Christ on a bike, that sounds horrific.
All this approach can do is replace codified guidelines with unknown, arbitrary ones. Who defines what "NetFlix's best interest" is? In an organisation of that size, conflicts of interest must happen all the time.
Is this just a fancy way of saying "If we don't like you, you're out of the door?"
Source https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1:
"Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults
Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake."
I trust myself, and everyone on my team to act in Netflix's best interest. Throughout my career, I've worked with many professional engineers who could have been trusted to work in the company's best interest. But there have been many times when we've been prevented to do so, due to process. So I've been fascinated at how Netflix is operating, and it's been great working here.
It's important to know that a key role of management is to provide context to employees: what problems exist, what challenges we are facing, what opportunities might exist, what's important to Netflix right now. So that we know what to do, and how to exercise judgement.
I've written about working at Netflix earlier this year on my blog (someone else posted a link).
We'd all like to work with people who operate with the same understanding, ethos, sense of humor, etc. It makes the day better, right? No office drama, no awkward meetings. But I would contend doing this tends to put you at a genetic disadvantage, and that some types of confrontation are essential for growth. Introducing only like-minded people will produce linear results.
What codified HR rules do is put some workplace guidelines around humanity - that allows a dissonant group of varied people to, you know, be themselves without necessarily worrying about conforming to avoid ruffling feathers.
Perhaps it's more nuanced than that, but it sounds more like "hire people you like" expressed somewhat condescendingly as it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessnes...
IOW, I'd rather work for a structured hierarchical firm, where politicians brown nose managers and the managers firewall these people from the rest of the team.
edit: Hum, your name seemed familiar. I attended your LISA talk. You're brilliant and well known (witty to boot, as I recall. :) ). You, sir, will be listened to by default, so you will tend not to encounter the failure modes I described above. But do think about them, okay? Tyranny of Structurelessness really is a great read.
The issue here is that some (many) people need more guidance, because it's not their company, and they have no idea what it considers "the right thing". Should you hire such people, you can't just dump them like thrash because you can't be bothered to manage them properly.
Netflix is going to get into a truckload of legal issues if it tries to scale this practice internationally in countries with decent employee protection laws, which is most of the Western world outside the US.
Netflix sounds to me like a Randian cult.
> A single specialist in Java distributed systems is managing the entire configuration without any commercial storage tools or help from engineers specializing in storage, SAN, or backup.
So this person is either a genius who has specialized knowledge in these areas, or it's been abstracted by the platforms people to the point where it's only Java knowledge. Either way, it sounds like this person never gets to take a vacation or be not on-call. Hopefully there's not just 1 person responsible for all of the configuration, it just takes 1 person to run it.
> Process prevents problems. At many companies, the standard response to something going wrong is to add a preventative step to the relevant procedure.
The linked section goes on to talk about HR process with the "Act in NetFlix's best interest". It totally avoids the concept of technical processes. I'm betting "best interest" is a bit more formal on the tech side. Bad process is process for process's sake. Good process serves a very important role for offloading what people have to remember, as well as knowledge transfer. From time to time, steps of a process become irrelevant because of other changes and it has to be pruned. Sometimes companies forget about this step.
If Netflix has ever seen a problem with their builds/deploys and added a test to check against that problem, guess what--they followed the standard response to update the procedure. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
Now, what you have to take into consideration is that it's written as a contrast to all kinds of other places that run a command structure where it's your boss' job to figure out what is good for the company.
I don't know about you, but I have worked in those environments before. They attract bad people, as doing what seems better for the company, as opposed to what is better for your boss, is discouraged. I think of one example in my past, where the team worked for two months on a feature we knew our in house customer did not want, and would refuse to use. However, it helped our boss' internal political status, so the team tolled, the feature was unused, and in the end, half the team quit. Our former manager, however, is still doing well, because what is good for the company was not what was good for his boss either.
I often get recruiting calls from that company. They have trouble retaining good talent. Imagine that.
So the Netflix approach brings in people that are more dedicated to the business than the chain of command. There's a lot of very good engineers there, and it's a pool that is often untapped outside of startups. It's not a bad strategic decision, IMHO.
