's not for you--but it is for someone, like if my fgemm.com thing goes to shit which it technically could hey maybe Netflix. By all means. High stakes, exactly like they said, like a pro sports team. Those teams have really high turnover let's just say, you can get fired like a bullet out of a machine gun, very rapidly. Right away.
So really it's not a question of quality--as though such a thing existed among employers--it's a question of elitism, and Netflix pays the price of being elitist. Which many places don't, they say they only hire the best bla bla well first off they don't hire the best because they didn't hire me, so second best in the most favorable view, and second off they want to...uh...pay the median for the best. Paying 50 percentile salaries--not even 51 percentile, just 50 percentile--for 99 percentile people according to their unpaid homework. Which is not worth a fuck, you can put original research and break impossibility limits on the unpaid homework, it won't matter if they smell excess dignity. DNANexus and JITX got crazy results and they didn't bite why? Don't know. Yeah I'm a fucking arrogant guy[1] I can read what I write but still, that's consistent with being the best (at the particular thing I do best, which isn't everything by any means, but programming interviews I always, always, always nail without prep), but they don't want spine. No spine. Except Elon Musk, weirdly enough. A few other places. Netflix too it appears, well like those sport teams, there's fucking arrogant guys there too, most athletes. Elitism means flowing with that, and most companies just don't.
And in general, most places saying they're hiring? Are actually firing. Not hiring, so much as firing. They're not growing, they're trying to diminish those W-2 line items with cheaper replacements, so there's a built-in cap to what you can ask of them, and then you hit a wall. And you're competing back and forth with a guy you can't talk to. They rip the job description of his resume.
So at least Netflix is consistent.
[1] To the point I consider myself a slave of GOD, knowing the last shall be the first (Matthew KJV).
EDIT: So in fact those are the two mainstream ways of ending up sick, drug use like Wolf of Wall Street ("it's your own fault, you were warned") and it being congenital like in American Psycho ("ew stay away from me don't get near me it's a deformity").
But there's a third way, malpractice. And you can't look down on that the same way. It's in now way my fault, you can't look at me like I'm inferior like for the other two cases. It's very, very different. It could happen to you through no fault of your own, or any reader, it's the shrink's fault, Doctor Jorge Barros Beck. The disease comes from him, he has both the drugs and the deformity.
If you so much as talk to him, you could have your eyes open and yet open your eyes. Reading this comment one instant, the next instant in a torture ward a month in the future unable to communicate in your own thoughts, halfway through this...did you make it to the end of this sentence?
So you know what, be happy you know anything, be happy you can remember anything, be happy to be. Live in the moment between the lacunae. And if you wake up there, know when you reread this years later there was no advice I can have given you that you will have been allowed to recall.
Read up on my comments, I talk at length about it.
This was hilarious. I hope it was meant to be. I liked the parody of the deluded man who thinks he's the best and that no one recognises his genius - maybe it was a bit on the nose, a bit too cliché, but nevertheless. It was a nice touch that the character spends, like, a thousand words saying nothing at all besides "I am smart, Netflix hires smart people, like me, I am smart, Netflix doesn't hire me, but I am smart enough that I will eventually make this syllogism make sense, I am smart, also I am smart".
It also explains quite well why I don't hire people like your character. They think they aren't hired because of their arrogance, like it's a downside that only merely vitiates their tremendous intelligence. In reality an attitude like that is a nearly-perfectly-reliable signal of someone who's totally deluded about their own intelligence. Truly super-intelligent people of course are not chippy, insecure, oppositional, constantly expatiating upon their great intelligence, etc - it's just a given, a neutral fact, much like the way Bill Gates doesn't go on about how much money he has, whereas a recruitment consultant earning 50k a year will go on about such.
Anyway, I enjoyed the skit. Thank you for sharing it. The technique of your not using quotation marks and suchlike really imbues it with a sense of great immediacy and realism. Marvelous stuff.
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?)
Less of a nit: You apparently care about liking your workplace. Sample size of 1, but I know of (a) no-one who went into finance who enjoyed their tenure; and (b) plenty of folks that retired early from their tech careers and none from their finance careers. (Most have moved from i-banking to PE or VC, but they’re still slogging away.)
I’ve known quite a few people from Netflix, the dream team analogy does seem to be, at least anecdotally somewhat true. They’re somewhat legendary for competing with the same engineering talent as Google and paying accordingly. 6 figure hiring bonuses are not uncommon.
