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Mirta Dozar
I do not doubt that in the coming days we will hear pushback from Netflix about the WSJ story. There will be claims that the story does not provide a full picture of what working at Netflix is really like. The company will trot out survey results to show that employees are happy. The company will blame the story on low-performing disgruntled former employees. Or maybe the company will say nothing.
What worries me most is not what is going on at Netflix. Instead, I worry about the diffusion of the Netflix culture to other organizations. Netflix is undeniably successful. Many companies will look at what Netflix has been able to do, and work to emulate the Netflix way.
As an academic who works in a center devoted to the advancement of learning, I have become a student of learning science. What you learn when you get into this literature is that fear can motivate short-term performance gains, but that fear destroys long-term progress. Any structure that promotes external punishments or rewards over the development of internal motivation can get quick results. These gains, however, will erode over time.
We also know that diverse teams and organizations will, over time, perform better than homogenous groups. Diversity is important because different experiences and perspectives enable organizations to avoid blindspots. Diversity drives creativity.
At Netflix, there seems to be little room for diverse perspectives. Strong alignment to the dominant culture means that those with different perspectives, orientations, and values will be silenced or pushed out. A diverse organization should not be judged solely on demographic factors. Diversity also encompasses the acceptance of difference.
Netflix may be able to be successful in the short term despite its culture. But who knows how much more successful the company might be if its leaders bothered to understand some of the science of learning.
In the long run, Netflix will need to change its culture. CEO Reed Hastings and his top executives will eventually leave or change. The damage to individual employees and the long-term future of the company will have been done.
Some companies project an image of an engineering paradise, where their technologies are awesome, the staff are stunning, and the keyboards are made of gold. But after joining, you discover that the technologies are crummy, the staff can be terrible, and your right shift key is sticky. It's a company where dumb stuff happens but nobody can fix it, and the future outlook is dull. The paradise was a facade.
After two years I still find Netflix an amazing place to work. What's surprised me most is the lack of unpleasant surprises. Before I joined, Netflix looked awesome, but I wondered if there was some catch or downside that I'd only learn after working here. I have yet to find one.
How does Netflix do it? I think the culture deck goes a long way to explain how, and it's still true. In short: everyone is professional, we work well together, innovate (freedom and responsibility), and have a good work/life balance. It works well.
This is also the most challenging job of my life, in part because of what I've chosen to work on. So far I've worked on kernel and hypervisor internals, various runtimes and databases, created many new performance tools, and performed distributed systems analysis as an SRE.
Me?...an SRE? Yes, I've volunteered to join the on-call rotation for the Core SRE team, where I get to do distributed systems analysis and SRE work. Core SRE is the central SRE team at Netflix. My colleague, Dave Hahn, gave a good talk about it at AWS re:Invent.
Netflix is composed of many microservices, and each have their own teams who are on-call. Much of the time, service teams have set up early alerts so that they are notified and can fix issues before they affect customers. Core gets paged when there is a customer impacting issue.
If the Netflix culture and company do sound attractive, and you're a senior professional with relevant skills and a top performer, I'd recommend checking our jobs page. Most of these jobs are based in Los Gatos, where we've just opened two new buildings and two more are on the way. These have staff at desks in a semi-open office layout, with private places you can visit to work.
A problem you might have, if you are a senior engineer, is the phenomenon of "the more you know, the more you don't know". If you've dug deep on technologies in the past, you may have been exposed to their vast complexities, and how much you've yet to learn. This can hurt your confidence, and that's a problem when applying for jobs. I don't know of a great solution other than to be self aware that you're falling into this trap, as well as chatting to Netflix staff about this.
Good luck, and come say hi if you join (I'm in D2 near a window overlooking the basketball court). You might also see me at the upcoming SREcon16, where I'm giving a talk on performance checklists for SREs.
Update: Many people have been emailing me their resumes. I'm glad they are interested in working at Netflix, but I'm an engineer, not a hiring manager. Please use jobs.netflix.com, which will send your details to the right people.
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As soon as a company or individual is successful they will attract attention. Some of it will be positive but some, almost inevitably, will be negative. The more successful you are, in whatever direction, the more likely you are to catch attention. And some of the things people say about you might be right. But they might also be wrong.
It seems clear to me that the author is not a fan of the business' culture and they may very well be right. I have no particular insight into the Netflix culture. But I do know one thing that is true of any negative culture. The people in it signed up to it - and to an extent, if they stay and choose not to speak up against it, they perpetuate it. They create the culture in which they work. We all do. We look around and decide if we can live with it.
They are concrete, prescriptive, not fluffy, and -I think- highly actionable. Some principles ("Are Right a Lot") are thought-provoking. Some are plain common sense ("Ownership", "Deliver Results"). And a lot others are the secret sauce of Amazon ("Customer Obsession", "Invent and Simplify")
The Netflix Culture Deck originally came out in 2009. It was created as an internal document by Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and former chief talent officer Patty McCord, then became publicly available, then it went "viral" for its innovative approach to workplace culture.
Itiel ShwartzItiel Shwartz is the CTO and co-founder of Komodor, a startup building the next-gen troubleshooting platform for Kubernetes. Worked at eBayForterRookout, A backend and infra developer turned DevOps, an avid public speaker that loves talking about things like infrastructure, Kubernetes, Python observability, and R&D culture.
So just to dive into my inspiration for this post a bit more, my love-hate relationship with microservices began when I was a software engineer at eBay trying to tame a crazy monster of a monolith. It was so complex and vast and no one really understood all of it, that I learned how truly difficult it is to break up a monolith that is the beating heart of a business.
Before kickstarting Komodor, I had a couple more opportunities to work on building microservices. The first was a gradual breakdown of a monolith, and the other was building a microservices architecture from the ground up. All of this experience provided me the opportunity to build the architecture that would drive our business from day one at my new venture, and I try to apply everything I have learned all the time.
I think the industry as a whole learned the importance of celebrating successes, and today nearly every organization that prides itself on its company culture has some way of demonstrating appreciation for good work. However, on the flip side, one thing that companies can still learn from Netflix is their approach to failures. At Netflix failures are not brushed under the rug, they are analyzed, to be able to learn from each experience in order for the organization to grow and evolve, and not make the same mistakes twice.
With microservices, it is impossible to micromanage and therefore you have to provide the general vision and direction and trust that your teams will align to these shared goals. Netflix understood how to do this really well, and this instilled a bottom-up joint purpose that fueled much of their success.
Great culture without modern engineering and architecture practices results in frustration in the inability to move at the desired velocity and deliver services as rapidly as engineers would like. Advanced architecture without the culture sets you up for failure, as you will not be able to capitalize on the benefits of microservices. So if you put in the effort to craft a truly great culture from the ground up, this will be foundational in enabling your people to thrive.
So eventually when we build great culture alongside an excellent product, this will drive those who are together with us in our purpose to get creative, and will repay us generously in both innovation and business.
"It's risky trusting employees as much as we do. Giving them as much freedom as we do," Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings said in an interview with NPR. "But it's essential in creative companies where you have much greater risk from lack of innovation."
Netflix's fortunes have continued to soar during the pandemic with millions of people stuck at home. Already the world's largest subscription video-streaming service, Netflix has added 26 million new users so far this year, pushing its subscriber base near 200 million worldwide.
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