Hire quickly and fire quickly with a generous severance. That’s the only method that I’ve seen works effectively. Netflix does more with 2000 engineers that companies with 10-20x that.
This also lets you take chances on engineers that weren’t “perfect” but had a lot of positives to offer.
The Netflix model makes a ton of sense, but doesn't apply to most other companies, bc Netflix is a unique case. They pay top of market, all cash. They have massive name recognition and obvious longevity. Probably most uniquely - they only hire senior people who have a track record of experience they can look at.
When you're a startup that nobody's heard of, half your engineers are going to be junior, and half your comp is stock options that will probably never be liquid, the offer doesn't make any sense. Are you just going to give offers to 20 random new college grads and coding bootcamp alums planning on firing the 50-75% that don't cut it? Good luck ever getting junior people to accept offers again. Do you think someone with 10+ years of experience is going to take a pay cut to take the job with a random startup with a decent chance of getting let go if the manager isn't feeling it after a few weeks?
With 15 years of experience and a family to provide for, there's no world where I'd consider that type of hiring/firing culture for anything other than a proven brand name with top of market comp, environment, and coworkers. Did an interview loop w/ Netflix a couple years ago, seems like an amazing place to work, ultimately went a different direction for non-culture related reasons.
Start ups need different kind of people than big companies. With a startup the biggest mistake someone can make is not moving fast enough, and the startup dies. In a big company the code base always gets too big, so a person who works slower, but is able to improve the code base while shrinking it is worth more than a person who finishes fast, but blows up or slows down the code base. Interviews have to search for the right style of people.
The nation is not conducive to business if it can't provide healthcare and safety nets for those without work or in between jobs. In the US we are held hostage with healthcare based on our employers - if you're even lucky enough to have a stable job with benefits.
"Hire quickly and fire quickly" has other issues than healthcare and safety nets though, moving across a country and spending weeks trying to find a place to live (possibly losing money on rent because you can't find anything to buy yet) only to have to do it again in a few weeks' time is difficult.
Less of an issue if you're full remote, or you provide good accommodations, I guess.
Not to mention that most apartments have mininum lease durations, and penalties for breaking said leases. So if you move for a new job, sign a one year lease (because that's all that's available, or you can't afford to pay extra for shorter terms), and then a month later you're handed a box and a security escort...
Indeed. And of course the biggest advantage of them all: living in a big city. One of the main reasons for the salary difference: it's a lot easier to get raises if there are 10 companies offering the same job
In France your jobseeker's allowance is 80% of the average salary of your last 12 working months. Whether your last employer was for 10 years or 10 days. It starts slowly ramping down after the second year of searching I think
French unemployment has been well above US unemployment since the 70s. This isn’t a free lunch. If the state makes employing people more expensive employers will employ fewer people.
Because most people who do work are being productive, doing useful things, serving their fellows. And being unemployed if you’re of working age and without some other productive role is awful.
Unemployment is bad for society generally and for the unemployed. Maybe one day we’ll get to fully automated luxury gay space communism but France is not there. Those extra unemployed people are having their talents and productivity wasted by economic mismanagement.
Past patterns can be an interesting contrast. During WWII generals were hired and fired quickly. Because the practice was pervasive there was no big stigma to being fired and there were always alternative positions to try. It also helped that there was a general structure which was not explicit or required but was broadly exhibited. That is, new hires were expected to show basic proficiency within two weeks and to make a significant contribution with in six weeks. Since a relatively quick test of skills was built in to the management structure there was less pressure on initial evaluation.
I definitely think that if every employer used Netflix's strategy there would be issues, but if the job market had more churn stability would take on a different meaning. Imagine that it was expected to change jobs frequently if you or your employer was unhappy; I'd bet lots of people would be way happier.
The problem is of course that even if you have every reason to think that some other place would hire you, you need a degree of slack to begin with. There aren't any easy answers there, but that's where I'd say an expanded social safety net should come in.
Saying that it isn’t conducive to an entire nation is a bit of an over-dramatization, don’t you think?
I think a generous severance makes up for that. Plus people would know what they are getting into, just like Netflix. If you don’t want the risk/return you don’t have to apply or accept a job there.
If the nation is well-functioning, getting fired isn’t the end of the world. If your job is independant of your healthcare and you have several years of allowance to seek another one it’s fine to try out a few jobs before finding what sticks
Only when the pay doesn't compensate for the instability, which in Netflix's case, is a lot. You could work two months and have enough saved to last you an year.
It would absolutely work -- assuming everyone has access to healthcare (preferably universal coverage).
Unfortunately this cuts at the moat that big corporations have set up not to mention health insurance industry and big pharma. Which is why it hasn't happened yet here (though it has in many other countries).
Netflix doesn’t act unethically. They are upfront about how they hire and fire and people select into applying there and jobs there based on that. Same as CostCo has much higher standards for employees than Walmart and much higher benefits. If all employers were like Costco lots of people would be unemployed who currently have jobs. Having an employment model that is not perfectly average is not unethical.
It's the responsibility of the government to create a well-functioning nation, and to use corporations to this end. But to suggest that people or the corporations have a direct responsibility, is to shift the responsibility away from those who are on 'our side', and to those who are either neutral or its primary victims.
>Surely every stakeholder has some degree of responsibility in the proper functioning of any system.
A civilization enforces responsibility through the law.