With respect to the “generous severance”, if you’re engineer who’s being recruited by Netflix and know of their “Dream team” culture where they hire slow and fire fast, you’d have to have some concern about joining that team and fearing that you won’t fit in regardless of skill set. The “generous severance” is there to ease that concern and exists as a hiring tool, not a firing one.
What if the soon to be fired-employee is just currently not able to give 100%? Maybe something in his personal life triggered a depression, maybe a death of a close friend, or he just became a dad and needs to invest a lot of energy in his child? Things happen...and life is not predictable.
This philosophy strikes me as cruel. Not everything is your fault, sometimes life is just hard and work, especially for anonymous giga-corp, is not all there is.
> What if the soon to be fired-employee is just currently not able to give 100%?
A professional sports person (like a soccer or basketball star) would not be able to give this same excuse, so why would it not be the same in an engineering setting? Netflix wants their workplace to be like pro-sports, where elites complete for the best outcome and be rewarded like so.
If you choose to apply for employment at netflix, this is what you're signing up for. There are other positions in other companies, if such an environment is not conducive to your own lifestyle - noone is forcing this onto you.
The natural condition of humanity is cruel, and society and civilization hasn't proceeded to the stage where such cruelty don't exist. But right now, there's still at least choice and options for those who don't want to compete this way (with the associated decrease in salary).
To be fair, the majority of professional sports contracts include items that keep the athlete on payroll while injured or otherwise unable to play, and teams will often invest significant resources waiting for a player to return to health (or even actively assisting the athlete in their recovery journey).
I'm not saying these contracts are "for life", but there are plenty of athletes who either a) get injured and are unable to play or b) take a significant period of time to deliver on their initial promise. Nature might be cruel, but sports teams are often quite fair & accommodating...
This is a bit off topic, but does the "professional sports" analogy really work for tech (e.g. software/hardware) organizations? In sports the game is always the same, and while there may be different play styles or systems the fundamentals are pretty much the same.
In tech orgs, a system (potentially composed of dozens of service) can often outgrow their team, especially when there's high attrition and turnover (perhaps because you view each individual software engineer as a highly expendable/fungible "pro sports player").
Seems like a breeding ground for entropy, and compositions of systems built on lost history, chaos, and confusion.
> A professional sports person (like a soccer or basketball star) would not be able to give this same excuse, so why would it not be the same in an engineering setting?
This situation is pretty common professional sports, actually. For example, Russell Westbrook's salary is higher than either Lebron James or Antonio Davis, and the highest-paid player on the Dallas Mavericks has been out for two months (including all of the playoffs). They have a strong union with guaranteed contracts, though.
> Netflix wants their workplace to be like pro-sports, where elites complete for the best outcome and be rewarded like so.
But of course it is not comparable. While Netflix pays very well (have many friends there), it's still nothing compared to a pro-sport star who is making double digit millions per year.
So we're supposed to just accept the "dream team athlete" analogy even though it falls massively short when it comes to a crucial factor: compensation?
In other words, Netflix gets to expect "star athlete" performance, and quickly fire those who fail to meet it, but doesn't have to pay anywhere near "star athlete" compensation.
Not to mention that in reality, "star athletes" are given plenty of time to grow to their potential, and recover when their performance drops, while Netflix made it into an ideology to immediately fire the employee in that exact situation.
It's a rotten deal for the engineers, sugarcoated with inappropriate and wildly inaccurate "dream team" glamor rhetoric.
> And netflix do pay above average of the FAANG amounts.
They pay about as well or a bit better for the same level of talent. "FAANG average" is meaningless, because you're averaging FAANGs who pay poorly (Amazon) to FAANGs who pay very well (Meta).
When Netflix stock was performing well, I imagine many of of their employees made double digit millions per year (annual change in net worth) through their stock options.
> A professional sports person (like a soccer or basketball star) would not be able to give this same excuse, so why would it not be the same in an engineering setting?
A professional sport star, certainly at "dream team" level, would be compensated far better than any alternative employment they may have. After just a few years at that level, they would have earned such vast amounts that financially they can retire, and any further employment in their role is optional. It's not a big deal if they lose it.
Netflix doesn't pay engineers much above their alternatives. They compete for the best talent with the other top employers, and pay about on par or slightly better, which doesn't compensate the engineer for the very transitory nature of their employment.
