Comment by magixx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magixx | Hacker News Reader

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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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