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Comment by outside1234 | Hacker News Reader

Netflix is Disneyland for Psychopaths

This all makes sense to me as a survivor because I'm in the in-group

(Disclosure: I worked at the company for three weeks and then fired it to go to a real FAANG, so I guess it works both ways.)

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"This makes sense to me because I'm in the in-group" is basically how I feel about "unlimited vacation" policies. If you've a Type A person who's tight with your boss, it's great. If you're non-confrontational and you think maybe your boss doesn't like you, or if you really need to keep your job, it's a nightmare.

It's also a nasty trap if your burned out. You need the time off but don't know if you have the political capital to safely take it.

I struggle to find a charitable guess about the intent behind these policies.

The intent is "because there isn't a specifically accrued amount of time off, we don't have to pay it out when they quit or are fired".

Less time spent dealing with the paperwork of tracking it and accounting for the termination liability of paying out vacation. Those are the two main reasons. I’ve always preferred it because the alternative is usually some too small fixed amount of vacation that I don’t have access to for the first year. It still takes just as much political capital to take time off as long as your boss has to approve, regardless of whether it’s “unlimited” or not.

I imagine the charitable story goes "if we have a good way of measuring your contributions, we don't need to bother counting your hours and days because we'll know whether you're effective without doing that, and if we don't have a good way of measuring your performance, we have bigger problems that vacation policies won't fix." But that's kind of bullshit.

> I struggle to find a charitable guess about the intent behind these policies.

We're all friends here, who needs the overhead from all these silly rules about counting beans?

Especially when counting those beans would mean I would have to make a payout if you left.

The charitable take is Hanlon’s Razor.

Leadership at these companies is simply incompetent and honestly believes it’s a good policy.

It’s an immediately disqualifying policy for me.

Not sure how this is different from a job with a defined amount of vacation. Your boss generally needs to approve either way. Plenty of horror stories of people losing carried-over vacation time because the boss wouldn’t approve it. Not sure how “unlimited” leave policies make any difference here.

Not clearly defining the benefit is to the advantage of the employer. A defined vacation policy means that if you're fired, the company needs to pay out your unused vacation. It means that if your boss isn't letting you take it, there's a problem between the written policy and your boss's preference, and that might mean a resolution mechanism. It means additional ammunition when asking because it's your due, not a favor. It means that the person who is not socially adroit understands how much vacation they're allowed and isn't leaving available vacation unused.

I interviewed at Netflix in 2015. Unlike every other company I interviewed at, they earmarked you for a team before you interviewed. I didn't know what teams were available; the recruiter earmarked me for the logged out experience.

I didn't get the job. The feedback? "You aced the technical stuff and everyone loved you, but we didn't sense your passion for the logged out experience."

Wow. It's kind of hilarious to imagine that maybe they found someone who did.

Because if there's anything that excites deep, abiding passion it's certainly the logged out experience.

Sounds like dialog from Silicon Valley.

Former Googler. I did not make it past the Netflix recruiter phone screen because they had me read the culture memo before the first call and when asked what I thought about it I said "kind of culty but I can deal with it". Apparently that is not the correct answer.

While reading some longish culture thing on Netflix hiring pages, it started out OK, but by the end... I'm skeptical of places that are self-congratulatory about their own supposed superiority. I expect those places to probably have dim-wittedness, mediocrity, and game-playing.

Is "the company" Netflix? They are the N in FAANG.

Netflix has only been there because they needed to make the acronym non slur.

Now they could use NVDA.

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