Netflix model is inferior for full-time employees, and they're not paying anywhere near enough to make it worthwhile. They're relying on hype rhetoric to convince naive engineers that they are "star athletes", just like all the startups that used to scam engineers into believing they are "rock stars" and will definitely earn millions upon exit, while in reality underpaying and overworking them.
Netflix's keeper test doesn't apply to someone going through a personal problem or other temporary issue. A manager would support them, making sure they get the time off they need. (And Netflix managers are usually very generous and understanding in that regard.) The keeper test is about maintaining a team of great contributors.
But the "dream team" doesn't last forever. The metaphor is meant to reinforce that. If you could play for a season with Michael Jordan, Barkley, Ewing, and the other amazing players from the actual 1992 Dream Team -- wouldn't you do it? And if you got cut the next season because there was someone even better than you -- would you regret being on that team? It would probably be a great experience, even if it only lasted a while. This is what the "dream team" idea is about.
It's clearly not for everybody, not for every company, and not for every situation. Netflix's culture is all about excellence, and the "dream team" and "keeper test" ideas work well there. I saw it play out first hand.
Jordan is famous but bloody lonely. His essentially a degen gambler. The biggest tool you could imagine.
But hey, he plays BBall well!
To all us on the outside, all i see is wasted talent, locked up, for the money and the prestiege. Who are so smart, they cant even build a profitable product!
It is extremely cruel. I have a friend who, while working at Netflix, had a major health problem and was coldly fired for not performing. As if anyone could perform at 110% (required at Netflix) from a hospital bed.
Thinking about it, what is really unsettling for me is that it views engineers as a commodity and not humans. Like a tool you just toss away if it's not performing to expectations. The embodiment of human resources, at your disposal and completely replaceable.
It's not about paying them off imo, it's about employer brand. They don't to that for them, they do it for the next hires opinions of them.
"even if your performance declines, you'll get a nice check before being let go" sounds a lot better to a candidate/employee than "not good enough? just leave. now."
it's nonsense to you because you just don't have the budget.
For a huge tech company, how much you pay people seems to matters a lot less than who's building the product. It's better to have a few amazing people that you pay way above market, than a bunch of crappy employees that you pay at market level or below.(for their level of "experience")
High churn rate in any dressing leads to stress. Stress often counterproductive for creativity. The expected result of the policy is a mediocre work with a lot of unproductive politicking self-selecting corresponding survivors.
This is exactly how the opening reads to the book No Rules Rules. Erin Meyer, a business professor, has that exact analysis of what "should" happen in an environment like one Netflix describes. But she interviewed dozens of Netflix employees for the book and found that the theory you state doesn't hold. The book is about figuring out why that is the case.
You can have a nice, pleasant life with a rule like "don't be a wanker". You'll have friends and probably a happy family. People will like you. People always like people who are non-threatening and don't make them feel insecure by being really good at something.
What you cannot do is compete in the highest level at any field while caring about things like "will people think I'm a wanker?". If you are succeeding spectacularly at anything, there are guaranteed to be thousands, if not millions, of people who think you're a wanker. Look at people at the top of anything and look at what people say about them.
I do not seem to hear a lot of bad press about Jessie Owens, Mohamed Ali, Usain Bolt, a lot of my fav. cricketers and lot of sports people. Narayan Murthy (founder of Infosys), Ratan Tata (chairman of Tata group), Abdul Kalam (late president of India), MLK Jr. are all examples of how you can be caring and successful.
Can you point out why succeeding spectacularly needs someone to be an asshole? Is it a US specific thing?
I don’t know all of them. Mohammad Ali was incredibly controversial in his time for converting to Islam and refusing to fight in Vietnam. A lot of people then would have called him an asshole.
Sure, after you’re dead people will look back and think you were great, but while you’re in the process in any competitive endeavor you necessarily are not going to be liked by the people you’re competing against, especially if you’re winning.
Take the late president of India. Did every single person in India vote for him? Did everyone agree with everything he proposed? He had no opposition? I know absolutely nothing about Indian politics, but I bet there were people who didn’t like him while he was in office.
“I better be nice and not do anything that anyone might object to” is not an attitude that leads to success.
And MLK, really???? You think nobody thought he was an asshole? You know they murdered him right? Do you think the people who killed him said he was a great guy?
