To my mind, this memo is fairly innocuous; compared to a more traditional dry HR employee guidelines document, it's rather inspirational and idealistic. Nothing wrong with that.
The one line that seems to have triggered the Post reporter:
As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.
I'm not sure I would put that into the employee guidelines, if I were running a company. It does seem a bit... I don't know, dismissive or maybe just unnecessary. Obviously if someone's not happy with the content their company produces, they're free to look for a better fit elsewhere. But why spell it out like that?
I do like the little passage from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at the very end. A company that's producing content needs to stay creative and openminded and continually search for inspiration, and Netflix seems to be aspiring to that goal.
> Obviously if someone's not happy with the content their company produces, they're free to look for a better fit elsewhere. But why spell it out like that?
Because people tend to forget that and intend to pressure their employer into changing its values, rather than simply changing their employer.
If Netflix views itself as a content library, rather than say, a content publisher then they could rightly say that they will keep certain content that's harmful to the community simply because that falls into the ethos of a library. Libraries (at least good ones in my opinion) keep Mein Kamphf on the shelves, even if no one in the library is a nazi and the only people checking them out are actual nazis (as opposed to college students writing papers). That the book is bad, doesn't mean that it ought to be burned.
So if Netflix is a library, then they're okay. However, this gets a bit muddy since not only collects content, but also actually publishes and promotes it themselves. Funding Chappelle, and publicizing it with huge billboards can be interpreted as support and not simply "we publish content that exists" since this harmful content might not exist if not for Netflix.
I think the quote above is necessary since Netflix has to clarify where it actually stands on this issue. They see it as a topic of 'personal' value, and not objective harm.
> I'm not sure I would put that into the employee guidelines, if I were running a company. It does seem a bit... I don't know, dismissive or maybe just unnecessary.
It would be very necessary if one were running a library. Netflix's role is somewhat similar.
As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.
I've been called upon to code for law enforcement and the military despite being somewhat left-wing in my personal politics. I've been called upon to code for religious organizations despite being a quietly militant atheist. I don't necessarily like it, but if your personal ethics are more stringent than that of your coworkers you might have to put aside your ideals and dirty your hands if you want to make a living.
If the work you're asked to do is that egregiously out of line with your ideals, you should remember that "at-will employment" works both ways. You don't need to give notice or justification. If you dislike your employer or their policies, ghost 'em.
Agreed, at-will means you can leave at any time, though perhaps at a cost to your career. I've just never seen a company explicitly say, effectively, "if you don't like it, you can leave" as part of their employee guidelines. Seems unnecessarily blunt.
> Agreed, at-will means you can leave at any time, though perhaps at a cost to your career.
I'm not sure how quietly leaving a workplace will come at a cost to a career. People need to leave employment for various personal reasons (e.g. death in the family, burnout, pregnancy, health issues), and at least in our sector I've never seen anyone judged poorly for that.
It says the following in the article if you've read it and can also be found in [0] as the source:
“Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful,” the communiqué continued. “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.” [0]
Given the plummeting subscribers, cancellations and password-sharing chaos and a cratering stock crash, they are cleaning up the dead wood and costs, including this and it sort of makes sense here.
Therefore, I find the evidence in this article and the findings in the internal memo highly likely to be true, otherwise they would have kept those workers as if their actions did not impact the company.
True, but due to the subscriber loss, I wonder if this is a ploy by Netflix to get as many people to leave so they do not have to fire people due to the decline.
Firing people in many US States will cause their taxes to increase.
The article links to https://jobs.netflix.com/culture, and the quotes appear to be verbatim and not out of context. (The interpretation that it's specifically about "woke" workers is of course purely from the Post).
Unfortunately archive.org isn't working, so it's hard to check whether the text really is new, or something that's in place for years.
The story has been picked up by the WSJ[1] and includes the following text confirming it is a recent change:
> A Netflix spokesman said the company updated its culture page on Thursday for the first time since 2017. He said Netflix had spent the past 18 months discussing cultural issues internally with employees. The new language was added, he said, “so that prospective employees could understand our position, and make better informed decisions about whether Netflix is the right company for them.”
>The interpretation that it's specifically about "woke" workers is of course purely from the Post
Yeah, that culture page applies just as much to Conservative employees offended by the presence of pro LGBT themes, criticism of religion or minority casting.
This isn't the anti-woke own the Post or HN commenters who never read past the title want it to be.
I agree. Netflix has alot of LGBT-friendly programming. People who believe LGBT is counter to morality would find working at Netflix similarly abhorrent and will also be encouraged to leave.
https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
To my mind, this memo is fairly innocuous; compared to a more traditional dry HR employee guidelines document, it's rather inspirational and idealistic. Nothing wrong with that.
The one line that seems to have triggered the Post reporter:
As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.
I'm not sure I would put that into the employee guidelines, if I were running a company. It does seem a bit... I don't know, dismissive or maybe just unnecessary. Obviously if someone's not happy with the content their company produces, they're free to look for a better fit elsewhere. But why spell it out like that?
I do like the little passage from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at the very end. A company that's producing content needs to stay creative and openminded and continually search for inspiration, and Netflix seems to be aspiring to that goal.