"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.
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!