If you think that having grace and form is going to stop people from calling you an asshole if you achieve any level of notoriety, you're in for some disappointment.
> The "keeper test" as described is nonsense - you don't pay more to person A to entice person B to enhance your team - that's complete nonsense. Why would you "pay off" person A for being rubbish?
To incentivize people to apply and work for you company, given the known higher risk of getting fired?
> What a load of wank. No one who has owned a company for more than five minutes would say that load of bollocks with a straight face.
Why? The founder of LinkedIn also says in his book Alliance that employees and their companies are not families. Instead, they form alliance. They work toward the same goal if they can be aligned, or they part ways. Netflix said a company is like a sports team. Similar idea, and Netflix is upfront about it. This is much better than the family utopia that companies like to promise but can never deliver.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
HN loves ridiculing this as often as it comes up, but for all Netflix is - it's a CDN serving files.
The details are important, and running a good CDN isn't easy but....it's a CDN serving files. People really did build a completely free version on their own time [1]. That also costs less to run (kind of a requirement if you're building a BitTorrent streaming client).
It's important to think really carefully about what Netflix actually does, as opposed to what they like to pretend they do: because all the important stuff isn't really tech, it's business, bureaucracy and manual labor - subtitling, license management, ISP negotiations for server placement, someone going through every episode of a show to set the "skip credits" titling.
Netflix has a really good CDN but I’ve not really had to deal with buffering on Prime or Disney+ and if I do it’s just seconds or two (probably could be solved by predictive pre-caching).
Streaming sites are “good enough” now and will live:die on content.
I regularly use other streaming apps and if Netflix has some magic performance advantage it really isn’t large enough to really be noticeable, and certainly not large enough to displace the actual content that is available.
I honestly have no idea what all that engineering talent is doing such that HBO Max is able to replicate 95% of the technology experience.
I’ve never had any lag from any of the major content providers. Streaming pre-recorded content at scale once you have good content is solved problem. How do you think all of the content providers were able to offer a streaming offering so quickly? They threw money at third parties.
It may divide people with its auto-playing trailers etc, but I don't think anyone can deny that Netflix's app is head and shoulders better than the rest.
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?
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.
Beyond a certain point talent is perception, managers have a huge influence on perception. Move a huge metric? Only matters if people care about the metric. Unblock a hundred engineers? Only matters if it’s deemed complex.
Harsh performance cultures favor the perception game over time.
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.
It wasn't a regular occurrence, managers didn't really abuse it. The one time I saw it happen directly, the people were invited back to take their old job under the new manager, who now had to backfill the positions, without an interview.
are you serious- I mean, are you talking from experience? You'd fire a person because of a single manager, then fire the manager, and invite back the person who was originally fired?
Maybe you like your employer, but let me tell you: that's sociopathic. It's deeply disrespectful to long-term individual contributors to treat them that way, and if this is in any way representative of the company's leadership's philosophy, then they are bad people who should not be hiring.
Yes, I speak from experience, I worked at Netflix. But I think you're missing some really important details:
- It was extremely rare. In my four years I only saw it happen once, and only heard about it happening one or two other times in the history of the company.
- The general philosophy was to make it easy to both hire and fire people, to allow for nimbleness. But they were open about this and let people know this wasn't for everyone.
- I think it shows great leadership -- the company admitted it made a mistake and tried to rectify it by inviting them back. Seems better to me than just trying to sweep it under the rug.
The sports team mentality wasn't for everyone, but for a lot of us, we loved it. We loved having coworkers who lifted us up and who we could trust to get things done and do them well, and knowing that if they didn't they wouldn't be around for long.
Oh, so you convolved an anecdote with company culture. If it only happened once, it's an outlier. As you wrote it, you made it sound like a regular thing.
If I was the employee affected and received that invite, I'd ask to speak to the SVP in charge of my division and ask them a few questions about how a good employee got fired. ANd I'd also let them know that as a human, it was a devaluing experience.
Having worked at a number of enterprises and been a manager, I can't say I'd ever want to work in your environment. Hiring and firing quickly isn't a recipe for nimbleness, it's a recipe for a weak foundation. Note: I have vendors and contractors for me, and I can easily hire or fire them. That's entirely different from FTEs.
