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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

> Employees are encouraged to ship half-baked features and move to another project

Maybe there is more to that. It's been more than a year since Llama 3 was released. That should be enough time for Meta to release something with significantly improvement. Or you mean quarter by quarter the engineers had to show that they were making impact in their perf review, which could be detrimental to the Llama 4 project?

Another thing that puzzles me is that again and again we see that the quality of a model can improve if we have more high-quality data, yet can't Meta manage to secure massive amount of new high-quality data to boost their model performance?

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> Or you mean quarter by quarter the engineers had to show that they were making impact in their perf review

This is what I think they were referencing. Launching things looks nice in review packets and few to none are going to look into the quality of the output. Submitting your own self review means that you can cherry pick statistics and how you present them. That's why that culture incentivizes launching half baked products and moving on to something else because it's smart and profitable (launch yet another half baked project) to distance yourself from the half baked project you started.

I like how Netflix set up its incentive systems years ago. Essentially they told the employees that all they needed to do is deliver what the company wanted. It was perfectly okay that an employee did their job and didn't move up or do more. Per their chief talent officer McCord, "a manager's job is all about setting the context" and the employees were let loose to deliver. This method puts a really high bar on the managers, as the entire report chain must know clearly what they want delivered. Their expectation must be high enough to move the company forward, but not too ridiculous to turn Netflix into a burnout factory.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to get an interview with Netflix.

> employees that all they needed to do is deliver what the company wanted

How did this work out in practice and across teams? My experience at Meta within my team was that it would be almost impossible to determine what the company actually wanted from our team in a year. Goals kept changing and the existing incentive system works against this since other teams are trying to come up with their own solutions to things which may impact your team.

> an employee did their job and didn't move up

Does Netflix cull employees if they haven't reached a certain IC level? I know at Meta SWEs need to reach IC5 after a while or risk being culled.

Netflix used to have a single level for engineers: Senior. That was the best decision they made, at least when they were small. It simply eliminated any incentive to work for promotion, and the result was magnificent: engineers would generally work on what's right, if they were ambitious. Or they could choose to finish what they were supposed to do. Netflix's culture deck explicitly said it was okay for employees to just do what their roles required, so no pressure to move up at all.

> How did this work out in practice and across teams? My experience at Meta within my team was that it would be almost impossible to determine what the company actually wanted from our team in a year.

That's why it is critical to have good leaders. A problem, at least per my own experience in Meta, is that many managers are people managers. I'm not sure what they want. It's hard to know what product they want to build, what gaps they want to fill, or what efficiency goals they want to drive. If they were in Netflix, they would fail the "setting the right context" test, as they didn't know what the right context should be.

Imagine if sports teams worked this way. Hey you as a wide reciever didn't get promoted to QB - sorry we have to let you go!

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