I read it like I would want to work there in a heart beat. Because it seems that Netflix trust you and doesn't (micro)mange you on bullshit KPI's or something.
It seems to me that at Netflix, you are trusted. You are trusted that your work improves the environment. Your work is evaluated afterwards. There is a risk of things going wrong, but with good, responsbile, knowledgable people, this is not so high.
Part of this is that you take the initiative to set expectations and clearly discuss what you are planning to do and what you'll be working on so there is no misunderstanding. It's all about setting expectations and communication.
I'm actually quite curious how life would be inside this culture. Since you have so much responsibility and control, life should be quite bussy, but manageable.
The ideal would be that you just have a bunch of adult, professional people who manage themselves just by talking to each other, agreeing on how they want to work with each other to get things done and they manage / steer this process themselves just with open communication. No (micro)managers needed.
The key is the people and their values / culture. Very simple things may make all the difference. Being on time. Being prepared for meetings (reading the short memo upfront, maybe lookup some things or make sure that you have done the tasks required of you). Starting the meeting on time. Respect each others time.
A willingness to to share and help people understand how tings are setup and why (reasoning), document the stuff that is important. And you know what is important or are capable of just asking what is important for other people to know so what you document is relevant.
I can only dream.
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-01-20/working-at-netfl...
If I can ever get my own business off of the ground, I hope to have it work similarly to what you described.
I've never worked for Netflix or any other company willing to make such bold statements so can't speak to the reality. It would be interesting to read a first-hand account from someone who has been at Netflix since the time such non-policies were enacted. At the time, it sounded like a fantastic experiment. I would love to see the results.
There are two major ramifications of unlimited vacation policies:
1) It changes how you feel about taking time off. Rather than paid time off being something that you have "earned", you evaluate your PTO in comparison to your teammates - specifically most people try to make sure they are not taking off more than the average. The end result being everyone is subconsciously competing with everyone else to consume less PTO than average.
2) Since you have not accrued vacation time, your company does not owe you financial compensation for vacation time not spent when you leave. As someone that changes jobs every 3 or 4 years, this is more painful than it sounds.
If I ever decide to be in a position that affords me the opportunity, I think I would enact a "minimum vacation policy". It's still unlimited, for whatever that's worth, but employees will be required to take a minimum amount of vacation every year.
"The more talent density u have the less process you need. The more process u create the less talent you retain.
-- Reed Hastings (@netflix)"
An 'untalented' developer is one who is perhaps slow to complete features, needs work on their design patterns, produces buggy code, etc.
Process isn't needed for these people, rather it is for people who do or try to get away with things like: expense excessive purchases, frequently lie about being sick to get out of working, speak or act in a lewd or unprofessional manner, etc.
Nobody is under the impression that mandating wearing a business suit (process) makes one suddenly better at programming (talent), the converse is equally absurd.
edit: punctuation
It's an ideological wet dream. It's like saying, you can make any choice, you have the freedom, just make sure you make the "right choice".
Not to mention what happens when netflix's best interest conflicts with outside interests.
The company is Nordstrom, a retail store that has been around for more than 100 years and comes up often in "Best Places To Work" articles. It's pretty great.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-hubspot-culture-code-c...
Every functioning organization requires faith in the people you work with.
"Best interest" is hardly a measurable or even agreeable term.
I can easily see just a couple rotten apples spooling that who could damage that whole system very quickly.
I'm sure it is, but is there any company where that isn't the policy?
I've never known a developer not to speak up when the development cycle is too fast or a user who is not averse to the resultant buggy software.
Pushing code too fast is clearly a problem that causes bugs, and neither developers or users are a fan of.
The 'development cycle' includes the total time to implement something, including time taken to fix resultant bugs.
Where you can speed up the development cycle without introducing more bugs (eg. by implementing comprehensive testing and QA practices), then no one is going to complain.
From the talks I kind of inferred that sharing is a good example of micro service, but that's also a good example of something that one could outsource to addthis, sharethis and similar (at least, I'm speaking from the perspective of a relatively young startup).