Where did you get that absurd interpretation? They’re saying: a good IC gets fired by a bad manager. Later bad manager gets fired by their manager (we’ll call them good manager). Good manager then goes back and asks good IC if they want their job back.
Yes, that was my interpretation. I don't understand what you think is absurd about that being sociopathic. Typically, to fire somebody, the manager has to convince at least one or two other people, typically outside of their department, through an extended period that is inspected by multiple different people. This exists to protect employees from vicious, vindictive and arbitrary leaders.
Okay, may have been my bad but it sounded like you thought that the same manager who fired the IC also was the one to offer to re-hire or something. Although your clarification about a firing theoretically needing approval from higher up sheds some light on that.
To your point, in general if you leave a place due to a bad manager (or get fired) and some kind of reform happens and you get invited back, usually the best move is not to come back. The organization already showed it was willing to toss you away at least once. That being said Netflix is probably a bit of an exception because it’s explicitly where you go to work if you want to work with people who are all insanely competent and hardworking and where performance is actually a core focus.
Also I still don’t quite understand the sociopathy element. It doesn’t seem sociopathic to say “hey we got rid of the toxic manager, want your old job back?” although like I said it’s still generally a bad idea to actually take the job back
We're in agreement- it makes sense to return if we feel strongly that it was the right place to work and don't care that we were treated arbitrarily.
The reason it's sociopathic is because companies shouldn't devalue their employees by treating them so callously as allowing a single bad manager to fire them. It speaks volumes about the nature of the company- one that is willing to bring in people and kick them back out without ever considering things like growth potential, job training, life circumstances, and any number of other things that affect employees.
I guess that's the sort of difference between companies that hire people and invest in them, and companies that just sort of churn through employees.
My 11-year-old just claimed that "The Wings of Fire" animated TV show - Ava DuVernay's adaptation that was in production at Netflix - has been canceled. Googling confirmed the news, and immediately thereafter led to news about the layoff.
My daughter's reaction was mild outrage; she's a huge fan of the book series, and of dragons in general. Mine was laughter (and a little sadness); this was the first time I'd learned major news about a tech company through something one of my kids told me, and it certainly won't be the last.
They've essentially shitcanned their entire animation division. Given that it's an area where they've gotten a lot of praise and attention, and is a point of difference, it seems like an odd choice.
My guess is that they're going to narrow their focus onto fewer, but more "profitable" (according to their data) demographics, and animation wasn't paying for itself there.
I feel like fancy metrics drive the conversation but sometimes it might be more instructive to do a totally subjective user-based sanity check (e.g. how much do I personally enjoy it?).
Netflix is supposedly growing massively but... is there anything good on it? So much of the content seems completely forgettable.
Furthermore, in the midst of a bad economy I'd imagine streaming services could be cut from the budget first.
Some of their content decisions are pathological from a viewer's standpoint.
Attack on Titan: 96% fresh on RT, and … they only get the first season? Like, why build your viewer up with a good show and not be able to finish the story?
One Punch Man: 86% fresh on RT. Only the first season.
SG:SG1, great show, but if you want to round it out w/ SG:U or Atlantis? No can do.
Inuyasha, (100%/93% on RT) … only the first 2 of 7 seasons.
> Attack on Titan: 96% fresh on RT, and … they only get the first season? Like, why build your viewer up with a good show and not be able to finish the story?
It's even worse than that. You can't access the English subtitles in some countries! I was watching in France and after reaching out to support they told me that their license didn't cover English subtitles lmao. And people wonder why handsomely paid people pirate stuff...
That's on you for using primevideo in the first place! Jokes aside, I hate that platform ever since it decided it was normal to play a show, that I was excited about, starting with the last episode. It ended up ruining the entire thing.
On the flipside when Manifest was canceled by NBC before its planned storyline could be completed, Netflix picked it up and has planned more than enough episodes to reach the end.
They consistently produce hits, to the degree that any network can these days. The Crown, Stranger Things, Sex Education, Russian Doll and Big Mouth all are still airing and all get rave reviews. They also come through with the occasional "cultural moment" stuff like Squid Game and Black Mirror. They also make a lot of "alt" comedy shows that I consider to be some of the best comedy content in recent years.
Aunty Donna (sketch), Middleditch and Schwartz (improv), Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special (a one-off) and as someone else mentioned, So I Think You Should Leave. Plus Big Mouth and its spinoff, Human Resources.
