
Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio] - msoad
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/28/435583328/episode-647-hard-work-is-irrelevant
======
codeonfire
One thing where the Netflix system breaks down is for some reason managers are
never found to be useless or relevant. It becomes a small number of individual
contributors trying to support a larger and larger management base. The real
reason is political. The people at the top fear people rising through the
ranks so they execute people like a dictatorship. At my previous job everyone
with more than 15 years of experience was pushed out and people with no
experience at all were brought in. Now, no one can make the case that people
with no experience were not useless. They had no skills. If it were a pro
sports team, it would be like bringing in little league players. The idea is
the little league-ers are so excited about being in the big leagues they don't
complain about the inept coaches.

It makes perfect political sense to have high turnover. What managers will
typically do is turn over the workforce, but also scale down the thing they
are trying to accomplish to meet the capabilities of their little league-ers.
All they want is to be able to claim a 'success' so they can get promoted.
They cut the workforce down, cut the work down, but when they build the
n-millionth + 1 music service or chat app they claim it is a revolution.
Executive management says, "wow you created a music service, here have $500k"
and the process starts again. No one has the cojones to point out that the
company has inadvertently started to play little league because the executives
are trying to ride successes as well.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>The real reason is political. The people at the top fear people rising
through the ranks so they execute people like a dictatorship. At my previous
job everyone with more than 15 years of experience was pushed out and people
with no experience at all were brought in.

Actually, the real reason is usually financial. People with 15 years of
experience tend to cost a lot more than new hires fresh out of college.

~~~
6d0debc071
Assuming that both groups are competent for their level of experience: If you
can't make more profit out of someone with 15 years experience than you can
out of someone who is fresh out of college, then I really question how good
you are at running a team. Sure, they're more expensive, but they can get a
lot more done a lot faster.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Many companies are inefficient at evaluating people right. Someone could be
very experienced, but in very wrong ways (e.g. playing politics); not all, or
maybe even most, ICs aspire to get better and better at their craft over time.
There is plenty of dead weight.

So in a sense you are right; it's just management is not very sure which
experienced persons are worth it or not. Whereas that new grad is all
potential: it's an opportunity to start over again and do it right this time
(but they never do of course....).

~~~
6d0debc071
I think we'd mostly agree. Though, I'd note that it's not just a consequence
of some people having limited aspirations. If you're interested in working
with good people, you should be coaching your staff to develop their skills.
That process makes it fairly apparent to you who's a good performer and who
isn't, and who wants to improve and who doesn't.

If someone's getting to fifteen years, for example, and only then discovering
that they've got to make cuts and don't _know_ who to keep. Jesus Christ. That
almost implies that they've made no investment, beyond money, in that
relationship whatsoever. Which, considering people are expensive, is a bit
like saying they've spent fifteen years burning the company's money.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Most big corps are exactly like that though: they don't really invest in their
people beyond the paycheck, they sort of go with the flow until something
traumatic happens and they need to cut people. What is even worse is that the
high performers get tired of the flow and will simply leave, leaving behind
what is more likely to be dead weight. Much of the performance management
regimes that come from HR are to avoid these problems, but it really takes
good people managers with continuous clear goals from above...and good luck
with that!

Frankly, it's amazing that the system works at all.

------
rifung
I actually found this.. disturbing.

I get that sometimes you have to fire people because you are running out of
money. What I can't agree with is that you can just fire people and it's fine
because people's careers are long and this is just another spot in their
"journey". Sure, maybe a person will work at many companies over their life.

On the other hand, people work to make a living, sometimes for an entire
family, and suddenly not having work can affect someone's livelihood very
negatively for obvious reasons. Don't get me wrong, I understand that
sometimes as a boss/manager you have to make difficult decisions for the sake
of the company. But, you're just lying to yourself if you think it's not a big
deal to fire someone.

~~~
psykotic
I'd agree if we weren't talking about a company renowned for having among the
highest base salaries in the business. Engineers who go to Netflix have a lot
of other options and should know what culture they're joining.