>I am free to degrade public infrastructure such as roads because it is not my responsibility to build them.
Yes. And either the government should set laws to prevent you from misusing the infrastructure, and/or the people should shun your company for being a bad actor. The former being consistent for infrastructure that is owned and maintained by the tax-funded government.
>I am morally justified in committing crimes since I am not a police officer.
Morality and legality are different things. Neither people nor corporations should be judged by the government through the abstract, subjective morality of individuals, only by agreed upon, written law, and at its loosest which is a court's interpretation of the law.
You as an individual can hold anyone responsible for anything under any criteria, but then you should state you're speaking for yourself as per your own moral code. As a society, we have rules for that.
If you want to make your moral code the law, then that should also be explicitly mentioned as such instead of speaking as if it's the status quo.
>Yes. And either the government should set laws to prevent you from misusing the infrastructure, and/or the people should shun your company for being a bad actor.
It seems we agree. Similarly, governments should encode the civic responsibility of businesses into law.
Whether or not they have actually done that is a different debate.
I have a responsibility not to violate the law or vandalize the roads, but I don't think I have a responsibility to drive extra carefully or patch up potholes as I see them.
To me, this seems like a very cynical scheme. We tell "normal people" that they, personally, ought to BUY AMERICAN to prevent jobs from moving abroad. When they eventually do, we can tell them they should've done more and that it was their fault. It shifts the liability on to the victims, rather than the perpetrators.
But the responsibility of ensuring that a country has a good trade deficit is upon the government, if anyone! There's no serious way I can prevent it, so the only real point of saying it's my responsibility is to diminish the government's responsibility for failing to prevent it.
To suggest that the companies have a moral obligation, is to suggest that an abstract body corporate can have a conscience. If it could, there would be no need to ban slavery - just expect that the honest businessmen of America cease to traffic in them.
When you add in "responsibility" like that, it becomes very vague. What does it mean for a company to have morally transgressed? Does it mean that it has violated its conscience, or does it just mean that it's an unfortunate behavior we would do best to punish?
Companies are inert objects. They do not have consciences. I can't say that a company does an evil thing, any more than I can blame a rock someone else threw for hitting my head. It hurts, but I can't very well blame the rock for it. Companies are just like driftwood in the ocean; their motion is defined solely by the forces acting upon them.
What is left, then, is to suggest that society should go after the companies that don't do what we want. But this can never be done by individuals. It has to be done by unions, governments, or something of the sort. It cannot be done by the companies themselves, and it cannot be done by individuals.
When you suggest that companies are doing something wrong, and not the government for failing to regulate them, this is tantamount to suggesting that the responsibility for punishing them actually lay on the individual. But to do so makes the primary victim into the perpetrator of the aggression against him. It is a terrible thing to do.
You have to pay the employer's share for COBRA, which is usually thousands of dollars per person per month. Right when you've lost income from the job.
H1Bs are one example, but isn't living in a high-rent area another? In either case, you can't maintain your physical position for long without continuous employment.
You probably don't need Hadoop, and you probably don't need 10x engineers.
> This also lets you take chances on engineers that weren’t “perfect” but had a lot of positives to offer.
This is not true. An AS/HFA/Autistic person wouldn't survive very long at Netflix, because they biologically struggle with the goal-setting/performance review game. These individuals may have talents that are biologically unavailable to neurotypical people.
The Netflix approach selects for a very specific type of individual: an extreme degree of rote knowledge and the ability to effortlessly apply that knowledge. There are people who acquire this knowledge and talent via unconventional means, and Netflix is able to grab those people up.
In addition, that individual is likely wasting mental resources gaming performance reviews, or their manager has identified their struggle and is protecting them from the ceremony. Systematically, Netflix is not equipped to deal with them.
Everyone either wastes mental resources gaming performance reviews or ignores them as a sideshow to actually doing a good job. The better the performance review the closer these two approaches are. Unless you have experience of Netflix’s culture and management you are less qualified to opine on whether Netflix is equipped to deal with autistic employees than someone who knows an autistic Netflix employee who is successfully working there.
> Everyone either wastes mental resources gaming performance reviews or ignores them as a sideshow to actually doing a good job.
You can find out that this is a false equivalency in DSM IV. Spectrum individuals struggle with certain executive functions, and performance reviews align incredibly well with those metrics.
You've claimed the anagolous equivalent of "everyone gets tired climbing stairs, paraplegics are no different."
> opine
I hate to tu quoque, but I'm one of those individuals and I do struggle with performance reviews - as would most (not all) adult diagnosed individuals. Literally page 5 of my AS/HFA workbook. I'm lucky to be managed by someone who gives me qualitative reviews, instead of quantitative ones.
I have also been diagnosed. Autistic individuals aren’t paraplegics in this analogy. They are dramatically shorter than average. Working under a disadvantage is not the same as being unable to do something.
It’s not like the population of people who take performance reviews seriously rather than as bullshit hoops that have to be endured or gamed is large.
You can only do this if you have the name recogition and compensation to attract enough candidates who are willing to take this risk. Plus, if you have long on-boarding processes this could become quite expensive.
Yeah. I used to know someone who worked at a call center once. The onboard training was like 40+ hours. They had a problem with people who only got hired so they could be paid to watch videos before quitting on the first day, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
This also lets you take chances on engineers that weren’t “perfect” but had a lot of positives to offer.