The fact that stuff is so hard to discover is insane. They literally show the same limited crap on their front page despite such a large catalogue. I'm not convinced their algorithm choice makes sense.
The top of my Netflix page being "these are the top shows in your country today" has been super puzzling to me. Surely any kind of recommendation alg would see that my interests align 0% with the average person in my country?
A bunch of reality TV show recommendations? Thanks Netflix.
I recently signed on and did notice a prominent uptick in more mainstream movies and not the fringe garbage that everyone else passed on. But yeah, in general, Netflix has poor quality for the stuff that's on there long term.
I have always wondered if it was ever a possibility for Netflix to have been a platform company. In that, instead of trying and failing to be HBO, they could have licensed out their platform to the content holders to build their platform on. As in, could they have been the Azure/AWS of content streaming? That time is gone now, but I do wonder if it would have been a better long term solution for them as a company.
The “sudden cancellation” stories really feel like anecdotal stories to me. Cancellations have always happened and users just move on to another show besides a vocal minority of angry users
Is it that expensive in the US? It’s 7.99€/month in Europe.
For 1 month of series binging that’s not too bad, just be sure to cancel the subscription directly. We re-enable it maybe once or twice per year.
Back in the mail subscription day at least they had the $2 obscure DVD that you couldn't find anywhere else. Now it's just the same show with different casts in different settings.
Their Cowboy Bebop remake was awful and missed the point of everything, but seemed like they could’ve fixed it, so of course they instantly canceled it instead.
I did not see any details here on what part of the organization the laid off employees were working in.
Netflix has over 10000 employees, so these roughly 1.5% feel pretty specific to me, and I'm curious where exactly Netflix has decided to make these cuts.
It should also be noted that the CMO who originally greenlit this "publication" (that no one else in the company really understood or seemed aware of) left the company in March.
So I look at this sort of layoff as not strictly indicative of the broader Netflix concerns (which are real and valid), but just as much about the executive sponsor of a project going away, and thus the project being dropped.
Unfortunately, I think we will see actual Netflix layoffs in the future, especially as they have to to deal with loss of subscribers, lower investor confidence, and the fact that Wall Street is finally making them answer for those bloated content budgets, but I don't look at this very small, and seemingly largely focused group of layoffs as a canary in the coal mine as much as some of the trade publications (that frankly, should know better), are trying to frame this.
Business seems hard. They've gone from a company that was fiscally irresponsible but beloved by customers to one that is MBA led and customer hostile. Curious if this strategy will work (in the long run, doesn't seem so great in the short run)
Netflix was beloved by customers because they were fiscally irresponsible. Users were getting more for their money than what they paid. Similarly, Uber was absolutely loved by customers when trips were only costing a fraction of what Uber paid for them, aka: VC were effectively paying for a portion of your trip.
Of course that was unsustainable on the long term, and two thing happen: quality will decrease and price will increase until the company can reach profitability which is necessary, at some point, to keep operating. For both Uber and Netflix, this is associated with less customer love since value-per-dollar decreases.
But there is no question that the strategy has to be tried, because the previous strategy was - in fact - not working.
> Similarly, Uber was absolutely loved by customers when trips were only costing a fraction of what Uber paid for them, aka: VC were effectively paying for a portion of your trip.
As a regular though infrequent user of Uber, in the last place in North America where Uber was legalized (Vancouver CA), the lower prices were probably 10% of why people liked Uber. 90% of it was that it was simply light years ahead of the competing experience of: calling a cab, waiting for them to show, except they don't show, so you walk around downtown at 2am trying to find a cab with a light on...
Yeah, surge pricing sucks and the prices have gone up and all that, but even if Uber were more expensive than cabs -- and it very well may be at this point -- I'm still more than willing to pay extra just to be able to order a ride home from my app, and actually see that it's coming and not ghosting me.
Not sure how widespread this is, but I took taxis in my city recently for work and I was surprised at how much it's gotten better on the UX side (for scheduling):
- When I called, a robot answered and prompted me for my current/origin address (the voice-to-text seemed to work very well)
- It sent me a text message with a link to a live GPS map & time estimate
Still, there are some inconveniences which is why I still prefer Uber for personal travel:
- Even if Uber is more expensive, at least I know the cost upfront, vs. only knowing at the end of the taxi ride
- I get a rough time estimate for the closest Uber before I order one
- No need to handle payment/tipping with the driver, which is the worst because IME taxi drivers always try to make you feel bad about whatever amount you end up tipping them. At least with Uber, I can tip exactly what I feel is 'right' without the awkwardness or over-spending.
