Reads like managers dictating how they are and how things are going to be.
Employee number whatever: Here are your new instructions, deal with it.
Employee number whatever: Here are your new instructions, deal with it.
I wish this where modern workplace problems. Now when you deal with parasite managers you don't get any instructions, never. So you are stuck with getting bored to death or starting to do something by yourself. If you do the first at some point you start complaining so much about life that your group will exclude you. If you do the second your manager will keep watching and use every mistake, every mediocre decision, every conflict with a colleague against you. If you succeed he or one of his friends takes the credit. If you fail you are blamed 100% because you made all the decisions by yourself.
Getting shitty instructions sounds like paradise compared to that.
(I mean, that sounds like a good thing. Firing people who aren't good for the team is an important responsibility of any manager who doesn't want the rest of their team to quit, so I would ideally want to know that my manager has at least thought about it a little.)
My understanding is that Netflix intends to have an unusually high-firing culture (cf. their culture deck, "The unusual part is that we give adequate performers a generous severance package"), so if I'm at Netflix I absolutely want my manager to be up-front about how they interpret that and what signs I have that I'm an adequate performer and not a top one. By signing onto Netflix I am afraid of being fired, but that reflects on the company and not on the manager. (And the answers this manager gave are good: statistics about firing and an explicit statement that it won't take you by surprise.) You'll note that the firing talk is gone from the current version, and the green/yellow/red performance stuff (which is generically useful) stays.
Referring to the Netflix version of the slide deck as "the old version" of the Slack version of the slide deck is inaccurate. I'm in a somewhat unusual position amongst the people whose READMEs were quoted, because I got to write one from both sides of the fence: As the established person welcoming a new member to the team (Netflix), and as someone joining a new organization (Slack). READMEs, for me, then end up looking very different.
It's also worth noting, as geofft notes, that Slack's culture and Netflix's culture are very very different, so the concerns of people within them would be different (and should be addressed differently). The concern that you might be fired was pervasive for new people at Netflix, and I sought to alleviate it; it's not a commonly-held concern at Slack.