~~~
timr
I knew that Netflix paid well, but I didn't know that they operated like this.
After hearing the story about laying off the tech team to move to AWS...well,
let's just say that the salaries I've heard wouldn't be enough. They recruit
engineers like crazy, but they still couldn't find a use for their existing,
high-performing team? That seems insane.

The whole time I was listening to this, I was thinking: if a company is going
to treat me like a _de facto_ contractor, shouldn't I just ask for the (much
higher) hourly risk-adjusted rate I'd demand as a contractor? Why bother with
the charade of full-time employment at all?

~~~
lmm
Absolutely, ask for the rate you'd demand as a contractor. Netflix might
actually be willing to pay it.

------
dvt
Netflix' long term view is "Look at the bigger picture" and yet their turnover
rate is an abysmal 20%-25%. I fail to see how this is looking at the bigger
picture.

I also fail to see how you can feel _passion for Netflix_ (one of their
company values) when, as an employee, you are basically treated like a
commodity.

I guess this kind of culture must be great for C-level execs like Ms. McCord,
but not so great for run of the mill engineers or salespeople that favor
stability for themselves and their families over a 2% increase in Netflix'
bottom line.

~~~
jeo1234
When you work for a company with an HR attitude like Netflix, you don't go in
expecting to stay there for the next 15 years. It gives you as an employee the
chance to make a pretty good living and more importantly sharpen your skills
so that when you're finished there it's easy to move on. And if then you want
to have a nice stable job which you can expect to stay in for the next decade,
you can.

Investment banking and high-end consulting have worked on a simpler principle
for a long time. When you're young you work crazy hours and get really at your
job. Once you're no longer able to do that, you leave for a calmer
environment.

~~~
UK-AL
Having worked with a lot of consultants from the big consultantancy companies
I would not say they're good at they're job.

It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better
than in house people.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better
than in house people.

Sorry, but this is a very ignorant thing to say. The fact of the matter is
that there's different types of consulting at different points along the
problem-complexity spectrum.

At the low end, a consultant is no different than a contractor, and the point
is not to hire those who are _better_ than in-house people, but _more
efficient_. For example, your in-house IT guy may have the skills to configure
Kerberos, but maybe you'd rather have him work on a more important project (or
maybe he is busy fighting fires, as helpdesk people usually are, and doesn't
have the time), so you hire an outside contractor to do it, and he or she can
get it done a lot faster (and with fewer errors) because they have done it
many times before.

At the high end (which you don't sound like you have experience with),
consultants are highly specialized and they are hired to solve very difficult
technical problems that are of great importance to the firm. These problems
tend to be well outside the competency of in-house people. For example,
imagine a scenario where the firm is the target of a lawsuit and they need to
perform e-discovery to gather each and every business record pertaining to the
subject matter from a large variety of sources and office locations across the
country. There are consulting companies that specialize in this type of
complex service, and they charge very high fees for that reason.

So yeah, it's not "essentially salesman and confidence skills". It may look
like that from the outside, but it just isn't.

~~~
UK-AL
I know people who work with e-discorvery, digital forensics from the
consultancy departments of big 4 accountants(PWC, kpmg etc) etc

They essentially run dedicated tools against computers and report and
summarize?

The real technical skills are the people who wrote those tools.

I was thinking of applying but the recruitment process says they look for
social skills, and not hard core techies. That put me off.

I.e they rather get history graduates , with social skills and teach them how
to use the tools than say super skilled computer science graduate without
salesmanship skills.

That says to me that technical skills arnt that important, its the sales part
that is is important.

I know people that did apply, and after talking to them, its mostly writing
SQL scripts, bash/powershell scripts, running dedicated forensics tools I.e
not 'really' hard technical skills

Most of the value added for them comes from proposals, reports(templates) and
presenting it.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>I know people who work with e-discorvery, digital forensics from the
consultancy departments of big 4 accountants(PWC, kpmg etc) etc

The big 4 accounting firms work in the middle of the complexity spectrum, and
sometimes even towards the lower end. There's two ways this is apparent:

1\. They are able to use dedicated tools other people have written. Those
tools exist because the problems they solve have been faced with many other
companies before, and someone sat down and developed a product for it.