- Some taxi drivers are still opposed to using a GPS for directions (??), so when I need to get somewhere that's not a peak tourist attraction, I have to guide them myself.
Yeah fair enough, there's more competition now. Still, pre-Uber things were just dire. The BC government was extremely openly corrupt and gave the taxi industry a headstart and tens of millions of dollars to make the Kater app, and it was still completely unusable (and now shut down). Before we got Lyft/Uber you were stuck either using extremely unreliable Yellow Cab dispatch, or using the shady probably-illegal Mandarin-only app that I forget the name of.
Yes, and I became a user of Uber (ubercab in those days) because I preferred being able to book a ride just-in-time using the app rather than well in advance on the telephone, not because it was much cheaper than the car service or the taxis (as I recall, Uber and the car service cost about the same in those days, which was slightly more expensive the taxis for much more reliability and a better UX).
Fiscally irresponsible? I am looking at this graph and they have been profitable since their IPO. Looks like they started tweaking knobs to be highly profitable 4 years ago. From an investor perspective, I see nothing wrong with the business. It's just that it isn't growing subscribers anymore but profit per share is still going up.
Debt, especially low interest debt, is not a bad investment if it is used to grow the company. Since content is the only differentiator in the streaming market, this looks like a good investment.
An IPO is a form of taking on debt but issuing more shares is not the only way to take on debt.
If no debt was required to grow the company and be profitable, the company could have stayed private. Of course this doesn't work because early investors want to see some returns after 5-10 years and an IPO is the obvious way to cash them out.
It is really sad that the new era is about many streaming services instead of a single one. Netflix was a godsend and an amazing service (still is btw), but now my shows are split between so many streaming services that I’ve started pirating movies again. The only service I’m paying for is youtube because these ads are annoying af otherwise. Imagine a single service where you can watch all movies. A bit like Apple music I guess (although they still lack a lot of foreign songs). Why can’t we do the same for movies? I predict that as internet speeds increase we will see pirating movies make a come back.
I presume it's partly because TV and film are much much more expensive to produce than music, and partly music is much more fungible than TV or film - there's way more of it and people are much happier to listen to random music than watch random films.
I mean if you've heard about Severance and want to watch it it's much more annoying that it's only on Apple TV than if one specific band isn't on Spotify. It's more noticeable and annoying.
I just pay for Prime and Netflix and pirate the rest.
That doesn't really mean anything. Lots of large companies with hundreds of billions in their bank account lay people off by choice rather than compulsion when the environment ensures that they won't get too much negative press for it. Same thing happened in 2008 with Microsoft, Google and many others.
Does that count for tech? I just looked at tech's and it's all between like 0.25 - 0.6 for the few samples I looked at. Netflix is 0.8 but still I think is low for most companies?
If you Google "good debt to equity ratio" one site says 2.0 - 2.5.
Financial debt kills because free cash flow gets squeezed. For most tech companies, operating expenses constrain free cash flow.
Quick ratio [1] and free cash flow (or alternatively, operating cash flow) as a fraction of cash on hand (or less conservatively, current assets) would be my go-to acid tests.
There are other things to look at such as how resilient their business model is, their price/ earning ratio, etc. But in general, I would say those tech companies that have huge price swings during the pandemic are most likely to going have some sort of layoff. They are the ones that most likely over-hired.
I’ve never in over a quarter of a century worried about whether a company is viable. My concern is whether my skillset is in sync with the market, my network strong and having a go to hell fund.
Well said. My skillset is really old but I just got a job with a modern skillset company however the company is in the hiring biz... any suggestions on what to do in this situation? Think I burned my bridge leaving the old place
My skillset was “really old” in 2008 at 34. I was still doing VB6 (7 years after it had been discontinued) and C++/MFC (Windows). What I did have is a level of maturity and the ability to talk to customers and knowing how to get things done.
I went to a company that used modern technology and learned how to talk the talk and built my resume.
But if I were in that position today instead of 2008, I would spend as much time as it took to study data system and algorithm style interviews - ie “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions).
I fell into a remote role at $BigTech through the cloud consulting department specializing in enterprise application development where that wasn’t necessary.
Right now it’s cloud application development, deployment consulting - “cloud application modernization”. I started specializing in that five years ago.
Before that it was regular old C#/Javascript “full stack development”. I could throw my resume up in the air and have a job offer in less than a month.
5 years before that I was just coming out of an “expert beginner stage”.
> Right now it’s cloud application development, deployment consulting - “cloud application modernization”. I started specializing in that five years ago.
Is that working with Google Cloud and AWS and deploying apps on them?
The question is what are good companies to invest in long term. And IMO the “bad bets” of the last few years become good bets (netflix, uber, facebook, wework, etc.)
As someone who used to work in oil: oil (or any commodities) is an industry you go into if you don't mind a major wipeout every few years. Layoffs there are cyclical and far reaching.
They need to focus on original content more than anything. That's likely what contributed to the price war they've been caught up in with all the others. When they had House of Cards, The Office, Black Mirror, a pretty solid in house studio, they weren't playing tag with Hulu. If you have a consistent quality backlog, people stay, worked for Viacom, worked for Nintendo regardless of their underperforming hardware.
Of course Paramount and Disney had little to no engagement in streaming back then, so I can't imagine Netflix recovering to 2014 dominance as realistic. But they can survive like HBO Go, crank out a few solid Soprano grade series and serve as an outlet for independent publishers that Viacom and Disney have noooo interest in.
The average consumer cares a lot more about Disney content based on their IP than Netflix’s. Could Netflix release any of its originals in theaters and gross over a billion?
There is much more excitement about Disney series based on their IP than Netflix’s
Not to mention that parents will get Disney just for their kids to have access to the Disney library.
Netflix has been offering originals since 2013. Since then, Disney has had 13 1 billion dollar grossing movies and has five studios that are proven capable of making sustainable hits. Small studios like Ghibli aren’t going to compete with that.
Besides, for Disney, streaming is “a feature not a product”. They can afford to put more money into content because they have more ways to monetize.
Pixar has been making blockbusters since 1995. Buzz Lightyear is hitting theaters this year based on a character that was introduced almost 30 years ago.
LucasFilms has been making Blockbusters since 1977.
Marvel based blockbuster movies have been successful since 1998.
Disney itself has a stream of evergreen animation that goes back to 1937 (Snow White). Little girls still dream about being “Disney princesses”.
Making hit movies is expensive. Disney isn’t solely dependent on its streaming revenue to make money, unlike Netflix.
Netflix has had direct streaming competition for a long time, and has lots of it now; their paid subscriber base in US & Canada is over half the number of households in those countries.
Vox was just pushing out what the CDC and mainstream media was saying during that time. I don't think its a great news publication but alot of those images were taken before anyone really knew about how the coronavirus spread or behaved.
1. She didn't write these or even have a hand in writing these.
2. These are all from before the pandemic when people knew next to nothing about the coming virus. That is completely different from the hot takes of today that go completely against what is commonly understood, i.e. it's not "disinformation".
> people knew next to nothing about the coming virus.
Exactly. That's the point. They DIDN'T know. Yet these articles not only have been written with utter certainty, there was also a strong thought-policing tone. Don't you dare think COVID will become pandemic, you'll be tagged as racist and white supremacist.
These tweets and news articles have caused great damage. Just because Vox is on the "right" political team, doesn't make it okay to spread disinformation. These tweets are not only politically motivated, there was also financial motivation behind them. Like Hollywood many people have made billions of dollars doing business deals with China. They want to appease China and keep making more billions. These people need to be called out.
>"We model ourselves on being a professional sports team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever"
Why would I care about being "best possible teammate" which basically translates to sacrifice your own financial interests to feed the owners and be laid off at first opportunity. Fuck that. Well unless of course they pay a ton and guarantee X amount of months/years.
Then it is all nice and fair. I knew the other company where the bosses were singing about "being a player" but they would screw a "team player" over as soon as it would save them another buck.
> We model ourselves on being a professional sports team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever. ...
> To strengthen our dream team, our managers use a “keeper test” for each of their people: if a team member was leaving for a similar role at another company, would the manager try to keep them? Those who do not pass the keeper test (i.e. their manager would not fight to keep them) are given a generous severance package so we can find someone even better for that position—making an even better dream team.
[1] https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
[2] https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-2009