2\. They employ a lot of juniors (which is why they are big), and are able to
offload a lot of the routine tasks in a project to those juniors (called
"leverage" in professional services). Unless you're very high up in your
organization yourself (e.g. C-level), it's likely that those juniors are the
"consultants" you see. The types of tasks you describe (writing simple scripts
and creating PowerPoint presentations) are exactly the types of things a
junior would be charged with.

In contrast, high-end consultancies tend to be small, and they consist almost
entirely of highly skilled and experienced people, who are often times
partners or equivalent. They often have to write their own tools and develop
their own processes and best practices due to the relatively unique nature of
the issues they tackle.

Don't get me wrong: all good consultants are also very good salespeople. They
have to be, since consulting is a very people-oriented business. But to say
that consulting is about sales and confidence is a gross oversimplification.

~~~
UK-AL
Boutique consultancies and the big consultancies tend be very different
things.

Boutique consultancies tend to be a few skilled people who have known each
other for years who decide start their own thing togother. They probably used
to be in-house people who specialised in ERP, security, databases or whatever
then started their own company. They have probably have doing it for years,
and have geniune interest in the subject. I have respect for that.

In fact I've worked for companies like that. But as programmer writing those
tools you talk about, and for deep technical problems the consultants can't
solve. The consultants would then try sell and use those tools along with
consutlancy services.

However when people think of consultancies they usually think of mckinseys,
accentures, PWCs of the world.

They grab prestigious graduates, teach them how do routine work on training
courses, then hire them out for a lot of money. I don't get that. I highly
doubt these guys could compete with an in-house guy who has been doing that
stuff for years.

------
brianmcconnell
Oooh, how I love it when out of shape tech industry people use professional
sports metaphors without understanding the difference between 1) a
professional sports tournament system and 2) employment in a growing industry.

In 1) there is an artificially limited number of slots (and money) in the "big
leagues" that little leaguers are clamoring for. In 2) there is generally a
shortage of people relative to the available jobs.

Applying the professional sports metaphor to category 2 merely demonstrates
that as a manager you are a f---t--d, which is probably why they have
ridiculously bad turnover (a HQ location that might as well be in Siberia
being another).

------
biffa
The slideshow referred to in the podcast:
[http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664](http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Definitely worth flipping thru. I found stuff I agreed with, stuff I disagreed
with. Much to think about. One of my favorites:

    
    
       Great workplace is not espresso, lush benefits,
       sushi lunches, grand parties, or nice offices
    

And the not-so-subtle dig against stack ranking:

    
    
       We avoid "top 30%" and "bottom 10%"
       rankings amongst employees
    
       We want employees to help each other,
       and they do

------
msoad
I would like to get some insights from Netflix engineers instead of their PR
machine. How do you like working at Netflix?

~~~
_RPM
This has been asked/answered before. check this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919343)

~~~
adevine
Thanks for posting that - adds some context and color to what is essentially a
PR story.

~~~
greggman
What about the story seemed like PR?

~~~
rifung
I thought it was bizarre how one of the hosts of the show just kept defending
their behavior and kept making excuses for them. It's like they tried to spin
it in a positive light even when the female host remarked and how cruel their
practices are.

Just my opinion of course, but I found it a bit strange.

------
sremani
This is difficult to listen to, but that is how it is. We can see this as a
meat-grinder or you can see as living organism shunning its weak-cells either
way, this is how world works and there are people who went bankrupt because
they have run companies like their families, and their workers could not help
them to survive beyond a point. Netflix adds value, to its customers but for
what ever weird reason or hypocrisy of me, I have cancelled my Netflix
subscription. Well, I used their rule of thumb, Is Netflix really critical for
my well being? No. Sayonara Netflix. I have moved one.

------
ljk
hmm isn't this what people were mad at Amazon about? and now a story praising
this type of work culture?

..unless i'm missing something

e: nevermind, they talk about a case of someone getting sick from overworking

~~~
Qantourisc
It's not because you are not getting sick you are not suffering. Stress can
have an invisible impact on your life.

